Linda Lael Miller Bundle (24 page)

“Go stand by the fire,” she told him as she lifted the roasting pan from the oven. Inside was a succulent blend of choice beef, a thin but aromatic gravy and perfectly cooked potatoes and carrots. “You’ll catch your death.”

Trista was in the dining room, lighting the candles.

“Where were you?” Jonathan demanded in a furious undertone. “I searched every inch of this house and the barn and the woodshed….”

Elisabeth shrugged. “I’ve explained it all before, Jonathan, and you never seem to believe me. And, frankly, I’d rather not risk having you throw me down on a bed and inject some primitive sedative into my veins because you think I’m hysterical.”

He rolled his wonderful gray eyes in exasperation.
“Where did you go?”

“Believe it or not, most of the time I was right here in this house.” She wanted to tell him about seeing Barbara, but the moment wasn’t right, and she couldn’t risk having Trista overhear what she said. “For now, Jonathan, I’m afraid you’re going to have to be satisfied with that answer.”

He glared at her, but there was a softening in his manner, and Elisabeth knew he was glad she’d come back—a fact that made her exultant.

The three of them ate dinner in the dining room, then Trista volunteered to clear the table and wash the dishes. While she was doing that, Elisabeth sat at the piano, playing a medley of the Beatles ballads.

Jonathan stood beside the fireplace, one arm braced against the mantelpiece, listening with a frown. “I’ve never heard that before,” he said.

Elisabeth smiled but made no comment.

He came to stand behind her, lightly resting his hands on her shoulders, which the dress left partially bare. “Lizzie,” he said gruffly, “please tell me who you are. Tell me how you managed to vanish that way.”

She stopped playing and turned slightly to look up at him. Her eyes were bright with tears because the name Lizzie had brought the full gravity of the situation down on her again, though she’d managed to put it out of her mind for a little while.

“There’s something I want to show you,” she said. “Something I brought back from—from where I live. We’ll talk about it after Trista goes to bed.”

He bent reluctantly and gave her a brief, soft kiss. He’d barely straightened up again when his daughter appeared, her round little cheeks flushed with pride.

“I did the dishes,” she announced.

Jonathan smiled and patted her small shoulder. “You’re a marvel,” he said.

“Can we go to the Founder’s Day picnic tomorrow, Papa?” she asked hopefully. “Since Elisabeth would be there to take me home, it wouldn’t matter if you had to leave early to set a broken bone or deliver a baby.”

Jonathan’s gaze shifted uncertainly to Elisabeth, and she felt a pang, knowing he was probably concerned about the questions her presence would raise. “Would you like to go?” he asked.

Elisabeth thrived on this man’s company, and his daughter’s. She wanted to be wherever they were, be it heaven or hell. “Yes,” she said in an oddly choked voice.

Pleasure lighted Jonathan’s weary eyes for just a moment, but then the spell was broken. He announced that he had things to do in the barn and went out.

Elisabeth exchanged the pink gown for her slacks and tank top and began heating water on the stove for Trista’s bath. Once the little girl had scrubbed from head to foot, dried herself and put on a warm flannel nightgown, she and Elisabeth sat near the stove, and Elisabeth gently combed the tangles from Trista’s hair.

“I wish you were my mama,” Trista confessed later, when Elisabeth was tucking her into bed, after reading her a chapter of
Huckleberry Finn.

Touched, Elisabeth kissed the little girl’s cheek. “I wish that, too,” she admitted. “But I’m not, and it’s no good pretending. However, we can be the very best of friends.”

Trista beamed. “I’d like that,” she said.

Elisabeth blew out Trista’s lamp, then sat on the edge of the bed until the child’s breathing was even with sleep. Her eyes adjusted now to the darkness, Elisabeth made her way to the inner door that led down to the kitchen.

Jonathan was seated at the table, drinking coffee. His expression and his bearing conveyed a weariness that made Elisabeth want to put her arms around him.

“What were you going to show me?”

Elisabeth put one hand into the pocket of her slacks and brought out the prescription bottle. “Nothing much,” she said, setting it on the table in front of him. “Just your ordinary, everyday, garden-variety wonder drug.”

He picked up the little vial and squinted at the print on the label. “Penicillin.” His eyes widened, and Elisabeth thought he was probably reading the date. As she sat down next to him, he looked at her in skeptical curiosity.

“In proper doses,” she said, “this stuff can cure some heavy hitters, like pneumonia. They call it an antibiotic.”

Jonathan tried to remove the child-proof cap and failed, until Elisabeth showed him the trick. He poured the white tablets into his palm and sniffed them, then picked one up and touched it to his tongue.

Elisabeth watched with delight as he made a face and dropped all the pills back into the bottle. “Well? Are you convinced?”

Still scowling, the country doctor tapped the side of the bottle with his finger nail. “What is this made of?”

“Plastic,” Elisabeth answered. “Another miracle. Take it from me, Jonathan, the twentieth century is full of them. I just wish I could show you everything.”

He studied her for a moment, then shoved the bottle toward her. It was obvious that, while he didn’t know what to think, he’d chosen not to believe Elisabeth. “The twentieth century,” he scoffed.

“Almost the twenty-first,” Elisabeth insisted implacably. No matter what this guy said or did, she wasn’t going to let him rile her again. There was simply too much at stake. She let her eyes rest on the penicillin. “When you use that, do it judiciously. The drug causes violent reactions, even death, in some people.”

Jonathan shook his head scornfully, but Elisabeth noticed that his gaze kept straying back to the little vial. It was obvious that he was itching to pick it up and examine it again.

She sighed, allowing herself a touch of exasperation. “All right, so you can dismiss the pills as some kind of trick. But what about the bottle? You admitted it yourself—you’ve never seen anything like it. And do you know why, Jonathan? Because it doesn’t exist in your world. It hasn’t been invented yet.”

Clearly, he could resist no longer. He reached out and snatched up the penicillin as if he thought Elisabeth would try to beat him to it, dropping the bottle into the pocket of his shirt.

“Where did you go?” he demanded in an impatient whisper.

Elisabeth smiled. “Why on earth would I want to tell you that?” she asked. “You’ll just think I’m having a fit and pump my veins full of dope.”

“Full of what?”

“Never mind.” She reached across the table and patted his hand in a deliberately patronizing fashion. “From here on out, just think of me as a…guardian angel. Actually, that should be no more difficult to absorb than the truth. I have the power to help you and Trista, even save your lives, if you’ll only let me.”

Jonathan surprised her with a slow smile. “A guardian angel? More likely, you’re a witch. And I’ve got to admit, I’m under your spell.”

Elisabeth glanced nervously toward the rear stairway, half expecting to find Trista there, listening. “Jonathan, while I was—er—where I was, I talked with Barbara.”

The smile faded, as Elisabeth had known it would. “Where? Damn it, if that woman has come back here, meaning to upset my daughter—”

“She’s a century away,” Elisabeth said. “And Trista is her daughter, too.”

“Are you telling me that Barbara…”

“Went to the future?” Elisabeth finished for him. “Yes. She was wearing my necklace at the time, though, of course, it was
her
necklace then.”

Jonathan erupted from his chair with such force that it clattered to the floor. Elisabeth watched as he went to the stove to refill his coffee mug, and even through the fabric of his shirt, she could see that the muscles in his shoulders were rigid. “You’re insane,” he accused without facing Elisabeth.

“I saw her. She said she had a lover, and you’d found out about him. She was afraid of what you might do to her.”

Jonathan went to the stairway and looked up to make sure his daughter wasn’t listening. “Is that why you’re here?” he snapped cruelly when he was certain they were alone. “Did Barbara send you to spy on me?”

It was getting harder and harder to keep her temper. Elisabeth managed, although her hands trembled slightly as she lifted her cup to her mouth and took a sip. “No. I stumbled onto this place quite by accident, I assure you—rather like Alice tumbling into the rabbit hole. That story has been written, I presume?”

He gave her a look of scalding sarcasm. “Every schoolchild knows it,” he said. “Where are those newspaper accounts you mentioned? The ones that cover my death?”

Elisabeth ran the tip of her tongue over dry lips. “Well, I had them, but in the end I decided you would only say I’d had them printed up somewhere myself. What I can’t understand is why you think I would want to pull such an elaborate hoax in the first place. Tell me exactly what you think I would have to gain by making up such a story.”

He took her cup, rather summarily, and refilled it. “You probably believe what you’re saying.”

She threw her hands out from her sides in a burst of annoyance. “If you think I’m a raving lunatic, why do you allow me to stay here? Why do you trust me with your daughter?”

Jonathan smiled and sat down again. “Because I think you’re a
harmless
lunatic.”

Elisabeth shoved her fingers through her hair, completely ruining the modified Gibson Girl style. “Thank you, Sigmund Freud.”

“Sigmund Who?”

“Forget it. It’s too hard to explain.”

Her host rolled his eyes and then leaned forward ominously, in effect ordering her to try.

“Listen, you’re bound to read about Dr. Freud soon, and all your questions will be answered. Though you shouldn’t take his theories concerning mothers and sons too seriously.”

Jonathan rubbed his temples with a thumb and forefinger and sighed in a long-suffering way.

“How are you going to explain me to the good citizens of Pine River at that picnic tomorrow?” Elisabeth asked, not only because she wanted to change the dead-end subject, but because she was curious. “By telling them I’m your wife’s sister?”

“I’m not about to change my story now,” he said. “Of course, Ellen’s told half the county you’re a witch, popping in and out whenever it strikes your fancy.”

Close,
Elisabeth thought with grim humor,
but no cigar.
“Maybe it would be simpler if I just stayed here.”

“We can’t hide you away forever, especially after that visit you paid to my office.”

Elisabeth fluttered her eyelashes. “I think I have an admirer in the big fella,” she teased. “What was his name again? Moose? Svend?”

Jonathan laughed. “Ivan.” He pushed back his chair and carried his cup and Elisabeth’s to the sink, leaving them for Ellen to wash in the morning. Then he waited, in that courtly way of his, while Elisabeth stood. “Will you disappear again tonight?” he asked.

“You wouldn’t tease if you knew how uncertain it is,” she answered. “I could get stuck on the other side and never find my way back.”

He escorted her to the door of the spare room and gave her a light, teasing kiss that left her wanting more. Much more. “Good night, Lizzie,” he said. “I’ll see you in the morning—I hope.”

E
lisabeth was pleasantly surprised to learn that the Founder’s Day picnic was to be held in one of her favorite places—the grassy area beside the creek, next to the covered bridge. All that sunny Saturday morning, while she and Trista were frying chicken and making a version of potato salad, wagons and buggies rattled past on the road.

When Jonathan returned from his morning rounds, the three of them walked through the orchard to the creek, Jonathan carrying the food in a big wicker basket. Elisabeth, wearing a demure blue-and-white checked gingham she’d found in one of the attic trunks, was at his side. Though her chin was at a slightly obstinate angle, there was no hiding her nervousness.

There were rigs lining the road on both sides of the bridge, and dozens of blankets had been spread out on the ground alongside the creek. Boys in caps and short pants chased each other, pursued in turn by little girls with huge bows in their hair. The ladies sat gracefully on their spreads, their skirts arranged in modest fashion. Some used ruffle-trimmed parasols to shelter their complexions from the sun, while others, clad in calico, seemed to relish the light as much as the children did.

Most of the men wore plain trousers and either flannel or cotton shirts, and Jonathan was the only one without a hat. They stood in clusters, talking among themselves and smoking, but when the Fortner household arrived, it seemed they all turned to look, as did the women.

Elisabeth was profoundly aware of the differences between herself and these people and, for one terrible moment, she had to struggle to keep from turning and running back to the shelter of the house.

Vera came over, a tiny emissary with flowing brown hair and freckles, and looked solemnly up into Elisabeth’s face. “You don’t look like a witch to me,” she remarked forthrightly.

“Does this mean they won’t burn me at the stake?” Elisabeth whispered to Jonathan, who chuckled.

“She’s not a witch,” Trista said, arms akimbo, her gray gaze sweeping the crowd and daring any detractor to step forward. Her youthful voice rang with conviction. “Elisabeth is my friend.”

Jonathan set the picnic basket down and began unfolding the blanket he’d been carrying under one arm, while Elisabeth waited, staring tensely at the population of Pine River, her smile wobbling on her mouth.

Finally, one of the women in calico came forward, returning Elisabeth’s smile and offering her hand. “I’m Clara Piedmont,” she said. “Vera’s mother.”

“Lizzie McCartney,” Jonathan said, making the false introduction smoothly, just a moment after Trista and Vera had run off to join the other kids, “my wife’s sister.”

“How do you do?” Clara asked as a shiver went down Elisabeth’s back. As long as she lived, which might not be very long at all, she would never get used to being called Lizzie.

This show of acceptance reassured her, though, and her smile was firm on her lips, no longer threatening to come unpinned and fall off. She murmured a polite response.

“Will you be staying in Pine River?” Clara inquired.

Elisabeth glanced in Jonathan’s direction, not certain how to respond. “I—haven’t decided,” she said lamely.

Although Clara was not a pretty woman, her smile was warm and open. She patted Elisabeth’s upper arm in a friendly way. “Well, you come over for tea one day this week. Trista will show you where we live.” She turned to Jonathan. “Would it be all right if Trista stayed at our house tonight? Vera’s been plaguing me about it all day.”

Jonathan didn’t look at Elisabeth, which was a good thing, because even a glance from him would have brought the color rushing to her cheeks. With Trista away, the two of them would be alone in the house.

“That would be fine,” he said.

Elisabeth felt a rush of anticipation so intense that it threatened to lift her off the ground and spin her around a few times, and she was mortified at herself. She didn’t even want to think what modern self-help books had to say about women who wanted a particular man’s lovemaking that much.

Over the course of the afternoon, she managed to blend in with the other women, and after eating, everyone posed for the town photographer, the wooden bridge looming in the background. Later, while the boys fished in the creek, girls waded in, deliberately scaring away the trout. The men puffed on their cigars and played horseshoes, and the ladies gossiped.

Toward sunset, when people were packing up their children, blankets and picnic baskets, the hooves of a single horse hammered over the plank floor of the bridge. The rider paused on the road above the creek bank and called, “Is Doc Fortner here? There’s been a man cut up pretty bad, over at the mill.”

Jonathan waved to the rider. “I’ll get my bag and meet you there in ten minutes,” he said. Then, after giving Elisabeth one unreadable look, he disappeared into the orchard, headed toward the house.

Elisabeth finished gathering the picnic things, feeling much less a part of the community now that Jonathan was gone. She was touched when Trista came to say goodbye before leaving with Vera’s family. “I’ll see you tomorrow, in church,” she promised. “Could I have a kiss, please?”

With a smile, Elisabeth bent to kiss the child’s smudged, sun-warmed cheek. “You certainly may.” She was painfully conscious of how short her time with this child might be and of how precious it was. “I love you, Trista,” she added.

Trista gave her a quicksilver, spontaneous hug, then raced off to scramble into the Piedmonts’ wagon with Vera. Carrying the picnic basket, now considerably lighter, and the blanket, Elisabeth turned and started for home.

Although Jonathan had left a lamp burning in the kitchen, its glow pushing back the twilight, he had, of course, already left for the sawmill. Elisabeth shivered to think what horrors might be awaiting him in that noisy, filthy place.

Taking pitchy chunks of pine from the woodbox beside the stove, Elisabeth built up the fire and put a kettle on for tea. Then, because she knew Jonathan would be tired and shaken when he returned, she filled the hot-water reservoir on the stove and put more wood in to make the flames burn hotter.

His clothes were covered with blood when he came in, nearly two hours later, and his gray eyes were haunted. “I couldn’t save him,” Jonathan muttered as Elisabeth took his bag and set it aside, then began helping him out of his coat. “He had a wife and four children.”

Elisabeth stood on tiptoe to kiss Jonathan’s cheek, which was rough with a new beard. “I’m so sorry,” she said gently. She’d set the oblong tin bathtub in the center of the kitchen floor earlier, and scouted out soap and a couple of thin, coarse towels. While Jonathan watched her bleakly, she began filling the tub with water from the reservoir and from various kettles on the stove. “Take off your clothes, Jon,” she urged quietly when he didn’t seem to make the connection. “I’ll get you a drink while you’re settling in.”

He was unbuttoning his shirt with the slow, distracted motions of a sleepwalker when Elisabeth went into the dining room. Earlier, she’d found virtually untouched bottles of whiskey and brandy behind one of the doors in the china cabinet, and she took her time deciding which would be most soothing.

When she returned to the kitchen with the brandy, Jonathan was in the bathtub, his head back, his eyes closed. His bloody shirt and trousers were draped neatly over the back of a chair.

“You were telling the truth,” he said when she knelt beside the tub and handed him a glass, “when you claimed to be a guardian angel.”

Elisabeth wasn’t feeling or thinking much like an angel. She was painfully, poignantly conscious of Jonathan’s powerful body, naked beneath the clear surface of the water. “We all need someone to take care of us once in a while—no matter how strong we are.”

“I half expected you to be gone when I got back,” Jonathan confessed, lifting the glass to his lips. He took a healthy swallow and then set the liquor aside on the floor. “I figured you might not want to be here, without Trista to act as an unofficial chaperone.”

Elisabeth couldn’t quite meet his eyes. “I don’t think I want to be chaperoned,” she said.

Jonathan’s chuckle was a raw sound, conveying despair and weariness, as well as amusement. “Ladies must be very forward where you come from,” he teased. Elisabeth could feel him watching her, caressing her with his gaze.

She made herself look at him. “I guess compared to Victorian women, they are.” She reached for soap and a wash cloth and made a lather. Jonathan looked pleasantly bewildered when she began washing his back. “The term ‘Victorian,’” she offered, before he could ask, “refers to the time of Queen Victoria’s reign.”

“I deduced that,” Jonathan said with a sigh, relaxing slightly under Elisabeth’s hand.

Bathing him was so sensual an experience that Elisabeth’s head was spinning, and the warm ache between her legs had already reached such a pitch that it was nearly painful.

“You know, of course,” Jonathan told her, leaning back as she began to wash his chest, “that I mean to take you directly from here to my bed and make love to you until you’ve given me everything?”

Elisabeth swallowed. Her heart was beating so hard, she could hear it. “Yes, Jon,” she replied. “I know.”

He took the soap and cloth from her hand and, after watching her face for a long moment, set about finishing his bath. Elisabeth left the kitchen, climbing the stairs to his bedroom.

As soon as the door closed behind her, she began undressing. She had barely managed to wash and put on a thin white eyelet chemise she’d found when Jonathan entered the room.

His dark hair was rumpled, and he was naked except for the inadequate towel wrapped around his waist. Thunder rattled the windows suddenly, like some kind of celestial warning, and Jonathan went to the fireplace and struck a match to the shavings that waited in the grate. On top of them, he laid several sticks of dry wood.

Elisabeth trembled, shy as a virgin, when he turned down the kerosene lamps on the mantelpiece, leaving the room dark except for the primitive crimson glow of the fire. He came to her, resting his strong, skilled hands on the sides of her waist.

“Thank you,” he said.

Heat was surging through Elisabeth’s system, and she could barely keep from swaying on her feet. “For what?” she managed to choke out as Jonathan began to caress her breasts through the fabric of the chemise.

He bent, nibbling at her neck even as his thumbs chafed her covered nipples into hard readiness for his mouth. “For being here, now, tonight, when I need you so much.”

Elisabeth gave a little moan and ran her hands up and down his muscled, still-damp back. He smelled of soap and brandy and manhood. “I need you, too, Jonathan,” she admitted in a whisper.

Jonathan drew back far enough to raise the chemise over her head and toss it aside. His charcoal eyes seemed to smolder as he took in the curves and valleys of her body, bare except for the rhythmic flicker of the firelight. He let the towel fall away.

She hadn’t meant to be bold, but he was so magnificent that she couldn’t resist touching him. When her fingers closed around his heated shaft, he tilted his head back and gave a low growl of fierce surrender. With one hand, she pressed him gently backward into a chair, while still caressing him with the other.

“Dear God,
Elisabeth…
” he moaned as she knelt between his knees and began kissing the bare skin of his upper thighs. “Stop…”

“I’m not going to stop,” she told him stubbornly between flicks of her tongue that made his flesh quiver. “I haven’t even begun to pleasure you.”

He uttered a raspy shout of shock and delight when she took him, his fingers entangling themselves in her hair. “Lizzie,” he gasped. “Oh…Lizzie…my God…”

Elisabeth lightly stroked the insides of his thighs as she enjoyed him.

Finally, with a ragged cry, he clasped her head in his hands and forced her to release him. In a matter of seconds, he’d lifted her from the floor so that she was standing in the chair itself, her feet on either side of his hips. He parted her with the fingers of one hand and then brought her down onto his mouth.

There was no need to be quiet, since they were alone in the house, and that was a good thing, because such pleasure knifed through Elisabeth that she burst out with a throaty yell. Her hands gripped the back of the chair in a desperate bid for balance as Jonathan continued to have her.

She began to pant as her hips moved back and forth of their own accord, and a thin film of perspiration broke out over every inch of her. She could feel tendrils of her hair clinging to her cheeks as she blindly moved against Jonathan’s mouth.

When she felt release approaching, she tried to pull away, wanting her full surrender to happen when Jonathan was inside her, but he wouldn’t let her go. Gripping her hips in his work-roughened hands, he held her to him even as the violent shudders began, making her fling her head back and moan without restraint.

He was greedy, granting her absolutely no quarter, and Elisabeth’s captured body began to convulse with pleasure. The firelight and the darkness blurred as she gave up her essence and then collapsed against the back of the chair, exhausted.

But Jonathan wasn’t about to let her rest. Within five minutes her cries of delighted fury again rang through the empty house.

“Now you’re ready for me,” he informed her in a husky voice as he lowered her to his lap and then stood, carrying her to the bed.

Elisabeth’s two releases had been so violent, so all-consuming, that she was left with no breath in her lungs. She lay gasping, gazing up at Jonathan as he arranged her in the center of the bed and put two fluffy pillows under her bottom.

He lay down beside her on the mattress, slightly lower so that he could take her nipple into his mouth while his hand stroked her tender mound.

“Jonathan,” she managed to whisper. “Please—
oh
—please…”

Jonathan spread her legs and knelt between them, parting her to give her one more teasing stroke. Then he poised himself over her. He had played her body so skillfully that in the instant his shaft glided inside her, she came apart.