Linda Lael Miller Bundle (41 page)

Rue rested her plastic-coated menu against her forehead for a moment, hiding her face while she battled amusement and her natural tendency to protest his arbitrary words. Finally, she met his gaze over the steaming cups of coffee between them, and said, “Even if we were married, which we’re not, I wouldn’t let you tell me what to wear, Farley. That would be like allowing you to tell me how to vote.”

He stared at her. “You can vote?”

She sighed and rolled her eyes heavenward. “I can see this is going to be quite a project, acclimatizing you to the twentieth century.”

The waitress returned, and Rue ordered a club sandwich and a diet cola, since it was lunchtime. Farley, having read his own menu, asked for sausage and eggs. Plainly, the toaster waffles hadn’t seemed like breakfast to him.

When the food came, he loaded it down with pepper, except for the toast, and consumed every bite, leaving nothing on his plate but a few streaks of egg yoke.

Rue paid the check with a credit card, and when the cashier handed it back, Farley intercepted and studied the card intently.

“This is money?” he asked, handing the card to Rue as they crossed the parking lot a few minutes later.

“The plastic variety,” Rue affirmed with a nod. She stopped and looked up into Farley’s wonderful eyes, feeling so much love for him that it was painful. “I know everything seems pretty bewildering,” she said gently, “but you’re a very intelligent man and you’ll figure things out.”

He looked the Land Rover over speculatively as they approached. “I’d like to drive now,” he announced.

“No way,” Rue answered, pulling her keys from the pocket of her jeans. “Cars move a whole lot faster than horses, Farley, and when they collide, people get killed.”

Although the marshal looked disappointed, he didn’t argue.

Where before his attention had been taken up by the gizmos on the dashboard, now Farley was intent on the other cars, the buildings, the power lines alongside the highway. As they drove toward Seattle, he asked a million questions about the pavement, the road signs, the cars and trucks in the other lanes.

When Seattle itself came into view, with its busy harbor and the picturesque Space Needle, Farley was apparently struck dumb by the sight. He stared intently, as though his eyes couldn’t take in enough to suit him, and he kept turning in different directions.

Rue drove through the city, knowing Farley couldn’t have absorbed explanations just then, and kept going until they reached a large mall.

She parked and they entered the concourse. Rue still didn’t speak because Farley was so busy absorbing the sights and sounds that he probably wouldn’t have heard her anyway.

He studied a colorful display in front of a bookstore with an attitude that seemed like reverence to Rue. She was touched by the depth of his wonder, knowing it must be something like what she felt when he made love to her.

Suddenly she wanted to give him the world, show him everything there was to see.

“I remember that you like reading,” she said, her voice a little shaky. She proceeded into the store, located the instructional section and found a comprehensive volume on how things work. Then from another shelf, she took a novel set in the twenty-fifth century. It was the only way she could think of to prepare Farley for the fact that human beings could fly now, that a few brave souls had even visited the moon.

Farley watched as she paid. “You can buy books with plastic money?” he asked as they left.

“You can buy almost anything with plastic money,” Rue replied, handing him the bag.

They went on to the men’s department of one of the big chain stores, and Farley was soon outfitted with jeans, shirts, underwear and socks. He refused to part with his boots, and Rue didn’t press the issue.

Soon they were on the freeway again, headed east. Farley alternated between staring out the window and thumbing through the books Rue had bought for him. When he opened one and started to read, she protested.

“You shouldn’t read in a moving car, Farley,” she said, amazed at how silly she sounded even as she was saying the words. “It’ll make you sick.”

Farley wet the tip of an index finger, turned a page and read on. “If you can go around with your knees showing in one of those short skirts,” he said without even glancing in her direction, “I can read whenever I want to. And I want to.”

“Fine,” Rue replied, because there was nothing else she could say. She was glad, in a way, that Farley hadn’t given in, because his stubborn strength was one of the qualities she loved most. Without looking away from the road, she took a cassette tape from the box between the seats and shoved it into the slot below the radio.

Farley jumped and then lowered the book when Carly Simon’s voice filled the Land Rover.

“I think the closest thing you had to this in 1892 was the music box,” Rue said without smugness. She knew Farley’s curiosity had to be almost overwhelming. “Or maybe a hand organ.”

“I’m getting a powerful headache,” Farley confessed, rubbing his eyes. “How could so much have happened in a hundred years?”

She didn’t tell him about automatic-teller machines and laser surgery, out of simple courtesy. “There were many factors involved,” she said gently. “A lot of historians think the nation turned a corner during the Civil War. There were other conflicts later. As wretched and horrible as war is, it forced science to advance, in both good ways and bad, because of the awesome needs it creates.”

Farley sat up rigidly straight—clearly some dire thought had just occurred to him—and rasped, “The Union—it still stands, doesn’t it?”

Rue nodded and reached out to pat his arm reassuringly. “Oh, yes,” she said. “There are fifty states now, you know.”

“Canada is a state?”

She laughed. “Hardly. Canada is still a great nation in her own right. I was talking about Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Alaska and Hawaii.”

Farley was quiet.

That evening, they pulled in at a truck stop to buy gas and have supper. Rue showed Farley how to work the gas pump, and his pride in the simple task was touching.

In the bright, busy restaurant adjoining the filling station, Farley consumed a cheeseburger deluxe, fries and a chocolate milk shake. “Anything that good has got to be kissing cousin to original sin,” he commented cheerfully, after making short work of the food.

Rue shrugged and smiled slightly. “Only too true,” she agreed with regret, deciding to save the nutritional lectures for later.

Farley cleared his throat. “I suppose these folks have filled in their outhouse, too,” he said seriously.

Rue laughed, pushed away the last of her own chef’s salad, and slid out of the booth. “This way, cowboy,” she said. She pointed out the men’s room, which was at the end of a long hallway, and paid the bill for their supper.

Farley reappeared shortly, his thick hair damp and finger-combed.

They were cruising along the freeway toward Spokane, a star-dappled sky shining above, before he spoke again.

“I keep thinking I must have gotten hold of some locoweed or something,” he said in a low, hoarse voice. “How could this be happening to me?”

Rue understood his feelings well, having experienced the same time-travel process, and she was sympathetic. “You’re not crazy, Farley,” she said, reaching over to touch his arm briefly. “That much I can promise you. There’s something really strange going on here, though, and I owe you an apology for dragging you into it the way I did. I’m sorry.”

He turned to her in apparent surprise. “It wasn’t your fault.”

Rue sighed, keeping a close eye on the road. “If I hadn’t attached myself to your leg the way I did when the necklace started acting up again and the room was spinning, you probably wouldn’t be here now.”

Farley chuckled and gave a rueful shake of his head. “I’d be back there wondering just how a lady could be standing in front of me one moment and gone without a trace the next.”

“I think the thing that bothers me the most about this whole situation is not knowing, not being able to pick up a thread of reason and follow it back to its spool, so to speak. I don’t like mysteries.”

Farley was going through Rue’s collection of cassettes. “Speaking of mysteries,” he marveled, turning a tape over in his hand. “This is the damnedest thing, the way you people can put a voice and a whole bunch of piano players and fiddlers into a little box like this. Back there at that place where we ate, they were selling these things.”

“Tapes are available almost everywhere. They don’t just have music on them, either—you can listen to books and to all sorts of instructional stuff.”

Farley grinned. “I saw one back at the truck stop that interested me,” he said. “It was called,
Red-hot Mamas on Wheels.
”

Again, Rue laughed. “I didn’t say it was all literature, Farley.”

“What exactly is a red-hot mama?”

“I’ll tell you when you’re older.”

“I’m thirty-six!”

“And then some,” Rue agreed, and this time it was Farley who laughed.

Several hours later, they reached Spokane, and Rue stopped at a large motel, knowing Farley would be uncomfortable with the formality of a city hotel. As it happened, he was pretty Victorian when it came to the subject of sharing rooms.

“It didn’t bother you last night!” Rue whispered impatiently. She’d asked for a double, and Farley had immediately objected, wanting two singles. The clerk waited in silence for a decision to be made, fingers poised over the keyboard of his computer, eyebrows raised.

Farley took Rue’s hand and hauled her away from the desk. They were partially hidden behind a gigantic jade tree, which only made matters worse, as far as Rue was concerned.

“We’re not married!” he ground out.

“Now there’s a flash,” Rue said, her hands on her hips. “We weren’t married
last
night, either!”

“That was different. This is a public place.”

Rue sighed. “Like the beds are in the lobby or something.” But then she conceded, “Okay, you win. Explaining this is obviously going to be a monumental task, and I’m too tired to tackle the job. We’ll compromise.” She went back to the desk, credit card in hand, and asked for adjoining rooms.

Her quarters and Farley’s were on the second floor, along an outside balcony.

“Good night,” she said tightly, after showing Farley how to unlock his door with the plastic card that served as a key. There was an inner door connecting the two rooms, but Rue had promised herself she wouldn’t use it. “Don’t eat the peanuts or drink the whiskey in the little refrigerator,” she warned. “Everything costs about four times what it would anywhere else.”

Farley’s tired blue eyes were twinkling with humor. “I’m only looking out for your reputation as a lady,” he said, plainly referring to their earlier row over shared accommodation.

“I have a reputation as a reporter,” Rue replied, folding her arms. “Nobody ever accused me of being a lady.”

Farley put down her suitcase and curled his fingers under the waistband of her jeans, pulling her against him with an unceremonious jerk. “Somebody’s accusing you of it right now,” he argued throatily, and then he gave Rue a long, thorough, lingering kiss that left her trembling. “You’re all woman, fiery as a red-hot branding iron, and the way you fuss when I have you, everybody in this place would know what was happening. I don’t want that—those gasps and cries and whimpers you give belong to me and me alone.”

Rue’s face was crimson by that time. She’d heard much blunter statements—while traveling with other journalists and camera crews, for instance—but this was intimate; it was personal. “Good night,” she said again, trying to wrench free of Farley’s grasp.

He held on to her waistband, the backs of his fingers teasing the tender flesh of her abdomen, and he kissed her again. When he finally drew back, her knees were so weak, she feared she might have to
crawl
into her room.

“Good night,” Farley said. Then he went into his room and closed the door.

T
hat night, Farley experienced a kind of weariness he’d never had to endure before—not after forced marches in the army or herding cattle across three states or tracking outlaws through the worst kind of terrain. No, it wasn’t his body that was worn out—he hadn’t done a lick of honest work all day long—it was his mind. His spirit. There was so much to understand, to absorb, and he was bewildered by the onslaught of information that had been coming down on him in a continuous cascade ever since his abrupt arrival in the 1990s.

He moved to toss his hat onto the bed, with its brown striped spread, and stopped himself at the last second. Where he came from, to do that was to invite ill fortune. In this strange place where everything was bigger, brighter and more intense, he hated to think what plain, old, sorry luck might have developed into.

After a little thought, he went to the wardrobe, which was built into the wall, and put his hat on the shelf. The conveniences were right next to that, and he couldn’t help marveling at the sleek and shiny bathtub, the sink and commode, the supply of thick, fluffy towels.

Except for Rue, who was just beyond a puny inside door, he was most attracted by the box on the bureau facing the bed. Rue had called the machine a TV, describing it as a shirttail relation to the camera, and Farley found the device wonderfully mystifying.

Facing it, he bent to squint at the buttons arrayed down one side, then touched the one that said Power.

Immediately, a black man with hair as flat as the top of a windswept mesa appeared, smiling in a mighty friendly way. He said something Farley didn’t quite catch, and a lot of unseen people laughed.

Farley punched another button and found an imposing-looking fellow standing behind the biggest pulpit he’d ever seen in his life. Beginning to catch on to the system, the marshal pressed still another button.

A lady wearing one of those skimpy dresses appeared, pushing something that might have been a carpet sweeper. There was a block in one side of the window, listing several different figures.

Farley proceeded to the next button, and this time he got a faceful of a bad-natured galoot with a long, red mustache and six-guns as big as he was. He was moving and talking, this noisy little desperado, and yet he wasn’t real, like the other TV people had been. He was a
drawing.

Farley sat down on the end of the mattress, enthralled. Next came a rabbit who walked upright, jabbered like an eager spinster and would do damn near anything for a carrot.

Finally, Farley turned off the machine, removed his boots and stretched out on the bed with a sigh. This century was enough to terrify a body, though he couldn’t rightly admit that out loud, being a United States marshal and all.

On the other side of the wall, he heard a deep voice say, “This is CNN,” and smiled. A month ago, even a day ago, he’d have torn the place apart, hearing that. He’d have been convinced there was a man in Rue’s room, bothering her. Now he knew she was only watching the TV machine.

He imagined her getting ready for bed, brushing her teeth, washing her face, maybe padding around in one of those thin excuses for a nightdress that made his whole body go hard all at once. He could have been in there with her—it was torture knowing that—but he didn’t want anybody thinking less of her because she’d shared a room with a man who wasn’t her husband. She was too fine for that, too special.

Farley got up after a time, stripped off his clothes and ran himself a bath in the fancy room with the tiles that not only covered the floor but climbed most of the way up the wall. When the tub was full, he tested the steaming water with a toe, yelped in pain, and studied the spigots, belatedly recalling that
H
meant hot and
C
meant cold.

He had scrubbed himself from head to foot and settled into bed with one of the books Rue had bought for him when the ugly contraption on the bedside stand started to make a jangling noise. Farley frowned, staring as though to intimidate it into silence. Then, remembering the brief lecture Rue had given him at her house, he recognized it as a telephone.

He picked up the removable part and heard Rue’s voice, tinny and small, saying, “Farley? Farley, are you there?”

He put the device to his ear, decided the cord wasn’t supposed to dangle over his eye and cheek, and turned it around. “Rue?”

“Who else would it be?” she teased. “Did I wake you?”

He glowered at the contrivance, part of which still sat on the bedside table. If the TV machine was family to the camera, this thing must be kin to the telegraph. Now that he thought about it, the conclusion seemed obvious. “No,” he said. “I wasn’t sleeping.” Farley liked talking to Rue this way, there was a strange intimacy to it, but he surely would have preferred to have her there in the bed with him. “I was watching that TV box a little while ago.”

There was a smile in her voice, though not the kind meant to make a man feel smaller than he should be. “What did you see?”

Farley shook his head, still marveling. “Pictures—drawings—that moved and talked. One was supposed to be a person, but it wasn’t.”

Rue was quiet for a moment, then she said, again without a trace of condescension in her voice, “That was a cartoon. Artists draw and paint figures, and then they’re brought to life by a process called animation. I’ll tell you more about it tomorrow.”

Farley wasn’t sure he was really that interested, not when there were so many other things to puzzle through, but he didn’t want to hurt Rue’s feelings, so he would listen when the time came. They talked for a few minutes more, then said good-night, and Farley put the talking part of the telephone back where he’d found it.

He’d mastered light switches—to his way of thinking it was diabolical how the damn things were in a different place on every lamp—so he twisted a bit of brass between his fingers and the room became comparatively dark.

He was as exhausted as before, maybe more so, and he yearned, body and soul, for the comfort Rue could give him. He closed his eyes, thinking he surely wouldn’t be able to sleep, and he promptly lost consciousness.

He must have rested undisturbed for a few hours, but then the dream was upon him, and it was so real that he felt the texture of the sheets change beneath him, the firmness of the mattress. Indeed, Farley felt the air itself alter, become thinner, harder to breathe.

The traffic sounds from the nearby highway turned to the twangy notes of saloon pianos, the nickering of horses, the squeaks and moans of wagon wheels.

Farley was back in his own lifetime.

Without Rue.

He let out a bellow, a primitive mixture of shock and protest, and sat bolt upright in bed. His skin was drenched with sweat, and he was gasping for breath, as though he’d been under water the length of the dream.

The dream. Farley wanted to weep with relief, but that, too, was something unbefitting a United States marshal. There was an anxious knock at the door separating his room from Rue’s, and then, just as Farley switched on the lamp, Rue burst in.

“Good grief, Farley, are you all right? It sounded like you were being scalped!”

He was embarrassed at being caught in the aftermath of a nightmare, and that made him a little angry. “Do you always barge in on people like that?”

Rue was wearing a white cotton nightdress that barely reached the top of her thighs. Her eyes were narrowed, and her hands were resting on her hips. “I seem to recall asking you a similar question,” she said, “when I woke up in the master bedroom at Pine River a hundred years ago and found you standing there staring at me.” She paused, drew a deep breath and went on, a fetching pink color rising in her cheeks. “Your virtue is in no danger, Farley. I just wanted to make sure you were okay. I mean, you could have slipped in the bathtub or something.”

He arched one eyebrow after casting an eye over her nightclothes—there were little bloomers underneath the skimpy gown, with ruffles around the legs—and then her long, slender legs. Lordy, she looked as sweet as a sun-warmed peach.

“Suppose I
had
fallen in the bathtub,” he responded huskily, leaning back against the padded headboard and pulling the sheets up to his armpits. One of them had to be modest, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be Rue, not in the getup she had on. “How would you have known?”

She ran impudent eyes over the length of his frame. “The walls are thin here, Marshal. And you would have made quite a crash.” She folded her arms, thus raising the nightdress higher. “Stop trying to evade the subject and tell me what made you let out a yell like that.”

Farley sighed. Now that he’d stalled long enough to regain most of his composure, he figured he could talk about what happened without breaking into a cold sweat. “I dreamed I was back in 1892, that’s all,” he said.

Rue came and sat on the foot of the bed, cross-legged like an Indian. “Was I there?”

Farley hoped the tremendous vulnerability he was feeling wasn’t audible in his voice. “No,” he said. “Don’t you have a dressing gown you can put on? I can’t concentrate with you wearing that skimpy little nightgown.”

She gave him a teasing grin. “You’ll just have to suffer.”

He fussed with his covers for a few moments. He was suffering, all right; it felt like he had a chunk of firewood between his legs. He changed the subject.

“Can one or the other of us be sent back even if that damn necklace is nowhere around?”

Rue’s smile faded. She bit her lower lip for a moment. “I don’t know, Farley,” she said quietly. “When I first found the necklace, I had to be wearing or holding it to travel through time, and I had to pass through a certain doorway in the upstairs hall of my aunt’s house. It was the same for Elisabeth. Later, it was as though the two time periods were meshing somehow, and I no longer had to go over the threshold to reach 1892.”

“But you always had the necklace?”

She nodded. “Things are obviously changing, though. It seems to me that if people can step backward or forward in time, anything can happen.”

Farley had another chill, though this was only a shadow of the one that had gripped him during the nightmare. Maybe he wouldn’t be allowed to stay in this crazy, mixed-up century, with this crazy, mixed-up woman. The idea was shattering.

Rue was as vital to him as the blood flowing through his veins, and there was so much he wanted to see, so much he wanted to know.

He moved over and tossed back the covers to make room for her. He hadn’t changed his mind about the impropriety of sharing a bed in a public inn, but he needed to sleep with his arms around her.

She switched off the lamp and crawled in beside him, all warm and soft and fragrant. When she snuggled close, Farley let out an involuntary groan.

Rue smoothed the hair on his chest with a palm. “Let’s hope we don’t do any time traveling while we’re making love,” she teased. “We could make an embarrassing landing, like in the horse trough in front of the feed and grain, or on one of the pool tables at the Hang-Dog Saloon. I don’t mind telling you, Marshal, the Society would be livid!”

Farley laughed, rolled onto his side and gathered her close with one arm. There was no use in trying to resist her; she was too delicious, too funny, too sweet.

“What am I going to do with you?” he asked in mock despair.

Rue started nibbling at his neck, and murmured, “I have a few suggestions.”

When Rue awoke the next morning, Farley was already up. He’d showered and dressed in some of his starchy new clothes, and he was sitting at the requisite round table by the windows, reading
USA Today.
“It seems to me that politicians haven’t changed much,” he commented without lowering the newspaper.

Rue smiled. She was hypersensitive, but in a pleasant way; the feel of Farley’s hands and mouth still lingered on her lips, her throat, her breasts and stomach. “Some things stay the same no matter how much time passes,” she replied, sitting up and wrapping her arms around her knees.

He peered at her over the colorful masthead. “I agree,” he said solemnly, folding the paper and setting it aside. Having done that, Farley shoved one hand through his gleaming brown hair. “It’s wrong for us to—to do what we did last night, Rue. That’s something that should be confined to marriage.”

Rue would have rolled her eyes if she hadn’t known Farley was dead serious. She reached for the telephone and punched the button for room service. “Are you trying to tell me that you were married to every woman you ever slept with?” she inquired reasonably.

“No, ma’am,” replied the youthful masculine voice at the other end of the line.

Hot color surged into Rue’s face, and she would have hung up in mortification if she hadn’t wanted coffee so much. “I wasn’t talking to you,” she told the room-service clerk with as much dignity as she could manage. Farley had clearly figured out what had happened, and he was chuckling.

Rue glared at him, then spoke into the receiver again, giving the room number and asking for a pot of coffee, fresh fruit and toast.

The moment she hung up, Farley gave a chortle of amusement.

“Well?” Rue demanded, not to be deterred. “
Were
you married to everyone you’ve ever made love with?”

Farley cleared his throat and reddened slightly. “Of course not. But this is different. A nice woman doesn’t—”

Rue interrupted with an imperious upward thrust of one finger and, “Don’t you dare say it, Farley Haynes!” She stabbed her own chest with that same digit. “
I
slept with you, and I’m one of the ‘nicest women’ you’ll ever hope to meet!”

“You only did it because I took advantage of you.”

“What a crock,” Rue muttered, flinging back the covers and standing. “Did I act like I was being taken advantage of?”

“You should have just stayed in your own room,” Farley grumbled.

“So now it’s my fault?”

The marshal sighed. “I think it would probably be easier to change General Custer’s mind about strategy than win an argument with you. Damn it, Rue, what I’m trying to say is, I think we should be married.”