Authors: Maddy Barone
He adjusted his eye patch and stared down at his empty plate. “When I first came in, it was early, and Katelyn was the only one in the kitchen. She was at the sink, her back to me, so I called her name. She didn’t answer. I guess she didn’t want to talk to me, but…” He blew out a breath. “I wanted to talk to her. I wanted her to look at me. She never does. So I touched her shoulder.”
Rose put her fork down, an inward niggle of worry poking her. “What happened?”
He looked at his plate with a frown half-fierce, half-sad. “She screamed. She looked at me like I was a monster, and she cowered from me. Then she ran away.”
“Oh, dear.” To have a woman he was interested in scream and run away must be devastating for Paint. Katelyn’s reaction seemed like more than just repugnance for a scarred man, though. Rose suspected she had been badly treated by a man in the past. She resolved to talk to Katelyn about Paint.
Stone entered the dining room. Rose fidgeted impatiently while he loaded his plate with breakfast. He walked to the seat next to hers and gave Neil a cold glower. Sky’s chief of security took enough time to wipe his plate with his last piece of toast before standing up and leaving the table. She waited until Stone sat down before speaking.
“Did you see Sara?”
He took a big bite of ham and made her wait while he chewed and swallowed. “Yeah. We talked a little. I’m going to have supper there again tonight.”
Rose was about to demand more when a teenage boy came into the dining room and went to Sky’s chair. Sky accepted the pink envelope the boy handed him and gave him a small coin from his pocket. As the boy left, Sky glanced down the table at her.
She smiled when he shook Zoe’s hand off his arm and stood up to walk down the table. It was small of her, but when Zoe aimed a glare at her, the smile grew.
“You have a letter, my dear.” He placed the envelope on the table next to her plate. His smile seemed a little bit forced. “Do you have a sweetheart I don’t know about?”
She looked up at him with a smile just as forced. Moron. “Darling, when would I find the opportunity to meet a sweetheart with you monopolizing all of my time?”
He lost the smile entirely. “Read your letter, love.”
His curt tone told her he wasn’t happy. Did he honestly think she had a man on the side? Idiot. She was sure she could feel everyone staring at her as she picked up the envelope and opened it. The single page was perfumed with the scent of roses. She quickly scanned the note and glanced back up at Sky. “It’s from Mrs. McGrath. She’s inviting me to visit her this afternoon.”
“Then you should go,” Sky said. “It’s an honor to be invited to the McGraths’ house.” His voice lowered. “Not many people are invited. Mrs. McGrath is a very private lady. She doesn’t get involved with her husband’s politics, but of course she must know quite a bit about what is going on in the city of Omaha. Perhaps you could learn from her.”
Rose stared. Her voice dropped to the barest whisper. “Do you want me to spy? What do you think I could learn?”
He dropped a light kiss on her hair and gave her one of the cool, smarmy smiles she detested. “Don’t be so dramatic, my dear. I’ll be out and about all day so I probably won’t see you again until supper time. Have a lovely day.”
With narrowed eyes, Rose watched him saunter out of the dining room. Someday she would understand him. It might not be until after they were both dead, but by God, someday she would understand him.
* * * *
Rose drew a deep breath of warm autumn air and enjoyed the feel of the late morning sun on her face. She smiled at Aimee, who walked beside her with light steps and a friendly expression on her pretty face. Aimee had exactly the figure the men in this time preferred, soft and curvy. Cayla walked on Rose’s other side. She was almost a foot taller than Aimee, but she had the same figure. Her bust and hips were broad and her waist was narrow. Her arms were loaded with books to return to the library. Rose never thought she would become friends with prostitutes, but Aimee was sweet-natured and Cayla was direct and honest. She decided since they didn’t complain about it, their profession was none of her business.
“How far is it to the library?” Rose asked. “I thought we might take the bus.”
Aimee gave a light giggle. “If we were going to the library downtown, then we would take the bus. Or maybe the carriage. But the Gold Coast branch of the library is only a mile away, and it’s a nice morning for a walk.”
Cayla agreed. “The weather won’t be this nice much longer, so we may as well enjoy it. Rose, I suppose you finished the romance I lent you. Did you like it?”
Rose cleared her throat. “It was a little bit, uh, different. I was surprised to see that it was written by a woman in 2025. I know that romances are usually written by women, but so few were left alive after the Terrible Times.”
Cayla nodded. “Yeah, that book is one in a series that was written by Shelley Chastain. What did you think of it?”
“Well, like I said, it was different. Not really a romance. At least, I didn’t think it was. I mean, how romantic is it for a woman to be kidnapped by five men and forced to sleep with all of them?”
Aimee rolled her eyes. “It’s not my idea of romance. To me, that’s real life. But I suppose some women might enjoy that.”
“Really?” There was exasperation and impatience in Cayla’s tone. “All of those men loved Janie. They fought over her and they all loved her so much that they agreed to share her. You don’t think that’s romantic?”
No, Rose really didn’t. “Not my cup of tea, I guess.”
Cayla’s laugh was rich and husky. “I suppose you don’t need five men to worship every inch of your body; you have Sky for that.”
Rose examined the sidewalk passing under her feet as if the cracked cement was fascinating. Aimee patted her arm with a soft laugh. “Well, he’s only got two hands and one mouth, so I don’t think he can do the work of five men. But I guess he knows what to do with what he has?”
She trailed off suggestively. While Cayla chuckled, Rose concentrated fiercely on the sidewalk. There was a long silence after the laughter died that Rose wasn’t willing to break. Just as the silence became uncomfortable, Aimee must have accepted Rose’s refusal to say anything, and changed gears. “How did you and Sky meet?”
Rose imagined saying,
The plane that I boarded in 2014 crashed out West eight years ago and I was rescued by Sky’s cousins. They just happened to be wolf shifters and Sky’s wolf decided that I was the girl for him.
No, she couldn’t say anything like that. No one in Omaha knew that she’d been born in 1998 and had traveled through time to be here. She wasn’t trying to keep it a secret. Everyone in Kearney knew about it, but after eight years it wasn’t news anymore. Maybe the stories had travelled east, but no one had asked her about it, so she doubted it. Either that or it was old news to Omaha too. That was a good thing. Rose didn’t want to have to try to explain it over and over.
“I was visiting his family out West. That’s how I met him.”
Cayla nudged her with an elbow. “Was it love at first sight?”
Rose muttered, “It was something at first sight.” She glanced ahead and saw a low brick building with a sign proclaiming it the Gold Coast Public Library. Thank God. “That must be the library.”
That was a lame thing to say, but Cayla and Aimee didn’t razz her. She liked them more and more. The three girls spent an hour at the library. It was very small, with only a dozen long shelves of books, but it smelled like a library and Rose loved it. She was amazed at how many of the books had been published in the last fifty years. They weren’t paperbacks like the books she remembered from the Times Before, but neither were they like the hardcover books in her day. A lot of the covers were actually fabric or leather, and the print on the pages sometimes looked uneven as if each page of text had been set and printed individually. She found a fantasy story that looked interesting, and a historical romance set during the Woodstock festival written by Laurie Taylor in 2065.
“Oh, yes, get that one,” Cayla said. “It’s one of my all-time favorites.”
Rose suppressed a smile. That explained Cayla’s use of slang from the ‘60s and ‘70s. She wondered how culturally accurate that book would be. Had Taye read any romances written in the last forty years? As silly as it sounded, Taye, the fierce alpha wolf, enjoyed reading romance.
The man at the checkout desk looked her over carefully, and at Cayla’s explanation that she was Sky Wolfe’s wife, he handed her a library card application form to fill out.
They arrived back at The Limit just at the end of lunch. Rose took her three books to her room upstairs and set them carefully on the dresser before hurrying back downstairs to eat. There were only a few people at the table, none of them Sky or the men from the den. She hid her disappointment and ate a good lunch of sweet potato and ham stew. Cayla and Aimee ate quickly and excused themselves. She thanked them for taking her to the library.
Just as she was getting up from the table, a slender man stepped inside the door and touched his fingers to his temple in a casual salute.
“Mrs. Wolfe? I’m Sal Hudd. Mr. Wolfe told me to drive you to visit Mrs. McGrath this afternoon. What time did you want to leave?”
Rose looked quickly at the wall clock. “I can be ready in half an hour.”
He touched his fingers to his temple again. “Yes, ma’am, I’ll have the carriage around front at one o’clock.”
Rose wasn’t sure what she should wear to visit the mayor’s wife. She went upstairs to her own room and realized she had forgotten to thank Sky for the lamp. Making a mental note to do so, she went into her room and looked through the clothes she had brought from Kearney. She decided on the cream colored silk blouse and the navy blue dress pants, and she looped the pink and peach wool scarf she had knitted last winter around her neck. Memories of spinning the wool during the long evenings at the den brought a rush of homesickness. Carla and Taye had surprised her with the expensively dyed roving for her birthday. Right at this moment she wanted desperately to be at the den. Stroking the soft wool over her collarbone eased her nerves, and until that moment she hadn’t realized she was nervous about visiting the mayor’s wife without Sky.
She stared at her pale face in the mirror over the bureau and lifted her chin. Rose Turner Wolfe had no reason to be nervous. She transferred her knife to the inner sheath of the navy blue pants, put on the bracelet of small amethyst chunks which Sky had sent for Christmas a few years ago, combed her hair, and went back downstairs to wait for Mr. Hudd to bring the carriage around.
The carriage driver was prompt. He handed Rose up into an open carriage behind two bay horses and drove them out the gates and into Omaha. Rose felt exposed sitting in the carriage driving past people walking on the streets. It certainly was different than driving in the mayor’s car. For one thing, although several of the men she drove past looked hard at her, no one scuttled off the street as if terrified of her.
When they drove up to the mayor’s house, it looked even more beautiful than the first time she’d seen it. Mr. Hudd pulled the horses to a stop at the gates so the guard could examine Rose and the carriage. He looked like a thug. Rose gave him a tentative smile, and after a long tense moment of looking her over thoroughly, he went back to open the gate and let them pass through. Rose watched the castle-like house get larger as they approached, and as they pulled around the U-shaped drive to the front entry she saw the gardens that spread behind the house like a tapestry of green spangled with vivid colors. It would be wonderful to sit with a book amid the flowers in the sun.
Mr. Hudd looped the reins around the knob at the front of the carriage and hopped out to assist her in getting down. He marched up to the front door and knocked. Rose waited a few steps behind him for the door to open.
Mayor McGrath smiled a wide, toothy welcome. Rose smiled back to hide her urge to run back to the carriage and have the coachman take her back to Sky’s house. Why was the mayor here? She’d come to visit his wife. When the mayor stepped back and waved her in, she turned to the coachman, who made a quaint little bow.
“Mr. Wolfe instructed me to wait for you, Mrs. Wolfe,” he said.
The mayor nodded at Mr. Hudd in the same vague way a man might nod at a horse or a dog. “You can pull around to the stable behind the house.”
He offered Rose his elbow and urged her in to the house. She took his arm, feeling almost trapped by his large bulk looming far too close. If Paint or Stone had been with her they would have snarled at the mayor for daring to touch her. Since Sky probably didn’t want his cousins in jail it was a good thing she’d come alone.
The butler, Mr. Davidson, stood beside an open door holding a silver platter loaded with a tea set and cookies. He stood back a step to allow Rose and the mayor to pass into the room. As they did so, he inclined his upper body in a shallow bow. Rose didn’t know that people bowed these days. It made her intensely uncomfortable to walk past the butler as if he was invisible, but the mayor paid no attention to the man. She decided she needed an etiquette handbook. Maybe they had one at the library.
Mrs. McGrath sat in her chair like a delicate porcelain figurine. She wore a long skirted dress in moss green and a triple strand of pearls around her neck. Rose was glad she had changed out of her jeans before coming. The mayor’s wife gave her what seemed to be a genuinely warm smile.
“Mrs. Wolfe,” she said, extending a hand to Rose. “Thank you so much for coming today. Won’t you please sit down?”
Rose accepted the chair kitty corner from the mayor’s wife. As she sat down she returned Mrs. McGrath’s smile. “Thank you for inviting me.”
The butler came in and put his tray on the low table between the women’s chairs. “Thank you, Davidson,” said Mrs. McGrath. “I don’t believe we’ll need you again for some time.”
“Very good, madam.” The butler made another shallow bow and left the room.
The smile Mrs. McGrath directed toward her husband looked far more brittle than the one she’d given Rose. “Run along now, Timothy. I think Mrs. Wolfe and I can serve ourselves without any help from a man.”