Daring Time (26 page)

Although it was distant and muffled, she distinctly heard the pop of a bullet's impact and then the sound of glass shattering.

***

Ryan shoved Hope through the gateway of the mirror at the same moment that Mario raised his pistol and aimed. The bullet tore a hole in the wood of the wardrobe when Ryan ducked. Another shot rang out. The sound of shattering glass seemed to pierce straight through his heart.

Everything seemed to switch into slow-motion viewing. The bullet blew the glass to smithereens at the point of impact. A crack splintered down the mirror. One large piece toward the bottom separated from the gilded frame.

Ryan dove headfirst into the mirror fragment even as it fell forward.

"Ryan,"
he heard Hope scream before he crashed onto the unforgiving wood floor. He'd landed on top of the borrowed coat and his ribs had slammed against the hard metal of his gun.

There wasn't a damn place on his body that didn't throb in pain at that moment. His heavy fall on the floor seemed to reactivate every one of Big Mario's punches in the ring.

Big Mario.

The last twenty seconds came back to him in graphic detail— Mario aiming his pistol.

The shot. The shattering mirror.

Shit.

He sprung up off the floor, doing his best to ignore his aching muscles and joints. He inspected the intact mirror closely. A thin ring of fog had returned around the outer edges. He pushed his fingers to the surface, but there was no give.

Nothing but smooth, impenetrable glass.

Something caught his attention. He reached up and ran his finger over the rough hole on the closed right door of the mahogany wardrobe—a bullet hole that had certainly never been there before, either in Hope's time or his own.

He turned around slowly to face Hope. She still knelt where he'd fallen on the floor, her skirt spread out around her. Her face

looked pale in the bright sunlight that flooded his bedroom in the year 2008.

He blinked in amazement and looked out the windows. It'd been the middle of the night in Hope's world. They seemed to have picked up several hours on their trip forward in time. He'd be damned if he understood the details of how that mirror worked.

And he
never
would now.

"Are you all right?" he asked as he approached Hope and sank down to his knees next to her.

"I'm fine. Are you well?" She reached up and lightly ran her fingertips over his brow, pushing back his hair. He saw her looking worriedly at the cut on his brow and wondered if it had started bleeding again.

"I'm okay. Hope ... the mirror in your bedroom. Mario's bullet hit it. It shattered."

She froze in the process of caressing his cheek. "I heard it breaking. But I thought... I thought since you made it through ..."

Her voice trailed off when she took in his expression.

"There was one large piece at the bottom that began to fall out of the frame. I dove through it before it struck the floor. I don't think much of it remains in your time. I'm sorry, Hope."

She looked every bit as shattered as the mirror. "I can't go back?"

He tried to pull her into his arms but she resisted him. She twisted around and stared at the room, her mouth agape with shock. He felt a fine tremor begin to vibrate her flesh and knew the reality of her situation had just been slammed home to her.

"Oh my God," she whispered. "I'm really in your world, aren't I? It's the year 2008?"

"Yes."

Her eyes glistened when she looked up at him.

"They're all dead, including my father. Everyone I ever knew or loved—ashes."

***

Ryan thought it was best to focus on one thing at a time. He'd never once considered Hope frail, but that's the word that came to him as she sat there on the bedroom floor. Her typical, almost tangible vibrancy seemed to drain out of her before his very eyes. He spread his hand along the side of her face, cradling her jaw.

"Hope, listen to me," he said, garnering her attention. She blinked and focused on him listlessly. "I think it would be very dangerous for either of us to try and travel through the mirror after what happened. Your father wouldn't thank you for gambling your life so foolishly, I'm sure. But I want you to know I'm not going to give up on trying to figure out how and why it enabled us to travel through time. This isn't the end of it. Do you understand?"

"You think there's still a chance?"

"I think there are a lot of things about that mirror I don't understand. I'd be a fool to start claiming I have all the answers at this point in time. That doesn't mean we'll always be ignorant. . . or that things are hopeless." He gave her a pointed stare before he stood.

"We're not going to solve anything at this moment. The only thing on your agenda at the moment is a bath and bed. Come on," he said as he reached for her hands and pulled her to her feet.

"But it looks like it's full morning here," Hope mumbled dazedly as she followed him.

"And you've been up all night, hit over the head, kidnapped, witnessed a murder and been shot at, not to mention been made love to .. . rigorously."

He turned in time to see her lower her eyelids. Her cheeks turned a delicate shade of pink.

He dropped a kiss on her mouth and spoke next to her parted lips.

"We
are
in the bedroom, witch."

He took his first full breath of air in several minutes when he saw Hope's lips curve into a weary smile.

NINETEEN

Hope had so many questions to ask Ryan about the house—why it seemed so empty, for instance. Didn't he have any family? Why were the servants so glaringly absent?

Other questions were more mundane, but made her burn with curiosity nonetheless. What were the mechanics of the porcelain bowl in the bathroom that had taken the place of the water closet? What awesome scientific advancements had allowed them to so perfectly distill the scent of strawberries in the cleanser she used to wash her hair or make the toilet paper so cushy and soft she almost felt guilty about using it for its purpose?

She wanted to ask Ryan all these things, but he was taking his turn in the bathroom.

Meanwhile, her eyelids uncooperatively grew heavier and heavier with each passing second.

She nodded and jerked into wakefulness when she heard the sound of the bedroom door open. Even though she'd been gifted

with the sight of Ryan's bare chest for the better part of the night, her eyes widened in amazement presently as though she were seeing him for the first time all over again.

His damp hair hadn't been combed and stuck up adorably at odd angles. She longed to run her fingers through the damp hair on his chest and feel the warm, dense muscle beneath. She noticed that something beige-colored stuck to his forehead, covering the cut on his brow.

"What is that?"

He crinkled his forehead in confusion when she pointed to his head. He reached up and touched his brow.

"It's a bandage. What are you doing sitting there? Why don't you lie down? You're about to fall over." He turned out the overhead light and walked over to pull the drapes on the windows.

"I have so many questions to ask you about the bathroom," she mumbled almost incoherently. It seemed that her lips had grown as heavy and unresponsive as her eyelids.

"The
bathroom?'"

She nodded. Ryan waggled his finger at the pillows. Hope scooted onto the bed—her very own brass bed—and sighed when her cheek touched the pillowcase. Ryan's scent wafted up to her appreciative nose. It smelled like the soap she'd found in a dish by the bathtub but with other odors mixed in—spices, musk, a hint of peppermint and some other scent that she associated singularly with Ryan. She struggled to keep her eyes open when Ryan came down on the bed next to her.

"What about the bathroom?"

"Can't 'member," Hope slurred. She smiled at the sound of his low chuckle. She wanted to purr when he opened his hand over her waist, lazily stroking her. He suddenly went still when he moved up over her ribs.

"What do you have on under this T-shirt?"

Hope cocked open one eye. T-shirt? Was that what one called the enormous, buttonless cotton shirt Ryan had given her to put on after her bath along with an equally gigantic pair of cotton pants with a drawstring?

"What do you mean?" she asked.

Ryan scowled before he rolled her onto her back and jerked up the hem of the T-shirt. He glanced up at her a second later, his handsome face full of laughter.

"Why are you wearing your corset?" She squawked in protest when he matter-of-factly lowered the pants before he flipped them back up to her waist. "Honey, if you were going to leave on your pantaloons, there was no need to put on the sweatpants."

"You don't expect me to wear these clothes without any underwear, do you?" she asked, scandalized.

He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it. The crooked grin he wore was unlike any smile she'd yet seen on his face. He shook his head, pulled her into his arms and planted a kiss on the top of her head.

"The only thing I expect at the moment, witch, is for you to get some sleep. Something tells me you're really going to need the rest."

Despite her contentment at being in Ryan's arms and her profound fatigue, Hope found that sleep didn't come as easily as she'd thought it would.

"Ryan, do you think that man—Mario—might have hurt my father or anyone else in the household?"

"No." He opened his palm over the back of her head, cradling it in a gesture that struck her as cherishing. Or perhaps she just wished that were true? She wondered sluggishly if it was uncomfortable for him to have her damp hair on his bare chest but found she was too content and tired to move.

"Why do you say that with so much confidence?"

"Because Jack kidnapped you in order to blackmail your father. He tried to get him on his payroll, but your father refused and went along with his own agenda. Jack wanted to control your father, not harm him and cast suspicion upon himself. Jack sent Mario to come to your house tonight to reclaim you—and likely to kill me— for a reason beyond the original plan, though."

"What reason?" Hope whispered. She felt his muscles flex as he shrugged.

"Payback. For having defied Jack's all-encompassing authority. The guy's a megalomaniac."

Something occurred to her and she jerked her head off his chest. "What of Mel? What if Mario stopped her from getting back to Addie? Do you think Mario saw her? Harmed her?"

"No. I don't."

He held her stare. She wondered if he was being so certain just to still her jitters over things she couldn't control one way or another. Even with that vague suspicion, however, Hope found herself calming.

"No more questions now. Go to sleep," he urged, pushing lightly on the back of her head.

She returned her cheek to his chest and closed her eyes.

It was impossible not to be affected by Ryan's quiet, depthless confidence.

TWENTY

Shadows lay thick in his bedroom by the time Ryan opened his eyes. He rubbed the grit out of his eyelids and glanced down beside him.

He bolted out of the brass bed.

"Hope?" he called out, instantly admonishing himself for shouting. The woman had a right to get up out of bed, didn't she?

His eyes flickered over to the gilded mirror.
She wouldn't.
Surely she saw the stark danger of trying to travel using the mirror when its twin had been destroyed in her time.

He headed for the door, deciding even Hope couldn't be that impulsive and headstrong. It still alarmed him to think of her wandering around in the twenty-first century alone. He'd had some of the guidance of history to prepare him and he'd still been shocked to the core. She'd be as innocent and curious as a toddler playing around a steep staircase with no adult present.

He could just imagine her wandering out in front of a barreling truck or asking a whacked-out drug dealer for directions to the nearest respectable jeweler where she might pawn her priceless jewelry.

"Hope!" He saw that the bathroom was empty and that her neatly folded skirt, blouse, petticoat and hosiery were missing. He barreled down the grand staircase and bellowed her name several more times as he checked room after room on the first floor. The memory of the intimate drawing room came to him and he changed direction.

The drawing room stood silent and empty when he reached it. Now that he knew what it'd looked like in the past, the room struck him as hollow and depressing—like an empty tomb.

"Hope"
he shouted with increasing anxiety. Where would she go to find comfort in a barren house that had once been a home filled with people she loved, every item that her gaze fell upon likely associated with the memories of a lifetime? Damn. Why hadn't he thought of this? Why hadn't he done something to make the austere mansion warmer, more cheery? As he ran down the hallway a movement outside of the uncurtained window caught his eyes.

A second later he hurried down the limestone front steps and ran across a quiet Prairie Avenue barefoot.

She stood on the sidewalk, shivering as she stared up at the Romanesque mansion kitty-corner from their house. Her long skirt and high-necked blouse didn't strike him as out of place like he might have expected it would. Enough of the elegance and grandeur of Prairie Avenue remained to make Hope look as natural there as in her own time.

When Ryan saw her face he wondered if her trembling was from the cool late November afternoon chill or shock.

"This is my friend Fanny's house. We went on our European tour together. They've made it into a museum," she said dully when he came beside her and said her name.

He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her around firmly. "Let's go back inside.

There was something important I needed to tell you before you saw the changes time has made."

She didn't resist him, but she moved like an automaton as he marched her across the street and back up the limestone steps. She cast a sad glance down the north side of the street, her eyes enormous in her white face. Ryan followed her gaze, trying to see Prairie Avenue through her eyes. None of the grand mansions on the Seventeenth and Sixteenth Street blocks remained. Gone was George Pullman's palatial mansion; gutted were the grand homes of Lydia and William Gold Hibbard's many children in a block that would have been known to Hope as Hibbardville due to the family's pervasive presence.