AUTHOR'S NOTE: Apologies for the delay. I had a minor health crisis, but am back on my feet and writing again. Enjoy!
I'd almost drifted off when I startled awake to, "Cooper! Get up here!"
"What?" I asked immediately, even as Benj somehow rolled out of his bedroll right into a crouch, a rifle ready in his hands. "Who?"
I had to flail with my own covers a little, even as he headed in the direction of the path Jacob had climbed to the lookout. "Stay here," warned Benj, over his shoulder. Then he stopped, just before vanishing. "No. Check yer boots and come with me. Could be a distraction."
Go ahead! I wanted to insist, grabbing up my boots and obediently shaking them out before slamming my feet into them. Jacob needs you!
But he didn't go, and I felt like the slowest boot-donner in the west—especially after I had to go back for my gun belt.
At least that, I was able to buckle while hurrying after my friend, even in the middle of the night. Full moons really do make a difference, in a world without electric lights. Benj paused on the steep path several times, reaching down a hand to help me up—how did he and Jacob make it look so easy? Each time, I wanted to push him ahead.
Jacob needed him.
Jacob wouldn't call unless he needed him!
But Benj had a point. Whatever had happened could be a way for Slade Callahan to separate us and catch me alone. So I scrambled as best I could, sometimes using hands and feet, until Benj pulled me over the top onto a flat stone shelf.
The first thing I noticed was Jacob, alive and apparently unhurt, slowly walking the perimeter of the house-sized rock, staring over its edge. I closed my eyes in a moment of relief. No matter what I decided about my own future, I didn't want anything bad happening to him.
I didn't like thinking that me leaving would be something bad happening to him.
When I opened my eyes again, the view in the moonlight took my breath. Wow! I could see across the rugged, rolling landscape for miles!
So why was my husband studying the ground immediately below this big rock, instead?
"Would of said to bring her," he snapped, upon seeing me.
Benj said, "Well pardon me for bein' overly cautious with yer wife."
Something about the way Garrison looked at him, and then at me, before going back to his examination of whatever lay beneath the boulder, gave me a bad feeling, and I didn't know why. It was as if... as if he knew a secret about us and he didn't like it.
"Take watch," he commanded—to Benj, of course. With a spread hand, he indicated a stretch across the other side of the rock. "Don't step here. Look fer tracks come mornin'."
"Somethin' was up here, left tracks?" I could hear the doubt in Benj's voice.
Garrison said, "Yep," and headed for the path back down.
"Anythin' likely to shoot at us?"
"Nope."
I followed my husband until he turned back and pointed. "Stay with Cooper."
"I'd rather stay with you."
Again, something flickered in his shadowed gaze that gave me pause. But he just said, "Suit yerself," and resumed his descent.
Thank goodness for the bright moonlight, or I could easily have tripped on the path, with bad results. When I say the look-out rock was house-sized, I mean at least a 2-story house, though not quite a McMansion. I had to go down on my butt feet first, part of the way. When he reached the bottom, by the campsite, Garrison offered me his hand instinctively as he studied the landscape around us.
I accepted his help, enjoyed the ease with which he pulled me to my feet. "What are we looking for?"
"Woman," he admitted.
"You already have a woman, mister," I warned, but of course I didn't feel jealous. This was Jacob.
My certainty in his faithfulness caught me off guard. I mean—of course, Mr. Rogers would be more likely to fool around than my husband, whether he loved me or not. But....
It was nice, was all. That certainty.
Garrison's steadiness had never, ever been a problem.
"Saw her up top," he admitted, without looking up from his work. He chose a stick from the pile I'd collected for firewood. He grabbed up a rope--he and Benj had several--and began wrapping the end of the stick. "Went over th'edge."
"Saw her?" But then I realized who he might mean. "You saw the ghost?"
"Ain't no ghosts." Jacob tied off the rope bulb at the end of the stick, secured it with a long length of rawhide.
"Was she wearing white?"
He found our unlit lamp--which, since we were riding rough, had no glass in it. They called it a Betty lamp, an odd, contraption that might have held a genie, if it weren't for the long, high-curved tail and the chain. Only when Jacob opened the hinged top and poured the oily contents onto our rope did I realize what he was doing.
Making a torch.
Sure enough, when he stirred the ropey end of the branch into our banked fire, it blazed into slow, then crackling brightness. Such a clever man.
"Was she wearing white?" I repeated.
Job done, he straightened out of his crouch. "Yep."
Holy crap! "Should we tell Benj what's happening?"
"He can hear."
I wasn't sure how he could be so certain of that, but I followed him past our now curious, night-hobbled horses as he circled to the back of the boulder.
First, he stood back and held the torch high, examining the rock face as if expecting to find a net or a cave in there. I divided my time between watching the curve of his strong back, and looking out at the landscape behind him--in adventure-movie terms, I had his six.
Unfortunately, the torch had left me a little night-blind. Fortunately, nothing loomed out of the darkness to attack us.
"How do you know she's not a ghost?" I asked.
Garrison actually took the time to turn to me for his firm answer. "No such thing."
Then he moved closer to the rock and crouched to examine the ground under it.
"Did you get a good look at it?" What I really wanted to ask was, Was it Maddie? Was it Lisle?
"Nope."
Damn. "And you didn't touch it to see if it was corporeal? I mean--solid?"
"Ain't in the habit of touchin' strange women."
Hah hah. "Did it breathe funny?" I tried to reproduce the sound I remembered from my maybe-not-a-dream-after-all. A wheezing inhale. A struggling exhale.
Garrison's head turned up to me so abruptly, I knew I must have done a good impression indeed.
"Then it's real. She's real. Wow." I considered that, then smirked. "Unless of course you imagined her."
He stared at me a moment longer, then went back to studying the ground. I'm not sure, but I think he was looking for tracks. Maybe he thought whoever went over the edge landed unharmed and ran off?
"Or maybe you were walking in your sleep."
He straightened, took several steps to the side, then crouched back into his tracking.
"Not so fun when people are doubting your sanity, is it?"
Reaching out to move some grass, then shaking his head, he ignored my gentle taunts. Or... were they so gentle?
"I don't really think that," I assured him, uncertain.
"Figured." His easy answer relieved me quite a bit.
"I mean, I don't think you imagined this woman. I do still think it's annoying to have people doubt my sanity. Especially if it's because I'm a woman."
It occurred to me to look into the darkness behind us again, just in case. But I saw nothing but shadows and, beyond them, silver-lit hills. That, and more stars than I could count--a vast display of the cosmos. At one point, a shooting star streaked across the big, sparkling Wyoming sky.
I made a wish. Please let him be the man I fell in love with.
Please don't give me another reason to leave....
With a creak of his knees, Garrison stood again. When I glanced over at him, he lowered the torch from where he'd raised it to better examine the rock face again, maybe looking for stairs or hand-holds. He shook his head--for once, not at me.
He stalked around the rock, trying other, even less-likely angles.
I followed, fully aware of his frustration. My husband did not like what he could not understand. And yet he'd really seen... someone. And whoever-it-was had really vanished. Except that people didn't vanish....
It occurred to me that time-travelers sometimes vanish, and for a moment, everything in me went still. Again I thought: Maddie?
Callahan had insisted that he didn't murder her. Maybe she'd gotten safely home, and now was coming back for me?
But no. To time slip, we needed concentration. It took either virtual-reality or really good visualization. I couldn't imagine doing that at gunpoint! Also, to move from one time and place to another was a huge, reality-splitting event. The enormity of it had robbed me of my memory for a week! Even if Maddie had safely traveled home, what were the chances that she would timeslip back to 1878 Wyoming?
Several times!
Unless maybe those were unsuccessful attempts at time travel, in which she couldn't quite anchor and kept boomeranging back to our future. But... how would she target all these different, exact locations, without having antique photographs with which to visualize them? Also, we come through naked, so if she were showing up as a woman in white, where was she getting all the white clothing every time?
And as a doctor, wouldn't she treat her lung issues before even trying?
My theories made no sense, unless....
Was it possible she'd gotten stuck between worlds, somehow?
God, I needed a physicist! Except, the only modern physicist available to me was the bad guy I'd be meeting tomorrow night. Not comforting.
A flare of light across my face had me flinching back from the illumination of Garrison's torch. There went more of my night vision.
My husband had gone from examining the lookout rock to examining me. "Surprised yer brain ain't tuckered, how hard you run it."
"I'm thinking time-travely thoughts," I warned him.
He went back to examining the looming rock, dismissing me just that fast. What, did he expect to find a secret tunnel?
"Because I'm a time traveler," I added.
"So you've said."
His annoyance fed my own. Thanks for nothing, shooting star.
"You're obviously not going to find anything." I turned to head back to our campsite. "I'm going to bed."
And I did--or started to. I got to the camp, all right. But before I could rejoin my bedroll, I heard a striding step coming after me. I turned to see my husband following, torch in hand until he tossed it into the fire ring.
"Don't go," he commanded me.
"Don't go back to bed," I challenged him.
He searched my face, then tried again. "Don't. You. Go."
As I realized what he meant, my breath fell short. He didn't want me to leave him. Didn't want....
Did that mean he cared? Or was this just another one of his many Boss orders to keep me in line? Please be the first, please be the first.
"I have no plans to--"
But that's as far as I got before he caught my face between two calloused hands and kissed me to freakin' pieces. His beard scratched, and his mouth kind of crushed mine, and his hot breath shivered across my face, and God, I loved it. In moments, even as I tried to keep up, I began to sink from a literal weakness of the knees. I caught him over the shoulders with both arms, grasping at his shirt to hang on. He pushed me against the rock wall and, with me thus propped, kissed me some more.
When he momentarily stopped, leaving me gasping mouthfuls of breath, we stared at each other in the moonlit shadows, in surprise. I mean--we'd always been hot, together. But this...
He wasn't asking for permission. I knew I could tell him no if I wanted to--insert hysterical laughter here--and that he would even yield. Nothing rapey was going on. But something primal sure the hell was.
Maybe it was his frustration at not understanding where the "ghost" had gone.
Maybe it was his anger at leaving the drive behind, for days, because of me and Slade Callahan.
Maybe it was altitude, or the phase of the moon. Did I care? Strengthened by those few great gulps of air, I used my hold on his shoulders to hook a leg over his hip and boost myself upward, so that now I was straddling him, my trousered legs crossed at the ankles behind his butt, leaning down for his kisses.
He obliged, at first, leaning up for mine, helping hold me in place with a wide hand under my ass. But then he began to kiss along my jaw, and then he trailed hot kisses down the sensitive side of my neck, and then he veered under the edge of my collar.
When my collar stopped him going any further, he shifted his hips to catch me even more securely between a literal rock and a hard place. That freed his hands enough to grab my shirt and yank it up over my head--the collar caught me under the chin, but not for long. Then he half-fumbled, half-forced the buttons on my underwear open as well--as long as I was dressing as a boy, I'd gone whole hog. And then he had that spread open too, baring my chest to the Wyoming night and to his rasping beard and his seeking mouth....
At this overload of sensations, I threw back my head and hit it on the rock.
I didn't mind.
So... many... feelings!
Eventually, I melted down the wall to my bedroll. He let me, helped guide me, followed me down. It was harder to get my pants off than it would have been to lift a skirt, and I'd never wanted girl clothes so badly, but with some tugging of heavy material and creative twisting of limbs, we made it work. To say I was ready for him, when he filled me, began to ride me, owned me, would be an understatement. My heels struggled to find purchase on the ground, against the push of him. My hands held on to whatever they could--fists full of his hair, nails sunk into his back.
He didn't seem to mind either.
Since we weren't with the drive, for once, Jacob didn't try to muffle swallow my cries with his mouth. He let me howl them into the night, joining the song of the wolves, the yips of coyotes, the strange scream of a lovelorn elk. The stars overhead—to whom I guess I owed gratitude and a big apology—sparkled through me and exploded.
By time we'd finished, my throat felt sore, my lips swollen, my limbs jelly, my body wrung out and throbbing. I wasn't sure I could move. Ever again. I could live with that.
Jacob lay beside me, both of us on top of my bedroll, his hard arms around me, his heavy legs around me. Eventually, his breathing--initially shaky and gasping, returned to normal.
Sometime later, mine did too.
"I won't," I promised, against the salty skin where his chest dipped in toward his shoulder.
He grunted confusion.
"Leave," I promised. Because that's what he'd asked me, before. "I won't go. Not unless--"
He groaned.
"Not unless I have to. If somehow I needed to leave for the baby. If something happened to you, and I was left alone. I have to know how, if that happens. But no, Jacob Garrison, I'm not leaving you. Is that good enough?"
He turned his head--with some apparent effort--and asked, incredulous, "How can you still talk?"
I laughed. "It's a gift."
His eyes smiled at me in the moonlight.
And yeah, clichéd or not, I was so in love that I could hardly breathe through it. He didn't want me to go. That mattered, right? Yes, on a pragmatic level--one I could hardly imagine, much less access at that moment, I still knew that he also didn't want his horse to go, wouldn't want to lose any more men, probably felt proprietary about his hat. Him not wanting to lose me was not exactly a declaration of unending love.
But it was a wonderful step in a very right direction.
"Reckon I'll take second watch, after all," he said, more loudly than seemed necessary. With our weak, shaking arms, we tugged and straightened and buttoned until we were both more or less dressed again, in case of emergencies. And then we slept under the stars.
I may have dreamed what happened when Benj came down the path to swap shifts with my husband. It seems unlikely that my friend would actually kick his partner awake and say, "You are one sorry son of a bitch."
It also seems unlikely that my puritanical husband, sitting up onto his knees and readjusting the covers over me, would respond to such foul language with a simple, "Ain't never claimed different."