Читать книгу The Cowboy from Christmas Past - Tina Leonard - Страница 11

Dillinger tried not to gasp as his body strained against the seat belt. It was as if he were being jerked by a strong, invisible hand trying to tear him from the car. Only the straps kept him restrained.

“Is something wrong?” Auburn asked, staring at him in the rearview mirror.

“No,” he said, grinding out the word.

She checked the road, then glanced back to his reflection. “Are you sure? You don’t look good.”

He unhooked the belt, relieved when the pressure subsided.

“You have to wear that,” Auburn said. “It’s against the law not to wear a seat belt.”

He grimaced at the pain in his stomach and across his chest. “Do you think that’s a strange thing to tell a gunslinger?” He checked the belt again. This time it was acting as it should. Maybe the thing had malfunctioned. Maybe there hadn’t been anything supernatural trying to drag him from this car.

“You know, about that gunslinger business, maybe we should figure out some other livelihood for you, when people ask what you do,” Auburn said, her voice bright.

“Why? Who’s going to care?”

She shook her head. “No one, most likely. But if anyone asks, why don’t you tell them you work for…I don’t know.” Her gaze lit on him in the mirror again. “You can say you’re an unemployed model.”

He laughed. “I don’t think so.”

“Well, just say you’re a ranch owner.”

“I am.”

“You are?”

She sounded so shocked that he frowned. “I told you. I own a ranch outside of Christmas River.”

“But I looked that up. There’s no such town.”

“Care to place a wager on that?”

“No.”

She could be quite the shrew. He tried to relax in the magic vehicle, which had a material top that she said pulled back to let in sunshine and fresh air and the feeling of freedom.

“You felt it, didn’t you?”

She’d caught him off guard. “Felt what?”

Auburn moved one finger in the air in a slow circle. “If you hadn’t been wearing that seat belt, you would have gone airborne again.”

Polly wouldn’t have hounded him so. This woman had no qualms about doing it. “The contraption simply malfunctioned.”

“You felt it, and now you know I was telling you the truth.”

He didn’t care. He was so sleepy all he could do was send a fast glance at Rose to make certain she was still happy and nestled in her carrier. Fear suddenly hit his gut. “Do me a favor,” he said, fighting to keep his eyelids open. “If something happens to me, take care of Rose.”

“Nothing’s going to happen to you,” Auburn said, trying to sound soothing. “You just have a bad habit of levitating.”

“Promise,” he insisted.

“I’m not really cut out for taking care of a baby. I’ve got problems of my own.”

He couldn’t argue with her any longer. Unconsciousness pulled at him, forbidding him to stay awake, as much as he would have enjoyed telling her that he’d never seen a woman so cut out to be a mother.

Except maybe Polly.

And that worried him, too. He fell asleep, his soul tortured by thoughts of what might have been and what should have been.

WHAT WOULD IT HURT to swing by this place he called Christmas River? Maybe the answers to his problem were there. Auburn punched “Christmas” into her GPS system. They weren’t far from a town called Christy River—maybe he was confused from all the whirling around he engaged in. It was just a fast detour from where they planned to go, but they certainly had no schedule and nowhere definitive to be. Going to such a remote place might even help her put some distance between her and her fiancé. The cowboy wouldn’t awaken, not for a while, so she couldn’t ask him, but she had a feeling he’d be happy to get home.

She knew something was wrong with him, knew he knew it, too. He didn’t want to admit his fear, but for a man who claimed to routinely face down killers, what was bugging him now appeared to be bigger than anything he’d dealt with before.

He’d asked her about taking care of Rose, and for the first time, concern swept through Auburn. She couldn’t take on a baby if something happened to the hunky cowboy. Her eyes went to him in the mirror. He slept with his head tipped back against the seat, an ungraceful position, which had no bearing whatsoever on his sex appeal. She liked her men tall, dark and handsome, with a dash of mystery thrown in, so Dillinger was everything she would never have been able to resist in a man.

And yet she would have forced herself to, which was why she’d chosen the supersafe Bradley Jackson for her fiancé, a dreadful mistake that hadn’t been safe at all. Her parents owned the popular McGinnis Perfumes. She’d proudly worked as a vice president at the company. Bradley had been the CFO.

But three weeks before the wedding matters had gone terribly wrong, and she’d learned things about the company—and specifically her own family—that she’d never known.

It still hurt to think about it. Her parents said Bradley basically owned the company now. They’d hit a snag during hard times and Bradley had financed their debt through his own company. The wonderful perfumes Auburn remembered her grandmother carefully fashioning to enrich a woman’s life were phased out, replaced with cheaply made imitations. Every bottle sold generated huge profit. In this way, Bradley was receiving revenue from the loan, which her parents had never had to pay back.

The debt would have all been swept clean with her marriage to Bradley. She still smarted under the realization that the man she’d loved—and believed loved her—had actually owned her and her family lock, stock and barrel. No woman wanted to feel like that.

“You’re deep in thought,” Dillinger said, startling her.

“You’re awake.”

He grunted.

“Do you feel better?”

“I didn’t feel bad.” He glanced down at the baby. “She sure does sleep peacefully when she sleeps.”

The infant probably derived comfort from Dillinger’s deep voice. Auburn turned her gaze back to the road, vowing not to allow the rearview mirror to continue to lure her to stare at the hunk in her backseat.

“What does it feel like?” Auburn asked.

“I’d like to pretend I don’t know what you’re talking about, but since I’m completely at a loss as to what’s happening to me, I guess I’ll just say it feels strange.”

“Like you’re having a hypoglycemic attack?”

“What’s that?”

“Low blood sugar.”

“I don’t know what that is. Sorry, my medical knowledge ends around 1892.”

She couldn’t help it; she stared at him in the mirror. “Part of me believes that you really think you’re from another place and time.”

He just shook his head, and she went back to driving. “Listen, maybe you should see a doctor,” she suggested worriedly.

“You mean you think I’m dangerous. That my mind is addled.”

She refused to meet his gaze; she could feel him looking at her in the mirror. “I don’t know what to think.”

He sighed. “Where are we going?”

“To Christy River.”

“I’m from Christmas River.”

“Can’t it be the same thing? Maybe the Google map has a misprint. It does that sometimes.”

“Google map?”

“Never mind.” She pulled into a Sonic drive-through, ordered a couple of burgers, and by the time they were finished—the cowboy wolfed his—Rose was awake and ready for her bottle. Together they managed the whole burp, diaper, comfort routine. Chilly as it was outside, Rose didn’t mind being put back into her snug carrier for another nap.

“She’s tired from traveling,” Dillinger observed.

“Oh, traveling does that to everyone.” Auburn got into the driver’s seat and started the car.

“I meant, traveling through time.”

She frowned. “Listen, let’s play a little game, okay?”

“I don’t really like games.”

“Who was the most famous person of 1892?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Lord Tennyson died in October. I like his poems. Some of them had to do with the Knights of the Round Table. My wife enjoyed reading to me.”

“Can you read?”

“Of course I can read!” He scowled at her. “It’s a pleasure to have one’s wife read aloud at fireside!”

“Sorry, sorry.” Jeez, he could be sensitive about certain things. Auburn didn’t know if Tennyson had died in 1892 or not, but Dillinger sounded pretty knowledgeable so she let it pass. “Who was the president?”

“Grover Cleveland was just reelected. Third term, though not consecutively. He came back to beat President Benjamin Harrison. Other than that, I didn’t pay too much attention. We tend to set our own rules out West. Not sure what he knows about ranching, so I let him run the country and I run my ranch.”

He could have studied 1892 and become well versed in the history. But why did he keep levitating?

What if he really was from another time? Auburn pulled out of the Sonic parking lot. She’d be a fool if she started believing this man’s wild story, she told herself. She’d just discovered how painful it was when someone you trusted lied to you, and she had her guard up. Planned on keeping it up.

“So what really happened to your wife?”

Dillinger’s heart clenched with familiar pain at the topic. He didn’t want to talk about it. Still, he sensed genuine curiosity not borne from meanness in Auburn’s question. “She died of pneumonia. I couldn’t get the doctor out to our ranch fast enough. Don’t know what he could have done, anyway. All those tinctures they give seem pretty useless to me. It started out as a cold, though I kept the house warm as toast. I never left her side.” He shuddered, remembering the fever that had swept through Polly. He’d kept her wrapped, made sure not a draft entered the house. Tried to feed her soup he made himself.

Nothing had helped.

“I’m so sorry,” Auburn said. “I can tell you miss her.”

“I don’t miss her so much that I’m unhinged, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I didn’t think that at all!”

“Sure you did,” Dillinger said.

Auburn’s eyes met his in the mirror, but he looked away before he could see the pity there. “She was an angel,” he said, “and now she’s with the angels. I really couldn’t have kept her long. I realize that now.”

“But now you have Rose,” Auburn said.

“But for how long?” Dillinger asked, gently touching the soft, fine hairs on the baby’s head. He was getting awfully attached to a child that wasn’t his. He didn’t even know why her mother had left her with him. No doubt the people of Christmas River would say he’d stolen her, the same way they’d accused him of murdering Polly.

“I hope she’ll stay with me,” he said quietly. “She’s all I’ve got right now.”

“Where would she go?” Auburn asked. “It’s not like she can walk away.”

Dillinger shook his head. Auburn couldn’t possibly understand the demons that drove him, and why this little angel was his only connection to the world he knew.