Polly had been sweet like that, too, which he missed more than anything.
In fact, he'd felt unfaithful and conflicted afterward, and though he knew it didn't make sense, he really had hoped Auburn would get snatched away by some heavenly hand, to the place where she belonged, wherever that was.
At the breakfast table, when she'd sat there so prettily with Rose in her arms, wearing Polly's dress, he'd nearly choked on his guilt. It was what he and Polly had so hoped for, Polly making pilgrimages to church in town dutifully every Sunday to pray for a baby.
He had failed her in that. What man couldn't get his wife with child?
Now he had a family of sorts, and he didn't know if he deserved them. Or wanted them. Or where they'd come from.
He stared out the window, seeing the track of boot prints left in the snow. Pierre didn't care that Dillinger knew he was out there, and neither did Dillinger. If he wanted, he could step outside right now and find him, kill him if he wished. He was the gunslinger, Pierre a trapper. It wouldn't be much of a fight.
But Dillinger had no urge to fight. He'd given up his livelihood for Polly, and taken up ranching and farming. He would not dishonor her memory by returning to it, and certainly not by killing her brother.
Though he would destroy Pierre if he ever laid a finger on Auburn.
What Dillinger was going to do about the story-spinning woman he wasn't certain. He couldn't just sleep with her every night, as if she were his wife; that would be wrong, most especially to her. She deserved better than what he had to offer.
He wanted to take her into his bedroom right now and apologize for all the rough things he'd said, kiss away the hurt he knew he'd caused her. Those doe eyes could soften with tender feelings to the point that it made him want to hold her, tell her she was an angel brought to bear light on his misery. What would be left for him if she and Rose disappeared? Surely they could not stay; they were not his to begin with.
The long, cruel claws of winter would once again crush his spirit.
"Dillinger?" Auburn said softly. "Do you want a bowl of Christmas turkey soup?"
He didn't turn from the window, but closed his eyes against the winter landscape outside, and his ears against the sound of her sweet voice.
He didn't want the soup, damn it.
He wanted her.
Chapter Thirteen
The next day, Auburn reached out with nervous fingers to touch the hidden journal she'd found in the writing desk. She'd discovered a secret drawer quite by accident after whacking her head as she straightened up from a crouched position, while sweeping up some dust. "Darn dust bunnies," she'd muttered, wishing she could conk Dillinger on the head so he'd see stars. And a drawer had popped open like magic.
There lay a green journal, leather-bound with gold letters. Auburn didn't need to open it to know it was Polly's treasured private thoughts. She gave the journal a stroke with her fingertips before hastily closing the drawer. Atop the desk, Polly's small self-portrait smiled serenely, her single earring shining beside it.
The writing desk was a shrine in some ways, and Auburn never touched the items here. It was all Dillinger had of his wife, besides her clothes, and what good did those do him? Here were her favorite things.
Of course, Auburn itched to learn what Polly had written in the hours she spent alone, while Dillinger was out doing his work. "You know," she told the portrait, "girl talk should go two ways. Reading your journal wouldn't be right. If you want me to read it, you'll have to let me know."
Nothing happened. Auburn left the desk and moved into the kitchen with her broom. The snow that got tramped into the house brought tiny bits of dirt and torn leaves with it, no matter how careful they tried to be about wiping their feet. The nicely fitted wood floors needed a daily sweeping to keep clean.
When she'd gone from corporate vice president to housemaid and chimney watcher, she wasn't certain. Somehow it wasn't all that bad, but maybe it was like summer camp, and she'd get tired of it after a few weeks. Sessions at the exclusive Walden Lake Summer Camp for Girls had always seemed so exciting, but by the fifth week—her parents liked her gone all season so she could learn "proper manners that all the girls from the best families know"—Auburn was tired of the spiders and the heat and the dirt and pillow fights, fun as it always was in the beginning.
She wondered if maybe she was just one of those women who bored easily. Look how quickly she'd tired of Bradley in just two short years. Why hadn't she realized he wasn't the right man for her more quickly?
Why hadn't she looked over the corporate books more carefully and discovered there was a problem?
Maybe, she decided with a pang, she'd been too content to let other people do things for her.
Polly had been an independent woman. While she'd lived in a time that had necessitated a certain version of women's roles, Polly had not been dependent on her husband for her entertainment and identity. She'd been a helpmate, not helpless.
Auburn was learning a lot from her example.
She went back to the desk, slowly picked up the earring, admiring it. Wondered where the other one was and if they'd ever find it. Gave it a small shake to hear the bells tinkle—and screamed when Bradley came crashing into the room like a drunken sailor.
She tossed the earring to the desk. "Bradley!"
He shook his head, dazed. "What?"
"What are you doing here?"
He looked at her, clearly confused. "Auburn?"
Oh, God, this was a nightmare. "Go, go," she said, giving him a couple of light shoves with the broom. "Go home to your own century."
He stood, brushing himself off. His round glasses were slightly askew, his hair rumpled. "Jeez, what the hell just happened? Auburn, quit sweeping at me."
What rotten luck for him to find her, all the way back in 1892. She pressed herself against the writing desk, hoping he was an apparition that would suddenly disappear.
"Why are you wearing that ugly dress?" Bradley asked, "and whose brat is that?"
Gasping, she picked up Rose. "Don't you call this sweet baby a brat!"
"Whatever." He brushed a few wrinkles from his shirt and his designer jeans. "I'm not very happy with you right now."
"I don't think I was ever happy with you, but never mind that," Auburn said. "How did you get here?"
"I have no idea," he stated. "One minute I was sitting on the bed in your hotel room, and the next second I'm here." He grinned, his blond good looks not having any effect on her. "I knew I'd find you eventually."
"You found me. You can go back now. Click your heels together. Do something that will reverse whatever you did."
"Whatever's cooking smells awesome." He strolled into the kitchen. "Fancy setup you've got here. Who made the soup?"
"I did," she said between gritted teeth, and he laughed.
"You don't cook."
Auburn sighed. "You need to go before Dillinger finds you here."
"Dillinger? Is that the guy you've been shacking up with?"
She frowned. "I'm not shacking up with anybody!"
"The security guard at your penthouse in Dallas told me you'd left with some cowboy and his kid. I'll give you kids, Auburn, if you're all hot to get pregnant. Your parents would love to be grandparents."
She hated his confident smirk. "It's over between us, Bradley, if I didn't make that perfectly clear."
"I don't think so. Your parents owe me a lot of money. In fact, they owe me the company." He gazed at her, trying to make his expression sympathetic and failing miserably.
"That will have to be their problem," she said softly, and Bradley's eyebrows rose.
"You don't care about McGinnis Perfumes?"
Slowly she shook her head. "Even if I knew how to get back home, I care about what I have here more."
"What? A baby? An unemployed roughneck?"
"Roughneck?"
"Redneck, whatever. Can't be much if he's got you stuck out on a farm in the middle of nowhere. You're a ci
ty girl, Auburn, a world traveler. You don't belong here."
He might be right, but she didn't need her life's big truths pointed out to her by a man who had ten pairs of golf shoes and eight expensive cars. "Don't worry about me. I'll be fine."
The front door burst open, kicked with force. Auburn let out a yelp, and just to make her nightmare complete, Pierre walked in, looking like a wolf among lambs.
"What have we here?" he asked, "a weasel in the henhouse? What will Dillinger think?"
"Pierre," Auburn said, "get out. Both of you disappear." Clearly, her fairy godmother had gone on strike.
The men looked at her, then shook hands with each other, instantly realizing they were on the same team. Auburn rolled her eyes. "If you're both quite done, I have to take care of Rose. And we don't want you here, so please leave. I have a feeling everything will go downhill from here if you don't depart at once."
They looked at one another and shrugged.
"I'll stay for dinner," Pierre stated.
"I'm not going anywhere," Bradley added. "I don't know how I got here."
"If there's witchcraft going on here, that would be very interesting to the authorities in town," Pierre mused.
"There is no witchcraft, Pierre," Auburn said. "And if you don't hush that kind of talk, I'm going to pull a spell of whup-ass out of my cauldron and give you a lesson in social etiquette you sorely need." She sidled over to her frying pan, ready to inflict damage if either of them got any more weird on her.
Fortunately, Dillinger walked in at that moment.
"Why is the door open?" he demanded. "You're going to freeze to—What the hell is going on in here?" He positively glowered at Bradley and Pierre, as if he'd like to kill them both with his stare.
"Boys club," Auburn said. "I can't convince them this house isn't a good meeting place."
"Get out," he commanded Pierre and Bradley, seeming to grow taller and meaner right before her eyes. His gaze narrowed and his hands went to his hips, then down his legs in a movement he must have made many times before. He'd been feeling for pistols out of habit, then remembered his promise to Polly.
Auburn shrank into the kitchen with the baby, eyeing her collection of pots and pans. If Dillinger went for one of their visitors, she could bean the other. A cast-iron skillet ought to leave a headache for a few days that would incapacitate any man.
"Auburn, take the baby and go into the back of the house," Dillinger told her.
"I'm…I'm staying," Auburn insisted, not about to leave him alone in a two-on-one fight. "I have to stir the soup."
She peeked at him from the doorway. He glared at her and she raised her chin.
Then he ignored her. "If either of you have something to say, get on with it and get out."
"Auburn is my fiancée, and she's coming back with me." Bradley seemed intimidated by Dillinger, but put on a brave face, probably because he felt he had a buddy in Pierre.
Pierre laughed. "This is too much fun."
"I don't think so," Auburn snapped. "I am not your fiancée, Bradley."
Dillinger looked at her. "This is the man you were going to marry?"
She nodded.
He raised one eyebrow, communicating his disdain.
"It seemed like a good idea at the time," Auburn said.
"Hey!"
"Oh, hush," she muttered. "You don't want me, Bradley. You're just trying to get the company away from my parents and me. You've done it. Congratulate yourself, accept that I'm not coming back with you, and take yourself home to New York."
They all stared at each other for a moment, then Auburn walked back into the main room and held out her hand to Bradley. "Give me the earring."
"What earring?" He seemed confused.
"You must have an earring somewhere on you," she said, knowing he had to have Polly's other earring or he wouldn't be here. A lot of things were beginning to make sense to her. The earrings, the baby, seeing Polly…this all had to do with Dillinger's wife.
But Auburn didn't want Bradley to know about the earrings or he'd take the set, use them to trip around the world in every century and somehow manage to profit from it.
"Oh, yeah. Is this yours?" he asked, handing her back the tiny belled bauble. "It didn't look like something you'd wear. You've always been a pearls kind of girl."
"True," Auburn said, "but change is good." She grabbed the earring, sneaked its mate from the writing desk and went to hide them in Dillinger's bedroom. They were his wife's earrings, his gift to her, and if they had a magical property of some kind, it was up to him to decide what to do with them.
She hoped he'd let her use them to get back home, but that was a conversation for another day. Going back into the main room, she saw Dillinger, Pierre and Bradley locked in a fierce glaring contest.
"Oh, for heaven's sake," she said, "the snow is coming down in clumps. You two had better head off, because I'm sure Dillinger doesn't want you to stay here."
Bradley looked around the well-built farmhouse. "I don't know. This is a pretty cool place. I've always wanted a house like this, far away from the city."
Auburn stared at him. "No, you haven't."
He nodded. "Yes, I did. Just too busy trying to keep up with your jet-set lifestyle to think of my own needs."
She raised her brows. "That's news to me."
"It would be," Bradley said piteously. "You never realized I had any."
"Any…what?" Auburn asked, curious in spite of herself.
"Needs."
"Oh, jeez." She looked at Dillinger. "Are you hungry? Are you ready for some soup? If you get rid of these two, I can have your dinner on the table in a jiff."
Bradley gazed at her with admiration. "I like this new housewifely you."
A small light came into Dillinger's eyes. "I was afraid you might have second thoughts, now that you see him again."
She did have second thoughts, but they were the same ones she'd had when Bradley had flown into the room: How do I get rid of him once and for all? "There is no interplanetary trash can big enough to hold him," she said.
"Hey!" Bradley yelped again.
"Pierre, you and I will have to settle our score another day," Dillinger said. "There are too many eyewitnesses for you to kill me now."
Auburn sucked in a breath. She looked at Pierre, whose dark-eyed gaze had been following everything with interest.
"I don't need to kill you today," Pierre said, "it's too much fun watching you squirm. We'll stay here tonight, me and my new friend, Bradley." He grinned, and Auburn thought it was a shame he was a weasel because he wasn't totally unattractive—he had a lot of Polly's good facial features.
"There's no room in the inn," Auburn said, "is there, Dillinger?" If these two stayed, she wouldn't be able to cast her lures his way, and she'd discovered the wonders of keeping warm in bed with a certain strong, sexy cowboy. Selfishly, she wanted Bradley and Pierre gone sooner rather than later.
"We'll sleep in this room," Pierre said. "The fur blanket will be the best bed I've had in a long time."
"I can handle that," Bradley agreed. "I want to take a look over this spread you've got, Dillinger. These are great digs."
Dillinger didn't look flattered. "Didn't you get here by sleigh, Pierre? You can leave the same way."
"No," he replied cheerfully. "Sleigh runner's broken, and you wouldn't turn a traveler out to freeze, would you?" He took off his Western hat and jacket, tossing them on the divan. "Farmer's Almanac says this may be the coldest, longest winter on record."
"Lovely," Auburn said wryly. "Dillinger?"
"I'll sleep in here with them," he sighed. "I can't turn Polly's brother out into a blinding snowstorm. Nor this city-slicker, either." He shot Bradley a disdainful glare. "Put the soup on, please, Auburn."
"But they want to kill you!" she argued.
"I don't," Bradley said.
"There's time for that later," Pierre added.
Auburn ignored them both. "Why do you have to sleep out he
re with them?" she asked Dillinger. "I mean, Rose and I always sleep in the guest room," she said hurriedly, not wanting to get a bunch of negative feedback on that topic, "but you should at least sleep in your own bed."
She was terrified that Pierre would try something as soon as Dillinger nodded off. If she had her way, Dillinger would be locked up tight in his bedroom and Pierre and Bradley would sleep in a barn far away from the house. Actually, they only deserved the outhouse, but Dillinger was in the mood to be hospitable.
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