by Lisa Norato
Biscuit crumbs formed a dry lump in his throat. He could scarcely manage a swallow. He watched, aghast, as a little swirl of green flame floated down the stairs.
It hovered inches above the ground. When it reached the bottom of the staircase, it turned and began skimming the floor towards him. A chill raced up his spine. He scraped his chair back from the table and jumped to his feet. As he reached for his gun, two onyx eyes gleamed up at him.
“Dang your little black hide, Hawr-hey. You came mighty close to paying St. Peter a visit at the pearly gates. What kind of a light have you got shining inside that collar around your neck?”
* * *
Shelby woke with a start, staring bug-eyed into the night while her heart pounded like she’d just run ten miles in a marathon.
In her dream, she’d been riding a small red horse with a bright strawberry blond mane and a white face that reminded her of a cameo. She pressed her cheek against the horse’s neck, and as they raced across the prairie, Shelby’s hair tangled with the horse’s mane in the wind until the similar colors blended into one fiery stream of red amber.
She hadn’t known where they were going, only that they were running to escape. What they’d been running from, Shelby hadn’t known for sure, but she had a pretty good idea it had been themselves. No matter how far they rode, no matter how fast, a feeling of fear and vulnerability followed hot on her heels.
Then, as if those emotions had charged the atmosphere and taken on physical form, the sky turned black and bore down on them with angry purple thunderheads. The air grew heavy and oppressive. The wind, which only moments before had been whisking them towards freedom, blew with threatening intensity. Lightning forked the heavens and struck the ground before the hooves of her little horse. It screamed and reared.
Shelby lost her balance. Below her, the earth rumbled with the sounds of a great coffee pot about to percolate. Thunder boomed and the rain fell in sheets, slanting into her face with an icy sting. Her cold, wet hands grasped at empty air. She was falling . . . falling . . . falling into the storm of her emotions.
Someone caught her. She saw a cowboy with a hard, shadowed jaw and a thick black mustache. His hat sheltered his face from the downpour. Rain funneled off its brim like drainage from a gutter, and yet his thick, dark lashes glistened with moisture, making Shelby wonder whether this was due to the mist or his tears. His strong arms held her fast against his warm chest.
He stared down at her, and in a rich masculine voice, said, “Love is a risk only brave people take.”
Shelby shivered at the memory and sat upright in bed, hugging her knees to her chest. What could he have meant by making such a statement? She wasn’t afraid of love. She had been searching for it all her life.
She turned to read the digital dial of her alarm clock, hoping it was closer to morning than the dark sky outside her window implied, but no lime green numerals shone back at her. Maybe she had knocked it over while dreaming that crazy dream. She reached for the lamp switch, but the lamp wasn’t there. Her nightstand was gone. This wasn’t her bed.
Panic shot through her like an electrical current. She sat in the stillness, breathing, and eventually she stopped kidding herself. She knew exactly where she was, and she knew the man in her dream had been Ruckert St. Cloud.
So, who was this historical hunk that he should be teaching her mature, modern, forty-year-old self about love? How dare he refuse to speak to her in the light of day, then invade her dreams with cryptic messages at night? Ha! She wasn’t afraid of him, any more than she was afraid of love, any more than she was afraid of falling in love with him.
During supper, in the course of asking questions, she had learned that Ruckert, the oldest of the St. Cloud sons, was a mere twenty-nine years old. Add that to the fact he was a product of another time zone, and there was no way this thing could work. So what if he had eyes that reached inside her soul and ripped her heart out?
A need for comfort led her to seek out her dog. Alarmed when she couldn’t find him, she jumped out of bed wearing a borrowed, red flannel shirt, and kicked aside the pair of knitted bootie slippers Rose had lent her. She searched under the bed, calling, “Jorge,” but no answer came back, not even his soft, nasal snore.
It was just one thing after another.
The bedroom door stood ajar, just enough for a five-pound rascal to squeeze past. She tiptoed from the room, and not finding him in the hall, headed for the staircase, where she soon heard the deep voice of the man in her dream echo up from the first floor.
“I don’t mind sharing my supper, Hawr-hey, but I reckon you’ve already eaten more than your body weight.”
Shelby sighed with relief. As tiny and fragile as he was, she always worried about Jorge wandering off by himself, and felt a stab of tenderness towards Ruckert for looking out for the little guy. Her first reaction was to fetch her pooch, and she moved to climb down the stairs, only to have the first step creak beneath her feet. She froze, suddenly aware she was headed straight for an encounter with that big, silent cowboy in an awkward state of undress.
“Hear that? This time I believe I’ll not sit and wait for whatever is up there to come down the stairs, but light a lamp to see for myself.”
Shelby heard a shuffle of movement below. Her heart slammed against the wall of her chest. She tried telling herself, I am not afraid, I am not afraid, but her stomach had begun twisting itself into knots the way it had the morning of her first piano recital at ten years of age. Come to think of it, this was the way she’d felt before each of her blind dates.
She hated the anxiety and vowed to ignore it as she continued down the stairs to let her presence be known. But confronting Ruckert St. Cloud alone in the night was like confronting the demons of her sleep. All the feelings of vulnerability she’d been fleeing on her red horse seemed to walk down each step with her.
“It’s just me,” she called in a shaky voice. “Shelby. I was looking for Jorge.”
A light flickered on, the soft, muted glow of an oil lamp.
She saw the pointed toes of Ruckert’s boots, and gradually more of him came into view as she descended the stairs. The tight knees of his faded blue jeans. The gun belt slanted across his slim hips. The dark bandanna looped over his chest. He stood at the large plank dining table, adjusting the smoky glass chimney of a lantern.
He looked up as she reached the bottom of the staircase, and his eyes widened until she thought they would swallow her whole.
She imagined her hair sticking up at odd angles around her head. Her freckled shins and bare feet shone from beneath the oversized shirt, which ended at about mid-thigh.
Taking a step forward, she grinned at her Pomeranian. “He must’ve heard you down here and slipped out of the, um. . . .” she pointed straight up to the ceiling and swallowed, “the bedroom.” The ability to articulate words seemed to have deserted her, and she gestured to the remains of Ruckert’s dinner. “I’m sorry he disturbed you while you were eating.”
Ruckert stepped closer. He cleared his throat, then swallowed as though preparing to speak. Shelby waited. A lock of hair had fallen over one eye, and she pushed it behind her ear. He said nothing. Rather, he glanced down at Jorge as though inviting her Pomeranian to respond, but for obvious reasons, Jorge had nothing to say.
That left Shelby to do the talking if there was to be any conversation between them. Since she had Ruckert’s undivided attention, and his expression did appear more humbled than she’d seen all day, she decided to tell him what was on her mind.
“Look . . . Ruckert. I won’t pretend to know why you refuse to speak to me. And I won’t pretend to be comfortable with it, either. That’s not to say I bear a grudge. To each his own, in my opinion. I’m sure you’re a perfectly nice guy,” she added, avoiding words like sane and normal. “And I did promise your mother I’d make an effort to get along with you, so what d’you say we try to find a way to interact without the sarcasm? It seems we’re both private people, but as long
as we can agree on some sort of mutual respect, I don’t see any reason we can’t be friends. And I’d like to start by thanking you for being so sweet to Jorge. Usually big guys like you give him a hard time. His size sets him up for a lot of abuse, but he’s really a big fellow at heart.” She gave a short, bell-like laugh. “But I guess you’ve already figured that out, huh?”
He nodded. Yeah. Shelby could almost hear the word inside his head, and she was grateful for that much response. She smiled, and when Ruckert didn’t return her peace offering, she was all ready to get insulted. But then he reached up to touch her face, grasping her chin between his forefinger and thumb. She stood trembling from shock, with her face in his big, strong hand as he scraped his callused thumb along the soft edge of her jaw. His eyes gazed down into hers with an expression that looked as though he wanted to say something so badly, he could cry.
She wanted to scream, What are you thinking? Tell me what’s on your mind, but to speak now would disturb the moment. And she didn’t want to do that. He was handsome, virile as all hell, and just as sincere as could be with those intense, emotional eyes, which rather made her feel like bawling herself. Trouble was, Shelby didn’t understand why she felt an urge to cry. Maybe the surprise of receiving such tenderness from him. Maybe because tenderness was just what she needed when she was stuck in a nineteenth-century time warp, and she felt alone, more lonely than she’d ever felt in her life. Maybe because the melancholy in his eyes reflected the lost feeling within her.
He released her and stepped back, his gaze descending in a slow, appreciative perusal. Shelby straightened. The open collar of her nightshirt slipped off one shoulder. Let him look, she thought. She only wished she were ten or fifteen years younger, with a really hot body to taunt him. But the body she did have grew very much aware of its total nakedness beneath the shirt and began to respond.
She was starting to get a little breathless when Ruckert stopped to gawk at her toes. His brows drew together. A puzzled expression came over his face.
“What? What is it?” Shelby wondered aloud as he reached for the lantern and held it over her feet.
Beneath the glow, her toenails shone in Siren Red, and then she understood. She didn’t know the date nail polish came into use, but surely the average, respectable, nineteenth-century woman had never dared paint her toenails.
Ruckert queried her with a sharply arched brow. His look was half disapproving, half turned on, but he didn’t ask and Shelby didn’t volunteer an explanation. She collected her dog, wished Ruckert a good night and padded back upstairs to bed. She hunkered beneath the calico bedspread, shaken by the experience and asking herself: how could one touch, one look, have such a profound impact on her emotional and physical state?
Several minutes later, she still hadn’t fallen asleep. A low tinkling and the clunk of footsteps sounded in the hallway. They stopped outside her door. Jorge scrambled to the edge of the bed, alert. He posed for a few seconds before his tail began to wag and he collapsed into a furry bundle of glee, which left no doubt in Shelby’s mind that Ruckert stood on the other side of her closed bedroom door.
* * *
Ruckert paused before Miss McCoy’s door and thought of her lying in the small iron bed on the other side. He could not dispel an image of her standing in the lamplight, her naked limbs and painted feet exposed from beneath one of his father’s shirts, so large it bared one shoulder, her apricot hair tousled and the sleep still in her eyes.
He did not understand why anyone would do the sorts of things she did, such as fasten a collar with a green light on her dog or wear red paint on her toenails or don men’s clothing in a manner that flaunted the femininity of her body. He had never known such a woman. Obviously, she did not care what others thought of her peculiarities. In fact, she seemed to expect him to be attracted to them. And God help him, he was.
Blood surged through him; his heartbeat thrummed in his ears. He was a man, and like any healthy, young male, he could not escape the force of his imagination. He reacted to the sight of a desirable woman in a state of undress with lust, passion and a hunger that set his loins on fire.
He’d known other women to look at him with the open interest he’d seen in Shelby McCoy’s eyes. But none had been so bold as to express herself aloud nor stand before him half naked and invite him to be friends.
None had sparked his interest in just this way, excited him to such urgency. He’d felt the attraction between them within the first moments of their meeting. And within less than a day of making her acquaintance, he had gone from predetermined dislike to an attraction that lured him even as he argued a relationship between them could never be.
Why this denial? What misdeed had condemned him to a life without intimacy and love? He had committed no offense. He wasn’t dull-witted or diseased or ugly. He wasn’t immoral or disrespectful or crude.
His only crime was that of having been inflicted with a stumbling tongue. When he opened his mouth, the words did not flow forth as did a normal speaker’s. This did not mean he didn’t have intelligent conversation to share with a woman, opinions and ideas to express, hopes and dreams to reveal, sweet words of affection to bestow.
But at the prospect of speaking to Miss McCoy, he tensed. Every cord in his body, from the roots of his hair to the souls of his feet, strummed like the strings of a fiddle. The fear of stuttering in front of her possessed him, overriding any inclination to respond. If he exposed his vulnerability, she would think him less of a man. She would find him repulsive or pathetic.
No woman would be drawn romantically to a man she pitied. No woman would feel passion for a man she felt sorry for.
And for the next three weeks, Shelby McCoy would be living under his roof as a constant torment. Maybe he couldn’t avoid her, but he sure wasn’t going to let her watch him wrestle the demons of speech.
Chapter Eight
Shelby woke with daybreak no more than a soft gray mist sifting through the pines in the hills.
She glanced at her surroundings and a sick feeling of helplessness and despair engulfed her. Her crisis hadn’t disappeared overnight. The nineteenth century still held her captive, and if it were up to her, she’d never leave the security of this bed. But Jorge had to potty.
Forcing herself to face the day, she donned her jeans beneath the flannel shirt she’d worn to bed. Then, as she reached for Jorge, she noticed something she hadn’t before.
“Hey, where’s your collar?” He was wearing it last night. Shelby remembered turning on the safety light so she could track him in the dark, though he’d wandered off all the same. “Did you pull it off?” she asked, but Shelby knew he could never have managed such a thing.
It had to have been Ruckert. But what he wanted with Jorge’s collar was far beyond her imaginings this early in the morning.
She pulled a spare collar from her rucksack, then carried Jorge out into the chilly morning.
Dawn tinted the sky with watercolor brush strokes of deep rose and golden pink light. Its faint glow filtered through the aspens and cottonwoods. The Snowy Range Mountains took shape in the mist.
Hunkered beneath the warmth of her leather aviator jacket, Shelby pulled her shirt cuffs down over her hands and tucked them beneath her armpits while she waited for Jorge to locate just the right spot.
Back inside, she filled her bedroom pitcher with warm water from a kettle on the kitchen stove and returned to the privacy of her room. While Jorge curled into a furry black ball on top of her pillow, the scent of wood smoke drifted up from the lower level along with the sound of activity. Now, at five-thirty, the rest of the household had begun to stir.
She got undressed and dumped the contents of her rucksack on the bed. Assorted items tumbled out. Among them, a bar of eucalyptus complexion soap, another purchase from the W.G. Jonn Grocery. The label boasted the soap had been made from pure vegetable oils, contained no perfumes and was guaranteed to leave the skin fresh and youthful in appearance. It claimed to be good for
the scalp, hair, skin diseases, pimples, brown spots, freckles and sunburn.
All this for ten cents, she marveled as she splashed water on her face, then lathered up. A noise behind her caused her to turn and she found Jorge chewing the cap of her ibuprofen bottle.
“No, Jorge,” she cried, snatching it away. She shook the bottle at him. “Bad, bad for you. But precious to Mama when that big cowboy keeps giving her a headache.”
Jorge stared back, his attention diverted from chewing the bottle cap to watching the soap drip off her face. Shelby plucked up a small plastic freezer bag and handed him a chicken drumstick-shaped dog biscuit. As he chomped away, she returned to her bath, then proceeded to search her cosmetic case for under-eye concealer.
She hadn’t slept well, and she could feel the bags under her baby blues. Rose had made herself clear yesterday when she’d told Shelby to wipe off her lipstick. Wearing trousers around the ranch was one thing, but a decent woman of the Wyoming prairie in 1886 did not use cosmetics. Shelby recognized that vanity had no place in her present situation, but no way was she going to let Ruckert St. Cloud see her looking like a tired old hag.
Last evening when she’d discovered him with Jorge, she’d laid pride aside and taken the first step in trying to encourage a more comfortable association between them. But nothing, it seemed, could entice Hoss Man to speak. Yet he had wanted to say something. Shelby felt certain of it.
Did he find her attractive? She couldn’t help but wonder. Could he be genuinely interested, or was he just playing some sort of sick game?
His touch had been gentle, even sweet in its tenderness, but in reflection Shelby realized it could have meant anything. “Yes, ma’am, I’d sure like to be friends.” “Sweet of you to offer, but no thanks.” Even, “Sorry, honey, you’re not my type.”