Inch by agonizing inch they made their way toward the room. When the men bounded forward on the General’s orders Jamie sprayed more of his pepper spray in their direction. Some turned and ran, others crumpled to the floor like a sack of flour.
Coughing and sputtering at the fumes she’d inhaled, Josette continued dragging. He’d grown heavier and she realized he was no longer helping.
“Jamie?”
There was no answer. She chanced a glance over her shoulder to see how far into the room they were. Not nearly close enough.
No, no, no! It couldn’t end like this. Hadn’t he warned her that spying would lead to her death? It wasn’t right that it should lead to Jamie’s death, too.
“On your feet and seize them!”
In desperation Josette threw herself over Jamie, reaching as far as she could, hoping the invisible portal that had transported Jamie to her all these months was somewhere within reach.
Nothing.
Hellfire and damnation! Hearing the thud of the men coming toward them, she took hold of Jamie’s hand and lunged forward as far as she could, hoping the portal was larger than they’d ever realized. She lost her footing and fell forward but instead of hitting the floor she kept falling. She tightened her fingers around Jamie’s, felt his fingers flex around hers.
And prayed.
Chapter Nine
With a thud the floorboards rushed up to meet them. Josette kept her eyes squeezed tightly shut, scarcely daring to open them lest she see the general’s men standing over them.
After what seemed like endless moments of silence, she sat up. Darkness surrounded them. Nothing looked familiar, but at least there were no soldiers, no shouting. And no chemicals stinging her eyes and throat.
“Jamie?”
He didn’t answer, but she felt him beside her. “Oh, please answer me.” Unable to see in the darkness, she patted around with her hands until she felt the steady rise and fall of his chest .
As her eyes adjusted to the light, she made out the familiar line of mountains in the distance. Her bedroom view. But when?
A low groan came from Jamie. “Did we make it?”
“I…I’m not sure where we are.”
He shifted and moaned in pain. “My cell phone. Take it and call nine one one.”
“Nine one what?”
“Emergency….number. Tell them….” His voice faded and grew weaker. “Send…ambulance.”
She fumbled in his pockets until she finally found the small silver device he’d shown her all those weeks ago. The moment she touched it, the screen lit up, shocking her so that she nearly dropped it.
She glanced at Jamie, the artificial light illuminating his closed eyes and pale features. She patted his cheeks insistently. “Don’t you dare die on me, Jamie D’Alessandro.” His eyes fluttered but didn’t open.
“I don’t know how to use this gadget of yours.”
He looked confused but when she held the phone up, he pressed a button. A buzzing came from the phone followed by a voice. “Nine one one, what is your emergency?”
Relief flooded her and she pressed the phone to her ear as she had seen Jamie do once before. “I need an ambulance. Please hurry.”
****
The whir of a blood pressure monitor cycling on stirred Jamie from sleep. He fought against it, reluctant to leave pleasant dreams and comfort. Pain medication left his brain fuzzy and sluggish, but he opened his eyes, glancing around the private hospital suite until he spied Len in a chair across the room.
“Welcome back.”
It took a few moments to work through the haze of medication and remember the events of the night before. The memories returned in a rush. He remembered Josette calling for the ambulance, and then, while barely clinging to consciousness he’d told her to call Len. The ambulance ride and being wheeled into surgery were dim recollections, like something he’d seen in a movie.
He glanced around the room, but Josette was nowhere to be seen. Had she taken the key and returned to her own time?
“Where is she?”
“Mata Hari? Sleeping in the next room, she’s had a long night, about a hundred and fifty years long if you get my meaning.”
He tried to sit up but the pain in his shoulder held him back. “You didn’t let her answer any questions, did you?”
Len chuckled. “They’d have locked her in the psych ward if I had. No, I explained that you were working on a living history project and accidentally shot yourself with an antique gun.”
He slumped back against the pillows, relieved. “She’s all right, then.”
“Mmm, kind of depends on how you define all right. The ambulance ride nearly did her in, not to mention her reaction to the hospital. She’s pretty overwhelmed.”
He could only imagine how stressful it had to be on Josette. He’d managed to shield her from most of the twenty first century so far, only sharing bits and pieces of his world. “Has anyone noticed that she’s….overwhelmed?”
“Oh, they noticed. She refused to change out of that bloodstained antique dress, for one thing. I uh, let it slip that she’d been raised in a cult and had never been out in the real world before. It was the only way to explain her screaming when the elevator started to move, or not knowing how to work the television or why the call buttons and public address system freaked her out.” She rose from the chair. “I promised I’d wake her when you came to.”
Jamie dozed while waiting for Len to return. When he opened his eyes, he could barely take in the vision before him.
Her black dress was torn and stained with dark red blood and lines of worry and exhaustion were evident on her face. But she’d never looked more beautiful to him. “You’re still here.”
Tears spilled down her cheeks. “I was just thinking the same thing. I came so close to losing you.”
“It was just my shoulder.”
“But if we hadn’t gotten you back to your own time…” She glanced guilty toward the door, apparently worried that someone might have overheard.
“We’ve had enough ‘what if’s’ to last us a lifetime, haven’t we?”
She sniffled. “Jamie, can you ever forgive me for doubting you? I didn’t want to leave you but I couldn’t let you sacrifice everything for me. And I truly thought my place was in my own time. But the minute I got there I knew I’d made a mistake, and then Maisie died and the general moved me to another room…“More tears streamed down her cheeks but she gave a shaky laugh. “Apparently I’m so hard headed it takes losing everything for me to realize what matters the most.”
He reached for her hand. “Then you don’t plan to go back?”
She clasped both hands around his. “My life is here. With you.”
A sigh of relief escaped him. “Josette, before he locked you away did the general…did he…”
“No, he planned to but you arrived before he could. Why?”
Jamie rested his head back on the pillow. “I knew it was mine.”
“Yours?”
Suddenly exhausted, Jamie rested his head back on the pillow. “The baby.”
“The baby? You mean…” she put her hands to her abdomen. A sob escaped her. “Oh Jamie…how can you be sure?”
He patted the mattress beside him and after a bit of urging she joined him on the bed. “Did you learn this on your magical phone with its computing powers?” She rested her head on his good shoulder. “Is it a boy or a girl?”
“Now that’s one thing I didn’t find out. I guess we’ll just have to be surprised.”
“Is that why you came back for me?”
He stroked her arm, afraid to let go, scarcely able to believe she was still there. “No. I came back because I didn’t want to live without you. And I couldn’t let anything happen to you or the baby, even if it turned out it wasn’t mine.”
“You’d have accepted the baby even if it wasn’t yours?”
“It’s still a part of you, Josette. That’s enough for me.”
They lay
together in contentment for a while and though sleep beckoned, Jamie was reluctant to give in to it. “After the house is finished, I think we should get married there.”
“I like that idea.”
“Under Sebastian’s tree.”
She raised her head and faced him with those coffee-dark eyes that had first caught his attention in then portrait. “Jamie what about Sebastian? The general cut the tree down, how will he ever get back inside?”
“I still have the key. When I go back for Sebastian, I’ll plant a seed from the tree, maybe it will grow again.”
“And then?”
“And then I’m destroying that damn key.”
“Are you sure we shouldn’t hold onto it? Just in case?’
“I’ve done all the time traveling I intend to do. I don’t want to take the chance of anyone else ever finding out about it and trying to change history.”
“You mean like a spy going back in time to help the south win?”
He laughed. “Exactly like that.”
She snuggled down into his embrace. “I was ready to give it up anyway, I’ve found something I want more than victory for the south.”
“What’s that?”
“A life with you.”
Epilogue
“And so that completes our tour of the fully restored home of famed Confederate spy The Virginia Rose.
“As for the lady herself, she remains as mysterious today as she was one hundred and fifty years ago. She simply vanished into thin air, never to be seen or heard from again. For more than a hundred years it was believed she died while on a mission for the south, but DNA tests have proven that the woman who came forward last year to share family documents that helped us to restore the home with such historical accuracy, is a direct descendant of the famous spy.
“So we can safely assume the Virginia Rose retied from spying and lived out her days with her husband and children in anonymity, vanishing as mysteriously as she emerged.” Jamie looked from the camera to where Josette stood just out of range and winked. “And while we may never know the importance of the Virginia Rose to the confederacy, or how long she continued to pass information to General Jackson after the Shenandoah campaign, her legend lives on.”
He walked slowly across the grounds, stopping just in front of the majestic oak tree that had grown from the seed he’d planted when he’d gone back to rescue Sebastian.
“As for Union General Stillwell, history tells us he was discharged from the army in the fall of eighteen sixty two and spent his remaining days locked in an insane asylum babbling about creatures from the future, poisonous gasses and deadly rays of light.”
“Cut,” the production assistant said. Jamie gave a nod of thanks to the television crew and headed back toward Josette, who stood with Len out of range of the cameras, holding their newborn daughter.
“So that’s it, the final show of The House Flipper is complete.”
“It was a wonderful way to end things.” Len said. “You made the historical society happy, the Daughters of the Confederacy are happy and the media is happy. Hell, even Ashley is happy, which is something I never thought I’d say.”
“Well a house in Maui and an Aston Martin would make almost anyone happy,” Jamie pointed out. “Not to mention the cool two million I gave her to go away for good.”
The baby began to fuss and Josette put her to her shoulder and patted her back. “Why is the media happy?”
“Because they love a happy ending and we gave them one. Josette Beaumont’s great-great-great granddaughter showed up out of the blue, giving a romantic ending to the story of the Virginia Rose—and we fell in love and got married while working on the house together. That’s a fairy tale ending in and of itself, since you were raised in a commune and had no idea of your famous ancestry until you happened across those historical documents.” He chuckled. “And then we had a daughter and named her Virginia Rose.”
She shifted the baby, bouncing her when she continued to fuss. “I’m not sure how I feel about being my own great-great-granddaughter.”
“Well it wraps things up in a nice neat little package, that’s all,” Len explained. “Give me that baby, she wants her Grammy Len.”
Josette handed the baby over and Len cooed and gushed while rocking the baby in her arms.
Jamie chuckled and glanced up at the house. “You know, when I first came here a year ago, I thought I’d already seen and done it all. I thought there was nothing left to surprise me.”
Josette smiled up at him, scooping up Sebastian when he rubbed against her leg. “But you were wrong. Your biggest adventure was waiting to be discovered.”
He nodded. “Who would have thought an old abandoned house would hold the key—literally—to what was missing from my life.”
A word about the author…
If it’s possible to be born a writer, then I certainly was. I’d probably have started sooner if there had been pen and paper available in the womb! But for as long as I can remember, I have heard voices in my head. Fortunately for me, they’re all characters—begging me to tell their stories.
I’ve been married to Peter, my best friend, for fifteen years, and am a work-at-home mom with two busy boys ages ten and twelve. When I’m not working, writing, or buried nose-deep in a research book, chances are I’m baking, taking my dog for long walks along the beautiful shores of Lake Ontario, or just kicking back and hanging with my guys.
Visit Nicole at
www.nicolemccaffrey.com
Also Available
Wild Texas Wind
by
Nicole McCaffrey
All Raz Colt wants is land, a quiet peaceable existence and to put his life as a hired gun in the past. When the chance to earn a sizable fortune by rescuing a kidnapped heiress comes his way, he seizes the opportunity. Trouble is, the heiress doesn’t want to be rescued. Offsetting Arden O’Hara’s beauty is a rattlesnake personality and shrewish temper. Despite her claim that she faked the kidnapping so her fiancé would ride to her rescue, Raz knows someone is out to kill her. And if anyone gets the pleasure of wringing her lovely neck, it’s going to be him.
Arden O’Hara is desperate to go home. Her fiancé was supposed to ride to her rescue, proving it’s her—and not her father’s money—he loves. Instead an arrogant stranger, with weapons strapped gun-fighter low and a decided lack of sympathy for her situation, shows up spouting a ridiculous tale about someone trying to kill her. It’s infuriating when Raz Colt’s claims prove true after not one but several attempts are made on her life. She has no idea who this fast gun with the deadly aim is, or why he makes her feel as wild and untamed as the Texas wind. But like it or not, if anyone is capable of getting her home alive, it’s Raz Colt.
Prologue
San Antonio, Texas
Spring 1884
“Brought you some towels, sugar.”
Raz Colt leaned back in the steaming bath water with a deep sigh. Life didn’t get much better than this. A cigar in one hand, a glass of fine bourbon in the other, and a pretty little dove for this evening’s pleasure. As she closed the door behind her, muffling the sound of piano music from downstairs, the cloying aroma of cheap perfume wrapped around him.
He took a sip of the bourbon and sighed again as the smooth liquid warmed his gullet. The past month had been busy as hell. He’d helped a friend clear his name of a brutal murder charge and brought the real killer to justice, then stuck around Colorado just long enough to make sure they hanged the bastard. He’d even provided a new rope for the occasion. It wasn’t often his chosen profession of hired gun brought him such personal satisfaction.
Betty Lou, or whatever her name was, inched closer, pausing long enough to refill his drink before taking the stool beside the tub. Dressed only in a camisole and pantalets, she had curves in all the right places plus a few extra, he noted with appreciation. A man liked a little something to hold onto in bed.
She trailed a finger in the bath water. “Want me to
wash your back?”
He smiled languidly as the bourbon washed through him. “Darlin’, you can wash anything you’d like.”
He’d been riding for weeks, heading straight to Texas after finishing up in Colorado. For no reason other than a sudden yearning to see his home state. After all that time on the trail, he was more than saddle sore, with aches in places a man didn’t like to think about.
She giggled a little too much at his comment, but he didn’t mind. He sat forward, careful not to get the cigar wet or spill his drink, while she dipped a cloth in the water and lathered it with a spicy, exotic-smelling soap. Damn near anything would smell better than the fine layer of trail dust he’d come in with.
“So,” she said, gently applying the hot cloth to his back, “you new in town or just passing through?”
He closed his eyes, groaning as the heat penetrated aching muscles. Tired and sore as he was, she’d be lucky if she got a rise out of him before he fell asleep. “Ain’t decided that yet. What would you suggest, sweet thing?”
“Stay, sugar, stay,” she cooed. “If you’re lookin’ for a good meal, Ma’s Place up the street is the best. And if you’re lookin’ for work, try the Triple H.”
He slumped back against the tub as she moved around to the front, soaping his neck and chest. “Triple H?”
“It’s the biggest spread around. H.H. O’Hara’s the richest man in these parts. He’s always lookin’ for help.”
Raz took another sip of his drink then clenched the cigar between his teeth. Ranching. He’d tried that once. Didn’t pay nearly as well as hiring out his gun. And he’d never been one for taking orders.
Betty Lou—or was it Linda Sue?—dipped the cloth again. “Want me to wash your hair?”
The bath was included with the price of the woman. He’d always had clean habits, but he supposed half the men waiting in the parlor downstairs had no use for soap. “Why not?”
She ladled warm water over his hair, then lathered the soap between her practiced hands. “I ain’t never seen hair like yours before,” she purred. “It’s so black, it’s nearly blue. You Indian or somethin’, sugar?”
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