A Wife in Time (Silhouette Desire) (5 page)

But Kane had other ideas. Sensing she was about to bolt, he circled her arm with his fingers. “You’re not going anywhere. I told you that we need money.”

She stared at him in disbelief. “Well, I’m not about to earn it the way Polly out there does!”

For one split second his gaze slid down her body as if he were mentally undressing her. It was what the twenty-five other men in the room had done when she’d first walked in. But where their looks had turned her stomach, Kane’s heated look curled her toes. And the feel of his fingers on the sensitive skin just above her elbow was creating more-than-justifiable havoc.

“Stop jumping to conclusions,” he reprimanded her, his cool voice decidedly at odds with the intimate look he’d just given her. “Stay here a minute.”

Without further ado he released her in order to stroll over to the bar where he began speaking to the bartender—Jed, the streetwalker had called him. Susannah stood nearby, close enough to Kane that the other men in the room wouldn’t get any ideas about approaching her themselves, but too far away for her to hear what Kane and Jed were quietly discussing. While waiting, she fanned herself with her right hand. It was incredibly warm in the tavern. Downright stifling, in fact.

Remembering she had a fold-up fan in her purse, a convention giveaway, she dug inside the large bag hanging from her shoulder until she found what she was looking for. As she did so, she was struck by culture shock. When she’d gotten the free fan that morning, the year had been 1995 and she’d been a woman confident of her agenda.

Now she wasn’t confident about much of anything; but one thing was sure—that old saying about you not missing something until it was gone was right on the money. Now that the conveniences of modern life were gone, Susannah missed them more than she could say. Air-conditioning topped the list. Air freshener and deodorant were right up there, too, she decided with a dainty sniff. The room could use the former and the men in it, the latter.

A few minutes later, Kane returned to her side. “Are we leaving now?” she asked hopefully.

“No. We’re going to play some poker. Or more precisely, I’m going to play poker. You’re going to stand nearby and keep quiet.”

“Surely you jest,” she retorted.

“Not at all.”

“And how do you plan on playing poker with no money?”

“I suppose I could try and use you as the stakes,” he responded teasingly.

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Try and die.”

“Somehow I figured you’d say that. So we’ll use your jewelry instead.”

“What’s with this ‘we’ business? And you’re not getting your grubby hands on my jewels.”

He raised an eyebrow at her, which gave him a devilish look that went well with his dark tux and tails.

“You know what I mean,” she muttered.

“You have a brighter idea?”

“There must be another way. A more reliable way than gambling.”

“If there is, we don’t have time to find out,” Kane said. “Jed tells me there’s a game just beginning in the back room. You’re welcome to wait outside with Polly, if you’d rather.”

She gave him a look that would have withered a rattlesnake before coolly informing him, “I’d rather have an iced cappuccino in front of an air conditioner set on High, but that doesn’t appear to be an option at the moment.”

“You’ve got that right. You’ll just have to make do with me.”

The man was laughing at her, damn him! She was prepared to give him a tongue-lashing—to use the vernacular of the time—when he put his arm around her, as if to solicitously lead her through the crowd in the tavern to the back room and the poker game. As he did so, he whispered a warning in her ear. “Don’t cause a scene here. Remember Bellevue.”

Bellevue? He had that right! She belonged in a mental institution for agreeing to this harebrained plan of his. Unfortunately she couldn’t come up with an alternative moneymaking scheme of her own at the moment.

So she kept quiet as Kane used the two rings she always wore—one a wide gold antique filigreed band she wore on her left hand, the other a half-carat channel-set diamond ring her parents had given her for her twenty-first birthday—as an opening stake into the game. Wryly wondering if her insurance policy covered losing her jewelry in a poker game held in 1884, Susannah was all too aware of the interested looks she was getting from the men in the smoky back room. Again, she was the only woman present.

The blue haze of cigar smoke was enough to make her stomach turn. Her queasiness was increased by the speed with which Kane began losing. Next he demanded her bracelet.

She immediately protested. “This was my—”

“Favorite bracelet. I know,” Kane said in a curt voice. “I’ll buy you another one.”

Despite the fact that he was losing, something about his confidence had her handing over her garnet-and-gold bracelet. And then her matching earrings. But she’d refused to take off her great-grandmother’s necklace. She absolutely drew the line there!

She watched with concern as the stack of coins Kane had been given dwindled to one. Kane had warned her not to say anything, but he was crazy if he thought she was going to stand here and watch him go into hock.

As if sensing her thoughts, he sent her a warning look before drawling, “Gentlemen, I appear to have a problem with dwindling resources.”

“Too bad,” a cigar-smoking man named J. P. Bellows said after spewing a series of perfect smoke rings. He was the most talkative of the bunch. “Appears I’ve won, then.”

“Not so fast,” Kane replied. “There’s still my wife’s necklace.”

Wife?
Susannah doubted her hearing. Her ears were starting to ring from exhaustion. She’d gotten up at four that morning to catch a flight from New York to Savannah and had arrived at the convention center a little before nine, spent the day on her feet with little to eat—not to mention time traveling 111 years. A person was bound to get a little jet-lagged under those circumstances.

Which no doubt explained why she thought she’d heard Kane describe her as his wife. Not that she was going to argue the point now. She’d seen the heated looks the Southern so-called gentlemen had been sending her way and she had a feeling their thoughts were as blue as the air. She had no intention of becoming the center of their unwanted attention. Kane was the lesser of two evils. For the moment, at least.

While she’d been momentarily distracted by her thoughts, Kane had finalized the arrangements for using her necklace as collateral for his latest bet. And, to her horror, he bet the entire amount on the cards he was holding.

“You’re going to need more than a garnet necklace to call my bet,” J.P. told Kane.

The room was suddenly still. Into the silence fell a sudden beep-beep.

“What was that?” J.P. demanded.

“My watch,” Kane replied.

“I never heard a watch make that sound before.”

“It’s a very unusual watch.”

“Let’s see it, then.”

Kane held out his wrist and showed them his watch, with its LCD digital display and numerous function buttons.

“That’s no watch,” J.P. scoffed. “Where’s the face?”

“Doesn’t need one. See, the time is displayed in numbers.”

“Toss in that strange watch of yours and you’ve got a deal,” J.P. declared.

“Done.”

Susannah wished she knew enough about poker to know if his hand was good or not. The expression on his face gave nothing away. The dismay on hers no doubt encouraged the other men around the table.

Susannah clung to her necklace, which Kane had been wise enough not to try to remove from around her neck. Closing her eyes, she sent up a prayer.

Moments later she heard the collective groans from the other men at the table. Was that good or bad?

Her eyes flew open to see Kane raking a large pile of coins and paper money in his direction. “Did we win?”

“We won,” he confirmed.

A wave of wild relief overtook her common sense. “Yes!” She let out a triumphant
whoop
worthy of a football fan while making an elated victorious gesture, fisting one hand and rocking back on one foot.

Seeing the openmouthed, wide-eyed stares of the men around the table, Kane knew he had to act fast. “My wife is prone to fits,” he quickly stated. “There’s only one cure.”

“Fits?” she exclaimed in protest. The next thing she knew, he’d taken her in his arms and was kissing her. Totally caught off guard, Susannah didn’t know what to do. She’d never expected such behavior from Kane. And who could have known he’d kiss like this—devilishly seductive, swooping down to capture her parted lips with utter confidence.

The heat, she told herself desperately. It was the heat. And he was generating plenty of it! Her lips quivered beneath his as he continued kissing her for another heart-stopping moment. She’d never been kissed this way in her entire life—as if she were Eve in the Garden of Eden. The passion was direct and all-consuming. Temptation. His kiss represented it. Promised it.

Desire shot through her system, rendering her speechless, even after he let her go. She blinked up at him, and saw in his eyes a flash of the same startled amazement she was feeling. That had been no ordinary kiss he’d just given her. It had been as sudden and intense as a bolt of lightning, coming out of nowhere and zapping her.

Okay, so traveling through time had rattled her. Shaken her to the soles of her feet, if the truth be known. That was understandable. Being rattled and shaken by his kiss wasn’t. And it wasn’t acceptable.

Unless it was just that the thrill of victory had momentarily left her senseless? Yes, that must have been it. She’d been that relieved that he’d won the poker game that she’d had a temporary bout of insanity. It was as good an explanation as any. It was less disturbing than the reality of being attracted to Kane Wilder.

She watched in silence as Kane gathered up his winnings. “Thank you, gentlemen,” he told his fellow poker players. “It’s been a very pleasurable experience.” He shot a fiery look at Susannah as he said that.

“Wait, sir,” J.P. protested. “You must give us the chance to recoup our losses.”

“Another time, perhaps,” Kane replied. “I must see to my wife’s health. Could one of you recommend a respectable boardinghouse nearby?”

“There’s one two blocks away,” J.P. said. “Turn right once you get outside. You can’t miss it.”

“Thank you.” With a nod, he returned Susannah’s jewelry to her before taking her arm and gallantly escorting her out of the tavern.

Once outside, she gratefully inhaled the fresh air. Turning to face him, she said, “Fits? I’m prone to fits?”

“I had to tell them something.”

“You didn’t have to kiss me!”

“Yes, I did. They were getting suspicious. I had to distract them.”

“Yes, well...” She floundered, the truth being he’d distracted
her
and how! “You’re just lucky things worked out as well as they did.”

“Luck had nothing to do with it,” he replied, stashing the remainder of the nineteenth-century money in his inside coat pocket before taking her arm and setting off at a brisk pace.

“Are you saying you cheated?” Susannah demanded, struggling to keep up.

“Of course not.”

“Then what did you mean?”

“That I’m an experienced poker player.”

“Sure, you are. And that was why you were losing?”

“Exactly. I was baiting the hook and they snapped.” Seeing her look of disbelief, he added, “Look, I’ve had a lot of experience testing software and one of the programs I designed a number of years back turned out to be the bestselling poker program on the market today. So trust me when I say that I knew what I was doing back there, okay?”

“No, it’s not okay!” Susannah couldn’t help herself. She socked him on the arm.

“Ow! What was that for?”

“For scaring me to death and not warning me what you were up to ahead of time!”

“And have you spill the beans by the look on your face? No way. Instead everything worked out just as I’d planned. You looked panic-stricken and that certainly helped our cause.”

She couldn’t help wondering if kissing her had been part of his master plan. Somehow she rather doubted it. He’d seemed as stunned as she was by the desire that had flared between them.

Rather than dwell on his kiss, she quickly latched on to another subject. “Wait a second. Why are we going this way? The man at the table told us that the boardinghouse was two blocks the
other
way.”

“I checked with Jed, the bartender, ahead of time. That boardinghouse is a dump. But don’t worry about a thing. I’ve got another place in mind. It’s only about a fifteen-minute walk from here.”

Five minutes of that time was spent trying to catch her breath at the fast pace he was setting. Her rented velvet dress felt as if it weighed a hundred pounds. “If you’d already spoken to Jed, then why did you ask those men about a boardinghouse?”

“Because I wanted them to think that’s where we’d be staying in case one of them got the bright idea of trying to recover their money by stealing it back.”

“Suspicious, aren’t you?”

“I prefer cautious,” he replied.

Susannah was both cautious and suspicious when she discovered, ten minutes later, the next surprise Kane had up his sleeve.

“I’ve already rented us a room,” he declared.

“A
room. As in one?” Susannah repeated in disbelief, her hand on his arm pulling Kane to a halt beside her. After having had him literally kiss her senseless a few minutes ago, she knew darn well that sharing a room with him would be too...tempting. Too dangerous to her peace of mind, she immediately corrected herself. “We’ll need
two
rooms.”

“I agree. We need two rooms.”

“Good.”

“Unfortunately we only have enough money to rent one room, which means—”

“That you’re out of your mind if you think I’m going to share a room with you!”

“Believe me, I’ve already doubted my sanity more times than I can count this evening,” Kane dryly countered. “But the fact remains that we only have enough money to rent one room.”

“Allow me to remind you that my jewelry paid for this room.”

“Correction. Your jewelry provided the initial
stakes.
My talent at playing poker quadrupled that stake. And don’t forget the importance my watch played. Ah, here we are.” He stood in front of a large three-story brick house. “Now try to remember that you’re my wife and wives were quiet in these days.”

“A typical male fantasy,” she promptly retorted. “There have always been plenty of strong women, regardless of the century.”

“And it’s just my luck to get stuck with one of the stubbornest,” Kane muttered. “We don’t want to stand out, remember?”

“We’re checking into a boardinghouse without any luggage,” she mockingly reminded him. “Don’t you think that’s bound to raise a few eyebrows?”

“Just stay quiet and follow my lead,” Kane said as he hurried her up the front steps to the stoop, where he paused to frown at the front door before knocking on it.

“Try using this,” Susannah suggested, reaching around him to pull on a round brass knob, about two inches large, placed near the right-hand doorjamb. Instantly a bell jangled on the other side of the door.

“How did you know about that?” Kane asked.

“I’m an editor. I know all kinds of things. However, I don’t know what makes you think they’ll answer the door at this time of night.”

“The fact that they’re expecting me.”

“Oh? Did you call ahead?” she mockingly inquired. “Hold the reservation with your credit card?”

“I just used common sense.”

“I didn’t know you had any,” she muttered.

“There’s a lot about me you don’t know,” Kane retorted. “Good evening,” he greeted the woman who cautiously opened the door. “Mrs. Broadstreet? Jed Paines over at the City Tavern said you’d be expecting us. My name is Kane Wilder and this is my wife, Susannah.”

“Ah, the poor couple that had their luggage stolen at the train station.” Nodding, the white lacy cap on her head tied in place with a prim bow just beneath her jaw, Mrs. Broadstreet opened the door wider in an invitation for them to come inside. “Jed sent a runner over with a note telling me all about it. He said you had an important party to attend and would be coming here directly afterward.”

“That’s right,” Kane confirmed.

“We apologize for the lateness of the hour,” Susannah said with unaccustomed formality.

“Well, I don’t usually take in boarders without references,” Mrs. Broadstreet confessed, “but I trust Jed’s judgment. He’s got a sixth sense about people.”

“Really?” Susannah murmured. “I didn’t realize that.” Susannah didn’t have much faith in Jed’s so-called sixth sense. After all, the man had thought she was a streetwalker like Polly!

“How dreadful to have all your trunks stolen that way,” Mrs. Broadstreet was saying. “At least you were able to save one of your bags.” She pointed to Susannah’s purse, hanging from her shoulder. “I must confess I’ve never seen one quite like that before. We’re not always up-to-date on the latest fashions here in Savannah, not like they are up in New York, but we do like to think that we keep up with things. About your missing trunks, I do hope you’ve notified the proper authorities?”

Kane nodded. “They don’t hold out much hope of finding our things, though.”

“I don’t know what the world is coming to,” Mrs. Broadstreet exclaimed with a shake of her head. “No one is safe. When the president of the United States can be assassinated in a railway station...”

Kane frowned. “I thought Lincoln was assassinated at a theater.”

“I was referring to President Garfield’s assassination three years ago.”

“Oh.”

“You’ll have to forgive my husband,” Susannah quickly said. “It’s been a long day.”

Mrs. Broadstreet nodded understandingly. “I’ll show you directly to your room, then.”

As they followed their landlady upstairs, Kane whispered to Susannah, “It’s been a long day, all right. About a hundred and eleven years long!”

“Shh.”

On the second floor, Mrs. Broadstreet led them to a room at the end of the hallway. As she prepared to open the door to their room, she said, “You’ll be needing some nightclothes. I hope you don’t mind my presumptuousness—I already set them out for you on the bed. My daughter left some clothes behind you can borrow, Mrs. Wilder, until your trunks are found. And my departed husband was about your size, Mr. Wilder, so the few things of his that I kept should fit you.”

“Thank you,” Kane said.

“If you’d like me to have the things you’re wearing cleaned, just let me know.” Mrs. Broadstreet went on to hesitantly name the amount for a week’s room and board. When Kane didn’t blink an eyelash, she added, “That would be payable in advance.”

Kane reached into his inside jacket pocket and carefully counted out the appropriate amount. The money was totally unfamiliar to him. He’d been careful not to put the nineteenth-century bills in his wallet lest he pulled a crisp twentieth-century greenback out by mistake.

Meanwhile, Susannah was wondering how one asked directions to the ladies’ room in 1884. Surely indoor plumbing was around by now? She’d stayed in Victorian bed-and-breakfasts before and they’d always had the most adorable bathrooms. Sometimes they were located down the hall, though.

“Is there a bathroom attached to our room?” she asked hopefully, looking around for a doorway.

“Bathroom?” their landlady repeated in confusion. “We have a copper bathtub in the room at the other end of the hallway.”

“What about the toilet? The john?” Susannah tried every description she could think of. She was getting desperate here. She hadn’t gone in 111 years!

“There’s a convenience out back.”

Out back? Susannah briefly wondered if she looked as dismayed as she felt. How could something outside be considered convenient?

“Or, if your prefer, there is that newfangled invention my husband insisted on getting before his untimely death.” She opened a door and, holding up the flickering lamp, showed them what she was talking about. “He made me promise to pour a bucket of water down it every few days, but that’s all I’ve done with it.”

It was a toilet—the oldest one on record, perhaps, and bearing little resemblance to anything Susannah had seen before, but it
was
a toilet, with a wooden seat and a chain hung from the ceiling.

Misinterpreting Susannah’s doubtful look, Mrs. Broadstreet said, “The water comes from a cistern on the roof, and it does work, but I’ve never quite trusted the thing myself. You hear these stories of sewer-gas explosions and all....”

Kane bent down to study the plumbing. He’d gotten a crash course in old-fashioned plumbing when a friend of his had bought a run-down Victorian house and, for a six-pack and a free dinner, he’d pitched in to help his buddy redo the bathrooms. Standing again, Kane said, “Sewer gas isn’t a problem, not with the elbow in the pipe. The standing water there prevents sewer gas from backing up. That’s why your husband had you pour water down it, to keep water in that elbow if you weren’t using it very often.”

“You sound as if you know about such things,” Mrs. Broadstreet noted in admiration. “Are you a plumber by any chance?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry. Well, I’ll just leave you both to your ablutions, then. There’s fresh water in the pitcher in your room. And the lamp is lit. What time would you like breakfast?”

“Nine would be fine.”

“All right, then. Good night. Oh, you’ll be needing this.” Mrs. Broadstreet handed over the kerosene lamp to Susannah.

“What about you?”

“Oh, I could find my way through this house blindfolded,” Mrs. Broadstreet told her with a grin as wide as she was. “Good night.”

As she carefully closed the water-closet door and made use of the facilities, Susannah told herself that this was no different than the summer vacations she and her family had spent in a rented woodland cabin in upstate New York. The electricity had been iffy and they’d often had to rely on candlelight or kerosene lamps. And while the plumbing may not have been as antiquated as this was, at least this was an
indoor
facility.

The water closet was rather cramped for space—now she knew why it was called a
closet
—so she had to be careful to keep the heavy velvet of her long skirt away from the lamp, which she’d been forced to set on the floor for lack of anyplace else to put it. All she needed at this point was to set fire to herself! Since she didn’t see anything resembling toilet paper, she had to use some tissues she had in the side pocket of her ever-present purse. With some trepidation, she pulled the chain, fearing the roof might cave in, but the system worked—much to her relief.

Since there was no sink, a wet towelette, also from her purse, allowed her to clean her hands. She saw no wastebasket in the small enclosure, so she had to stick the soiled towelette in a Ziploc plastic bag and stash it in an inside compartment of her purse until she could dispose of it. She always carried a few bags with her, using them for all kinds of things.

Hoisting her purse back over her shoulder, Susannah carefully picked up the lamp and made her way to the room she’d be sharing with Kane that night.

The room was simply furnished—a double bed, a dresser that had a flowered washbowl and pitcher on top of it and a mirror on the wall behind it, a screen made of some kind of fabric between a wooden frame, and a rocking chair in the corner with what looked like a hand-crocheted pillow on it. The carpet was sisal, she thought, and the walls were papered in a dark maroon print on an oyster white backing. There were no pictures on the walls. Light was furnished by a wall fixture covered with an etched-glass globe.

“Gas,” Kane said.

“Do you need an antacid?” she asked, reaching into her purse.

Smiling, Kane shook his head, a lock of his dark brown hair falling over his forehead. “I was referring to the light. It’s gas.”

“Oh.” She eyed the lamp fixture suspiciously. While Mrs. Broadstreet might be afraid of sewer gas, Susannah wasn’t real fond of natural gas, due to an explosion that had occurred in their neighborhood when she was a child. A construction worker with a backhoe had inadvertently hit a gas main, rupturing it. Two people had been badly injured in the resultant explosion. Her mother had immediately gone out and bought an electric stove. Susannah had electric in her first two apartments, as well.

“How do you turn it off?” she asked suspiciously.

“With that valve on the bottom.” Kane came closer to show her what he was talking about. “The premise is the same as turning off your stove.”

“I have an electric stove at home.”
Home.
The word hit her with the force of a ton of bricks. When would she be home again? When would she see her family again? She didn’t realize she’d voiced the question aloud until Kane said, “I don’t know when we’ll get back.”

“It was Wednesday when we left.... I wasn’t supposed to fly back to New York until Tuesday morning. But my absence from the conference is going to be noted before that.” And not appreciated, Susannah added to herself. Knowing McPhearson Publishing’s coldhearted personnel policy, she doubted that “time travel” was in the manual as an excuse for unauthorized leave. She could just imagine herself trying to explain things to her boss. It wouldn’t go over well at all. She could almost hear him saying, “We’ve all got problems, but we don’t let them interfere with our work.”

“I’ll be missed, too,” Kane said, interrupting her thoughts.

“Leave a girlfriend back home, did you?” The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them.

“I meant missed at work,” he replied.

“Oh. I meant the same thing. And I’ll be missed by my family.”

“Same here.”

So there was no girlfriend for him back home. Interesting. “How do you think this time-travel thing works? Do you think that time is going on back there as it is here?”

Kane shook his head. “If you’d have asked me that question yesterday, I’d have said that a situation like this was impossible. But clearly it is possible. From what I remember about Einstein’s theory, time is progressing at an equal pace. Damn, I wish I had my laptop with me! I could access that information in an instant. But who knew when I left the hotel this evening, that I’d end up here?”

“Don’t tell me you’re helpless without your computer? Let me guess, I’ll bet you don’t know anyone’s phone number, either. Only their number on your memory bank. Am I right?”

As if on cue, his watch chimed again.

“Boys and their toys,” she murmured with a shake of her head.

“I’ll have you know this watch stores thirty different phone numbers, can be set for sixty different alarm settings, and shows the time in twenty-seven cities worldwide.”

She wasn’t impressed. “So what? It’s not going to do you any good here.”

“I wouldn’t say that. It helped me win at tonight’s card game.”

“Even so, you’d better take it off before anyone else notices how strange it is.” Squinting at it, she said, “How can you even read it with all those little dials and things on there?”

“I’m not taking it off, but I will turn the alarm function off.”

Realizing that was as much of a compromise as she was likely to get from him, she went on to the next item on her agenda. “Listen, after your comment about Lincoln, I think perhaps I should fill you in on a few important basics regarding this time period. As I said, I edited a book on the Victorian era not too long ago. I’ll try and go over a few of the high points. The period is named after Queen Victoria, of course.”