Linda Lael Miller Bundle

by Linda Lael Miller

  The townswomen buzzed behind their fans at this statement, and it occurred to Elisabeth that many of them had probably either hoped to marry Jonathan themselves or had wanted to land him for a son-in-law or a nephew by marriage.

  “You loved him,” the prosecutor said in a voice that made Elisabeth want to slap his smug face. “And yet you did murder, Miss—Lizzie. You killed the man and his child as they slept, unwitting, in their beds!”

  A shape moved in the open doorway, then a familiar voice rolled over the murmurs of the crowd like a low roll of thunder. “If I’m dead, Walter,” Jonathan said, “I think it’s going to come as a big shock to both of us.”

  He stood in the center aisle, his clothes ripped and covered in soot, one arm in a makeshift sling made from one of the silk scarves Elisabeth had collected in her other incarnation. His gray eyes linking with hers, he continued, “I’m alive, obviously, and so is Trista.”

  Women were fainting all over the room, and some of the men didn’t look too chipper, either. But Elisabeth’s shock was pure, undiluted joy. She flung herself at Jonathan and embraced him, being careful not to press against his injured arm.

  He kissed her, holding her unashamedly close, his good hand pressed to the small of her back. And even after he lifted his mouth from hers, he seemed impervious to the crowd stuffing the schoolhouse.

  It was Farley who shouldered his way to Jonathan and demanded, “Damn it, Jon, where the hell have you been?”

  Jonathan’s teeth were startlingly white against his soot-smudged face. He slapped the marshal’s shoulder affectionately. “Someday, Farley, when we’re both so old it can’t make a difference, I may just tell you.”

  “Order, order!” the judge was yelling, hammering at the desk with his trusty gavel.

  The mob paid no attention. They were shouting questions at Jonathan, but he ignored them, ushering a stunned Elisabeth down the aisle and out into the bright July sunshine.

  “It seems time has played another of its nasty tricks on us,” he said when he and Elisabeth stood beneath the sheltering leaves of a maple tree. He traced her jawline with the tip of one index finger. “Let’s make a vow, Lizzie, never to be apart again.”

  Tears were trickling down Elisabeth’s cheeks, tears of joy and relief. “Jonathan, what happened?”

  He held her close, and she rested her head against his shoulder, not minding the acrid, smoky smell of him in the least. “I’m not really sure,” he replied, his breath moving in her hair. “I woke up, Trista was screaming and there was no sign of you. I had the necklace in my hand. All three stairways were closed off, and the roof was burning, too. I grabbed up my daughter, offered a prayer and went over the threshold.”

  Elisabeth clung to him, hardly able even then to believe that he’d really come back to her. “How long were you there?” she asked.

  He propped his chin on top of her head, and the townspeople kept their distance, though they were streaming out of the schoolhouse, chattering and speculating. “That’s the crazy part, Elisabeth,” he said. “A few hours passed at the most—I waited until I could be fairly sure the fire would be out, then I came over again, this time carrying Trista on my back. Climbing down through the charred ruins took some time.”

  “How did you know where to look for me?”

  His powerful shoulders moved in a shrug. “There were a lot of horses and wagons going past. I stopped old Cully Reed, and he about spit out his teeth when he saw me. Then he told me what was going on and brought me here in his hay wagon.”

  Elisabeth stiffened, looking up into Jonathan’s face, searching for any sign of a secret. “And Trista wasn’t hurt?”

  He shook his head. “She’s already convinced the whole thing was a nightmare, brought on by swallowing so much smoke. Maybe when she’s older, we can tell her what really happened, but I think it would only confuse her now. God knows, it confuses me.”

  The judge, who had been ready to send Elisabeth to the gallows only minutes before, dared to impinge upon the invisible circle that had kept the townspeople back. He laid a hand to Jonathan’s shoulder and smiled. “Looks like you need some medical attention for that arm, son.”

  “The first thing I need,” Jonathan answered quietly, his eyes never leaving Elisabeth’s face, “is a wife. Think you could perform the ceremony, Judge? Say in an hour, out by the covered bridge?”

  The judge agreed with a nod, and Elisabeth thought how full of small ironies life is, not to mention mysteries.

  “Will you marry me, Lizzie?” Jonathan asked, a little belatedly. “Will you throw away the necklace and live with me forever?”

  Elisabeth thought only briefly of that other life, in that other, faraway place. She might have dreamed it, for all the reality it had, though she knew she would miss Rue and her friends. “Yes, Jon.”

  He kissed her again, lifting her onto her toes to do it, and the spectators cheered. Elisabeth forgave them for their fickleness because a lifetime of love and happiness lay before her, because Jonathan was back and she was carrying his baby, and because Trista would grow up to raise a family of her own.

  As Elisabeth caught a glimpse of the half-burned house, what in her mind had been the very symbol of shattered hopes now, miraculously, became a place where children would laugh and run and work, a place where music would play.

  “Oh, Jonathan, I love you,” Elisabeth said, her arm linked with his as Cully Reed’s hay wagon came to a stop in the side yard. They’d been sitting in the back, their feet dangling.

  Jonathan kissed her smartly, jumped to the ground and lifted her after him with one arm. “I love you, too,” he answered huskily, and his eyes brushed over her, making her flesh tingle with the anticipation of his lovemaking. He waved at the driver. “Thanks, Cully. See you at the wedding.”

  Practical concerns closed around Elisabeth like barking dogs as she and Jonathan went up the front steps and into the house. “What am I going to wear?” she fretted, holding wide the skirts of Big Lil’s brown calico dress. “I can’t be married in this!”

  Jonathan assessed the outfit and laughed. “Why not, Lizzie? This certainly isn’t going to be a conventional wedding day anyhow.”

  Elisabeth sighed. There was no denying that. Nonetheless, she diligently searched the upstairs and was heartbroken to find nothing that wasn’t in even worse condition than what she was wearing.

  In his bedroom, Jonathan sank into a chair and unwrapped his wounded arm. Elisabeth winced when she saw the angry burn.

  “Oh, Jon,” she whispered, chagrined. She fell to her knees beside his chair. “Here I am, worrying about a stupid dress, when you’re hurt….”

  He bent to kiss her forehead. “I’ll be all right,” he assured her gruffly. “But after the wedding, I’d like to go first to Seattle and then San Francisco. There’s a doctor in Seattle who might be able to help me keep full use of the muscles in my hand and wrist.”

  Elisabeth’s eyes filled with tears. “I’ll go anywhere, as long as I can be with you. You know that. But who will look after your patients here?” Even as she voiced the question, she thought of the young, red-haired physician who had been summoned from Seattle after Jonathan’s disappearance.

  “Whoever’s been doing it in my absence,” Jonathan replied, and there was pain in his eyes, and distance. “I won’t be of use to anybody if I can’t use my right hand, Lizzie.”

  Elisabeth watched unflinchingly as he began treating the burns with a smelly ointment. “That’s not true. You’re so important to me that I can’t even imagine what I’d have done without you.”

  Before Jonathan could respond to that, Trista bolted into the room and hurled herself into Elisabeth’s waiting arms.

  “Vera said there was a trial and that she testified,” the child chattered. Her brow was crimped into a frown when she drew back to search Elisabeth’s face. “How could so much have happened while I was sleeping?”

  Elisabeth kissed her cheek. “I don’t think I can explain, sweethe
art,” she said truthfully enough, “because I don’t understand, either. I’m just glad we’re all together again.”

  “Vera’s mother says there’s going to be a wedding, and she’s bringing over her own dress for you to wear. She says the least Pine River can do for you is see that things are done properly.”

  Soon Vera’s mother did, indeed, arrive with a dress, and Elisabeth was so grateful that she forgot how the woman’s child had practically called her a witch that very morning. She bathed in the privacy of the spare room, and brushed her hair until it shone, pinned it into a modified Gibson-girl and put on the lace-trimmed ivory silk dress her neighbor had so generously offered. The fabric made a rustling sound as Elisabeth moved, and smelled pleasantly of lavender. Trista gathered wildflowers and made a garland for Elisabeth’s hair, and when the two of them reached the site Jonathan had chosen, next to the covered bridge, the doctor was waiting there with a handful of daisies and tiger lilies.

  The townsfolk crowded the hillside and creek bank, and several schoolboys even sat on the roof of the bridge. Elisabeth marveled that she’d come so close to losing her life and then had gained everything she’d ever wanted, all in the space of a single day.

  To be married by the very judge who would probably have handed down her death sentence was a supreme irony.

  The ceremony passed in a sort of sparkling daze for Elisabeth; it seemed as though she and Jonathan were surrounded by an impenetrable white light, and the ordinary sounds of a summer afternoon blended into a low-key whir.

  Only when Jonathan kissed her did Elisabeth realize she was married. When the kiss ended, she was flushed with the poignant richness of life. Instead of tossing her bouquet, she handed it to Trista and hugged the child.

  “Now we’re a family,” Trista said, her gray eyes glowing as she looked up at her stepmother.

  “We are, indeed,” Elisabeth agreed, her throat choked with happy tears.

  After the ceremony, there was corn bread and coffee at the hotel. There hadn’t been enough advance warning for a cake, but Elisabeth didn’t care. What stories she’d be able to tell her and Jonathan’s grandchildren!

  Trista would spend the night with Vera, it was agreed, and the Fortner family would leave on their trip the following morning. Once all the corn bread had been consumed and Jonathan and Elisabeth had been wished the best by everyone, from the judge who had married them to the man who swept out the saloon, the newlyweds retired to the room Jonathan had rented.

  Beyond the window and the door, ordinary life went on. Buggies and wagons rattled by, and the piano player hammered out bawdy tunes in the saloon across the road. But Jonathan and Elisabeth were alone in a world no one else could enter.

  She trembled with love and wanting as he slowly, gently undressed her, and it was an awkward process, since his right arm was still in a sling. “I’m going to have your baby, Jon,” she said in a breathless whisper as he unbuttoned her muslin camisole and pushed it back off her shoulders, baring her breasts. “I’m sure of that now.”

  He bent his head, almost reverently, to kiss each of her firm, opulent breasts. “The first of many, I hope,” he relied.

  Elisabeth drew in a quick breath as she felt his mouth close over her nipple. “I missed you so much, Jon,” she managed after a moment, tilting her head back and closing her eyes in blissful surrender as he enjoyed her. “I was terrified I would never see you again.”

  He suckled for a long, leisurely time before drawing back long enough to answer, “I was scared, too, wondering if you escaped the fire.” He turned to her other breast, and Elisabeth moaned and entwined her fingers in his rich, dark hair, holding him close as he drank from her. If she never had another day to laugh and breathe and love, she thought, this one would be sweet enough to cherish through the rest of eternity.

  Presently, he laid her down on the edge of the bed, running his hands along her inner thighs, easing her quivering legs apart for an intimate plundering. She felt her hair come undone from its pins and spread it over the covers with her fingers in a gesture of relinquishment.

  Her soul was open to Jonathan now; there was no part of it he was not free to explore.

  He knelt, his hands gripping the tender undersides of her knees, and nuzzled the moist delta where her womanhood nestled. “I love pleasing you, Elisabeth,” he said. “I love making you give yourself up to me, totally, without reservation of any kind.”

  Elisabeth’s breath was quick and shallow, and she could barely speak. “I need you,” she whimpered.

  Jonathan burrowed through and took her fiercely, and Elisabeth cried out, her body making a graceful arch on the mattress, her hands clutching and pounding at the blankets.

  He consumed her until she was writhing wildly on the bed, until she was uttering low cries, until her skin was wet with perspiration and her muscles were aching with the effort of thrusting her toward him. He drove her straight out of herself and made her soar, and brought her back to earth with patient caresses and muttered reassurances.

  She found him beside her on the lumpy hotel bed, after she’d returned to herself and could think and see clearly. Very gently, she touched his bandaged arm.

  “Does it hurt much?”

  He bent to scatter light kisses over her collarbone. “It hurts like hell, Mrs. Fortner. Just exactly how do you propose to comfort your husband in his time of need?”

  She stretched like some contented cat, and he poised himself over her, one of his legs parting hers. “I intend to love him so thoroughly that he won’t remember his name,” she responded saucily, spreading her fingers in the coarse hair that covered his chest.

  Jonathan groaned, touching his hardness to her softness, receiving warmth. Elisabeth guided him gently inside her, arching her back to take him deep within, and his magnificent gray eyes glazed with pleasure.

  Slowly, slowly, she moved beneath him, tempting, teasing, taking and giving. With one hand thrust far into the mattress, the other resting against his middle in its sling and bandage, he met her thrusts, retreated, parried.

  The release was sudden and ferocious, and it took Elisabeth completely by surprise because she’d thought she was finished, that all the responses from then on would be Jonathan’s. But her body buckled in a seizure of satisfaction, and he lowered his mouth to hers, as much to muffle her cries as to kiss her.

  When the last whimper of delight had been wrung from her, and only then, Jonathan gave up his formidable control and surrendered. He was like a magnificent savage as he lunged into her, drew back, and lunged again.

  Finally, with a loud groan, he spilled himself inside her and then collapsed to lie trembling beside her on the mattress, his chest rising and falling with the effort to breathe. Elisabeth draped one leg across both of his and let her cheek rest against his chest.

  For a long time, they were silent, and Elisabeth even slept for a while.

  When she awakened, there were long shadows in the room and Jonathan’s hand was running lightly up and down her back.

  “I think you’ll miss your world,” he said sadly as she stirred against him and yawned. “Maybe you shouldn’t stay, Elisabeth. Maybe you should take the necklace and go back and pretend that none of this ever happened.”

  She scrambled into a sitting position and stared down at him. “I’m not going anywhere, Jonathan Fortner. You’re stuck with me and with our baby.”

  “But the medicine—the magic box…”

  Elisabeth smiled and smoothed his hair, less anxious now. “In some ways the twentieth century is better,” she conceded. “They’ve wiped out a lot of the diseases that are killing people now. And life is much easier, in terms of ordinary work, because there are so many labor-saving devices. But there are bad things, too, Jon—things I won’t miss at all.”

  His forehead wrinkled as he frowned. “Like what?”

  Elisabeth sighed. “Like nuclear bombs. Jonathan, my generation is capable of wiping out this entire planet with the push of a single button
.”

  His frown deepened. “Would they actually be stupid enough to do that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He sighed and settled deeper into the pillows. “Do you suppose all the rest of us would die, too, if they did? I mean, the past and the present are obviously connected in ways we don’t understand.”

  Elisabeth was saddened. “Let’s hope and pray that never happens.”

  Jonathan stroked her hair and held her close against his chest. “What else can you tell me about the twentieth century?”

  “You’re bound to experience some of it yourself, since it’s only about eight years away,” she answered, entwining an index finger in a curl of hair on his chest. She bit her lip, remembering history that hadn’t happened yet. “But I’ll see if I can’t give you some previews of coming attractions. Around the turn of the century, America will declare war on Spain. And then, about 1914 or so, the Germans will decide to take over the world. France, England, Russia and eventually the United States will take them on and beat them.”

  Jonathan stared pensively into her face, waiting for more.

  “Then, around 1929, the stock market will crash. If we’re still around then, we’ll have to make sure we invest the egg money carefully. After that—”

  He laughed and held her close. “My little Gypsy fortune teller. After that, what?”

  “Another war, unfortunately,” Elisabeth confessed with a sigh. “Germany again, and Japan. As awful as it was for everybody, I think most of the scientific and medical advances made in the twentieth century happened because—well, necessity is the mother of invention, and nothing creates necessity like war.”

  Jonathan shuddered. “Tell me the good things.”

  Elisabeth talked about airplanes and microwave ovens and Disneyland. She described movies, electric Christmas-tree lights, corn dogs and Major League Baseball games. Jonathan laughed when she swore that a former actor had served two terms as President of the United States, and he absolutely refused to believe that men were having themselves changed into women and vice versa.