by Lisa Norato
She reached for her mug of coffee and broke the silence. “Before I begin, I should warn you.”
Without comment, Ruckert dropped his fork on his tin plate and gave her his full attention.
Shelby took a deep breath. “If you didn’t believe me when I told you my ‘car’ had gotten a flat on the highway, then how will you accept the rest of what I have to say? You’ve been after the truth since I arrived, but are you ready to hear it?”
He looked deep into her eyes with his gray-green ones, critically, yet searching for understanding. “I’m listening,” he said.
Maybe her close call with the stampede had mellowed him some? Left him in a more receptive frame of mind for news of the twenty-first century and the concept of time travel? Yeah, it was a stretch.
Shelby grinned nervously beneath his intense gaze. “That was no lie. But I wasn’t referring to a railway car. And I didn’t take the train. I’ve never been inside a stagecoach. And I certainly didn’t walk here all the way from Cheyenne. I drove to your ranch . . . in, for want of a better description, a horseless carriage. In particular, what’s called an SUV. Sports Utility Vehicle. It looks a bit like a small motorized coach, but it’s made of steel with four thick rubber tires.”
Lifting his hat, Ruckert shoved his fingers back through his damp, black hair. Shelby waited expectantly for a reaction. She thought he was going to protest. His jaw worked for a second, then shut without him having uttered a sound.
Despite his incredulous look, he was giving her the opportunity to finish speaking, she realized. Shelby wrapped her fingers around her tin mug to warm them. “Okay, I don’t know how else to say this without sounding all sci-fi, but—”
“Sci wh-wh-what?!”
“—I’m from the future!” In a more subdued tone, she added, “Or you’re from the past, depending on who’s perspective you take.”
He shot her a dark scowl.
In a nervous gesture, Shelby tucked her hair back behind one ear, then raised her gaze to his. “When I left home that morning over a week ago, I was living in the twenty-first century. I loaded Jorge and my belongings into my, er, ‘horseless carriage,’ so to speak, and drove to what I thought would be my sister’s historic dude ranch.”
She smirked. “Ha, ha, joke’s on me. No dudes at this ranch. Just real nineteenth-century cowboys. I know it’s a lot to wrap your head around, but please believe me. More than one hundred and twenty years from now, one of your ancestors will sell a partnership interest in the Flying Eagle to my sister and her husband Michael, who, by the way, is a dead ringer for Hugh. We won’t get into that again. The thing is, I was headed there for a visit, when suddenly the landscape altered around me and I was back in time.”
She went on to further explain her movements up until she ran into Ruckert and his family. When she had finished speaking, he removed his breakfast plate from his lap and set it down by the fire. Clearly, he no longer had an appetite.
As his gaze found hers across the snapping flames, Shelby got the impression maybe the reason he hadn’t said anything yet was because he didn’t want to call her a liar.
She jumped to her feet. “I have proof,” she offered in her defense, as if he’d spoken aloud. “My dad always preached the importance of carrying identification whenever we left the house. Habit, I guess. I took it with me on the roundup.”
Ruckert watched curiously from beneath his hat brim as she reached behind to slip her driver’s license from the back pocket of her jeans. She stepped around for a seat on the log beside him, then handed him the card.
“Wh-wh-what’s this?”
“It’s my driver’s license. You need a license to operate a motor vehicle. See, that’s me. That’s my picture,” she pointed out, leaning into him. “Now tell me, where have you ever seen a card like this before? And a color photograph? Color photography is still in experimental stages, but by the next century it’ll be common. And while this picture may not be the most flattering, the license and all the information on it identify me as a registered driver in the State of Wyoming.”
He pulled away, turning to face her, but before an objection could leave his lips, Shelby explained. “That’s right, state. On July tenth, eighteen ninety, a little over two years from now, Wyoming will enter the Union as the forty-fourth state.” She gestured to the plastic card in his hand. “That’s my Cheyenne address there. And my date of birth. I had a birthday last week.”
She hesitated, but knew she’d never get a better chance to drop the bomb. “I turned the big four-oh.”
“Huh?”
“I’m forty years old.”
Ruckert eyed her with a hard, critical stare. “I admit, this is a likeness of you such as I’ve never seen b-b-before, all in color. And I believe it can well be true what you say, for presently government is working to bring Wyoming into statehood. But it can only be guff you’re feeding me when you claim to be f-f-f-forty years of age.”
He returned the license, unconvinced. “No, that can’t be right. My ma is forty-seven.”
Outwardly, Shelby maintained a straight face. Inside, her self-esteem had curled into the fetal position. She was closer in age to Ruckert’s mother than to him?
She took a moment to absorb the news. So what was the big deal? Dating younger men had become quite fashionable. And common. Not to mention, forty was the new thirty. Unfortunately, this was not the new millennium.
“Okay, you know what? Let’s save the age issue for later. One thing at a time. You said so yourself, you could find no evidence I arrived in Laramie by any normal means of transportation. You do believe me, right?”
He hoisted himself to his feet and planted his scarred, heeled boots beside her. “It’s a c-c-c-conundrum, to be sure. I can think of no good reason why you would cipher up a story wilder than anything in a yellow-back novel, but it’ll take more than a picture card with numbers on it to c-c-c-convince me you hail from a future time.”
“You’ve said yourself, there’s things about me you don’t understand.”
He released a heavy sigh. “You are a regular curiosity. I will admit.”
“And is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“You could not have picked up that sassy tongue from any civilized place around here.”
“Where I’m from, all women talk this way.”
“Then I believe I shall never visit.”
Who had the sassy tongue now? Shelby stood and faced him with fresh determination to make him understand. “Years from now, lots of women will choose to wear their hair shorter. They’ll apply a full face of makeup every day. They’ll wear lipstick and paint their toenails, and there will be absolutely nothing out of the ordinary about it. Denim will never go out of style, but trousers cut from the fabric will be called ‘jeans,’ and they will all have zippers.” To illustrate, she unzipped her fly while Ruckert watched, his eyes growing wide. If she didn’t have his attention before, she certainly had it now.
“You can fight to deny it in your mind, but how else do you explain these peculiarities about me? Things that have been puzzling you? Don’t you get it? That’s why I dress and talk strangely to you. I’m not from this age.”
Shelby could see indecision simmering in his eyes. He considered her words with a blank stare, then drawled,
“Well. . . .”
“Yes?” she prodded, hopeful.
“Well, even if I was inclined to believe this is no foolery, neither can I accept something as impossible as traveling through time. How do you explain the letter from Nana Tinkler telling us to expect you?”
Okay, so he wasn’t fully on board with the whole moving-supernaturally-through-time concept. But finally, thank goodness, Shelby felt she was beginning to get through to him. She could’ve wept with relief.
“Excellent question. I’m sorry to say I have no explanation. Just a crazy theory.” And before Ruckert lost all patience with her, she pressed closer, pleading with her baby blues he keep an open mind. Way o
pen.
“Nana Tinkler was, or is, rather, my great-great-great-grandmother. We’ve never met. She died long before I was born. The only reason I even know of her is because my sister Caitlin dug through our family history and found her picture. So you see—Nana Tinkler, my sister Caitlin and myself—there’s a connection. A supernatural combination that somehow pulled me back in time. And by what miracle Nana Tinkler was able to compose and send a letter about a granddaughter who, as far as she’s concerned, has yet to be born, is beyond me.”
Shelby noticed a misty look in Ruckert’s eyes. “A grandmother is a p-p-power-ful force of nature.” He spoke with a reverence and a wisdom that brought a grin to her lips.
“I guess so,” she agreed, “because only the power of heaven could have brought me here. I know it’s not much of an explanation, but it’s the best I can offer. That’s all I know.”
* * *
Ruckert plumb did not know what to make of all Shelby had told him. His mind wasn’t buying into the notion of traveling back through time, and yet something inside warned him not to discount her words. Truth being, he was just a speck of dust in God’s whole great creation. What’d he know about the mysteries of life? And Miss Shelby McCoy was quite the mystery, you bet!
One thing he did know. His heart was wide open with love for her. Love that stretched as far as the Laramie plains and rose higher than the mountains of the Medicine Bow range. He reached for her, this fascinating woman whose beauty transcended time, and felt her resistance. She didn’t realize how lovely she was. She didn’t comprehend how deep was his devotion. She still worried he mightn’t believe her.
He wrapped his arms around her shoulders and forced her tightly to his chest. He kissed the top of her sunshiny head, then tucked it beneath his chin, hoping to offer the reassurance he couldn’t bring himself to express in words. Because if he dared accept her story as truth, then he’d also have to allow the same power that brought her here could just as easily take her away.
She surrendered into the soft, worn wool of his vest. Her arms rose up to encircle his waist. “Well?” she appealed. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
Ruckert breathed deep of the crisp, pine-scented air. A reflection of rainbow shimmered in the dew that clung to the tall mountain grasses, changing in color from one to the next, as he mulled over his answer. “I u-u-understand you are from a d-different life than mmm-m-mine, though it doesn’t m-matter to me where. If it’s all true, there must have been a rrr-reason you were sent here. You were meant to be here . . . with mmm-me. M-my an-gel. Yeah, I’m inclined to believe that’s what you are and leave it at th-that. An angel.”
She lifted her smiling face to his. There was laughter in her larkspur blue eyes and an invitation written all over those sweet lips.
He kissed her tenderly, holding onto her lips an extra moment before releasing them.
“So? How’re you going to handle my ‘secret?’ Will you tell your family?” She pulled back to address him eye-to-eye, her concern evident in her expression and the increasing volume of her voice. “What’ll happen when Cookie returns and tells everyone that not only am I not his niece, he’s never seen me before in his life?”
“There’s no reason to question you are anyone b-b-b-but who your Nana says you are, whether Cookie claims t-to know you or not. If they do, they’ll answer to me, though I will k-k-keep your secret. You have a home at the Flying Eagle. I will always be there to take care of you, I promise you that.”
“Always? Always is a long time. Are you certain you want to make that promise?”
“I-I-I am.”
“Thank you,” she breathed softly. She grinned up at him through her lashes, and Ruckert knew then he was a doomed man. Her arms tightened around his middle to draw him close.
In a low, soft voice that might have come from a kitten if such a creature could speak, she said, “So, tell me what’re you thinking now.”
It took a moment to answer, for presently it was his body doing all the talking and speech seemed inconceivable, which was not an uncommon occurrence for him. Although a mysterious and beautiful woman who claimed to be from the future was.
“I’m th-th-th-think-ing I w-w-w-was mistaken c-calling you an angel, for there is n-nothing sss-saintly about you, but you are full of d-d-d-d-d-deviltry.”
His heart raced with the effort to speak clearly. It was all Ruckert could do to fight feelings of shame and look her in the eye when he stood before her imperfect. He wanted her to regard him as a desirable man, as desirable as he found her.
Her eyes shone back with love. She showed no sign of embarrassment, only acceptance, making him treasure her more.
As he reached for her lips, she pressed upwards to meet him with a fiery kiss, only to pull away too soon and leave him wanting.
“You . . . are . . . so, sooo . . . incredibly handsome,” she told him in a honeyed, mellow voice. “Ah, I don’t mean attractive in the sense of Holden’s pretty-boy features or Hugh’s boyish scruffiness, but a face shaped by everything masculine and strong. Handsome, in the true sense of the word.”
Ruckert had no comment but for a dismissive, low chuckle.
“It’s probably a good thing I didn’t meet you in the women-empowered, man-hungry, twenty-first century,” she continued, “because I wouldn’t have stood a chance competing for your attention. They don’t make them like you anymore.”
Ruckert peered down at her. “I can now say for dead certain you are loco.”
She stared. Not smiling back, but serious. She placed a quick kiss on his chin then with a sigh rested her head on his chest like she’d had the last word, when she hadn’t said anything more at all.
Ruckert couldn’t say for certain whether Miss Shelby McCoy was an angel or not. She didn’t talk or behave like he imagined an angel would, but because of her he had proof there was a heaven, and this was it.
* * *
With a full day’s ride ahead, they were off to a late start. The family would worry if they didn’t return soon. And although Shelby regretted leaving the privacy of their woodland shack, she did so with a heart much lighter than the one she’d arrived with.
She packed the breakfast leftovers, while Ruckert saddled the horses. He’d shown patience and given his support, but Shelby suspected she had yet to convince him of her time-travel theory. She didn’t blame him. She wouldn’t have believed it herself, if she hadn’t experienced it firsthand. How could the future exist simultaneously with the past? It was enough to blow anyone’s mind.
The important thing was, no secrets remained that could drive them apart.
“I’ve got s-s-something I want to sh-show you,” Ruckert said to her as they set off.
They journeyed upland. Ruckert brought her to a summit overlooking a mile square of open pasture hidden in the shadows of the mountains. Beneath a calm blue sky, the world loomed large, throbbing with life. Nature so awesome it both fascinated and frightened her.
Ruckert indicated the pasture below. Shelby could see he had something he wanted to say and waited as he geared up with the effort to push the words out. “Y-ou are th-the only p-p-person I have ever brought h-here,” he said.
And his struggle to say just those simple words told her it was a big deal. Shelby looked down at the Flying Eagle’s resident herd of wild mustangs. A chestnut stallion stood guard as they grazed. Long tail and mane blowing, he circled his band of mares and colts. Shelby watched him toss back his head, reaching his nose to the wind, higher and higher. He stood listening, then swung his head in their direction. His eye fixed on Ruckert.
“Wow . . . he knows you . . . doesn’t he?” she asked, although it went without saying. Even she could sense the communion between them. Hoss Man.
They journeyed home, riding abreast. They followed the creek downstream. Between crossing in and out of the stream, they slithered down banks and piked up hills, then rambled along the endless green blanket of plains.
At dusk, Shelby witnessed he
r first sunset on horseback. In the deepening blue of the sky, clouds like outstretched cotton tufts with shadowed underbellies reflected the dying orange blaze of the sun. Slowly, it disappeared behind the darkening plains and fringed the horizon in golden yellow.
By nightfall, Shelby was sagging in the saddle. She was never so grateful to see anything, as when the stone ranch house came into view. It glowed warm and cozy inside with the light of a single lamp to welcome them home.
Chapter Nineteen
Between the stampede and eight hours of range riding into the night, Shelby fell into a deep, dreamless sleep the instant her head hit the pillow. She dwelt in the land of the unconscious until late afternoon the following day.
Around three p.m., she was awakened by Jorge. He circled the bed, nails clacking on the hardwood, his barks like sharp explosions in her ears.
Once the fog had begun to clear inside her head, her first thought was to orient herself. She lay in her own bed back at the ranch, prone on her stomach and limper than a strand of overcooked linguine.
And Ruckert? Oh, he’d probably been up since dawn, going about his business as usual. Ah, youth.
She listened as footsteps ascended the staircase. They continued down the hall and entered her room. In wafted the aroma of bacon, coffee and homemade bread. As her senses stirred, her empty stomach responded with a low growl. Shelby cracked open her right eye. The daylight was blinding. Ugh.
“Is that coffee I smell?” Her throat felt parched and her mouth icky, like her teeth needed brushing in the worst way.
“Yes, dear. I thought you’d be hungry. What else can I get you?”
Rose coaxed her upright, fluffed the pillows at her back, then settled a tray on her lap.
Bleary-eyed, Shelby watched a thick slab of butter melt into a slice of warm sourdough. “At the moment, there are only two things I want in this world.”
Rose pulled a chair up to her bedside. “And what’s that, dear?”
