Page 43 of Stolen Time

“Do you need some help?”

I knew I could have lowered myself to the blankets on my own without any trouble, but I still took his hand anyway, happy to feel the strength of his fingers as they wrapped around mine and helped guide me to the ground. Sitting cross-legged in a skirt was out of the question, so I tucked my legs to one side and hoped the position wouldn’t get too uncomfortable after a while.

Seth seated himself as well, and started to pull all sorts of yummy things out of the basket — a plate of fried chicken, some apples, a bowl of luscious-looking potato salad.

“You made all this?” I asked, and he grinned.

“Not the fried chicken,” he said. “That’s my mother’s specialty. But I made the potato salad, even though it’s based on a recipe of hers.”

“Well, it all looks wonderful.”

“Here’s hoping.”

I shook my head to let him know I wasn’t about to take that comment seriously, and then he got out a pair of speckled blue tin plates so we could load them up without having to worry about breaking anything. Had he borrowed the plates from his mother as well?

Possibly, or maybe they were on temporary “loan” from the store. Either way, they were the perfect solution for a picnic, sturdy and much better than paper plates, which I wasn’t sure had even been invented yet. That was one of the crazy things about coming back to this particular decade — I knew a whole lot of modern conveniences had made their appearance in the twentieth century, but because I wasn’t a student of inventions or anything close to it, there was no way in the world I’d ever be able to pinpoint when certain items made their way into the mainstream, whether they were paper plates or aluminum foil or central air conditioning.

Well, A/C definitely wasn’t a thing yet in Jerome, that was for sure. I had the impression that ceiling fans, like the ones Ruth had in her parlors, were still something of a luxury, which might have been why I hadn’t spotted any in Seth’s bungalow. By the time the twenty-first century had rolled around, that same home had been upgraded with air conditioning in addition to built-in fans, but they didn’t seem to be a given the way they might have been in my own time.

He also poured some lemonade for us out of a flask that looked something like a Thermos, but not quite. Whatever it was, it had helped to keep the liquid cold. Although it was much cooler up here, thanks to both the elevation and the shadeprovided by the ponderosa pines that towered overhead, the nicely chilled lemonade still felt good on my throat, refreshing and tart and slightly sweet.

The fried chicken, although lukewarm by that point, was amazing, crisp and savory on the outside and succulent on the inside.

“This is the best fried chicken I’ve ever had,” I said, which was the simple truth.

Take that, Colonel Sanders.

Seth had just taken a bite of a drumstick, so he needed to finish chewing before he could reply. “Thank you,” he said after a moment. “I’ll let my mother know you liked it.”

“Like” seemed as though it was a pretty lackluster word to describe something so delicious. But I just nodded and had a bite of my own, one I followed up with some of the potato salad.

“And that’s also delicious,” I told him.

“My mother’s recipe,” he reminded me.

“Maybe,” I said, “but you’re the one who made it.”

His shoulders lifted, although it didn’t seem as if he wanted to protest further, since he also had some potato salad before returning to his half-eaten drumstick. We ate in silence for a moment, which was fine.

Actually, better than fine. Just having him seated there on the blanket a foot or so away from me made this moment feel more real, more vivid, than anything I’d ever experienced before. Maybe it was the gentle pine-scented breeze that washed over us, or the way his eyes were nearly the same color as the sapphire skies overhead, but it seemed then almost as if we’d managed to capture ourselves in a little bubble away from the world, away from time, where we could simply be and not have to worry about anything at all.

“More chicken?” he asked after I’d devoured my second drumstick.

The fried chicken was so good that I probably could have had a third piece. However, I reminded myself that we had Ruth’s chocolate cookies for dessert, so it was probably a good idea for me to leave a little room.

I shook my head. “No, I’m fine for now.”

“Then I’ll wrap all this up.”

Deftly, he gathered the oversized napkin that had protected the plate of chicken during the drive up here, then covered the dish once again and returned it to the picnic basket. Afterward, he did much the same thing with the half-eaten bowl of potato salad before bringing out the package of cookies.

“Dessert first, or would you rather walk for a while before we have the cookies?”

“Walk,” I said promptly. Although I wouldn’t have said I was uncomfortably full, it just seemed better to get a little exercise first and walk off some of our meal.

“Done,” Seth said as he got to his feet. “I’ll put the basket back in the trunk, just to be safe. Not too many people come up here, but it’s probably better not to leave the food out while we’re gone.” He paused there, blue eyes taking on an amused glint. “The last thing I want is someone to come along and steal Ruth’s cookies.”

“That would be a tragedy,” I agreed with a grin. Or have them taken by a raccoon or maybe even a bear, although I didn’t know for sure whether bears even roamed the pine forests here. No one had mentioned anything about them during my tenure in Jerome, but maybe that was only because they’d moved on to other areas by the time the twenty-first century rolled around.

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