Page 11 of Borrowed Time

He followed her into her room, where he quickly shut the door behind them, glad that no one had seen him and Devynn go in there together. True, they were posing as brother and sister, but he couldn’t think of too many men who would have pitched in to help their sisters get dressed in the morning, especially not in 1884, when he guessed people were even stricter about such things than they were in his own time.

“It’s this thing,” she said, lifting a white silk brocade corset from a nest of paper wrapping. “Jeremiah had it delivered this morning, along with some extra underthings. I suppose I should have thought of that — my mother told me once that she only brought the one corset with her to 1884, and obviously, she would have been wearing it when she went back to the future.”

“Can’t you just not wear it?” Seth asked. In his own time, women had dispensed with those kinds of constricting undergarments, so he didn’t know how much help he could even be.

Devynn’s nose wrinkled. “I wish. But these clothes won’t fit right without one, and besides, if I’m trying to look like a proper young lady, I need to wear a corset. We’re supposed to be acting respectable, aren’t we?”

He supposed so. While he had absolutely no idea of what the Landons had been like, most witch families were fairly prosperous and did whatever they could to fit in with the nonmagical population. And that, he guessed, meant not running around town without a corset, not when doing so would have made Devynn look like one of the loose women he guessed must work in the brothels and saloons here. Even during Prohibition, his hometown of Jerome was wild enough, and hehad to believe that a budding frontier city like Flagstaff would have had its own collection of prostitutes.

The very last thing Devynn should be doing was trying to look like one of them.

Still, he knew he was less than eager to help her into her undergarments. True, she was wearing some kind of chemise and petticoat under her lace-trimmed robe, and was fairly well covered, but still….

However, she didn’t give him any time to hesitate and instead popped open the busk at the front of the stays, saying, “At least my mother told me how these things work. I can fasten it up the front, and then I need you to tighten the lacings until I tell you to stop.”

Well, that sounded a little less fraught.

She pulled off the robe and tossed it on the bed. Although she was very much dressed, the combination of chemise and petticoat still left her arms bare, and he found himself marveling a little at their slender grace…and at the faint hint of muscle he glimpsed in her biceps as she fastened the metal hooks at the front of the contraption.

Did all the women of her time display that kind of strength?

No time to ask, because she backed up toward him, saying, “Okay, start pulling.”

This close, he thought he could sense some faint perfume emanating from her damp hair, which lay around her shoulders. Clearly, she’d gone to use the bath much earlier than he had, guessing that she would need as much time as possible to let her long locks dry before she started her day in earnest.

His body wanted to respond to her nearness, but he gritted his teeth and told the troublesome parts of his anatomy that they had much more important matters to deal with right now, no matter how intoxicating she might be.

Forcing his gaze toward the laces at the back of the corset, he saw how they had been loosened enough so she could easily fasten the front on her own. Now he started tugging at the heavy cords, tightening them from the bottom and moving toward the top.

She was already slender, but it was impossible to miss the way her waist grew even smaller, more defined.

“How much?” he asked, and her shoulders lifted.

“I don’t know for sure,” she replied. “Is there a gap at the back?”

“A little bit,” he said. “Maybe not quite an inch.”

She scooted a bit to the left so she could grab the nearest bedpost. “Try pulling it in a little more.”

Seth wanted to shake his head — her waist certainly looked small enough to him — but he went ahead and did as she asked, tugging on the laces again until he’d achieved the tiny gap she’d requested. “How is that?”

“I think that should be good,” she said, now sounding somewhat breathless. “Honestly, if I can’t fit into those clothes now, then I’m just going to have to ask Jeremiah to get me some different ones.”

She spoke so blithely, as if it were no great thing to reach out to the Wilcox patriarch and put in an order for more clothing. Maybe it wasn’t.

After all, Devynn was also a Wilcox and part of his clan, even when removed by multiple generations.

Seth still wasn’t quite sure what to think about that. Yes, she’d told him basically the truth about her father and the clan he’d come from, but she’d never really mentioned her mother, and he’d just assumed she must also be a member of the Winfield family.

A sin of omission, he supposed, but still….

After delivering that comment, she hadn’t waited for him to reply, but instead went over to the trunk of clothing Jeremiah had sent over and pulled out an odd contraption, one that looked vaguely as though someone had chopped a hoopskirt in half.

“What in the world is that?”

“A bustle cage,” she said as she placed it at her waist and fastened a series of hooks on its waistband to hold it in place. “Bustle skirts were the style in the 1880s, according to my mom.”

Another petticoat went on top of the bustle cage, one that had a series of flounces going down the back — to hide the outline of the wires, he assumed. Then there was an underskirt, an overskirt with lots of elaborate draping, and finally a tight-fitting bodice that fastened down the front with a row of velvet-covered buttons to match the velvet of the gown’s high collar.

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