Page 12 of Killing Time

Seth stirred and sat up, the covers falling away so I could get an eyeful of his wonderful torso.

He looked even better in daylight.

“Good morning,” he said, offering me a shy smile.

Well, I’d probably introduced him to quite a few novel activities the night before.

“Good morning,” I replied, then bent over so I could give him a kiss. “And a good thing that we brought some coffee and tea over from the mercantile yesterday.”

“That’s for sure,” he said, now looking a little more relaxed. “No cream or milk, though.”

“I can drink my tea plain,” I said. “Black coffee is a no-go for me, though.”

His hand reached under the covers and found mine, then squeezed it gently. “Then we’ll both have tea. I never drink more than one cup of coffee, so it would be a waste to make a full pot.”

“Tea first, or a shower?” I asked, knowing I must have a twinkle in my eyes.

For a second, Seth stared back at me, not quite getting it. Then a flush rose in his cheeks, and he said, “You really think there’s room for the both of us?”

I smiled. “Only one way to find out.”

The shower had been something of a squeeze, but we managed to fit, and had a wonderful time rubbing soap over each other’s bodies, caressing one another, teasing and playing. We both seemed to realize it probably wasn’t a good idea to initiate another round of sex, though, not when we needed to head into Cottonwood and do some more shopping to pick up a few odds and ends we were still missing. We could go talk to Abigail and the elders sometime after that.

And all right, maybe they wouldn’t have been able to tell that we’d been playing drop the soap in the shower, but I figured it was probably better not to take any chances.

No, we got dressed and made some tea, and realized we’d need to go out to breakfast if we wanted to actually eat something, since we didn’t have bread or bacon or eggs, only a container of oatmeal that neither of us thought sounded all that appetizing.

It was a little past nine-thirty when Seth backed the Chevy out of the garage and we headed down the hill to Cottonwood. He seemed in very good spirits…but why shouldn’t he be?

We were now closer than we’d ever been.

The night before when we’d gone out to dinner, I’d been a little worried that we might bump into someone who’d known him twenty years earlier, but that hadn’t turned out to be the case. And as we drove down Main Street, we passed the Copper Café, since it wasn’t open for business, and pulled up to a place called Shorty’s that advertised 50¢ breakfasts and had such a full parking lot that we had to park on the street.

“This place didn’t exist back in the 1920s,” he said cheerfully as he locked the car door after I’d exited. “So I think the chances of running into anyone I used to know are pretty low.”

“Here’s hoping,” I replied. I had no doubt that the McAllisters would have put out the word about Seth’s return, so if we ended up bumping into any of them, it wouldn’t be the endof the world. No, the real risk was running into someone who lived and worked in Cottonwood but had known him from when he was still working at his parents’ store, or maybe from his time at the mine, even though I’d gotten the impression that a lot of the miners had come to the Verde Valley specifically to work in the mines and weren’t local.

If the worst happened, I could only hope he had some stories up his sleeve to explain his startling resemblance to the man who’d disappeared in 1926.

The diner was packed when we walked in, so full that the only spots available were located at the counter. Giving a mental shrug, I followed Seth over there and hopped up onto one of the stools, glad I was relatively tall for a woman of that period and could get up there without too much awkward scooching around.

My surroundings weren’t entirely unfamiliar, mostly because retro diners like this were still popular in the twenty-first century. In fact, the chrome trim on the stools and the counter, the red leatherette seats, and the black and white checkered floor felt like such a cliché that I had to remind myself this was the original deal, the kind of diner all those later versions had been based on.

Menus were stuffed into a rack behind the aluminum napkin dispensers placed on the countertop near us, and Seth and I both took one and perused the offerings. Honest-to-God diner food, including burgers and grilled cheese sandwiches and all the comfort food I’d been missing for the past month. Seeing those items made me want to rethink our decision to get breakfast, although I had to admit it was probably a little early for a hamburger or a French dip.

So I settled for a Denver omelet with a side of bacon and some iced tea, while Seth got ham and eggs and toast, as well as a cup of coffee. He’d seemed all right with the tea we’d had at hisbungalow, but apparently, he still needed a cup of joe to get his day really started.

The place was way too crowded for us to even think about discussing anything important, so instead we talked about the butcher shop and the general store and the bakery we’d seen as we drove over to the diner. It would be too impractical — and expensive — to keep eating out, which meant we should get some real groceries. Not too many, since I didn’t know when we might set out for Flagstaff to rescue Ruby from Jasper Wilcox’s clutches, but at least enough so we could have dinner at home tonight and breakfast and maybe lunch the next day.

Funny how the bungalow already felt like home to me. Yes, I’d been living there back in the twenty-first century, but that wasn’t what I meant. In my present, I’d been in Jerome for less than a month and was just starting to settle into the place. Now, though…now Seth and I had made love there, had acknowledged that we were going to be together no matter the year, and I wanted nothing more than to start sharing those days together in the little house as soon as I could.

All that would have to wait until Ruby was rescued, though. If she wasn’t returned to the McAllisters, they wouldn’t have the strength and guidance that had steered them safely through the rocky decades of the 1950s and 1960s until the town began to come alive again…until the time when her great-niece Angela would be born, the final piece of a puzzle generations in the making. Without Angela, the Wilcox curse would never be broken and the Arizona witch clans would never become one united front.

The food came quickly and was delicious, and Seth and I did our best not to rush through it even though we knew we had other things that needed to get done today. I couldn’t help wondering why the elders hadn’t reached out to us — in 1926, the bungalow definitely didn’t have a phone, but a big rotary-dialmodel now sat on a side table in the living room — but maybe they’d thought to give us a little time to settle in while they formulated their own plans.

But even though we hadn’t heard from them, I knew we’d have to sit down with the elders…and Abigail and Charles…and have a talk once we were done running our errands this morning. They’d probably think our plan was crazy, but I honestly couldn’t see how they would come up with anything better. Maybe they had enchantments that would work like a mobile version of the wards that protected Jerome, but since Jasper and his goons had easily gotten past them, I didn’t think they’d be much help.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been thinking of Jasper’s companions that way, since it was entirely possible that one of those “goons” was related to me somehow. I had no real idea, thanks to the way I’d never managed to get a glimpse of them in my dreams, and even when we’d encountered the men in person, their backs had been to us as they’d gotten in their cars and hustled Ruby away.

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