The Cowboy from Christmas Past

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“Nothing’s going to happen to you,” Auburn said, trying to sound soothing. “You just have a bad habit of levitating.”

“Promise,” he insisted.

“I’m not really cut out for taking care of a baby. I’ve got problems of my own.”

He couldn’t argue with her any longer. Unconsciousness pulled at him, forbidding him to stay awake, as much as he would have enjoyed telling her that he’d never seen a woman so cut out to be a mother.

Except maybe Polly.

And that worried him, too. He fell asleep, his soul tortured by thoughts of what might have been and what should have been.

WHAT WOULD IT HURT to swing by this place he called Christmas River? Maybe the answers to his problem were there. Auburn punched “Christmas” into her GPS system. They weren’t far from a town called Christy River—maybe he was confused from all the whirling around he engaged in. It was just a fast detour from where they planned to go, but they certainly had no schedule and nowhere definitive to be. Going to such a remote place might even help her put some distance between her and her fiancé. The cowboy wouldn’t awaken, not for a while, so she couldn’t ask him, but she had a feeling he’d be happy to get home.

She knew something was wrong with him, knew he knew it, too. He didn’t want to admit his fear, but for a man who claimed to routinely face down killers, what was bugging him now appeared to be bigger than anything he’d dealt with before.

He’d asked her about taking care of Rose, and for the first time, concern swept through Auburn. She couldn’t take on a baby if something happened to the hunky cowboy. Her eyes went to him in the mirror. He slept with his head tipped back against the seat, an ungraceful position, which had no bearing whatsoever on his sex appeal. She liked her men tall, dark and handsome, with a dash of mystery thrown in, so Dillinger was everything she would never have been able to resist in a man.

And yet she would have forced herself to, which was why she’d chosen the supersafe Bradley Jackson for her fiancé, a dreadful mistake that hadn’t been safe at all. Her parents owned the popular McGinnis Perfumes. She’d proudly worked as a vice president at the company. Bradley had been the CFO.

But three weeks before the wedding matters had gone terribly wrong, and she’d learned things about the company—and specifically her own family—that she’d never known.

It still hurt to think about it. Her parents said Bradley basically owned the company now. They’d hit a snag during hard times and Bradley had financed their debt through his own company. The wonderful perfumes Auburn remembered her grandmother carefully fashioning to enrich a woman’s life were phased out, replaced with cheaply made imitations. Every bottle sold generated huge profit. In this way, Bradley was receiving revenue from the loan, which her parents had never had to pay back.

The debt would have all been swept clean with her marriage to Bradley. She still smarted under the realization that the man she’d loved—and believed loved her—had actually owned her and her family lock, stock and barrel. No woman wanted to feel like that.

“You’re deep in thought,” Dillinger said, startling her.

“You’re awake.”

He grunted.

“Do you feel better?”

“I didn’t feel bad.” He glanced down at the baby. “She sure does sleep peacefully when she sleeps.”

The infant probably derived comfort from Dillinger’s deep voice. Auburn turned her gaze back to the road, vowing not to allow the rearview mirror to continue to lure her to stare at the hunk in her backseat.

“What does it feel like?” Auburn asked.

“I’d like to pretend I don’t know what you’re talking about, but since I’m completely at a loss as to what’s happening to me, I guess I’ll just say it feels strange.”

“Like you’re having a hypoglycemic attack?”

“What’s that?”

“Low blood sugar.”

“I don’t know what that is. Sorry, my medical knowledge ends around 1892.”

She couldn’t help it; she stared at him in the mirror. “Part of me believes that you really think you’re from another place and time.”

He just shook his head, and she went back to driving. “Listen, maybe you should see a doctor,” she suggested worriedly.

“You mean you think I’m dangerous. That my mind is addled.”

She refused to meet his gaze; she could feel him looking at her in the mirror. “I don’t know what to think.”

He sighed. “Where are we going?”

“To Christy River.”

“I’m from Christmas River.”

“Can’t it be the same thing? Maybe the Google map has a misprint. It does that sometimes.”

“Google map?”

“Never mind.” She pulled into a Sonic drive-through, ordered a couple of burgers, and by the time they were finished—the cowboy wolfed his—Rose was awake and ready for her bottle. Together they managed the whole burp, diaper, comfort routine. Chilly as it was outside, Rose didn’t mind being put back into her snug carrier for another nap.

“She’s tired from traveling,” Dillinger observed.

“Oh, traveling does that to everyone.” Auburn got into the driver’s seat and started the car.

“I meant, traveling through time.”

She frowned. “Listen, let’s play a little game, okay?”

“I don’t really like games.”

“Who was the most famous person of 1892?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Lord Tennyson died in October. I like his poems. Some of them had to do with the Knights of the Round Table. My wife enjoyed reading to me.”

“Can you read?”

“Of course I can read!” He scowled at her. “It’s a pleasure to have one’s wife read aloud at fireside!”

“Sorry, sorry.” Jeez, he could be sensitive about certain things. Auburn didn’t know if Tennyson had died in 1892 or not, but Dillinger sounded pretty knowledgeable so she let it pass. “Who was the president?”

“Grover Cleveland was just reelected. Third term, though not consecutively. He came back to beat President Benjamin Harrison. Other than that, I didn’t pay too much attention. We tend to set our own rules out West. Not sure what he knows about ranching, so I let him run the country and I run my ranch.”

He could have studied 1892 and become well versed in the history. But why did he keep levitating?

What if he really was from another time? Auburn pulled out of the Sonic parking lot. She’d be a fool if she started believing this man’s wild story, she told herself. She’d just discovered how painful it was when someone you trusted lied to you, and she had her guard up. Planned on keeping it up.

“So what really happened to your wife?”

Dillinger’s heart clenched with familiar pain at the topic. He didn’t want to talk about it. Still, he sensed genuine curiosity not borne from meanness in Auburn’s question. “She died of pneumonia. I couldn’t get the doctor out to our ranch fast enough. Don’t know what he could have done, anyway. All those tinctures they give seem pretty useless to me. It started out as a cold, though I kept the house warm as toast. I never left her side.” He shuddered, remembering the fever that had swept through Polly. He’d kept her wrapped, made sure not a draft entered the house. Tried to feed her soup he made himself.

Nothing had helped.

“I’m so sorry,” Auburn said. “I can tell you miss her.”

“I don’t miss her so much that I’m unhinged, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I didn’t think that at all!”

“Sure you did,” Dillinger said.

Auburn’s eyes met his in the mirror, but he looked away before he could see the pity there. “She was an angel,” he said, “and now she’s with the angels. I really couldn’t have kept her long. I realize that now.”

“But now you have Rose,” Auburn said.

“But for how long?” Dillinger asked, gently touching the soft, fine hairs on the baby’s head. He was getting awfully attached to a child that wasn’t his. He didn’t even know why her mother had left her with him. No doubt the people of Christmas River would say he’d stolen her, the same way they’d accused him of murdering Polly.

“I hope she’ll stay with me,” he said quietly. “She’s all I’ve got right now.”

“Where would she go?” Auburn asked. “It’s not like she can walk away.”

Dillinger shook his head. Auburn couldn’t possibly understand the demons that drove him, and why this little angel was his only connection to the world he knew.

Chapter Five

They got out of the car in Christy River just a few hours later. Dillinger shook his head. “This isn’t it.”

Auburn was disappointed. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.” Even if everything wasn’t much more modern, changed over and new, he would recognize his hometown. “The topography isn’t even the same.”

She held Rose tucked to her chest, surveying the road where they’d stopped. He liked watching her care for the baby, but he couldn’t get over the astonishing sight of hundreds of cars flying along the highway. “We rode horses over land like this,” he murmured.

She smiled at him. “You’re an old-fashioned guy.”

“I think I’m fairly progressive.”

“What made you become a gunslinger?” she asked softly, and he forced himself to consider the question and give her an honest answer, even if he really didn’t want to talk about a way of life he’d given up for Polly.

“I met one man who didn’t believe in peaceful solutions,” he said. “After that, it seemed I was offered plenty of jobs the law couldn’t handle—or didn’t want to handle—on their own. And the pay was good.” He shrugged. “Let’s get one of those burger things, on my nickel. Being a new father is making me hungry. I want to eat like Rose does, every three hours.”

“We can grab something at that McDonald’s,” Auburn suggested, getting in the car. “It’s pretty non-nutritious food, but I do love their French fries.”

He got in the car, made sure Rose was secure in her seat.

“Would you ever tell me about how you did your job?” Auburn asked as their eyes met over Rose’s carrier.

“No,” he said quietly. “Some stories aren’t good in the retelling.”

She didn’t believe he was from 1892. How could she understand anything about his life? Dillinger let Rose grab his finger, smiling when she held on to it with determination. “She’s a tough little girl,” he said. “A survivor.”

Auburn started the car and pulled into traffic. He was surprised by how comfortable he was, letting her drive him around. Where he was from, the man usually handled the team of horses, drove the buckboard. He couldn’t remember Polly driving anything, although she’d been an excellent horsewoman. Polly had been more delicate than Auburn. It was strange how Auburn had changed since she’d left her employment at the theater; she was softer, more feminine. He wondered about her family, why they didn’t seem concerned about her being off on her own.

A sudden shrill ringing startled him and Rose.

“Sorry,” Auburn said, “I have to take this. It’s my sister, Cherie.”

He watched, astonished, as she pulled a small black box from her purse and began talking into it. She listened, laughed, then talked some more. It was amazing. Everything one wanted to say could be done instantly, not in a letter or handwritten message.

She put the object away. “She’s telling everyone I’ve gone to Florida to think things over.”

“Can I look at that thing?”

“This? It’s an iPhone,” she said, handing it to him. “Don’t you have a cell phone?”

“No.” He stared at it, amazed by all the strange markings. “And you can talk to someone on this.”

“Anywhere in the world.”

He blinked. “Anywhere?”

“Yes.”

He handed it back to her. “How do you know how to reach someone?”

“Usually you know their number and have it in your phone list. If not, you can look it up in a phone book or on the Internet. There are maps of everything, anything you want to know at all, right here.”

He considered that. “So, if there was such a thing as Christmas River, that phone would show it.”

“Right. And there’s nothing listed. I checked.”

So the town name had changed. He was going to have to find out what the new name was, or be forever lost. “I have to know what happened to my town,” he told her.