might intend for it to do, so it was never much trouble.
She paused halfway up the stairs when she realized her heart was pounding loudly and she needed to catch her breath. It wasn’t the stair climbing that had made her heart race and her breathing quicken. No, it was that brief touch from Cowboy Charlie.
Or whatever his name was. For a moment she regretted sending him away. But at least he’d gone. Which was good, she assured herself, continuing her journey upstairs. Yes, much better…for all concerned.
She made it back down thirteen minutes later, which wasn’t bad. After retrieving her purse from the hall table, she grabbed a ring of keys from a hook and pulled open the door.
No Charlie.
She admitted to a brief sense of disappointment. Not that she’d expected him to be waiting there, she told herself. Not that she’d wanted him to be waiting there.
No, that wasn’t it. She’d done the right thing, been firm, set her boundaries, let him know that the water and coffee and cookies were all he could expect from her, and that she had a busy life to lead that didn’t include his presence.
She sure had let him know. Good for her.
She closed the door, then used her key to double lock it. When she turned around again, she gasped.
There he was, standing there, big as life. It was as though he’d appeared out of thin air!
Charlie tipped his hat. “Didn’t mean to scare you,” he said, feeling awful as he took in Cassie’s startled reaction. You should never sneak up on a body like that, and he sure hadn’t meant to do that this time.
“Where…where did you come from?” she asked him, her hand on her throat.
“You said not to wait on the porch, so I was over there—” he angled his head to indicate the direction “—at the side of the house.”
“Oh. Well, then,” she said, and let out a deep sigh. He watched as the color returned to her face. “You took me literally then. You didn’t just…materialize from…nowhere?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Good,” she said. “I really don’t think my heart could take that.” She seemed to gather herself together and walked purposefully down the two porch steps and onto the path leading to the street, saying, “Well, I’ll be on my way then.”
He followed. She stopped, turned to him again and offered her hand, just as she had done in the house. In the full morning sunlight, he could see tired lines around her eyes, and he had to resist the urge to run a thumb over them to smooth them away. She was too young to look so worn-out.
“You really can go now, Charlie,” she said with a smile. “Thanks for brightening up my day. It was nice meeting you.”
Again her hand was soft, and this time, when she tried to pull it away, he didn’t let it go. “The feeling’s mutual. It’s just, you haven’t told me yet what I’m supposed to do for you.”
“Are we back to that?”
“Never left it.”
She blew out a breath, and one of her bouncy brown curls lifted momentarily off her forehead then settled back into place. He sure did want to see how that healthy looking hair would feel between his fingers, sure did want to touch some more of her skin. But first he needed to get his assignment.
“Right. Fine,” she said, looking from their still-joined hands and back into his gaze. His gut told him she was dismissing both his request and him.
“You can go to the bank,” she said. “That’s First Yatesboro Savings on Main Street. And get them to give me thirty more days on the mortgage. Okay? If you can do that, maybe I’ll believe in Santa Claus. At least, maybe I’ll believe in you.” Gently she pried her hand out of his and walked away.
He watched her sashay off down the walkway and get into her small blue machine. Car. Unbidden, the word came to his head. He might have come from the Old West, but, for some reason, he now knew that was the name for the machine, same as he knew it ran on fuel made from oil pumped out of the ground.
He was getting this thing now, this transformation; clearly, he would have been granted all the knowledge he would need to function in Cassie’s twenty-first-century world.
Now all he had to do was furnish a miracle.
Chapter Three
Frowning, Charlie watched Cassie drive away. Automobiles sure were wondrous things. Some of the newer characters in his world bragged about the inventions in “real” life, and he had to admit a car was convenient—though of course it couldn’t beat Felicity.
So, go to a bank and deal with a mortgage, that was what he was supposed to do for Cassie, was it? Get her a thirty-day extension. Which meant she was short on money.
It was a classic scenario, the little widow woman with child, the wolf, or mortgage holder, at the door, waiting to pounce. It could almost be one of Cassie’s stories. Starring him.
What would she have him do, if this were one of her stories? A scene flashed through his mind involving heading into the bank and pointing his six guns at whoever handled mortgages there….
No, he knew instinctively. They didn’t do things like that nowadays, he didn’t think, not without serious consequences. And besides, like Felicity, his bullets hadn’t made the trip through time and space, either.
Still, he had to take action, and better now than later. First, though, he removed his spurs. They jangled too much and slowed him down. No horse to ride, no spurs necessary.
He took both the spurs and the guns in their holster to the garage and left them there. Then, deep in thought, Charlie began to walk in the direction of the few tall buildings he could see in the distance. He figured those buildings would be the center of town. The business district, that was what it was called. The business district. He rolled the words over on his tongue. Formal sounding words, those.
He walked on paved sidewalks—another first for him—and passed small, modest houses similar to Cassie’s. The lawns were so green, so even. And the houses were so close together, he marveled. You could look into each other’s windows and see all kinds of private acts, he figured. Back home you could get shot for doing that. But not, he assumed, here. Maybe neighbors didn’t look at neighbors? No, more than likely they did, but just pretended not to see.
Where did the folks here have room to grow their vegetables? he wondered. And how could you breathe with your neighbor so close?
First Yatesboro Savings, Cassie had said. He kept an eye out for the sign as he stopped at a cross street named Main. Funny, there was a Main Street back home. Did every town have a main street? It warmed him, this small connection. Maybe things weren’t that different here, after all.
Small machines—cars—like Cassie’s but with different shapes and colors, passed him by. No horses, though. He didn’t see one, which made him kind of sad. Were there horses anymore in Cassie’s world?
He was crossing Main to get to the other side, when he heard a loud screech and a man’s voice yelling, “Hey, cowboy! Can’t you see it’s red?” The car was right close to him and the driver looked pretty mad.
Red? Charlie gazed around him, then up at the sky, and sure enough there was a box hanging in the middle of the street. It had three circles on it, and one of them was red. He watched as that color went out and the one at the bottom it turned green. Other folks joined him now crossing the road.
“Sorry,” he called out to the irate driver. Another new rule to learn. Red meant you stopped and green meant you could go. And yellow must mean to pay attention, he told himself. This new way of thinking was slowly seeping in and part of it must come from Cassie’s belief that he knew about modern life.
He began to notice the