“I’m so sorry, love,” I whispered, my chin on his chest as he laid waste to the terrible memories.
“You have nothing to be sorry for, angel. By that afternoon I’d changed tactics and called your phone at least fifty times. And then I finally pulled myself together enough to call Shore Leave…”
“And of course I wasn’t there,” I finished, cringing at the thought of my family’s pain; to this day they didn’t know if I was alive or dead. “They must be so scared, Marsh. If time moves along there at the same pace as here with us, we’ve been gone so long…”
“I don’t know if it does. I left 2014 within twenty-four hours of you, but I arrived here months later. Go figure.”
“I had to arrive earlier and maybe somehow that factors into it. I don’t know for sure, but think about it. If I’d arrived later than in time than I did, Jacob might already have been born and Celia would have sent him east. He’d be…” I gulped, unable to speak the word.
“Lost,” Marshall concluded softly. “He’d be gone. My family would never have existed.”
“Right,” I whispered. “So maybe when we get back home, hardly any time will have passed at all.” Or time might have flown; it could be decades later. There was no way to know.
“Tish and Case know where we are, or at least as best as they can approximate,” Marshall continued, tightening his hold, sensing the restless fear surfacing under my skin. “I was in a panic but I stopped at their trailer first to tell them what I intended. I didn’t prepare near as well as I should have, I just knew I had to move fast. I tried to bring Arrow, I was riding him when I disappeared…”
“And he couldn’t cross the time barrier, or whatever the hell it is, because he’s something living that isn’t capable.” We had spent many an hour pondering this conundrum, using our limited theories. “You and I are capable of crossing that barrier, but Tish and Case aren’t.” I closed my eyes, attempting to reconcile Tish, my sister, with the Patricia I knew and loved here in 1882; sometimes I could not separate their faces.
“That makes sense,” Marshall mused, kissing my shoulder. He had glanced toward Axton, whose back was to us as he slept on the opposite side of the banked fire. Both of us loved Axton Douglas as dearly as we loved our own brothers, Axton who had risked everything to save Patricia and me, with nothing to gain for himself; he’d done so because he loved me and was in love with Patricia, desperately so.
“How long will Tish and Case wait before telling everyone where we are?” I asked. Our families were loving and kind and unfailingly open-minded, but I struggled to believe they could accept such a farfetched explanation for our disappearance. “What did Tish say before you left?”
“She’d guessed where you went. State patrol had found your car off the interstate and the driver’s side seatbelt was still fastened but there was no sign of you. I went to their trailer right away to get the letters. I told Tish I’d find you or I’d die trying.” He kissed my forehead, bracketing the back of my head with one hand. “Tish understood I had to go alone, that she wasn’t able to. I said I figured we’d be back within a week, go figure. If not, I asked them to tell Dad and my brothers. And Tish said she would tell your family.”
I thought of Mom, Camille and Mathias, Aunt Jilly and Uncle Justin and Clint, Grandma and Aunt Ellen. Of my stepdad, Blythe, and my half-brothers, Matthew and Nathaniel, of all my sweet nieces and nephews, and Dodge and Rich; my entire family in Minnesota attempting to accept such a preposterous story – even one delivered by Tish, a lawyer with a decided ability to refrain from sentimentality. How could they begin to understand, let alone accept, the truth?
Now our journey to Howardsville, a small town deep in Montana Territory, was but a few days from completion; Marshall, Axton, and I had spent the night at the hospitality of a rancher Ax knew peripherally; he’d stayed in the main house with the family, while Marshall and I had been allowed the delectable privacy of their old shanty cabin – or ‘soddy,’ as they called it – a small dirt-block structure about fifty paces away. I leaned to kiss him in the morning light; he made a soft, throaty sound and my heart jolted with love and the desire to sweep away all lingering agony, to fill him with only joy from this moment forth. “Good morning.”
He released a slow breath through his nostrils, having regained control, and a smile lit his eyes before moving to his lips. “Morning, angel. Do you think everyone will be mad that we missed dinner?” I stretched, deliciously lazy, luxuriating in being tucked within an actual bed after weeks of making do on the unforgiving ground. The ropes beneath us were sagging this morning and I giggled, bouncing my hips. “We might be in trouble for more than one reason.”
“I’ll take all the blame, it was worth it to make love to you in a real bed. It’s so goddamn hard to be quiet for Axton’s sake,” Marshall said, venting even as he rolled me under his warm nude body, nuzzling my neck, running his palms along my ribcage, on either side. “I don’t mind him traveling with us, I actually really enjoy his company, but still…”
“I know,” I murmured, clutching the lean muscles of his ass with both hands, making a cradle of my hips. “I don’t want to offend him…oh God, Marsh…”
“You’re so wet,” he breathed, eyelids lowering in pleasure, grasping the thick horizontal wooden pole that made up the headboard, forearms braced on either side of my head. “Aw,
