“Shut up!” Paul whispered. “Do you want to get us both shot?”

I whirled around. I could only dimly make out his figure there in the darkness. But it was enough to send my pulse, which had been racing before, to a near standstill.

“What are you doing here?” I demanded, hoping he couldn’t hear the confusion in my voice. I was feeling an odd mix of emotions at seeing him: anger, that he’d gotten there before me; fear, that he was there at all; and relief, at seeing a familiar face.

“What do you think I’m doing here?” Paul tossed something rough and heavy at me.

I caught it inexpertly. “What’s this?”

“A blanket. So you can dry yourself off.”

I gratefully threw the blanket around my shoulders. Even though I still had my motorcycle jacket on, I was shivering beneath the leather. I don’t think it was from the rain, either.

The blanket smelled strongly of horse. But not in a bad way. I guess.

“So,” Paul said and moved into the sliver of light thrown through the still-open barn door, so that I could finally see his face. “You made it.”

I sniffled miserably. I tried not to pay attention to the fact that I was cold, wet, and inside a barn. In the year1850.

“I can’t believe you really thought you would get away with it,” I said, glad I’d finally seemed to get the trembling of my voice under control. My chattering teeth were another story. “Did you think I wouldn’t try to stop you?”

Paul shrugged. “I figured it was worth a try. And there’s still a chance I’ll succeed, you know, Suze. He isn’t here yet.”

“Who isn’t?” I asked stupidly. I was still busy trying to figure out how I could possibly ditch Paul and get to Jesse without him noticing.

“Jesse,” Paul said as if I were mentally impaired. And you know what? Probably I am. “We’re a day early. He gets here tomorrow.”

“How do you know?” I asked, wiping my dripping nose on the back of my wrist.

“I talked to that lady,” he said. “Mrs. O’Neil. The one who owns your house.”

“She talked to you?” I couldn’t hide my surprise. “She wouldn’t talk to me. She threw me out.”

“What’d you do, materialize in front of her?” Paul asked with a sneer.

“No,” I said. “Well, not right in front of her.”

Paul shook his head. But I could see that he was grinning a little. “Bet you gave her a coronary. What’d she think of your getup?” He gestured at my clothes.

I looked down at myself. In my jeans and motorcycle jacket, I guess I didn’t really resemble any nineteenth-century miss I’d ever seen in the movies. Or, more important, in pictures from the era.

“She said she ran a respectable house and I should know better than to show my face there,” I admitted and was stung when Paul laughed out loud.

“What?” I demanded.

“Nothing,” Paul said. But he was still laughing.

“Just tell me.”

“Okay. But don’t get mad. She thought you were a lady of the evening.”

I glared at him. “She did not!”

“She did so. And I told you not to get mad.”

“I’m not exactly dressed like a hoochie mama,” I pointed out. “I’m wearing pants.”

“That’s the problem,” Paul said. “No respectable woman in this century wears pants. Good thing Jesse didn’t see you. He probably wouldn’t even have talked to you.”

I had had about all I could take of Paul. I said hotly, “He would so. Jesse’s not like that.”

“Not the Jesse you know,” Paul said. “But we’re not talking about the one you know, are we? We’re talking about the one who’s never met you. Who hasn’t sat around for a hundred and fifty years, watching the world go by. We’re talking about the Jesse who’s on his way to Carmel to marry the girl of his—”

“Shut up,” I said before he could finish that sentence.

Paul’s grin got broader. “Sorry. Well, we’ve got a while to wait. No sense spending it arguing. Come up to the loft with me, and we’ll sit out this storm together.”

He slipped back into the shadows, and I heard a foot scrape on a wooden rung. One of the horses whinnied.

“Don’t be scared, Suze,” Paul called down to me from a few feet in the air. “They’re just horses. They won’t bite. If you don’t get too near them.”

That wasn’t why I was scared. Not that I was about to admit any such thing to him.

“I think I’ll stay down here,” I said into the darkness his voice had come from.

“Fine by me,” Paul said, “if you want to get caught. It’ll just make my job easier. Mr. O’Neil came by a little while ago to check on the horses. I’m sure he wouldn’t shoot a girl, though. If he realized you were a girl in time, I mean.”

This got me moving toward the ladder.

“I hate you,” I commented, as I started to climb.

“No, you don’t,” Paul said from the darkness above me. I could tell by his voice that he was grinning again. “But you go right on telling yourself that, if it makes you feel better.”

Chapter

fourteen

It was warm in the loft. Warm and dry. And not just because of all the hay. No, also because Paul and I were sitting so close together—for body-heat purposes only, I’d informed him, when he’d shown me the hole he’d dug in the giant pile of hay at one end of the loft.

“Because I don’t want to die of hypothermia,” was what I’d said, since the horse blanket didn’t seem to be doing the job. At least, my teeth hadn’t stopped chattering. My jeans weren’t drying as fast as I’d have liked them to.

“I’ll keep my hands to myself,” Paul had assured me.

And so far, he’d been true to his word.

“What I don’t get,” I said as the rain pelted down outside, with occasional flashes of lightning, though the thunderstorm portion of the evening seemed to be mostly over, “is what you’re doing here. Aren’t you supposed to be looking for Felix Diego? To stop him?”

“Yeah.” In the darkness of the loft, I could only make out Paul’s profile by the light that crept in from chinks and knotholes in the wood that made up the barn walls.