I opened my mouth to deny to this, then realized that Paul was right. It was the truth. A screwed-up version of the truth, but the truth just the same.

“What have you got to be so bitter about?” I demanded instead. “You’ve always gotten everything you’ve ever wanted your whole life. You’ve only had to ask for it, and it was yours. But it’s like it’s never enough for you.”

“I haven’t gotten everything I’ve ever wanted,” Paul said pointedly. “Although I’m working to correct that.”

I shook my head, knowing what he meant.

“You only want me because you can’t have me, Paul,” I said. “And you know it. I mean, my God. You’ve got Kelly. All the guys in school want her.”

“All the guys in school,” Paul said, “are idiots.”

I ignored that.

“You would be a lot better off,” I said, “if you’d just be happy with what you have, Paul, instead of wanting what you’ll never get.”

But Paul kept right on grinning. Grinning and rolling back over so he could sleep. “I wouldn’t be so sure of that, if I were you, Suze,” he said in a tone that sounded way too smug to me.

“You—”

“Go to sleep, Suze,” Paul said.

“But you—”

“We’ve got a long day ahead of us. Just sleep.”

Amazingly, I did. Sleep, I mean. I hadn’t expected that I’d be able to. But maybe Dr. Slaski was right. Traveling through time DOES wear you out. I don’t think I’d have fallen asleep otherwise… you know, given the hay, the horses, the rain, and, oh yeah, the hot-but-totally-deadly guy lying next to me.

But I laid my head down, and next thing I knew, lights-out.

I woke with a start. I hadn’t even realized I’d been asleep. But there was light streaming through the slits between the wood planks that made up the sides of the barn. Not the gray light of dawn, either. It was full-on sunlight, revealing that I’d slept way past 8:00….

And kneeling in front of me was Paul, with breakfast.

“Where’d you get that?” I asked, sitting up. Because in Paul’s hands was a pie. A whole pie. Apple, from the smell of it.

And it was still warm.

“Don’t ask,” he said, pulling, of all things, two forks from his back pocket. “Just eat.”

“Paul.” I could hear movement below. Paul had been speaking in hushed tones. I knew why now.

We were not alone.

A man’s voice said, “Git along there.” He appeared to speaking to the horses.

“Did you steal this?” I asked, even as I was taking the fork and digging in. Time travel doesn’t just make you sleepy. It makes you hungry, too.

“I told you not to ask,” Paul said as he, too, shoveled a forkful of pie into his mouth,

Stolen or not, it was good. Not the best I’d ever had, by any means—I don’t know if, out in the Wild West, they really had access to the best sugar and stuff.

But it satisfied the rumbling in my stomach… and soon made me aware of another urge.

Paul seemed to read my mind.

“There’s an outhouse behind the barn,” he informed me.

“A what house?”

“You know.” Paul grinned. “Watch out for the spiders.”

I thought he was joking.

He wasn’t. There were spiders. Worse, what they had to use as toilet paper back then? Let’s just say that today, it wouldn’t be considered fit to write on, let alone… you know… anything else.

Plus I had to hurry, so no one would see me in my twenty-first-century clothes and ask questions.

But it was hard because once I’d slipped out of the barn, I was flabbergasted by what I saw….

Which was nothing.

Really. Nothing, in all directions. No houses. No telephone poles. No paved roads. No Circle K. No In-N-Out Burger. Nothing. Just trees. And a dirt track that I suppose passed for a street.

I could, however, see the red dome of the basilica. There it was, down in the valley below us, with the sea behind it. That, at least, hadn’t changed in the last 150 years.

Thank God plumbing has, however.

When I crept back up to the loft, there was no sign of Mr. O’Neil. He appeared to have taken his horses and gone off to do whatever it was men like him did all day in 1850. Paul was waiting for me with an odd look on his face.

“What?” I asked, thinking he was going to tease me about the outhouse.

“Nothing,” was all he said, however. “Just… I have a surprise for you.”

Thinking it was another food-related item, although I was quite full from the pie, I said, “What? And don’t tell me it’s an Egg McMuffin, because I know they don’t have drive-through here.”

“It’s not,” Paul said.

And then, moving faster than I’d ever seen him move before, he took something else from his back pocket—a length of rope. Then he grabbed me.

People have, of course, tied me up before. But never somebody whose tongue was once in my mouth. I really wasn’t expecting Paul to do something so underhanded. Save my boyfriend’s life so I’d never meet him, yes. But hogtie my hands behind my back?

Not so much.

I struggled, of course. I got in a few good elbow jabs. But I couldn’t scream, not if I didn’t want Mrs. O’Neil to show up and go running for the sheriff or whatever. I wouldn’t be able to help Jesse from jail.

But it appeared I wouldn’t be much help to him for the time being, either.

“Believe me,” Paul said as he tightened knots that were already practically cutting off my circulation. “This hurts me a lot more than it hurts you.”

“It does not,” I said, struggling. But it was hard to struggle when I was on my stomach in the hay, and his knee was in the small of my back.

“Well,” he said, going to work on my feet now. “You’re right, I guess. Actually, this doesn’t hurt me at all. And it’ll keep you out of trouble while I go find Diego.”

“There’s a special place for people like you, Paul,” I informed him, spitting out hay. I was getting really sick of hay.

“Reform school?” he asked lightly.

“Hell,” I informed him.

“Now, Suze, don’t be that way.” He finished with my feet and, just to be sure I wouldn’t get it into my head to, I don’t know, roll out of the hayloft, he tied one end of the rope to a nearby post. “I’ll be back to untie you just as soon as I kill Felix Diego. Then we can go home.”