Out of the Past (Heritage Time Travel Romance Series, Book 1 PG-13 All Iowa Edition) Read online

  “What I say,” Dave interrupted. “Is that I think that you are worrying for no reason and I don’t see any problem with what we’re experiencing. I’m enjoying the warps so much—even if I do make a fool out of myself most of the time because I don’t know who I am or where I am. Still, I’m finding out so much about the way things were constructed—and farming,” he said in amazement. “I had absolutely no idea what it really entailed to get a field cleared and plowed so that it could be put into production or what it took to get crops into the ground.”

  “Pfft! Yeah right crops,” I snorted derisively. “When you left the dance with little Amelia the other night, you seemed to figure out what to do with her pretty quick. You plowed her field in short order!”

  I wasn’t really upset about it but I did like giving Dave a hard time, just to see that grin he couldn’t hold back, like just now, before he attempted to look appropriately contrite.

  “Torie, that was two days ago. Damn, I wish that I hadn’t let you get that out of me. You’ll never let me live it down will you?” he predicted.

  “Probably not,” I agreed.

  “Again, babe, what was I supposed to do? She was my wife,” he reminded me imploringly.

  “Of course she just happened to be the most beautiful woman in the entire town and possibly in the history of Fremont,” I said grumpily. “And you’re sure that you couldn’t have just told her that you had a headache?”

  He gave me one of those smokin’ hot, sexy looks of his. The kind that causes my womb to clench and demand that I give up the prize to him immediately if my watery weak knees can hold me up long enough to propel me toward some horizontal surface in order to do so—but I fought that visceral urge to merge.

  “Clearly, you seem pretty darned pleased with yourself and your “bedding of Amelia” experience,” I observed, using air quotes.

  “You’re the most beautiful woman ever to live in Fremont and you know it and besides, it’s you I love, Torie,” he assured me as he approached the sofa and bent down to kiss me.

  I gave him a little smacking smooch as I resisted sharing the smile that beamed from his entire face and lighted his eyes like blue crystals.

  To be honest he had apologized to me profusely and I had believed him when he had told me that he had been unable to stop himself. He had gone on to say that I just couldn’t imagine or understand the mental anguish that he had gone through as he had tried and failed to keep control of the situation.

  Not wanting to steal any of his thunder, I’d decided that it wasn’t necessary to tell him that I knew exactly what he had gone through. After all, it had been my sharing of that confusing carnal experience with Wyatt Mills that had been the catalyst which had set me on my path toward Dave and I didn’t feel any true jealousy regarding him and Amelia. Still, that didn’t mean that I couldn’t enjoy razzing him about it.

  “Oh, my god, would you stop that insufferable smirking every time you think about it,” I teased him as he took both of my hands in one of his and pulled me off of the couch to stand before him.

  “Not funny, Mills,” he informed me, grinning down into my face while pointing the way to the front door and our shoes that we’d left, tossed haphazardly at the threshold.

  “A little funny,” I argued, sticking my tongue out at him playfully as I stepped into my flip flops.

  “Let’s go, smart aleck,” he ordered, opening the front door and shooing me out before him by giving me a gentle swat on the butt.

  ***

  It was a blast—just so much fun to live in two different worlds. Ever since Dave and I had started cohabitating at my house every night, it had become pretty complicated too, because he isn’t as educated as I am about the people of old Fremont, and so often, I am forced to assist him or cover his faux pas’ and the havoc that he wreaks because he doesn’t know who everyone is or what is happening when he arrives in the middle of a time warp already in progress.

  Sometimes though, I have no choice but to let him sink or swim on his own, because he will be inhabiting someone who is totally unassociated with me and so I might be in the same warp but perhaps across the room looking on from a distance as he comically blunders his way through, usually receiving some pretty humorous reactions from others who are sharing the warp with him.

  I can almost always tell that it is him; all I need to do is to look for a man or boy who doesn’t seem quite right and it is almost always Dave—usually with his telltale deer-in-the-headlights look about him which is a dead giveaway. Even more difficult, is him trying to figure out if I am in a certain time warp with him (usually I’m not) and so for a while now he has been ‘in search of’ some solution to this problem; so that we can communicate silently with each other and give each other a head’s up if we are there.

  ***

  So it was, that one lazy summer Sunday morning, I lay naked and still comfortably abed, covered by a lightweight cotton sheet, with my hands stacked behind my head and my feet tucked up close to avoid being trampled upon, as I watched Dave, he in glorious nakedness, stomping about on the bed above me. Once again he was trying doggedly to figure out a signal that we two could use—this particular morning with a certain amount of urgency brought on by yet another extremely difficult time travel we’d only just returned from. He was determined to not live through another such embarrassment ever again.

  His stroke of genius, this time around, was for him and me to sign to each other.

  “Like a third-base coach at a baseball game,” he explained.

  I couldn’t help but giggle, completely unhinged, as he seriously and single-mindedly worked out a routine for us to use, while I used the proceedings as a perfect opportunity to admire the sexy rugged scenery of him, striding around and shaking the entire bed as he did so.

  “You know,” I observed. “You look like that movie Thelma and Louise when Brad Pitt was standing up on the bed showing Geena Davis how he did a stickup, but I think he was wearing, at least, some underwear.”

  “Stop!” he scolded good-naturedly. “Okay now watch me.”

  Then he started this extremely complicated routine, touching his nose, his ear, his nose again, and his shoulder, then slashing an index finger diagonally across his bare chest.

  I snorted a laugh as I raised my hand in the air excitedly like an overachiever in a grade-school classroom vying for the teacher’s attention.

  “Oh—oh! I know, I know! Tom Hanks—Field of Dreams!” I guessed idiotically.

  Dave glared at me and took a deep disgusted breath through his nose.

  “It was A League of Their Own,” he burst out, correcting me and then he got pissed that I’d distracted him, and crossing his arms over his chest, he looked down his nose at me.

  “Damn it, Torie! We aren’t playing charades. I’m trying to actually do something here,” he growled, not making me believe for one instant that he was really mad at me. He is the most even-tempered, good-natured man that I’ve ever known in my life and he can take some teasing just as well as he can dish it out.

  He tried to seriously start another veritable hand signaling cornucopia that quickly dissolved into this sexy but comical, over-the-top routine which included some rather obscene grabbing of his groin and thrusting of his hips.

  “You really expect us to be doing all of this craziness while we’re sitting in a church service or riding in a buggy or at an ice cream social with a bunch of people?” I asked and he shot me an incredulous look, his eyes wide at the horror of me mentioning the ice cream social, which was the warp that we’d just returned from.

  “Ouch, not nice,” he hissed. “Hey, if you’ve got a better idea I’d love to hear it.”

  “Well—” I began helpfully, but was cut off by him as he began striding around on the bed above me again.

  “Last night,” he snapped, his voice booming like some high-powered lawyer getting ready to present his evidence to a jury. He then began gesturing dramatically as he set the scene for me, although I’
d been there and had no trouble envisioning it. His pantomime complete with him acting out himself approaching phantom people stationed around the perimeter of the queen-sized expanse of the bed.

  “Like a complete idiot I was walking around that church yard with my stupid bowl of ice cream in hand, slinking up to every woman and girl in attendance like I was some kind of mentally challenged secret agent and looking deeply into their eyes while whispering, ‘Torie—Torie, is that you?’ Jesus! And you don’t think that wasn’t a little bit awkward?” he demanded and shook his head in embarrassment, remembering the scene.

  “It was pretty funny, though, when your great-great-grandmother Katherine asked someone to fetch some smelling salts and told you to sit down and rest. ‘Take it easy, Jasper. Could be that the heats got to ya,’” I mimicked, in my best feeble old lady voice. “I thought that I was going to burst while trying to hold in the laughter.”

  “Yeah, and thanks for the assist, love of my life,” he cajoled me as he lowered himself down before me, throwing the sheet off of me and holding his weight on his elbows while effectively pinning my naked body underneath his own.

  “How about like on The Carol Burnett Show?” I suggested, running my hands along the swell of his back and down over his muscular buttocks, squeezing lightly. “Remember that autobiography we watched about her last week? About how at the end of her show, she would always pull on her earlobe? It was a signal to an aunt of hers or something like that.”

  “Well, okay that might be better,” he conceded dryly after pondering it for a moment. “A little less conspicuous anyway—okay that’s what it’ll be then, a pull of an earlobe—agreed?”

  “Agreed,” I said with a smile, lifting a hand and smoothing his disheveled hair off of his forehead.

  ***

  But even though we had a lot to contend with, trying to navigate the town of Fremont anywhere from eighty to a hundred and fifty years in the past, we had some awesome experiences together. One warp in particular was devastatingly beautiful for us both and the combination of euphoria and melancholy that we had experienced when it was over, had lasted for days and had brought us even closer together. During that time travel, I had been my great-grandaunt Ivy Wyman McFall and Dave had been her first husband, Joshua McFall. We had warped into the scene at almost the same time and were there, alone in their home together, for hours...

  I arrived in early morning and I was standing at a closed bedroom window, holding the sheers back and looking out onto a side lawn. There were several flowering trees just outside of the window and inside a white picket fence, and the branches of the trees were covered by deep, rich pink blossoms. A light breeze was blowing across the yard and causing the blossoms to swirl like a blizzard of pink-tinged snowflakes, falling and drifting in a tousled storm over the brilliant green grass of early spring. The azure sky was dazzling and newly sprouting fields of crops in the distance were laid out in a precise pattern, alternating a line of emerald green beside the rich inky black of the Iowa soil, stretching out to the far horizon.

  I turned from the window, letting the sheer drop back into place and noticed at once the total stillness within, in contrast to the riot of color and movement outside. As always is the case, when arriving in a new travel, my field of vision seemed to gradually expand out as I started to register everything and my first impression was that I was in a perfect, turn of the century, Victorian bedroom. The bed was ornately carved with a cherry-oak head and foot board and a thick embroidered comforter looked to have been carefully folded down and was bunched up at the foot of the bed. While the white linen sheets looked as though the occupants had just recently risen, leaving the impressions of their bodies in the pillows and the ticking of the feather mattress.

  The dresser across the room from the bed was draped by an ivory lace doily and I approached it to admire a wedding photograph in a gilded frame which was the exact moment that I figured out that I was Ivy Wyman. The tintype was of her wedding day with her first husband Joshua McFall who was Dave’s great-granduncle. In the photo, Joshua was sitting straight and proud in a chair as Ivy stood at his right, with her hand resting lightly upon his shoulder. It happens to be a family heirloom that I have in my possession in the real world.

  Beside the cherry-oak dresser was a large oval floor mirror and I paused there next to look at my reflection and realized, for the first time, that my left arm was draped across my chest protectively, holding a white cotton nightgown over my breasts and shielding my body as though for modesty’s sake, however the stillness around me indicated that I was likely alone.

  I stepped closer to study my reflection in the mirror and decided that I was probably in my very early twenties, with long and loose light brown hair that was falling over my shoulders and my breasts, in a riot of cork screw curls. The face reflected before me was lovely; with midnight-blue eyes staring back at me with a curious, expressive smile upon her full pink lips.

  I was still clutching the gown to the front of my body and moved it now to look at my figure and I gasped as I saw my hugely rounded stomach. I was at least seven or eight months pregnant, I decided. I cradled my rounded abdomen in my hands and in fascination, turned sideways and looked into the mirror and gasped again as I felt a movement inside of me. It was very shocking to have the sudden sensation of a baby poking and stretching within me, especially since it is something that I’ve never experienced in my own body.

  Before I even had a chance to process this completely, I heard the slap of a screen door somewhere in the house and then determined heavy footsteps, a man’s, I thought, striding in my direction across a hardwood floor and I sucked in my breath, held the gown before my naked body and tiptoed over to hide against the wall next to the door out of sight. That’s when I heard the man’s voice.

  “I—vy,” he called softly, enticingly as he approached the room, separating the name into two very long drawn out syllables that had a definite sexual connotation.

  Then the steps halted abruptly just outside the bedroom door and oddly, there was nothing more, just total silence. I waited, breathing shallow, listening intently when finally the man spoke again.

  “Oh shit!” he hissed low and gruff. “Where the hell…?”

  Even though it was a completely different voice, I knew immediately that it had to be Dave, arriving with his usual, ahem—flair.

  I clutched the gown to the front of my body and cautiously peeked around the doorjamb and out into the hallway to witness Joshua McFall standing in pitiable uncertainty. He was dressed in just pants and boots with his suspenders dangling loosely down around his hips, looking as if he had definitely dressed hurriedly for some reason. He turned and tiptoed down the hall in the opposite direction of me, guardedly looking through an arched doorway that likely led to the front room or possibly a dining room.

  “Dave,” I whispered quietly to save startling him but still he jumped like he’d just been skewered with a red hot poker and swung around to face me.

  “Torie, thank God! Where the hell are we and…” his voice trailed off as I moved the gown to hold it down at my side and stepped from behind the doorframe out into the hallway so that he could see my body completely.

  He eyes bugged as he gaped at the obvious mound of my stomach.

  “Oh my God, you’re pregnant!” he blurted unnecessarily.

  “It’s Katie,” I said, touching my stomach tenderly.

  Dave shook his head and shrugged his shoulders, not getting my meaning.

  I reached out and took his hand in mine and led him into the bedroom where I showed him our wedding photograph and I tried to explain to him who we were. He got distracted as he looked at his own image in the floor mirror and he reached up to touch his shoulder length brown hair and then he watched himself in fascination as he smoothed his modest and well-trimmed mustache. He seemed to recall me all at once and turned his attention back to me, trying to focus on what I was saying but at the same time I could see his eyes darting around as he
took in everything about the warp as quickly as he could process it.

  “Sorry. You were saying,” he apologized and said to clarify. “You’re Ivy and I’m Joshua.”

  “Yes, and do you remember when we were at the gazebo and you were Wyatt and you sat down next to me and that little girl with blonde pigtails? She was sitting right next to you and me on the blanket.”

  “I remember the girl but,” he nodded.

  I smoothed my hand over my stomach and laughed softly. “This is her.”

  “How on earth can you possibly know that?” he wondered in amazement.

  “She was their only child, Dave. Joshua McFall died just a couple of months after Katie was born while he was out hunting alone when his gun discharged accidentally as he was climbing over a barbed-wire fence. He died instantly.”

  “This is too much to handle, Torie. I am feeling really overwhelmed for some reason,” Dave admitted, placing a hand against his forehead as if to stop his head from spinning. “So this is our house. Are we alone?” he asked, lowering his voice as he realized that we might not be and fearing that he could be overheard.

  I nodded. “I’m sure that we are. When I arrived I was looking out of the window and I think that I was anxiously awaiting your return,” I said looking at his state of undress before I continued. “I think that you must have run outside to do some morning chores and were on your way back to me because by the tone of your voice and your footsteps—you meant business as you approached the bedroom door.”

  I moved the gown away from my body again, exposing my nakedness. “I think that they were planning to have some early morning delight,’ I said and let my eyes drift over his body again, tall and broad but sinewy and whipcord lean.

  It was the most unusual sensation because I was feeling my love and desire for Dave and feeling a very deep sense of Ivy’s love for Joshua and my heart seemed to squeeze with a maelstrom of emotion overflowing and surging through my system in every direction. I think it must have been what Dave was feeling too and the reason that he was feeling overwhelmed because that was exactly what I was feeling, totally overwhelmed. I felt tears come to my eyes and then I felt the baby move within me again, very strong, adding to my tumultuous emotions and I gasped, clutching my stomach.