Magical Weddings (92 page)

I looked at Jonas. He was teasing, and I wondered if he believed me at all.

“No, I don’t have that power.” I clasped my hands together and stared at the garden.

“Well, I find myself at a loss as to how to help you, Miss Hamilton. You say that you are lost and unsure how to return home, that the stone you believe initiated the ‘time travel’ is not there, and I presume you have nowhere to stay while you sort through this difficulty. I think you should return to my farm with me. I can at least offer you shelter and food, perhaps find some suitable clothing for you while you are here.” He eyed my knees again.

If one thought about it, my way back to the future would probably come following Jonas’s death after he was interred and a stone erected. I didn’t want him to die...ever. I might have been a little saddened by my breakup with Brad, but I couldn’t imagine a man like Jonas ever looking at me and saying, “I’ve just fallen out of love with you.” So the best way to protect him was to take him up on his offer and stay at his farm. Whether he believed me or was simply helping out a troubled woman didn’t really seem to matter. He didn’t seem predisposed to running off to find a doctor at the moment.

“Thank you,” I said gratefully. “I would be most grateful if I could stay with you until I figure this out. Wait!” My heart pounded. “Did those ladies find you a wife? Are you married?”

Jonas’s cheeks bronzed. “No, I am not. I do have a housekeeper who stops by to clean the house, but other than that, I live alone. You see that as a problem, do you not?”

Relief swept over me. “Oh no! Not at all. We’re a little more relaxed about those things in the twenty-first century,” I confided.

He quirked a dark eyebrow again. “I am anxious to hear all about it.”

I frowned. Was he envisioning nightly tales of futuristic science fiction before the fireplace? Did he believe me? He hadn’t really said.

“Come along then, Miss Hamilton.” Jonas rose and held out a hand to help me to my feet. He led me over to the wagon and helped me up, an embarrassing task requiring me to hitch my dress even higher so I could climb in. To his credit, he didn’t say anything.

He climbed in beside me and reached behind the buckboard for a woolen blanket, which he placed over my knees. He then produced a stiff brown jacket made of some sort of cotton and settled that around my shoulders. I thrust my arms through the sleeves. The weather was warm, and I assumed he intended to cover me up in case we encountered anyone else on the road.

“We have to pass through town to reach my farm, although it lies directly behind Darius’s farm. I do not wish for you to be ogled, and the brevity of your costume would cause comment.”

“I can imagine,” I said. “It’s perfectly decent in my time though...just so you know.” It surprised me that his opinion was already important to me, but it was.

“I do not doubt it, Miss Hamilton.”

I gave him a sideways look, still not quite sure how to take his responses.

He expertly backed the horses and wagon down the drive and out into the dirt road. I had last seen the road paved and bordered on both sides by tall stalks of corn.

We drove toward town with me hanging on to the bench seat with one hand and the wooden sideboard with my other. I couldn’t think of anything to say at the moment, so intent was I in staying put in my seat. Jonas probably had no idea that I’d never been in a wagon before.

I remembered the town of Lilium—quiet, mostly supporting a rural community, a general store, a hardware store, and a mostly deserted main street. I thought I remembered seeing a population of about 183 on the road sign leading into town.

We soon passed a man on a smaller wagon heading toward town, then several more walking and several on horseback. In fact, the road was positively high traffic.

Jonas reached Main Street and turned right. No longer a sleepy, almost forgotten town, Lilium thrived. Brick and false-fronted wooden buildings lined the street, and people shopped, milled and walked. Wagons and even a few buggies parked along the sides of the street or passed us going the opposite way. Folks nodded to Jonas and eyed me with curiosity.

“So many people!” I breathed. I’d hardly seen any people in the three visits I’d made to Lilium.

“Not as many as a few years ago though, they say. When they moved the county seat to Logan, people and businesses moved as well, and the town dwindled. I like it this way though. I believe there are about twelve hundred souls in Lilium, far fewer than Hartford, Vermont, where I come from.”

I had wondered about the clip in Jonas’s accent, and I supposed it was that he was from the Northeast.

“So, you moved to Lilium to get away from it all?”

Jonas, busy maneuvering his team through traffic, gave me a sideways smile.

“Yes. I am a second son, and I wanted a farm of my own, so to Lilium I came.”

“Why did you pick Lilium? Why not any of the other towns in Harrison County? Most of them look pretty small.”

“When you see the farm, you will know why.”

We finally left town and turned right again, following another dirt road down an incline into a beautiful treed valley. A stream appeared to my right, and we followed its course to a large white Victorian farmhouse. The house was built facing the stream, and trees abounded everywhere.

Yes, I could see why Jonas had picked this farm.

“It’s beautiful,” I said. “What crops do you grow?”

“Corn,” he said. “My land abuts that of Darius. There is a small stream between our fields.”

I looked to my right and could indeed see fields of short green shrubs, which I assumed would grow to tall stalks. I strained to see Darius’s house, but trees blocked it from view.

“Is that Darius’s house beyond those trees?”

“Yes,” Jonas replied. He climbed down from the wagon and helped me down, tossing the blanket in the bed and helping me out of his jacket. He unhitched the horses and let them wander off. They didn’t go far, and I didn’t blame them. His place was a piece of paradise.

“Do you farm this all yourself?”

“No, it would be too much. Some of the local lads help out at planting and harvesting season. Right now, there is little to do but watch the corn grow.”

“So you sit on your porch there and watch the corn grow?” I grinned. A wide porch, much like Darius’s, fronted the house, and several white-painted rocking chairs faced the fields.

“Yes. It can be a bit lonely at times.” Jonas’s eyes darkened, but he quickly smiled again. “But was I not just saying that I appreciated life in a small town?”

“You did,” I said with a teasing lift of my eyebrows. His smile widened, and he ducked his head. So handsome! How could I save him from dying? What would happen to him?

“Shall we?” he asked as he gestured toward the house.

I nodded and followed him, assuming that the nineteenth-century gentleman in Jonas wasn’t about to attack me once we got into the house. Because if he did, I would know how he would die!

I bit my lip. No, I hadn’t known him long, but I had no apprehension that Jonas would do anything ungentlemanly. I had no real basis for my instinct, but there it was.

He held the door open, and I stepped inside. A lovely home, if sparsely furnished, the wooden floors gleamed, and the plaster walls were painted white. A river rock–framed fireplace dominated the living room.

“Would you like some tea? Or something to eat?” Jonas took off his hat and hung it on a hook near the front door.

I nodded, realizing I was hungry. I had only grabbed a piece of toast that morning—a couple hundred years ago—before helping Molly dress for the wedding.

“I’m starved,” I said. “Yes. So you cook too?”

“Yes, of course! I am a bachelor. I would starve otherwise. The housekeeper appears to be done for the day and is gone. That is to our benefit so that I do not have to explain you to her just yet.”

He led me to the rear of the house to a large farmhouse kitchen, if historical. An ornate black and pewter-gilded wood-burning cookstove dominated the room, and after seating me at a large round oak table, Jonas thrust wood into the stove and lit it. He set a copper teakettle on one of the burners and turned to me.

“What would you like to eat? I have some corn chowder and bread put by.”

Of course! Corn. But I loved corn chowder.

“That sounds wonderful!” I said. I hated to cook, so any man who did instantly became that much more romantic in my eyes. Brad hated to cook as well, so we had eaten out a lot—an easy thing to do in a city like Seattle.

Jonas reached into an oak cabinet, which I realized was an icebox of some kind, and he withdrew the soup and poured it into a pan to boil. He opened up a wooden bread box, the like of which I had not seen since my grandmother used one, and he pulled out a loaf of bread and sliced some.

“You really do cook, don’t you? Don’t tell me you bake bread?”

Jonas looked over his shoulder at me, and my heart pounded at the blue twinkle in his eyes.

“Well, I am not saying that I cannot bake bread, but no, I bought this at the bakery in town yesterday. I never have guests, so this is a pleasure for me to serve a meal. I have been too busy with the farm since I arrived and have made few acquaintances in town.”

“But I thought the ladies of the town were trying to fix you up?” I hated the thought though.

“Fix me up?” He looked at me again and grinned. “Find me a wife? Yes, several of them do fuss about my bachelorhood, including the owner of the bakery.”

“And how is that going?” His answer was important to me.

“Not well,” he said. “I am stubborn and resist their efforts. I will find a wife in my own time.”

Pick me! Pick me! Feeling foolish and not a little like a starstruck teenager, I shook my head and watched his back. For goodness’ sake, I was here to save him, not marry him! I had no doubt about my purpose. Then I would return to my own time—to the comforts of home and the big, sometimes lonely city of Seattle. I could not, under any circumstances, live in the nineteenth century.

We ate at the table, and I was aware that Jonas looked up to gaze at me often. I kept my attention on my food to avoid slurping the chowder or anything that might convince Jonas that women in the twenty-first century were ill bred. Or perhaps I was really self-consciously eager to impress him.

“This is lovely. Thank you,” I said. “You
are
a good cook!” I was a microwaver at best. Boiling water evaporated without a trace from my pots.

“Thank you,” he said, his cheeks bronzing in the most charming way. I didn’t know why I hadn’t noticed the dimples at the corners of his mouth before. I released a quiet breath of air as if I had been holding it for some time. I think it was a sigh. Oh, yes, he would make some girl a lovely husband. My stomach knotted. But the tombstone suggested he wouldn’t have time to find a wife.

“You look so very sad, Miss Hamilton,” he murmured, setting his spoon down. He covered one of my hands with his own warm callused hand. “We will find a way out of your predicament, Miss Hamilton. Do not fret.”

Jonas could not know that I worried about him at the moment, not my own future.

“Thank you,” I murmured quietly.

“Can you tell me more about this young man who died, the one whose stone you touched?”

I set down my own spoon, my appetite gone, and I shook my head.

“No, not really,” I said, pressing my lips together and staring at my bowl.

“I want to help you, Miss Hamilton, truly, I do, but how can I when you offer such sparse information? I do not know you well, and I know that I will sound presumptuous when I say that your expression belies your words. I think you know more than you are telling me. For instance, you said you have met the man. I thought you had not met anyone on your arrival except me.”

My eyes flew to his face, and he blinked. Rearing back, he widened his blue eyes and pulled his hand from mine.

“You mean me, do you not, Miss Hamilton? You touched my gravestone.”

I wanted to grab his hand again, to reassure him, to reassure myself, but he had withdrawn his hands to his lap.

I shook my head.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

Jonas drew in a deep breath and released it as he leaned back in his chair.

“I know I will die. Do not we all? But you said I died young. How young?”

My heart ached. How do you tell someone when he is going to die?

“Maybe it wasn’t your stone, Jonas?” I tried.

“Was the name on the headstone Jonas Ramsey?”

I nodded miserably.

“Then it must be mine. What year, Miss Hamilton?”