Joan Johnston - A Little Time In Texas

“I’ll say!” Angel snapped.

He glared at her and continued, “I’ve never shirked my responsibilities, and I don’t intend to start now. I’ll be by your side every second until I think you’re capable of surviving in this century. Have you got that?”

He shoved her back into the seat, let go and stared at her, daring her to move.

If he’d known Angel better, he wouldn’t have thrown down the gauntlet quite so dramatically. As it was, she was nose to nose with him again in a matter of seconds.

“Now you listen to me,” Angel said, punctuating her speech with a finger poking at his chest. “I’ve been on my own since I was fourteen. And I travel alone—when I please and where I please. Is that clear?”

“As a pane of glass,” he said. “But it doesn’t change a thing. Until I say different, you travel with me, and you go where I say.” He didn’t give her a chance to argue, just turned back to the wheel, started the engine and peeled out so she was slung back against the seat by the force of the truck’s acceleration.

Angel stared at the swiftly passing landscape—bone-dry rolling prairie dotted with mesquite and cactus—and realized she had just missed her best chance to escape from this madman before they arrived at wherever he was taking her. She felt trapped, and she didn’t like it. But Angel had spent her life making the best of bad situations. This was no different. At least that’s what she tried to tell herself.

“Does your insistence on keeping me with you mean that you believe I’m from the past?” Angel asked.

“I don’t know what to believe,” Dallas admitted. “But until I’m sure one way or the other, I don’t intend to take any chances with you.”

“Why should you care what happens to me?”

“I’m a lawman. It’s my duty to help the helpless.”

“You told me yourself you’re on a leave of absence from duty,” Angel countered. “And besides, I’m far from helpless.”

“Then chalk it up to the Code of the West,” Dallas said. “A man protects a woman. That’s just the way things are done—even today. By the way, have you got anything on you that could prove you’re from the past?”

Angel touched her pants pocket protectively. The paper was still there. “No. Nothing.” Nothing I want to show you.

Dallas stopped the truck in front of a peak-roofed two-story white frame house. Several moss-draped live oaks shaded the house, which had a covered porch that ran across the front of it. Victorian gingerbread trim decorated the porch and the eaves. Old-fashioned forest-green shutters flanked the front windows, upstairs and down. It was not a twentieth century house—at least not on the outside.

Dallas stepped out of the truck and helped Angel down. He held on to her hand as he led her up the front porch steps and into the house. He told himself it was because she might need his support. The truth was he felt an unusual sense of possessiveness that made him never want to let her go. He labeled it a delayed reaction to saving her life and tried not to think about it.

Angel stared at the room, which was a mixture of both strange and recognizable objects. “Do you live here alone?”

“I have since my father was shot and killed ten years ago.”

“I’m sorry.” She turned and her blue eyes met his hazel ones, full of sympathy and understanding. “Indians? Or outlaws?”

Dallas stared at her for a moment. That was the sort of instinctual response that could only be made by someone to whom marauding Comanches were still a threat. Someone from the past. “Outlaws,” he said at last. “My father also was a Texas Ranger. He was shot trying to save a child who’d been kidnapped.”

By now Angel had touched almost everything in the room with which she was familiar—the Victorian sofa, the pine trestle table and four chairs, the sideboard, the standing hat rack, the shelves full of leather-bound books and the mantel over the stone fireplace. She had avoided everything else.

Dallas picked up a black object and punched buttons on it. “Hi, Doc,” he said into one end of the object. “I wondered if you could make a house call. I don’t know if you’d call it an emergency. More like a necessary visit. I can’t explain on the phone. Good. I’ll be here.”

“What is that you’re holding?” Angel asked. “Why were you speaking into it?”

“It’s a phone. It’s used to talk to people who are somewhere else.”

Angel frowned. “Magic?”

“No. It’s mechanical. Although I don’t know if you’d call fiber optics exactly mechanical,” Dallas said with a humorous twist of his lips. “Maybe magic is the better word.”

“How does it work?”

Dallas grimaced. Every question she asked pointed out his ignorance of the technical world in which he lived. “I just know how to work it, not how it works,” he admitted. “The world’s not a simple place anymore. There’s a lot we accept on faith. Like, if I turn on the stove I get heat. The refrigerator keeps things cold. I turn a spigot and water comes out, punch a button and the television works. These days people learn specific jobs and don’t know much beyond their own particular skill.”

“Sort of like the butcher and the baker and the blacksmith each has a trade?” Angel asked.

“Exactly the same,” he agreed. “Only things have gotten a lot more complicated since computers were invented.”

Angel didn’t understand a tenth of what Dallas was saying. The words he used meant nothing, provoked no images of anything with which she was familiar. It was hard not to feel overwhelmed. And frightened. Much as she hated to admit it, perhaps staying with Dallas wasn’t such a bad idea—at least until she could absorb and understand some of the shocking changes the world had undergone. Or until she could figure out some way to get back to her life in the past.

“Would you like to see the rest of the house?” Dallas asked.

“I suppose.”

Dallas showed Angel the kitchen, demonstrating modern appliances that kept her eyebrows perpetually raised in astonishment. The bathroom had a sink, toilet and tub, all of which she longed to use. There were three bedrooms. The two bedrooms upstairs were filled with furniture he called antiques, but which she found achingly familiar. The downstairs bedroom had been converted into an office. Besides what Dallas described as “a bed hidden in the sofa,” the room contained more mechanical devices, including a mystical “computer” that had apparently revolutionized the way things were done in the modern world.

“Would it be all right if I take a bath?” Angel asked, looking longingly in the direction of the large indoor tub she had seen.

Dallas frowned. “I’d feel better if Doc Philips checked you out before I leave you alone behind a closed door.”

“How long before he gets here?”

A knock on the door answered her question. “I suspect that’s him now.”

Dallas opened the door to a handsome young man, not much older than he, wearing a white Oxford cloth shirt and jeans with a denim jacket. His eyes were a startling blue and openly curious when he spotted Angel.

Dallas put a protective arm around Angel’s shoulders and pulled her forward. “Angel, this is Dr. Adam Philips. We grew up as neighbors. Adam, this is Angel Taylor.”

“You both look pretty healthy to me,” Adam said. “Why the urgent call?”

Dallas’s gaze slid to Angel and back to the doctor. “Everything isn’t always what it seems.”

“Meaning?”

“Angel has a bump on her head. I’d like you to check it out.”

Dallas met Adam’s questioning gaze but shook his head slightly to indicate he didn’t want to talk.

“All right,” Adam said. “Let’s get to it. How about if you lie down on the couch, Angel, and I’ll look you over.”