Page 35 of Stolen Time

Unless he was trying to warn me away from his brother.

I swallowed some more lemonade and found myself wishing it was a margarita. What a stupid idea Prohibition was, anyway. How long had this bullshit even lasted?

Due to my general disinterest in U.S. history, I couldn’t remember. Was it during the Depression? Or had they repealed the dumb thing as World War 2 broke out, figuring it probably wasn’t too smart to force their soldiers to be sober when they were on leave?

Not that it mattered, I supposed. I was certainly in the heart of Prohibition now, so it wasn’t as though anything about the situation was going to change any time soon.

And then I opened the letter. No envelope, not even a seal, so the contents of it could have been easily read by the boy who’d brought it here, even though I didn’t see any signs of the telltale dirt smudges he would have left behind.

Dear Miss Rowe,

I apologize for my neglect over the past couple of days. Work has been very busy at the mine, so I thought it better for things to slow down a bit before we attempted another meal together. Would you be available for dinner in Cottonwood tomorrow night?

If so, you can leave me a note at my house. Just tuck it under the doormat.

Your friend,

Seth McAllister

He wasn’t dumping me, or playing the ghost game. No, he was just working ten-plus hours a day so he could save up for a bigger house, maybe get another promotion.

The relief that flooded through my body was so extreme, I wanted to shake my head at myself. I knew I absolutely should not be getting so emotionally invested in Seth McAllister…and the more I tried to believe that, the more I knew I’d never be able to stay away.

Even if I’d come just that much closer to returning to my own time. Shouldn’t I politely decline his invitation and tell him itseemed clear he was too busy to see anyone right now, and that I thought it better if we both went our separate ways?

Well, that would have been the logical thing to do. Too bad I was feeling anything but logical at the moment. All I knew was that I wanted to spend as much time with him here as I could. If I ended up returning to the twenty-first century, my disappearance would hurt him…and yet I had to believe it would hurt him even more to know I was here and had decided I didn’t want to see him anymore.

I’d appeared mysteriously…and maybe I’d disappear the same way. In the meantime, I needed to steal these moments with Seth when I could.

It felt a little strange not to lock the door behind me as I left to go to Seth’s bungalow, but as far as I could tell, Ruth and Timothy didn’t seem to bother much with door locks. True, any witch or warlock worth their salt didn’t need a key to get in and out of a place, and yet that wasn’t what was going on here. No, it seemed as if all the neighbors on this street looked after one another, and didn’t appear to worry too much about the unruly denizens of the boarding houses and hotels on Main Street making their way up here to see if the homes contained any valuables worth taking.

A subtle enchantment…or merely a simpler time?

Just as I was walking down the front path to the sidewalk, a woman about my age or maybe a little younger came closer, expression curious. She had pale blonde hair and pale blue eyes, and her skin was very fair as well, giving the impression of someone who looked as though she was beginning to fade around the edges.

“Hello,” she said. She had a light, pretty voice, one that matched her appearance. Like mine, her white dress was made of cotton and reached a little below her knees, but it was much fancier, with a lot of pintucking and tone-on-tone embroidery. “Are you the girl who’s staying with Ruth and Timothy McAllister?”

“I am,” I replied. “I’m Deborah Rowe.”

And I extended a hand — one I’d remembered at the last minute to cover in the single pair of thin kid gloves Molly McAllister had provided, along with the darlingest little cloche hat made of fine straw she had included in my latest batch of clothing.

The girl was also wearing gloves, although finely crocheted ones, and the hat that covered her head was wide-brimmed, something I thought wasn’t completely in fashion in the 1920s but definitely provided much more sun protection than the one I currently had on.

“Abigail McAllister,” she said. “I live just down the street.”

She pointed with a gloved finger toward a Victorian that was the largest and fanciest on Paradise Lane.

In fact…wasn’t that Angela’s house?

All right, it couldn’t be Angela’s now, but it certainly was more than a hundred years in the future.

And if Abigail lived there now, that meant she must be theprima.

No, not theprima,I corrected myself hastily. Theprima’sdaughter, or what most witch clans referred to as theprima-in-waiting. The Wilcoxes were different from pretty much every other clan in that we had a male head of the family and not a woman, but even I knew that when the girl who’d been designated as next in line turned twenty-one, she had a year to find her consort, her soul mate, so she could come into the fullness of her powers whenever the currentprimapassed on.

Up close, this girl looked barely eighteen or nineteen, so I guessed she still had a few years to go before she had to worry about finding her consort. In a way, I was relieved to see that, because otherwise, Seth would probably have been among her possible consorts. From what I’d heard, the elders — or whoever else was lining up the guys to try on the glass slipper, so to speak — did their best to avoid age gaps that were too large in these situations and almost always were looking for guys who weren’t more than five or six years older than theprima-in-waiting. At twenty-four, Seth would certainly fall into that group…as long as he wasn’t too closely related to Abigail.

Obviously, I couldn’t ask her about any of that, since, thanks to the magic I’d inherited from the Rowe side of the family, Abigail must have believed I was just another civilian.