Chapter Twenty-Two
Twenty-Two
Rose woke up in her bedroom with Henry sleeping next to her, an arm flung over her midsection.
Once again, it had been daybreak by the time they’d gone to bed.
She was wearing her oversize Not My First Rodeo cowgirl T-shirt she’d been wearing on the first night she’d met him, with no pants, and Henry hadn’t raised an eyebrow at that. How things had changed.
She sighed, picked up her phone, and saw she had several texts. She opened the one from Emily first.
I was just watching WGN, Cubs are going to be good this year
Had she texted Rose by mistake? Emily loved the Cubs, but she knew Rose didn’t follow any sports. If she had, she probably would’ve been a White Sox fan like Ryan…
“Oh no,” she said aloud. Emily was texting in code.
Next to her, Henry stirred. “What is the matter?”
“Our stealing the astrolabe is on the local news.” Of course it was. Because what they’d done last night hadn’t just been shenanigans. It had been a major crime.
Henry frowned and sat up in bed next to her. “Have you been identified?”
Rose’s heart was pounding. “Hang on.” She pulled up the first news story about it she found.
Henry, looking over her shoulder, read the headline aloud. “ ‘Mystery Couple Steals Artifact at Charity Gala.’ ”
“Whoa,” Rose breathed. That would’ve sounded kind of badass…if she hadn’t been terrified of going to jail forever. “Wait, there’s a video.” Her heart pounded as she clicked.
The security footage had captured Henry skulking down the hallway with balls of light covering their eyes and noses. As they moved closer to the camera, the light expanded to cover their entire face.
“Those glasses worked,” Henry said, marveling.
“Thank Goddess,” Rose breathed. “There are descriptions of us…which don’t match us at all.
” They’d be looking for a man with salt-and-pepper hair, and a woman with the kind of straight brown hair you might see on ten different women if you walked down a city block.
No one had recognized them at the Weiner Stand or after, apparently.
“They even say I’m two inches shorter than I am,” she added. And she usually wore wedges, not flats.
Henry absentmindedly put his arm around her and stroked her arm as he read the news story. “Reuter has put out a five-hundred-thousand-dollar reward.”
“I’m kind of surprised it’s not more,” Rose admitted. And right now it was sitting on her coffee table. She should probably move it.
“He didn’t pay much more than that at auction,” Henry pointed out. “Perhaps he didn’t want to flag the attention of others, like Mr. Yun.”
“You know, I still have a lot of questions for that guy.”
The late-morning sunlight was flooding through the blinds, making it feel like an ordinary, safe Sunday, and Henry dropped a kiss on her shoulder. Somehow, she hadn’t expected him to be so snuggly. Although if he wasn’t careful, snuggly would tip over into sexy right quick.
“Did he send you any messages?” Henry asked. “I expect he will want to discuss the past evening’s events.”
“Good point. Let’s see.” She flipped back to her texts and opened the one from Jason.
11 at Lou Mitchell’s?
“Who is Mr. Mitchell?” Henry asked.
“I don’t know,” she mused. “We’re going to brunch.”
“What is brunch?”
“Sort of a mix between breakfast and lunch?”
He snorted. “Brunch is a coward, then. It should be one meal or the other.”
She giggled. “No, brunch is my favorite. You cannot hate on brunch.”
“I certainly can. Because it still gives me no time beforehand with the most notorious lady thief in Chicago.”
She turned and peered at him. “You’re enjoying this!”
“Enjoying being in bed with the beautiful woman I adore?” His voice took on a husky note as he said, “I think you already know that.”
Feeling as though she was glowing from within, she leaned her forehead against his. “What I mean is, you’re enjoying getting away with a crime.”
He seemed to consider this. “Perhaps I am pleased with such a successful adventure. Besides, it is my astrolabe.”
A half hour later, she and Henry were both dressed. Rose, after some thought, removed a frozen pizza from its box in the freezer and put the astrolabe in its place. “Hopefully, I won’t freeze the magic off of it or anything,” she said to Henry, who was watching her from the doorway.
“I’m not an expert, but I doubt that very much,” he said, crossing his arms. He was wearing navy pants and a sky blue button-down shirt with his sleeves rolled up to below the elbow.
Rose had suggested to him before that it was fine for men to roll up their sleeves, and she’d been too honest not to add that she loved the look of his forearms.
They took the bus to the West Loop and walked to the over-one-hundred-year-old diner.
The name Lou Mitchell’s was spelled out in neon red cursive, and the bold claim Serving the world’s finest COFFEE was also in neon below it.
The smells of bacon and freshly fried donut holes were thick in the air as they went inside.
A couple dozen people waited for tables.
Henry froze beside her. Then she saw why.
Standing with Jason, who was nearly unrecognizable in a T-shirt and cargo shorts, were Emily and Griffin, who were no doubt the last people Henry wanted to see.
Ryan was with them. He had that wide-eyed look he got when he was feeling especially on edge, and he carried a filthy white tote bag from a blood bank over his shoulder.
She knew that look all too well, and it worried her.
“How are you?” Emily and Jason asked Rose as they approached.
Before Rose could answer, Ryan growled, “I thought you weren’t going to do that!”
Oh, geez. She hadn’t considered that he might be mad at her for stealing it. But as worried as he’d been about her before, she probably should’ve anticipated this.
“We should probably keep our voices down,” she told him, but when she took a quick look around them, no one in the crowd was paying attention.
“I picked this place because it’s loud,” Jason said. “It’s hard for anyone to overhear.”
“Milk Duds?” a woman’s voice interjected. They turned to see a smiling white-haired woman with a basket of small yellow boxes, the size one might hand out to trick-or-treaters at Halloween.
“Here you go, ladies,” she said, handing Emily and Rose boxes before moving on.
Griffin looked bewildered, and Emily explained, “They give them to women and children. I don’t know why.”
“This is how the patriarchy hurts men,” Ryan joked.
Jason smiled. “Rose, why don’t you tell us what happened last night.”
She took in a deep breath. “We weren’t planning to…you know. But an alarm went off as soon as he got hold of it—we got hold of it.”
Griffin looked grave. “My lady Rose, if it was none of your doing, you may say so. I know you have sometimes defended those who have not respected you as you deserve.” He didn’t even look at Henry.
“I beg your pardon,” Henry said icily, not sounding remotely as though he was begging. “But no man respects, admires, and cherishes Miss Novak more than I, or wishes more fervently for the health and happiness she deserves.”
Everyone stared at Henry in surprise. Emily’s eyes sparkled and she fought a smile as she caught Rose’s gaze.
Griffin was unmoved. “Easy words from a man who will be gone as soon as he is able.”
Rose winced. “He never asked to be here. That’s kind of the problem,” she said, reminding herself as much as Griffin. She looked around at the rest of them. “I wanted to do it, too. And Henry was amazing. He’s like the British James Bond!”
Ryan tilted his head in disbelief. “James Bond, famously, is British.” She recalled that they’d watched a James Bond movie the month before, though in her defense, she’d fallen asleep.
“The British James Bourne, then,” she said impatiently.
“Jason Bourne,” Jason corrected her.
“Yun, party of six,” the hostess called out, and a server approached and led them to a table in the sunny front corner of the restaurant.
Emily hung back with Griffin for a few moments, talking to him about something.
Once they’d all been seated and had ordered their drinks, Rose told them about the fake arrival of a famous person that had allowed them to slip into the kitchen and up the stairs.
Griffin said to Henry, “That was a clever diversion. Like Hannibal with his cattle.”
Rose immediately thought of a certain fictional cannibal, but Henry said, “Yes. I was thinking of the Second Punic War.”
At least Griffin and Henry were bonding over something, even if it was battle strategy.
As the server returned with tea for Griffin, coffee for everyone else, and a complimentary donut hole, each with an orange slice, for men and women alike, she and Henry told everyone else the rest of the story.
They all seemed impressed by the way the moonstone had led Rose to the astrolabe.
Jason asked, “When are you going to try to use it to send Henry back? Is there a certain day or moon phase you think would work best?”
“Oh, yeah.” Rose ducked her head. “We, uh, tried it last night.”
He nodded. “So it didn’t work the first time. Well—”
“It worked,” Henry said. The others turned to stare at him.
“But not perfectly,” Rose added.
She described their experience on the Chicago-less Illinois plain, and then how it had seemed to go on the fritz, depositing them briefly in the middle of the twentieth century. “Jesus Christ,” Ryan muttered at one point.
“I didn’t even do anything to get back,” Rose emphasized. “It was more like the spell didn’t last for long.”
“I’m just glad you got back okay!” Emily said to Rose. She looked around the table. “This is crazy!”
“Yeah, it is,” Jason said, his eyes bright.
Ryan shook his head. “If you were on a plain and didn’t see anyone, you don’t know exactly what year it was. For all you know, you could’ve been several hundred years earlier.”