Chapter 4
Chapter Four
The kitchen smelled delicious, yeast and flour and heat, but it didn’t feel right.
Cade tried to make sense of what he saw. The ovens were there, or versions of them, but covered in black glass with glowing numbers. Light blazed from the ceiling without flame. A box in the corner buzzed like a hive of metal bees.
“Breathe,” Wyatt said, his hand still gripping Cade’s shoulder. “Just breathe. You’re here. You made it.”
Made it where? Cade wanted to ask, but his throat closed up. The last time he’d seen Wyatt, he’d been at the chuckwagon cooking their meal.
“Sit.” Wyatt pushed him toward a wheeled chair. “Before you fall down.”
Cade sat. The chair rolled backward, and he gripped the table edge as if it might save his life.
“A blizzard,” he said. “Captain Murray, Rhett, and Holden—”
“Tell me.” Wyatt pulled up another wheeled chair, and Cade had the absurd thought that they looked like two kids playing with furniture. “Tell me everything.”
So he did. The storm, the shimmer in the air, the way Paloma vanished from between his legs. The barn with its impossible lights and tiny horses. Tessa in her blinking sweater, holding a card.
“A Christmas card,” Cade said. “With a painting of me. Signed by—”
“Jeb Ortega.” Wyatt nodded.
Cade’s head snapped up. “Yours too?”
“Yep.” Wyatt rubbed his face, with a palm. He was clean shaven now, no longer bearded like Cade. “Eliza found a card in Maggie Foster’s effects. That’s how I got here.”
They sat in silence. Cade thought of Jeb Ortega with his wild hair and paint-stained fingers, who showed up at cattle camps and mining towns, trading portraits for meals and barn space.
“Remember when he painted that mural in the saloon?” Wyatt asked. “Took him three days, and he lived on nothing but whiskey and crackers.”
“Made that dancing girl look like an angel.” Cade could see it clear as yesterday because, for him, it nearly was. “The bartender gave him free drinks for a month.”
“He painted my horse once,” Wyatt said. “Just a quick sketch of him on paper, but it looked so real I swear Storm could’ve walked off the page.”
“Half genius, half crazy.” Cade always thought Jeb was touched in the head, the way he muttered to himself while painting, like he was having conversations with people who weren’t there. “Always scribbling in that book of his.”
“Never without it.” Wyatt’s expression went dark, and he fell silent again.
The box in the corner clicked louder. Cade tensed.
“Ice box,” Wyatt said. “Except the ice never melts. Don’t ask me how. I’ve only been here ten days, and I still don’t understand half of it.”
Cade leaned forward. “So how do we get back? The card brought us here. It has to take us home. Right?”
Wyatt’s face went dark. “You don’t want to go back. Trust me on that.”
“What do you mean? Of course I want—”
“No. You don’t. Because I tried, and it nearly killed me.”
Cade’s heart skipped a beat. “What happened?”
Wyatt stared at his hands. “Three days ago. Some company wanted to buy Eliza’s family cookie recipe.
Fifty thousand dollars. More money than I’d see in ten lifetimes.
She was considering it, and I thought...
” He swallowed hard. “I thought she didn’t need me anymore.
That I was just some displaced cowboy making her life harder. ”
“Wyatt.” Cade didn’t know what else to say.
“I went to the storeroom where I’d been keeping the card. Started talking to it, to the painted version of myself. Told it she’d be better off without me.” He gave a rueful shake of his head. “That’s when it started glowing.”
“Talking to it made it glow?”
“Not on purpose. But the moment I said she didn’t need me and really believed it, the card lit up like a forge.
Started pulling at me.” Wyatt clenched his fists.
“I tried to drop the card. Tried to let go. But my fingers locked around it like they were frozen. The pull got stronger, dragging me backward through time.”
“Dad burn.”
“I tried to fight it. Grabbed for the wall, the shelf, anything. But it was like being caught in a river current. One second I was in the storeroom, the next...” Wyatt shuddered. “I was back.”
“But that’s good. You made it back—”
“No.” Wyatt met his eyes, and Cade saw real terror there. “It was wrong. All wrong. The sun went out like God snuffed a candle. Day to night in a heartbeat. The men were there. Captain Murray, Rhett, Holden…you.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“No, because you all looked right through me, said I was a stranger, wasn’t in the ledger. My bedroll was gone. My horse acted like he didn’t know me.”
Cade couldn’t imagine Paloma not knowing him. “Maybe you went to the—”
“It was the right place. But I didn’t belong there anymore. And then...” Wyatt paused. “I started fading. My hands went transparent first. I could see the ground through my feet. Then my arms. I was being erased, Cade. Written out of existence.”
Cade’s stomach turned to lead. “How did you get back here?”
“I don’t know. One moment I was disappearing, watching my body turn to smoke, and the next I was in Eliza’s bedroom. She was holding me, crying. The card caught fire and burned to ashes.” Wyatt paused. “Eliza refused that offer for money. Somehow that choice pulled me back.”
“So we can’t go home.”
“This is home now for me. The moment I came through the portal, my old life ended. Same might be true for you. Your men have either survived that storm or they haven’t.”
“No.”
“I’m afraid so. But the good news is, you’re here now.” The relief on Wyatt’s face felt like a lifeline. “We got each other.”
Cade held out his hand, shook Wyatt’s.
“Do you still have it?” Wyatt asked. “Your card?”
Cade recalled Tessa slipping the card into her back pocket. “She has it. Tessa.”
Wyatt’s eyebrows rose. “Already? You let her take it?”
“She just did. Wasn’t thinking about it at the time.”
“Then she’s your anchor now.” Wyatt stood.
Lord help me.
The weight of it settled on Cade’s shoulders as the truth hit hard. His fate rested in the hands of a woman in a blinking red Christmas sweater.
* * *
The kitchen door swung open, and Cade walked back into the bakery looking stunned, his Stetson, the one he had taken off when they entered the building, still clutched in his hands.
What had Wyatt said to him?
His gray eyes found Tessa’s, and something passed between them, an electric awareness that took her breath away.
Wyatt followed, looking more settled but still carrying the displacement they both wore like an invisible coat. Wyatt got by with it because Eliza presented him as an old west reenactor she’d hired for a Christmas promotion, but Tessa didn’t have that luxury.
Yikes. So much to think about.
Eliza canted her head, studying the men. “So, Tessa and I were just talking. Cade needs clothes that don’t scream ‘I time-traveled here from 1878.’”
Cade clenched his jaw. “Nothing wrong with my clothes.”
“You need to blend in.” Antsy, Tessa shifted her weight. “People will start asking nosy questions.”
“Let them ask.”
“It’ll be easier for me, okay?” She sent him a pleading glance.
“Oh.” He blinked.
Eliza’s smile came across way too perky. “How about this? Tessa takes you shopping while Wyatt and I close up here? We can all meet at Zeke’s at five for dinner.”
“I don’t have the money for new clothes.” Cade frowned.
“You couldn’t use your money here anyway.” Wyatt leaned against the display case. “It’s not the same money they have now.”
“That’s settled then.” Cade plunked his Stetson on his head as if that concluded the discussion. “No money, no shopping.”
“I’m buying your clothes.” Tessa crunched numbers in her head, trying to figure out how much to pay him for working with the minis.
“I’m not taking your money.” A stubborn look came into his eyes.
“It’s not charity,” she said. “Consider it an advance on your salary. For training my horses. You’ve already done more with them in an hour than I managed in three weeks.”
He studied her for a long moment, and she tried not to fidget under his steely gaze. “Salary?”
“Yes. Salary. For the work you’re doing. For me.” Eek. Why did everything she said around him sound vaguely sexual?
The tension in the room was thick enough to spread on toast, and Tessa shoved her hands in her back pockets. Her fingers hit cardboard.
Oh shoot.
The card. She’d forgotten about the Christmas card. She tugged it out and stared at the painting of Cade astride a beautiful horse, captured mid-motion against a backdrop of winter mountains. Even in miniature, Cade appeared ready to ride straight into her life.
Eek, stop thinking like that.
“I shouldn’t have this.” She thrust it at him. Everyone was staring at her; well, at the card, well, at her holding the card.
“You found it. It’s yours.”
“No.” She shook it at him. “Take it. This is your lifeline. Your way home.”
He didn’t move. Not a twitch. Simply stood there looking like sexy, stubborn granite. “Can’t.”
“Why not?”
He shrugged and darted a glance at Wyatt. “I’m scared of it.”
“Well, I am too.” She waved the card at Cade again. “Please, take it.”
“I don’t want it.”
“It’s your only way back.”
“To what? Wyatt told me when he went back he was in no man’s land. I need you to keep it safe for me.”
Tessa notched up her chin. “You don’t understand. I’m terrible with important things. I once forgot I was pet-sitting my neighbor’s goldfish. For a week. The goldfish was fine. They’re unkillable apparently, but that’s not the point. The point is you can’t trust me with something this important.”
“I’m not trusting you. The card already did.”
“The card is wrong!” She grabbed his hand and tried to force the card into it. He pulled back as if she had handed him a live grenade, which, given what the card could do, wasn’t far off.
“Why won’t you take it?”
“Because you wished for help. The card answered. It came to you. That connection isn’t mine to claim.” Cade stepped closer, and she caught that intoxicating scent of cowboy and it scrambled her brain.
They stood there, locked in the world’s most ridiculous standoff, while Eliza and Wyatt glanced from one to the other like they had ringside seats to a boxing match.
Tessa’s chest banged. This was the kind of weight she’d spent her whole life avoiding. Something she couldn’t laugh off or pivot away from when it got hard. Snap decision.
“Wyatt.” She spun toward him. “You should hold it.”
Wyatt’s eyebrows shot up. “Wh-what?”
“You understand how this works. You’ve been through it.” She tossed the card at him. “You’re the only one who makes sense.”
Wyatt lunged for the card as if it might explode. “Tessa, I—”
“It’s perfect. Problem solved.” She stepped back, hands up, trying to ignore the way her stomach leaped into her throat. “Wyatt’s got the card. Everyone’s safe.”
The silence that followed told her passing it off to Wyatt was a mistake. She glanced at Cade. He wasn’t looking at her anymore. His attention was fixed on the window, shoulders tense, jaw tight.
“Right,” he said. “We should go, get those clothes.”
Those two words somehow managed to say you failed a test. Wyatt tucked the Christmas card featuring Cade into his shirt pocket.
Cade tracked the movement, a strange expression on his face.
Why then did Tessa feel like a shit heel? She’d done the sensible thing. Given the card to someone competent. So why did it feel like she had messed up badly?