Out of Time (Lovers in Time Series, Book 1): Time Travel Romance Page 6

  "Kelly? Are you—"

  She opened the door and gasped. He was glowing from head to toe, as though a thousand light bulbs had been turned on beneath his flesh. A white-gold aura extended about six inches beyond his body. It was such an incredible sight, she almost didn't notice he was naked.

  Standing in the metal tub with his arms stretched out, he was clearly too frightened to care about his nudity. "Do you s-see what I s-see?" he asked.

  She swallowed hard and kept her gaze on his face. "That depends on whether or not you see a man who could star in his own science fiction movie. Boy, we sure could have used you the night the lights went out in Georgia."

  "This is not funny!" he snapped but, his mouth slowly curved into a grin. "Well, maybe it's a little funny."

  "Do you feel all right?"

  He checked his body. "I feel fine. In fact, I feel terrific, except that my heart's pounding a little hard but that could be because I just had the hell scared out of me. I guess it has something to do with adding copper and water to an electric current. But I wasn't sure what would happen if I got out."

  "Well, you obviously can't stand there for eternity." She pulled the bath towel off the rack and tossed it to him. "Get out and dry yourself. You're probably right about the water and the tub. I'll be right back." A few seconds later she returned with her rubber flip-flops. "I have no idea whether these will make any difference. They'll be a little small but they don't conduct electricity. Step into them then follow me outside." She grabbed a fireplace poker on her way out.

  When he joined her outside, the glow was still evident in spite of the late afternoon sun. She was somewhat relieved to see that he had made use of the towel but the parts of his body that weren't covered were still mouthwatering. Although it was common for men to shave their chests, Kelly had always found a little hair across nicely developed pecs to be very sexy.

  Darren's suggestion that she needed to have a fling came back to her and she realized he may have been right. If she could be turned-on by a man who claimed to be a time traveler and was charged with enough electricity to glow in the dark, she had clearly gone too long between tune-ups.

  "Unless you have a death wish, you'd better not touch me with that thing."

  His warning broke into her thoughts. She had been stroking the poker without realizing it. "Oh. I know that. I was thinking that maybe this could help drain the charge off you. You know, like how the guide wire on a house directs lightning into the ground." She placed the poker on the ground and moved away. "It's worth a try."

  Jack shrugged, picked up the poker by one end and stuck the other end into the dirt. Instantly, his body stiffened and a visible stream of electricity shot down the iron staff. A few seconds later, Jack collapsed to his knees.

  Kelly rushed forward and touched him before she thought of the consequences. "Are you—Ouch!" she cried and jerked her hand back.

  "Are you okay?" they asked simultaneously then laughed despite the seriousness of her mistake.

  "I'm fine," she said quickly. "It was only a spark. I guess that means my lightning rod idea worked."

  He took a deep breath then used the poker to help himself stand. "I feel like... more was drained out of me than... an excess charge of power. I feel... weak."

  She thought he looked terribly pale. "Drop the poker, Jack. Maybe that was a bad idea after all. Maybe the electrical charge is what's keeping you going."

  He gave her a lopsided smile. "Does your imagination ever turn off?"

  She shrugged. "I don't think so. That's probably why I write fiction—to get rid of the overflow. You were a reporter. Didn't you always have questions or theories or something like that going on inside your head?"

  "Yeah. I did." He took another deep breath and some of his natural color returned.

  "The charge is building back up on its own, isn't it?"

  He nodded slowly. "I think so. I feel better."

  "Good. Then we can finally get to work."

  Although Kelly had seen every masculine inch of his lean body, Jack went back inside the bathroom to get dressed. That was a shame. She wouldn't mind—

  Good grief. Her mind had gone down Horny Road again. Never in her life had she been so preoccupied with sex. Perhaps she needed to have her hormone levels checked.

  When he came back out, she noted that he had tried to comb back his damp hair but it was already falling around his face again.

  "You look very nice," she said, admiring the fit of the clothes she'd chosen. He was really quite a handsome man.

  "You have red hair," he said, as though she didn't already know that.

  While he was dressing, she had taken off the cap and brushed her hair out only because the bobby pins were irritating her scalp. She hadn't been thinking of making herself more attractive for him but his reaction was very flattering. "When I spend time in the sun, it turns more blond than red but I haven't been out much this summer."

  She turned her head to watch him as he walked around behind her, clearly entranced.

  "It's so long," he murmured as his fingers extended to touch the pink-gold strands. There was a loud crackle of static electricity and a whole handful of her hair lifted into his hand. He quickly jumped away. "Did I hurt you?"

  She shook her head. "Not at all. It just felt weird." When he kept staring at her hair, she spoke to him more sternly. "Sit down. I have a whole list of questions."

  He straddled the chair on the other side of the table but he still seemed distracted by her appearance. Men and their one-track minds. Considering the lusty route her mind kept taking, she decided it was best to get him on another track as quickly as possible.

  "Tell me about your relationship with Ginger O'Neill."

  Chapter 4

  "You're different from most women."

  Kelly clucked her tongue. "My hair is this color because I inherited it from my father. It's long because it goes with my public image. It has nothing to do with—"

  "I wasn't talking about your hair. I was talking about your reactions. You see a strange man in your home, you calmly pull a gun on him. That man says he's traveled through time and you accept that, albeit after some reasonable disbelief. He turns on like a light bulb and you think of a way to normalize him. Most women I know would have flipped out, screamed their heads off or started crying."

  She laughed. "I'm sure you're right. I'm not like most women you would have known. But most of the women I know today don't have the luxury of acting like twits in emergencies. They've learned to think on their feet, respond intuitively and use the brains God gave them."

  "Well, amen to that." He scratched his lower back on one side then the other.

  She thought he looked and sounded like he really meant that. Lucky for him. "Now quit stalling. Tell me about Ginger O'Neill."

  "Swear to me you aren't planning on using any real names."

  "I swear. I only write fiction." Kelly could almost see him arranging his thoughts before speaking aloud. She'd have to remember this man interviewed people for a living. With her pen poised over a pad of lined paper, she waited for him to open up to her.

  "I didn't know she was married."

  She arched one eyebrow questioningly and he hurried to explain.

  "She wasn't wearing a ring when I met her and she never told me she had a husband until the day she broke it off with me."

  From the strange dream, Kelly had already known Ginger was keeping a secret from him. Another coincidence?

  He took a deep breath. "Let me start at the beginning. It'll make more sense that way. I moved to Atlanta from Detroit in October of '64. I was doing well with the Daily News but I was tired of the winters so I applied for staff positions in milder climates. I got a few offers but the Journal's location appealed the most. Besides the weather, Atlanta was in the eye of a political hurricane."

  "What do you mean?"

  He looked surprised. "The march on Washington in '63. The Civil Rights Act. Racial equality. Don't tell me it
was all for nothing."

  "Oh no. Tremendous progress was made. In fact, in some areas like employment and housing, minorities—and that includes women now—occasionally have an advantage over Caucasian males. Unfortunately, you can't legislate people's attitudes."

  Though she was anxious to move on with her questions, she accepted the fact she would have to explain a few things as they went. "I'm a transplanted Georgian also. I moved to Atlanta from Scranton, Pennsylvania when my husband—my ex-husband that is—was transferred. I had occasionally encountered prejudice up north but in parts of Georgia it seems more, I don't know, out in the open. I have to admit, though, I'm not that knowledgeable about the sixties. I was only born in 1982."

  "Hmmm. What about the space program? That was one of the other major issues in the national news. Did we ever put a man on the moon? Which reminds me, you drive a very cool car but we thought everyone would be flying around in personal little spaceships by now."

  She laughed. "Still using roads and gasoline, I'm afraid. A man walked on the moon in 1969. But a lot of other issues like war and environmental pollution pushed space travel out of a priority position a long time ago."

  "Wars? You mean with Russia? Since we're sitting here, can I assume they never launched a nuclear war?"

  "Actually—Hey, wait a minute. Who's being interviewed here anyway?"

  He grinned at her. "Sorry. I didn't do that on purpose. It's just that I suddenly realized how much I have to catch up on."

  "And I have something here to help you do that." She pointed at her laptop computer. "One of the wonders of my time, the personal computer. If I'm not mistaken, in the sixties, a computer system was about the size of this cabin, made a lot of noise and took forever to spit out coded information. When I realized how sporadic the signal was here, I uploaded a basic encyclopedia program on it. It's good enough for the kinds of questions you have. I usually just start with Wikipedia for my simple research but—shoot, now I'm doing it. I promise to explain the internet and show you how to use the computer to fill in the blanks... later."

  She noticed the way he kept repositioning himself on the chair and making a face as though he couldn't quite get comfortable. "Are you all right?"

  "Yeah but I don't think I got all the soap off when I rinsed. Go ahead."

  "No, you go ahead. I want to hear your story now."

  His pout made it clear he was more interested in the questions bouncing around his head but he agreed to answer hers first. "Okay. So, I moved to Atlanta and got into hot water by New Year's. I covered some local stories that obviously had racism at their core. That was when I was approached by FBI Special Agent, What's-his-name. All I did was write a few editorials about the new civil rights laws that were being ignored. You would have thought I was the one breaking the law."

  He paused and closed his eyes for several seconds before continuing. "At first, there were subtle hints for me to back off, notes, anonymous threatening phone calls, that sort of thing. Nothing I hadn't dealt with before. But after I wrote a piece offering proof that several confirmed Ku Klux Klan members were behind one of the cases of violence, they got serious." He stopped and scratched at several spots on his back before continuing.

  "One night, on the way between my car and my apartment, I was bashed on the head, blindfolded, bound and taken for a long ride in the back of a pickup truck. When the blindfold came off, I was in a clearing in the woods—looked kinda like this area actually—surrounded by four guys wearing white pointed hoods. There was an enormous wooden cross burning in front of me. One did all the talking. He warned me to 'stop writin' all that Yankee shit or the next cross they burned would have me tied to it'." The quote was delivered with an appropriate accent.

  "Sounds like the Klan to me," Kelly stated in a matter-of-fact tone.

  He nodded. "They played kickball with me for a while... you can guess who got to play the part of the ball. One really huge guy did most of the damage... like he really enjoyed his work. Then they left me to find my way back to Atlanta on my own, which took the rest of the night."

  "Did you report the incident to the police?"

  "The emergency room doctor, who stitched up the cuts on my head and taped my cracked ribs, strongly suggested I mind my own business."

  "Did you think of calling the FBI agent?"

  He snorted. "Yeah, for about a heartbeat, but I didn't have a clue as to who the hooded guys were and the agent had been very clear that he couldn't get involved unless I had some solid evidence to share. And then there was that being-burned-on-a-cross thing to consider.

  "When I told my editor about it, his solution was to give me an assignment that had absolutely no racial aspects to it. There had been several rapes of white housewives, allegedly committed by a white man, around Lake Sidney Lanier. Besides keeping me out of trouble with the Klan, it was also right up my alley. I cut my teeth on crime reporting, even helped the Detroit police solve a case or two."

  She noted the pride in his voice. "But instead of helping to find the rapist, you were eventually accused of being him."

  "Right. And my traveling in and out of the area on that assignment was part of the prosecutor's case against me. But we're jumping ahead. First came the assignment. Then I met Ginger. It was the second time I was up here, trying to get interviews with the victims, without much success. I was driving through Charming and stopped at the drugstore for a soda. Ginger was working there. At first I thought she was just a high school kid but once we started talking, she said she was twenty-one. It was a good thing too because the sparks started flying the minute I—" He cut himself off with a somewhat sheepish look.

  "Don't censor your story on my account. I assure you, there's not much you could say that would shock me. In fact, the kind of things I write might shock you. Just tell me what happened, without trying to decide what I should and shouldn't hear."

  He looked skeptical but got back to his story. "Anyway, we hit it off immediately and she ended up calling two of the victims and convincing them to talk to me. But when I invited her to dinner that night, she turned me down, saying it was not possible for her to be seen with me socially. She claimed she still lived with her mother, who would be horrified if she found out Ginger had helped some damn Yankee with his liberal writin' and going out on a date with me would probably give her a stroke. However, she took my card and promised to call me the next time she was in Atlanta. I swear, at no time did she mention a husband."

  "Would it have mattered?" Kelly asked.

  "Yes, dammit. It would have mattered. Not only had I never messed around with a married woman, in this case, it would have kept me out of jail."

  "Maybe. Maybe not. Could she have been part of your frame-up?"

  His eyes opened wide in surprise. "What? How could you think that? She ended up dead."

  Kelly shrugged. "Maybe she was set up also. I realize I haven't heard it all yet but I'm already thinking the Klan may have been behind your conviction. If you riled them that much, they may have gone to extremes to shut you up."

  "Not that extreme. She once told me her father and brother were members of the local chapter. They wouldn't kill one of their own to set me up, especially not in such a brutal manner."

  "Okay, we'll put that theory down on the bottom of the list. Back to your relationship with Ginger."

  "Let's see. I gave her my card but didn't actually expect her to call and I didn't have any reason to go back to Charming." He stopped and shook his head. "Wow, I just realized how different my life would have turned out if I just hadn't given her my card that day. But I had and a couple weeks later, I heard from her. She told me she'd been visiting a friend in Atlanta and had a few hours before she had to get home... to her mother.

  "Things got serious between us pretty quickly after that. Because of her situation at home, we could only talk on the phone occasionally, like when she was at her girlfriend Mary Beth's house. We barely got together once a week, sometimes at my apartment, sometimes at a mote
l in-between. Never anywhere that someone from Charming might see us. But, oh boy, when we did—I don't know if it was a case of 'absence makes the heart grow fonder' but, for the first time in my life, I was thinking about settling down with one woman."

  Kelly arched an eyebrow at him. "Are you saying you'd never been in love?"

  Jack frowned, giving that some thought. "When I look back on it, I don't think I was in love with Ginger. Lust, yes. But love... I don't think I've got what it takes to fall in love."

  That was too important of a comment to get into at the moment so Kelly just let it pass. "And then?"

  "Then, out of the blue, on the Fourth of July, it was over. She came to me with her eyes all bloodshot, like she'd been crying for a long time. Said it was just hay fever."

  Kelly remained quiet as he sifted through his memories. The events he spoke of may have occurred over fifty years ago for her but for him, the hurt was still fresh.

  "That night she admitted everything. The drugstore where I met her wasn't her father's. It was her husband's. She had gotten married to Reid O'Neill right out of high school. Her father introduced them. Apparently everyone, especially her father, believed it was a very good match for her despite the seventeen- year difference in their ages. Mind you, it turned out that I was eleven years older than her also but I had no idea she was only eighteen when we met. She lied about that too."

  He stopped to scratch an itch on his leg, fidgeted a little more then continued. "She told me she had only called me the first time because she'd had a fight with him and wanted to pay him back in the worst way possible. But then she supposedly fell in love with me and couldn't stay away. Apparently her conscience finally got the better of her and she was breaking it off with me. I felt like there was something she wasn't telling me but she insisted that she'd just woken up that morning and realized what a mistake she'd made cheating on her husband. Before she left, she made me promise that under no circumstances was I to try to see her again."