A Little Time In Texas. Joan Johnston

glass; yet another sent water spraying up to clean off the bugs.

      “Things have certainly changed a lot,” Angel said, in perhaps the understatement of the century.

      “Lady, you don’t know the half of it. Why, we can fly across the entire country in a couple of hours.”

      Angel’s cheeks flushed with anger. “Now you’re making fun of me. We both know men can’t fly.”

      “Men can’t. Airplanes can.”

      “Airplanes?”

      “Another mechanical contraption, like a truck with wings, only it moves in the air.”

      “I don’t believe you.”

      “It’s the truth, whether you believe me or not. Stay around long enough and I’ll show you one. Hell, I’ll even take you up in one!”

      “No, thanks,” Angel said vehemently.

      “Whether you can accept it or not, there’s been a lot of progress in the past hundred and twenty-five or so years.”

      “The clothes you’re wearing are the same,” she protested.

      Dallas looked down at the chambray shirt, jeans, and boots he was wearing. “Maybe men’s fashions haven’t changed much. But women show a lot more skin than they used to. Come to think of it, that outfit you’re wearing doesn’t fit my image of what a woman in 1864 ought to have on.

      “In Gone with the Wind Scarlett O’Hara was wearing something a little more feminine than that getup, as I recall.”

      Angel wondered who Scarlett O’Hara was. She fingered the top button of the striped cotton, round-necked man’s shirt, its sleeves folded up to reveal her slender forearms. A hemp rope held up the too-large, patched wool trousers. On her feet she wore knee-high black boots. “I was traveling dressed as a man, so I wouldn’t be harassed on the road,” she explained.

      Dallas glanced at the silvery blond hair that fell practically to her waist and said, “You’re not going to fool too many men with hair like that.”

      “My hair was tucked up under a farmer’s hat. I had it off because I’d stopped for a drink of water at that pond near the cave opening. That’s when those piss-poor excuses for cowboys rode up and—” She shrugged. “You know the rest.”

      “I guess the question now is, what am I going to do with you?” Dallas murmured to himself.

      Angel bristled. “You don’t have to do anything with me. I can take care of myself.”

      Dallas drove through a gate and across a cattle guard that led onto his property. “Maybe in 1864 you could have managed by yourself—although even that’s doubtful, considering the situation I found you in. Here in 1992, you’re as naive as a newborn. You wouldn’t last ten seconds on your own.” Dallas pursed his lips in disgust. “I guess I’m stuck with you, all right.”

      “Stuck with me! Why of all the cabbage-headed, tom-doodle ideas I ever heard—”

      Dallas hit the brakes and the truck fishtailed on gravel as it skidded to a stop. He half turned in the seat and grabbed Angel by the shoulders, drawing her toward him until they were nose to nose.

      “Look, you—you nincompoop,” he flung at her, having searched for and found a word as quaint as any of hers. “I’m not any happier about this situation than you are. But let’s get one thing straight. I’m not a cabbage head, a tom-doodle or any of the other names you’ve called me since we had the misfortune to meet. In some convoluted way, I suppose I’m to blame for your predicament.”

      “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