Daring Time

"Indeed," Hope replied as she gently nudged Sadie toward the exit where Evan would be waiting with the carriage.

"There's just one thing, miss." Hope blinked in surprise when the young woman's cheeky grin revealed a gleaming gold tooth. "I'll be needing to use the facilities after that long trip, if you don't mind."

"Of course, I should have asked. Right this way, Miss Holcrum," Hope said as she nodded in the direction of the ladies' lounge.

She got a measure of satisfaction when she saw Marvin slink back into the main waiting room notably with no young woman on his arm. A shiver of apprehension went through her when he gave first Sadie and then Hope a narrow, assessing look before Hope lost sight of him in the crowd.

NINE

Ryan's heart still hammered like a locomotive going full steam inside his chest as he stared at his laptop computer. He tried to take a slow, steadying breath and forced his attention on the black-and-white photo of men in the stands at Marshall Field watching a University of Chicago football game in the year 1905. None of his jackets would pass as suitable, but his long, black overcoat would work along with a white shirt and black tie.

Apparently it was time for him to fully enter Hope's world. He knew that because he just had.

The jarring experience had taught him that he needed to be a bit more cautious and prepared on his next attempt, although he didn't know how he could have prepared himself for that.

Five minutes ago he'd noticed that the fog on the mirror had completely cleared.

Although he couldn't see Hope or the interior of her bedroom, he found that the surface of the mirror had enough give for him to penetrate it completely.

Like a fool he'd stepped through and ended up in the middle of a clamoring city street with a team of horses bounding straight toward him. The animals' shrieks of terror and the image of them rearing in panic—the lethal, kicking hooves and the whites of their rolling eyes—would likely be emblazoned on Ryan's memory until the day he died. He'd experienced some pretty significant shocks in his life, but that had to be one of the biggest ever.

He didn't have the opportunity to be dismayed over the fact that the window of the mirror had disappeared by the time he turned in panic. He'd dived through the space where it had been and smacked into the wooden floor of the Prairie Avenue bedroom so hard that'd it'd knocked the breath clean out of him for ten seconds.

Obviously this mirror didn't work precisely in the way he'd imagined, he acknowledged when he was finally able to draw air again.

He grinned distractedly when he pulled the ivory felt, short-brimmed hat from a still unpacked box of memorabilia from his college days. It was a replica of the hat Coach Amos Alonzo Stagg used to wear. The University of Chicago Hall of Famer had long been one of Ryan's sports idols. He'd bought the hat for fifty cents at a Hyde Park garage sale while he was still in college because of its similarity to the one Coach Stagg wore in the very picture Ryan had pulled up on his computer.

He put the hat on his head and studied himself in the gilt mirror. There was no way around it. He was going to have to shave his goatee.

Fifteen minutes later, clean shaven and wearing his best facsimile of early-1900s apparel, Ryan reached into the mahogany wardrobe and extricated his SIG Sauer semiautomatic from the holster. He slid the weapon into the chest pocket of his overcoat. After showing up in the middle of the street with those horses charging straight at him, Ryan didn't know what to expect. The last thing he needed was to find himself in a situation in 1906

where he was required to remove his coat, thus revealing his holster and gun. He checked that the clip on his Spyderco Captain knife was secure before he tucked it out of sight in his boot.

He stood before the mirror and concentrated on the poignant memory of Hope last night, the mixture of anxiety and trust on her face when she'd pushed her robe off her shoulders and gifted him with the sight of her naked beauty.

Gifted him with all her. Period.

Ryan didn't understand what had happened there at the end of their lovemaking, couldn't comprehend why she'd tried to escape his hold. He only knew it was the image of her giving herself so trustingly to him that he needed to cling to if he ever hoped to reach her.

If he ever hoped to save her.

He took a deep breath and stepped into the gilt mirror.

And found himself staring at a long bar in a dark, dingy room. Each empty wooden bar stool had a none-too-clean-looking brass spittoon directly beside it. A man with flaming red hair behind the bar's polished glasses. He glanced up and met Ryan's reflection in the dirty mirror behind the bar.

"Mother p'—" The bartender spun around. "How'd ya get there all of a sudden?"

Ryan took in the man's thick mustache and hair that had been slicked back with so much oil that it dripped onto his dirty white collar. His accent seemed strange and yet familiar at once; some exotic mixture of Irish and south-side Chicago.

Ryan's tongue had seemingly become glued to the roof of his mouth. Reality slammed into his brain with the effect of a baseball bat whacking his skull.

Holy shit. He re

ally was in the early twentieth century. If Alistair could only see this.

At first the man seemed angry at Ryan's muteness.

"The Sweet Lash ain't open yet fer business, mister, so scram." An idea seemed to occur to the bartender whose forearms reminded Ryan of Popeye. "Hang on! I know who ya are. Shoulda known, from the size of ya. At least Shapiro sent someone decent this time.