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Chapter 1
9-19-1919 Manitou Springs, Colorado
“Happy birthday, Jack.”
Jack held Jewel’s hands as they stood on the porch of Barker House where he’d gotten her a room. He still couldn’t believe it was real—that she was real. After dreaming about her for ten years, it didn’t seem possible that he was looking into her dark eyes and holding her slender fingers with his own.
The last time he had seen her, she was in a rather baggy medical outfit called “scrubs,” and he had still been entranced. She’d shown up today in a midnight blue dress and a red hat with the brim turned up in front, and his heart had nearly stopped at the sight of her.
Ever since he’d beheld her on his parents’ front porch, he’d wanted to kiss her. He longed to see if the real thing measured up in any way to the amazing kisses they’d shared in his dreams. But now that they were finally alone, he was feeling awkward and sweating bullets. After all, they really didn’t know each other.
Jewel had kissed him and taken care of him in another time when his sixteen-year-old self had ridden the lightning to the year 2015 in search of his sister. Therefore, she had real memories of him. His memories had only come to him in dreams of a timeline that had been erased or reset or whatever happens when someone changes it. Jackson had never been too clear on all the workings of time travel.
“Jack, if you’ve changed your mind in the last decade, I’ll understand.” She gave him a teasing smile. “But you’re stuck with me until the next storm.”
Jack blinked, realizing he was giving off wrong signals. “No, Jewel, I haven’t changed my mind. It’s just that… well… I don’t know how to begin. I feel sort of at a disadvantage; you know all about me, but I know almost nothing about you.”
She pulled free of his hands and slid hers around his neck. “Why don’t you come up to my room and get to know me?” Her sultry alto voice only made that proposition seem more wanton.
He placed his hands on her back. “It’s 1919, Jewel, and this is a small town. With you a stranger, everyone will be watching. About all I can do right now is kiss you good night.”
A corner of her mouth quirked up. “Well, at least there’s that.”
He stood nervously looking down at her until her brows rose in question; then he shook off his timidity and inclined his head to put his lips on hers. The contact nearly stole his breath, and her response made his head spin. He pulled her in closer, and his hat slipped off and hit the porch floor. He didn’t care. She was the sweetest thing he’d ever tasted, and she seemed to enjoy his explorations as well, sliding her hands into his hair and matching his intensity.
The sound of footsteps registered in the back of Jack’s brain somewhere, but it wasn’t until someone cleared his throat that Jack abruptly broke away from Jewel, blushing from his hairline to his collar when he turned to find Reverend Niemeyer and his wife, Doris, standing there.
Jack blew out a breath and ran a hand through his hair before bending to pick up his hat. “Reverend, what brings you out to Barker House so late?”
“Pie and coffee, Jack.” His eyes flicked to the woman slightly behind him. “I guess I don’t have to ask you the same question.”
Jack reached back to pull Jewel forward. He’d have to introduce her sooner or later; may as well do it now. “Reverend, Mrs. Niemeyer, this is Jewel Jamison. My… my friend.”
The gray-haired man hitched a brow. “Your… rather special friend, I should think, Jack.” He put out a hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Miss Jamison.” His gaze slipped past them. “Are you here alone?”
“Uh, yes, just had a big birthday party at the folk’s. Twenty-six today.” Jack was hoping he had distracted him from the “alone” question.
“Are you?” Doris asked with a smile that didn’t seem to light her eyes. “Time certainly does fly. I remember clearly the day your folks first brought you to church as a chubby-cheeked baby. Don’t you, Robert?”
He nodded. “I do. I also remember the day he was baptized and made his confession of faith.” A weak smile graced his lips. “One could get the idea… what with you and the young lady unchaperoned–”
Jewel stepped forward, extending her hand to the reverend. “It’s nice to meet you, sir.” She shook his hand and then his wife’s. “Mrs. Niemeyer, it’s a pleasure.”
“Where has Jack been hiding you, Jewel?” Doris asked, unable to conceal her assessing scrutiny. “Secrets are hard to keep in a town this small.”
“I imagine they are,” Jewel agreed without offering any other explanation. Then she abruptly leaned toward the woman. “I don’t suppose you have any cigarettes in your purse. I’m dying for a smoke.”
Jack chirped in surprise right along with Doris and took hold of Jewel’s elbow. “Well, don’t let us keep you two any longer. They might be running out of pie this time of night.” He tipped his hat and moved Jewel down the stairs.
“Where are we going?”
“If you want cigarettes, I can probably bum a few off of one of the guys at the pool hall. No store is open right now to buy any.”
They walked in silence for half a block before Jewel spoke. “You know I was trying to get her to leave, don’t you?”
He stopped. “So you don’t want a smoke?”
She crossed her arms. “Well, yeah, but I knew she wouldn’t have any.”
“So you were deliberately trying to… shock her?”
Jewel smirked. “Sorry, I don’t have much use for religion.”
Jack started walking again, guiding her across the cobblestone street after a Model T drove slowly past. “I see.”
“Does that disappoint you?”
Jack thought a moment. “I’m not sure. I’ve never considered it before.”
They walked on while Jack pondered Jewel’s declaration. He’d spent his whole life going to the Congregational Church in Manitou. Can I just stop now? Do I want to?
Jewel interrupted his thoughts. “So I’m your… ‘friend.’ ”
Her tone had him snapping his head to look at her. “You know you’re more to me than that. I just didn’t want to have to explain how much more to the reverend.”
“Well,” she said, slipping her hand in his, “why don’t you explain it to me.”
Jack slowed his steps, not knowing how to put it into words. He couldn’t say she was his obsession and had been so for ten years. He might scare her off. “We’ve spooned together, Jewel,” he said teasingly. “That has to be more than friends.”
Jewel laughed. “I suppose, although you could have been just using me for warmth. You were skinny as a fence post, and we were on a damned chilly mountaintop.”
He flashed her a crooked smile. “You heated me up, all right. A teenage fantasy come to life.”
She ran her free hand up his forearm. “I’m glad to see that you have… filled out.”
The way she said it had his heart beating faster. “And I’m glad to see that you haven’t changed a bit.”
They walked on, their footsteps loud in the dark quiet of Jack’s sleepy mountain town. “My mother thinks you must have known something about me before you met me in 2015. Is that right?” They stopped in front of the pool hall doors, and he gave her another lop-sided smile. “Did you find me in the funny papers?”
Her smile was sly. “Something like that.”
He could tell that was all he was going to get out of her at the moment, so he pushed the door open and ushered her in.
The smoke-filled room told him he’d have no problem finding her some cigarettes, even though the thought brought a certain amount of guilt. His brother-in-law had made very clear over the last decade, the dangers of smoking.
The hazy atmosphere stung his eyes, but Jewel seemed to be breathing it in with relish. “Are you sure you don’t want to quit, Jewel? Jeff says–”
“I know what Jeff says,” she cut him off as she walked to the rack and pulled off two pool cues. “While we’re here, we may as well play a game.”
Jack was well aware of all the eyes looking her way. Male eyes that shown with appreciation. Jack moved possessively to take the cue she held out to him. “Sure, why not.” This is how relationships start, right? Doing ordinary things together?
After he set up the balls, he broke, then looked up to see that, somehow, Jewel had already bummed a smoke and was getting a light. Of course, there’s nothing ordinary about Jewel.
***
Jewel woke with a hacking cough that racked her small frame. Stumbling out of bed, she coughed her way to the dresser in a silky beige teddy where a pitcher of water was sitting next to an empty glass. She shook with the spasms in her chest and very nearly got more water on the hardwood floor than in the glass. Tipping it up, she drank, trying to calm the tickle, knowing that it wouldn’t really help until she had coughed up what was stuck in her lungs.
She started toward the door but caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and thought better of it. She wasn’t in Victorian times, but it wasn’t quite the roaring, anything goes, twenties yet either.
Picking up a folded coverlet off the end of the bed, she shook it out and wrapped it around her for her sojourn down the hall to the communal bathroom. She didn’t own a robe yet, and she only had the one dress.
Still coughing now and then, she turned a corner in the hall and was dismayed to find a line forming outside the bathroom. Damned 1919. Turning back, she headed down the stairs, past the parlor and out the front door. Walking to the side porch railing, she coughed deeply. Finally able to breath clearly, she straightened and swept the hair back from her face. Her eye caught on a frozen figure with raised eyebrows. Jack.
“J-Jewel,” he stammered with saucer eyes. “What are you—”
“Sorry, Jack,” she said in her slow, lazy speaking style, “I could have died waiting for the bathroom to open up.”
Jack blinked and made his way speedily up the porch steps. “Okay, well, why don’t you go back in and get dressed. I’ll wait here for you.”
“Don’t you have to work?”
“Not on Saturdays.” He was tugging her blanket up over her shoulders.
“I have to work, Jack.”
“What? Where?”
She was amused at his almost constant state of surprise. “Millie’s Dress Boutique. You didn’t think I just found that outfit I was wearing yesterday by the side of the road, did you? I have to work to pay it off.”
A couple was approaching on the sidewalk, and Jack began pushing her toward the door. “I’ll take care of it. Just… just get inside.”
She smiled over her shoulder as he turned the doorknob and practically shoved her through the doorway. “Thanks, Jack.” He was adorable when he was flustered.
She headed back up the narrow stairs, hoping the bathroom was now free, wondering what had possessed her to try out this time period. She smiled. It wasn’t a what, Jewel, and you know it. It was a who.
She had become consumed with a man in the history books—the brother of her half-sister—a man who had saved thousands of lives, even though he had no idea he would do that yet. He had captured her thoughts long before she ever met him as a half-starved teenager just a few days ago in 2015.
She hitched up her blanket as she took her place in the slightly shorter bathroom line. Remember, we won’t be here forever. Jack has work to do.
Jack watched her make her way back up the stairs, her hips swinging under the quilt she was wrapped in. He shook his head and went back out to sit on the porch.
Taking off his hat, he held it between his knees, feeling jumpy. If he couldn’t rein Jewel in a bit, they would be the talk of the town.
As a younger man, he had been completely captivated by the stories Jeff, Nellie, Cory, and Ashley had told him about their time together in the 21st century—filling in the details that his dreams lacked. Jewel was the amazing, beautiful heroine who had led them out of disaster, and somehow her smoking had seemed a side point, with her bold nature and unpredictability a plus, not an eyebrow-raising embarrassment.
Have I just gotten stodgy?
Their kisses of the night before came back to him, and “stodgy” was not what he was feeling. The second round of good night kisses–without interruption by the reverend and his wife–were even better than the first. He shifted on the hard bench. She just needs time to adjust to a new time period, that’s all. And I’ll keep working on the smoking.
She appeared momentarily, wearing the same outfit she’d had on the day before, and after he’d paid off her debt at the boutique and bought her several more dresses, underthings, and toiletries, being the talk of the town was a sealed deal. And with every eye turned their way as they entered the diner for breakfast, he realized that they were already fodder for the grapevine. He supposed he had Mrs. Niemeyer to thank for that. At least he hoped that the good reverend wasn’t responsible for their Barker House porch kiss being blabbed all over town.
Jack walked Jewel to a table at the side of the room, feeling heat rise in his face, and pulled out her chair. After she sat, Jack leaned to her ear. “No need to shock anyone this morning. Your lacy knickers put on my tab will be shock enough for a long while.”
Jewel was shooting him a perturbed look by the time he sat across the table. She leaned toward him. “I think maybe you were more fun at sixteen than you are now, Jack. When did you get so dull? I don’t think the man you are now would have spooned with me wrapped in a blanket on a mountain.”
Jack plucked a menu from the rack next to the wall. “I would if the whole town wasn’t watching.”
Jewel nabbed a menu of her own. “I’m not so sure.”
Jack was suddenly grumpy. He stared at the words in front of him, not seeing them at all. “Well I’m not sixteen anymore,” he muttered.
“I’m older than you are, Jack,” Jewel threw back in an uncharacteristic staccato.
He looked up at her gaze fixed on the menu, her lips a tight line, and blew out a breath. “I’m sorry, Jewel. I’m just a bit edgy with all this attention.” He ran a finger over her hand clutching the diner’s offerings. “Forgive me?”
“Nope,” she shot back.
Jack snapped straight in his chair. “What?”
Jewel looked at him over her menu. “Prove to me you haven’t become an old man at twenty-six.”
“How?”
“When you were sixteen, you were going to show me your lightning mark, but Nellie stopped you. Show me now.”
“Here? Now? In the diner?” Jack couldn’t believe what she was asking, but she merely nodded.
“I’ll be arrested, Jewel.” He shook his head and went back to perusing the breakfast choices. “I’ll show you later. In private.”
Jewel wasn’t happy with that answer but resolved to let it go. She looked around at the crowd who were still watching them without pretense and supposed he was right. She looked to Jack’s worried brow and decided she needed to cut him some slack. “All right, but I’ll hold you to that.”
They chitchatted through their meal, and Jack caught her up on what had transpired in the last ten years. It was mostly about family and his work at the auto shop, although he told her some of the national and world happenings, as well.
There was something glaringly missing from his narrative. “How did you avoid the war, Jack? You would have been of an age to be drafted.” She speared a bite of sausage with her fork and lifted it to her mouth.
Jack blinked in bewilderment. “What war?”
Jewel paused a moment in chewing. That was not the response she had been expecting. She swallowed and leaned over her plate, lowering her voice. “The world war that started in 1914 with the Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination and ended in 1918, although America didn’t jump in until 1917.”
Jack still looked baffled. “There was no ‘world war,’ Jewel. No army draft. We are a bit out of touch at times in our little town, but I think I’d know about that.”
Jewel laid down her fork, contemplating the implications. I may not be able to stay as long as I thought.
Praise for JIVE:
“This was a dynamite finale to a great series!!! Jodi Bowersox just jumped to the top five of my favorite authors!! I love indie writers! They give a bang-up story without crippling the pocketbook.”
318 pages
$17 (shipping included)
OR buy it on Amazon in paperback or digital