Kiss Across Chaos (Kiss Across Time #10) - Tracy Cooper-Posey Page 0,32

front of the dark jacket to examine the shirt and vest beneath. He wore a tie and a collared shirt, but the collar was rounded and the tie was matte black, not the silky multicolored ties she was used to. “Edwardian.”

“Where are we?” She twisted to look behind her. Already, the aroma of the poor unfortunate dog was fading in her awareness. Her twisting was halted by a rigid pushing against her breasts and hips. She gasped and looked down at herself and brought her hand up to her waist.

Aran chuckled. “They still wore corsets in 1906.”

“That’s where we are?” She prodded and felt stiffness beneath the woven jacket she wore. The jacket was a plain light blue color, with a darker blue braid stitched in swirls and flourishes along the hem and up both sides of the front. The jacket was buttoned to her neck, and she could feel the soft scratch of lace under her chin. She was wearing a shirt beneath the jacket, too. Lace peeped at the edges of the jacket sleeve. The sleeve of the jacket had the same piping swirls over it as the hem, but narrower.

Jesse tried to bend to look at her feet, but her waist didn’t move and the corset dug into her hips. Bending made her conscious of the light weight on her head. She felt there, and discovered a small hat was pinned to her hair, which was piled upon the back of her head in loops and curls.

“Bend from the hips,” Aran advised her gravely, although she could hear his amusement. “Or don’t bend at all. Ladies don’t, as a rule.”

“I want to see what I’m wearing,” she muttered, and bent experimentally. It was awkward, but she caught a glimpse of a skirt that fell to nearly brush the dirt she stood upon. More flourishes decorated the skirt. Folds of the skirt fell forward as she bent, swirling around her feet. “God, there’s yards of this thing!”

“You look very nice,” Aran assured her. “Check your pockets. See if your gloves are there.”

“My…” She felt around her hips and discovered there were pockets in the skirt. She felt inside them. More lace. She withdrew the fragile looking gloves and put them on. That was when she discovered the plain gold ring on her left hand.

She stared at it, her heart thudding.

“Mmm…fortunate window dressing,” Aran murmured. “Young unmarried ladies don’t traipse around New York on their own, here and now, and I was going to pass as your husband, anyway.”

“My…” She realized dimly that she had repeated herself. “You really have to be my husband?”

Aran’s expression didn’t change. He was clean-shaved, she realized with a jolt. “It makes everything a lot easier if I am. Trust me. You’ll soon understand.” He pulled a fob watch out of his pocket, flipped the lid open and checked the time. “It is just gone nine-thirty. A good time to check their new stock, before anyone else gets there.”

“Huh?”

“You say ‘excuse me’. No one grunts here.” He held out his elbow.

“Really?” Jesse said, looking at it.

“Really,” he assured her. “It’s not a game, Jesse. This is real. Take my elbow.”

She slid her lace-covered fingers beneath his arm and followed him along the alley. They stepped out on to a New York street unlike any she’d ever seen.

Her first impression was that streets were wider in this time, but after a few steps, she realized that it was simply that the buildings were not all high-rises, here, turning the street into a canyon. She could see lots of blue sky overhead…and no smog.

The traffic along the street was louder than modern New York, but it was a completely different sort of loud. Horses with carriages and carts behind them, and horses bearing riders in their saddles trotted and cantered along the road, which was an ochre-colored dirt. Jesse itched to access a computer and research what the surface really was. It wasn’t simply gravel.

Down the middle of the street were two sets of train lines. Then she saw what travelled upon them. Trams. Street cars. They were painted a dark brown, with cream colored roofs. A tram passed by them as she watched a man run over to it, put his foot upon the rear step and swing himself up into the vehicle.

And everywhere, high overhead, there were wires. They crisscrossed the street and ran down the center of it. The center ones were used by the trams to draw power through the mechanism that