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  “Ah,” Adam said, seeming to be at a loss for anything else to say. “Shall we go?” he said to Jack as he stood up.

  “Ready when you are,” Jack answered, standing up, also.

  Darci put down her glass and stood, too. “I can’t possibly wear this. I’d trip on the skirts.” She smiled at Adam. “In my time, women wear trousers.”

  “Tight ones,” Jack said, grinning. “Real tight.”

  Adam didn’t smile. He looked Darci up and down. “You cannot possibly go with us,” he said. “Jack and I will find the statue and bring it back here.”

  Adam seemed to assume that his decree was final, so he turned toward the stairs.

  “Mr. Drayton?” Darci asked. “How many times have you been in the tunnels?”

  He looked back at her. “Never.” He knew about what she was hinting and smiled. “However, I do know the combination to the safe. I gave the safe to Fonty so we’ll be able to open it when we find it.”

  “Great,” Darci said as she sat back down in the chair. “You don’t need to sneak into the tunnels and you don’t need a guide through them. I can stay here by the fire and sleep. However, I’m curious about your plan. Since we’re on a deadline and you don’t want to waste time getting lost in that maze, maybe you’ll go to your friend and tell him you need the little statue. What does it matter that he believes it has given him all his good fortune? Will you tell him you want to destroy it to get the key inside? Maybe you should tell him the truth, that you need the key so your new friends can go back to the twenty-first century. Oh well, I’m sure that you and Fonty are such good friends that he’ll believe you and will happily hand over the statue to you. For old times’ sake, of course.”

  Adam turned to Jack. “Do all the women of your time talk like this?”

  “She’s one of the nice ones,” Jack said. “I had a girlfriend who turned a gun on me when I told her I was going somewhere without her. Of course, she was an FBI agent and outranked me and we were on assignment, but still…” He shrugged.

  “What did you do?” Adam asked.

  “Tied her to a chair and put tape across her mouth. She wouldn’t go out with me again after that, though.”

  “Interesting,” Adam said as he looked at Darci in speculation.

  “Don’t even think it.” She smiled sweetly at Adam. “You want me to try to come back, don’t you? If you leave me here tonight I promise that I won’t even try.”

  Adam looked at Jack. “I don’t envy you your time. Tell me where we went wrong that this has happened to women.”

  “Don’t give them the vote, don’t let them drive and, above all else, don’t let them read romance novels. They start comparing you to some guy in a book. And, trust me on this, you’ll never live up to the standards of Hawk and Ethan.”

  “Could you two stop with the male bonding and get me some pants to wear?” Darci said as she headed for the stairs. “If I’m going to be your guide, I need something besides fifty pounds of skirt swirling around my legs.”

  While Adam was shaking his head in disbelief, Jack said, “You wouldn’t happen to have any firearms around here, would you? This isn’t the time of the blunderbuss, is it?”

  “It seems that what you have found in machines you have lost in civility,” Adam said.

  Darci paused on the stairs. “Maybe we should have a talk about child labor in Victorian times,” she said.

  “You have nothing in your time that needs social reform?” Adam asked on the stairs behind her.

  “While she gets dressed, let me tell you about terrorism,” Jack said. “I think we males need to stick together.”

  Darci tried to smile, tried to tell herself that now was different from the last time she’d been in the Camwell tunnels. Now there was no woman with powers that she’d gathered from acts too heinous to think about. Now all that was there were men armed to the teeth with guns.

  But the worst thing was that, this time, Darci would be going into the tunnels with no powers of her own. There’d be no more laughing and teasing as she’d done at the candy machines. She’d felt safe then because she’d known that no one was near them. This time she’d just have her eyes and ears, and her memory of what was where.

  As Adam led them to the stairs to the attic, where he said they’d find trunks full of clothes, she offered up a prayer for protection.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “THIS IS THE MOST RIDICULOUS SITUATION I HAVE ever encountered,” Adam was muttering under his breath as he expertly handled the horses of the buggy. It was full night, with only a quarter moon, but both he and the horses knew the way to Camwell.

  What he was complaining about was the fact that Lavender was in the backseat with Jack. She’d sobered considerably since dinner, but Adam was angry because she had on a costume that they’d found in a trunk in the attic. Jack had called it a “belly dancing costume,” and he and Darci had come up with the idea of putting Lavender in it and using her as a diversion for the armed guards. Her lower face would be veiled to protect her identity. However, her extraordinary purple eyes would still show.

  Adam had been horrified at the whole idea. There was little fabric in the costume and Lavey’s midsection was bare. “She cannot possibly wear that,” Adam said. “Her father would call me out. If I allowed this, any judge would order me hanged. Lavender Shay is a young woman of sterling repute.”

  “Until this afternoon,” Lavender said, sleepy-eyed, still a bit tipsy, and grinning wickedly at Jack. She took the flimsy costume out of Adam’s hands and declared that she’d like nothing better than to wear it. “And dance,” she said.

  The men had left the women alone in the attic for about thirty minutes while they dressed—or, in Lavender’s case, undressed.

  But Lavender had nearly chickened out. “I can’t do this,” she said, her hand over her bare belly. “I can’t possibly…”

  “You can’t fool me,” Darci said. “You love it! Good grief, but you look like a Victoria’s Secret model.”

  “Do you mean Queen Victoria?”

  “More or less. Queen of men’s hearts, in this case. Lavey, you look great. Wearing those corsets all these years has given you abs modern women would kill for. Have you ever seen a belly dancer?”

  Lavender blinked at Darci as though to say, You’re kidding, aren’t you?

  At Darci’s gym, she’d once taken a few classes of belly dancing, so she showed Lavender a couple of moves. Within seconds, Lavender picked it up as though she’d been dancing for years. “This has to be a past life thing,” Darci said, and again vowed that if she ever got her powers back, she was going to start looking into the past more.

  Darci wrapped a long cape that looked like molting seal skin around Lavender’s shoulders and they both went downstairs. In the library in front of the men, Lavender started to giggle. She thought Darci was more odd-looking than she was because Darci was dressed as a boy. She had on plaid wool trousers that reached to her knees, tall socks that disappeared under the trousers, and heavy shoes. On top she wore a white shirt with stiff collar and cuffs, and a pair of navy blue suspenders. She’d happily removed the artificial bun from the back of her head, combed out her hated ringlets, and tucked her hair up under a big newsboy cap. She felt the best she had since she’d arrived.

  “Not a bad little tush there,” Jack said when he saw Darci, making Adam frown in a way that reminded her completely of her husband.

  Not to be outdone, Lavender dropped the heavy cloak to the floor and stood before them in an outfit that was conservative to Jack and Darci’s modern eyes, but Adam was shocked. Women of good repute did not wear flimsy garments that showed their bare middles.

  “Shall I dance for you?” Lavender asked, her eyes lowered halfway.

  “Yes!” Jack said.

  “No!” Adam said as he picked up the cape and put it back around Lavender’s shoulders.

  Ten minutes later, they were all in the buggy and riding toward Camwell.

  “I d