OverTime 1 - Searching (Time Travel) by Yvonne Jocks Page B

what's best for the company."
    Why is she so sure what 's best for the company won't be good for her? 
    "You can 't punish me for something Everett did!" she protests, wishing her words sounded more sure.
    "Something I allegedly did. " The shark wants the other men in the room to believe she's lying. She is not. But it no longer seems to matter, in here.
    "True," purrs one of the impeccably dressed women. "But we can't afford the publicity. We can't afford any publicity."
    The woman realizes that two men have moved to stand behind her, blocking her way to the door....
     
    I awoke with a gasp, nearly fell, and caught myself against—what? Wood! Somehow, I 'd fallen asleep on something wooden, although I did have lumpy, somewhat smelly pillows behind me. Why did I hurt so badly? Where the hell was I?
    It seemed to take me forever to recognize the driver 's seat of the chuck wagon and the bedrolls that made a nice backrest—or pillow—behind it. Part of the reason I felt disoriented was because there were no lanky horses in front of me anymore; we'd stopped, the wagon tongue angled down to the grass, far below me, and the team stood off to the right, their front feet loosely tied together and bags hanging off their funny noses. Wow—I'd slept as if drugged! The light was different too, low on the horizon, and we were no longer beside a huge herd of cows. Part of my disorientation came from that.
    But part of the reason was the certainty that I had no business on a chuck wagon, much less on a cattle drive. I had no business riding horses. I had no business kissing cowboys. This wasn't me.  Something awful....
    I grabbed onto the wooden seat beneath me, tighter than I 'd held on while riding over bumps and jolts next to the silent Schmidty, who'd made Garrison look like a reality-show host—
    — a what? The thought vanished—
    I held on until the wave of dizziness, a feeling as if I would fade into nothingness, slowly vanished. Of course I didn't belong on a cattle drive, or riding cow horses, or kissing cowboys. I was an educated lady from the East, right? Benjamin Cooper had said so.
    Inhumanly stiff from the horseback riding and saddle sores both, I clambered slowly down from the wagon seat —it was a climb—and circled to the noise coming from the back. In the distance I spotted the herd, barely a dust-producing speck behind us. We must have put on some speed.
    Supper time, I guess. Not only had Schmidty stopped the wagon, unhitched the team, and gotten them food while I snoozed, but he 'd unfolded a wooden table out from the back of the wagon, from beneath the drawers, and he'd started a fire. He was well into what must be dinner.
    "Can I help with anything?" I asked. At least if I did something, I 'd be interacting with this strange world I'd found myself in, instead of just watching it like some... some....
    Play, I thought.  But that wasn't the right word. Show?
    Schmidty picked up the largest coffee pot I 'd maybe ever seen, went to the barrel lashed to the side of the wagon, and dipped water from one to the other.
    "I could do that for you," I offered.
    He put the pot on the ground beside his fire and went back to what turned out to be a huge box full of drawers built right into the back of the wagon. A grinder of some sort was bolted onto the side, and he cranked its handle to grind coffee—delicious, rich-smelling coffee—into an empty can. It was a long process, but not as loud as I somehow expected.
    My whole body came to attention at that smell. Coffee!
    Then he poured the grounds straight into the pot.
    "Aren't you going to use a filter?" I suggested, only belatedly wondering how I knew about filters.
    He glared at me and went back to the temporary table to pull down the bag of vegetables Garrison had bought. I glanced back toward the approaching herd, but the cowboys weren 't exactly hurrying their charges, no matter what Benj had said about moving double-time. It was just Schmidty and me, the wagon