Forever.
It had to be insanity—she’d never do something like kiss a total stranger without having first lost her mind. Except he wasn’t a total stranger. He was so much like Chuck. A Chuck who still remembered how to smile and laugh.
“Well,” Charles breathed as he pulled back to look into her eyes. “Yeah. That was pretty damn territorial. I think if the man who was following you was watching that, he’s probably convinced that you’re not single and … are you, by any chance, single?”
His eyes were filled with a molten heat. Maggie had seen traces of the same fire in Chuck’s eyes, but Chuck was quick to try to hide it, while Charles had no qualms against letting her see his attraction.
She cleared her throat as she straightened up, gently freeing herself from his grasp. “Yeah,” she said, having some trouble catching her breath. “Yes, I sort of am. Single.”
Chuck had told her that the physical attraction between them had been instant when they met. He hadn’t been kidding.
Charles picked up on her evasive wording. “Sort of?”
There was no way she could explain that over the past day or so she had been fighting the totally insane urge to have a love affair with the man he would become in seven years. Fortunately, he let it go.
“Do you have a name?” he asked.
“Maggie,” she told him.
“Maggie,” he repeated. The way he said it, it sounded like a caress.
“Winthrop,” she said, moistening her suddenly dry lips with the tip of her tongue. “Maggie Winthrop.”
Charles held out his hand. “Pleased to meet you, Maggie Winthrop.”
His hand was big and warm, with long, graceful fingers. Instead of shaking her hand as she expected, he lifted her fingers to his lips and kissed the back of her hand.
Maggie had to laugh again. Again, from knowing the grim and seemingly dangerous man he would become, she never would have dreamed he could be so utterly flirtatious. And smooth. He was very smooth, as if he’d had a great amount of practice using his considerable charms to seduce. And his charms were considerable, as he darn well knew. He didn’t let go of her hand as he smiled at her again.
“I’m Charles—”
“Della Croce,” she finished for him. “I know.”
He froze for just a fraction of a second. “You do?”
“You work over at Data Tech,” she explained. “I do too. Sort of.”
He released her hand. “There’s that ‘sort of’ again.”
“I’m a freelance writer. I just signed a contract with Data Tech to do a couple of projects including the annual report. I’ll be in and out over the next few months until all the jobs are complete.”
He shifted in his seat, his gaze intense, sharp with curiosity and a hint of wariness. “As far as I know, I’ve got nothing to do with the annual report. What made you recognize me?”
“I’ve seen you around. That, combined with gossip heard at the coffee machine …” Maggie lied again. Still, this one wasn’t a very big lie. She had no doubt that this man was talked about frequently as the women in the office took their morning coffee break.
He laughed. “If it’s gossip, it’s probably not true.”
He was still gazing at her, and despite the warmth in his eyes, she was struck by his coolness, his reserve. It was odd, really. There was heat in his eyes—heat from desire and attraction. But at the same time he held himself aloof, keeping himself emotionally distanced.
Maggie had seen that same distance in Chuck, she realized, but it wasn’t as glaringly obvious. With Chuck, it was hidden beneath his burning anger. It was dwarfed by his desperate need to set things right.
In a burst of nervous energy so much like Chuck’s, Charles drummed his fingers on the table for the briefest of moments before forcing himself to stop. It was a gesture so like Chuck’s because Charles was Chuck. Or rather, at one time, Chuck had been Charles.
“You called me Chuck,” he remembered suddenly. “When you first sat down.”
“I knew your name was Charles, I assumed Chuck was a nickname.”
“I don’t have a nickname. I’ve just always been Charles.”
“Even when you were a child?”
Something shifted in his eyes, and Maggie got the impression of a drawbridge being raised and clanging shut with a metallic thud against the very private outer defenses of an impenetrable castle. “No,” he said. “Not even when I was a child.”
“No nicknames, huh? None at all?” she asked. “Come on. There must be something.” She wanted to rock the foundations of that castle. “What do women call you when you take them to bed?”
For one short moment Charles dropped his guard, and Maggie could see honest emotion in his eyes. Surprise, and genuine amusement. But then heat sparked, drowning out all else. “I don’t know,” he murmured. “Want to try it and see?”
She was treading upon extremely dangerous territory.
Still she couldn’t forget what Chuck had told her. She’d dated this deliciously sexy man, and because he wouldn’t share more than the physical with her, she’d kept their relationship from becoming intimate.
She still wanted more from him.
“Can I talk you into having lunch with me?” he asked.
Maggie shook her head no, glancing at her watch. “I have to go. I have a one o’clock meeting.” But instead of standing up, she leaned forward. “Charles, tell me something. Tell me just one thing about yourself that you’ve never told anyone before.”
He hesitated just long enough so that for a moment Maggie thought he might actually do it.
But he didn’t. “I hate carrot cake,” he said.
She laughed to cover her disappointment. “The fact that you hate carrot cake is a deeply personal secret?”
“Actually, yes, it is.”
Maggie shook her head in despair as she stood up. “Thanks for … helping me.”
He rose to his feet, and once again she was struck by his height. “Wait—”
She started for the door. “I really have to go.”
“Without giving me your phone number? I’d like to see you again, Maggie.”
She turned and looked up at Charles Della Croce. “Oh, you’ll see me again,” she told him. “You can count on it.”
FOUR
MAGGIE GOT TO the mall at seven-thirty.
Chuck had left a message on her answering machine, asking her to meet him there at six, but she’d had a dinner meeting scheduled with a client. It was a meeting that she couldn’t get out of. Or maybe she simply didn’t want to get out of it. Maybe she was intentionally trying to keep her distance from this man.
Lord knows she’d let herself get a little too close to Charles this afternoon.
As Maggie hurried into the air-conditioned coolness of the shopping mall, she wondered if Chuck would still be waiting for her. She hadn’t had any way to contact him to tell him about her meeting, and he hadn’t called back.
He was sitting on one of the benches near the movie theater, reading a book, just the way he’d said he’d be. Maggie felt a surge of emotion at the sight of him. It may have been relief. Or it may have been something else entirely.
He stood up as she approached.
“Sorry I’m so late,” she told him. “I had a meeting that couldn’t be rescheduled.”
“I figured it was something like that,” he said. “Did you eat?”
“Yeah. Did you?” Why was she so nervous? Just standing here talking to him, saying nothing of any importance whatsoever, was making her feel totally on edge.
“I grabbed something from the food court about a half hour ago.”
Maybe it was the way he was looking at her, with his usual high-powered intensity. It was as if he were memorizing every detail of her—face, clothes, hair, everything. And all she could think about was that he was surely noticing every wrinkle in her denim skirt, every chip in the polish on her toenails, every scuff mark in the leather of her sandals.
Maggie had to laugh. “Are you kidding? We’re here to go shopping?”
One side of his mouth turned up in wry half smile. “You don’t think I asked you to meet me at the mall simply for the atmosphere, do you?”
“Actually, I didn’t think about it,” Maggie admitted, hurrying to keep up.
“We’re here to buy you a dress to wear to the Data Tech party.”
Maggie stopped short. “I don’t need a dress. I’ve already figured out what I’m going to wear—”
“Black pants with a tuxedo-style jacket,” Chuck told her, “over a shirt made of some kind of shimmery material.”
“Yeah,” she said slowly. “That’s what I’m going to wear. It’s formal without being too feminine. It’s businesslike. It’s not too …”
“Sexy?” he supplied.
Maggie lifted her chin. “That’s right. In order to compete in the male-dominated world of business, women have to be careful not to—”
“I happen to think it made you look incredibly sexy.”
Maggie started walking again, trying to hide the way his softly spoken words affected her. “Then why are we buying me a new dress?”
Chuck glanced at her. “Because over the past seven years there’s been a time or two when you went all out and got really dressed up and wore a … I don’t know, maybe you’d call it a gown. It was some kind of really fancy dress and you wore your hair up and …” And each time he had seen her dressed like that, it had damn near stopped his heart.
But he couldn’t tell her that.
“Just trust me on this, all right?” he said.
She was silent, walking alongside him, carefully not meeting his eyes. Trust him, Chuck had told her. But he wouldn’t blame her one bit if she didn’t trust him. After all, in her mind he’d given her nothing of himself, nothing to make her think that he trusted her in return.
In her mind.
In truth, he had. In truth, he’d told her something he’d never told anyone before.
“Carrot cake,” he said.
She stopped in front of a shoe store’s window display to stare at him. “Excuse me?”
“The fact that I don’t like carrot cake really was something I’d never told anyone.” He could see surprise and confusion in her eyes, so he tried to explain as he pulled her closer to the window, out of the stream of pedestrian traffic. “When I was little, I went to live with my uncle, my mother’s brother, and his housekeeper made me a carrot cake the first day I arrived. I really hated it, I mean, hated it—but I ate it because it seemed rude not to.”
Maggie was still staring at him, her eyes wide.
Chuck cleared his throat. “I, um, I guess, you know, because I didn’t want to be there, I had this sense that everything was destined to be awful, but I was stuck there until I was old enough to live on my own. I don’t know, it seemed kind of appropriate that I choke down that terrible cake. So I did, and Jen, the housekeeper, got it into her head that I really loved her carrot cake, so she made it for me all the time. Every holiday, every birthday. She’d probably still be making it for me now, but my uncle finally died a few years ago, and she retired.”
Maggie didn’t say a word.
“I know I didn’t manage to get that all out this morning, but that’s what I was talking about when I told you that I hated carrot cake,” Chuck told her.
“This morning …” The surprise in Maggie’s eyes turned to suspicion. “Did you follow me today? Oh, my God. Did you somehow listen in on my conversation with Charles?”
Chuck had to laugh. It started as a chuckle but grew into a full laugh. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d laughed this way. “Mags. You don’t get it, do you? Think about it. Think about what you just said.”
But her expression had changed again. She was looking at him now much the way she’d looked at him this morning. This morning, in her time. Seven years of mornings earlier in his.
He could see his own attraction for her mirrored in her eyes. And he could see something else, something warm and soft, something that made him nearly dizzy with longing.
“You don’t do that often enough,” Maggie told him quietly. “You don’t laugh anymore. Or even smile.”
She reached out then, gently touching the side of his face, and he remembered the heaven it had been to kiss her. Seven years ago she’d walked into that restaurant in downtown Scottsdale. He was supposed to meet Boyd Rogers for lunch, but Boyd had called and canceled. And then Maggie had appeared, telling him some ridiculous story about someone following her. He’d been so enchanted by her sparkling smile, by the way she seemed to look at him with something akin to wonder in her eyes, he hadn’t been able to resist. He’d kissed her. Twice. God, he could remember the softness of her lips, the sweetness of her mouth as if it were yesterday.
Or more precisely, as if it were about eleven forty-five this morning.
“I didn’t follow you,” he told her. “I didn’t have to. I was there.” He saw the realization dawn in her eyes, and he said aloud the words she already knew. “I was there, because I’m Charles. Or rather, I was Charles.”
He’d spent most of the day going to movies. It had taken him almost no time to find the perfect dress for Maggie to wear to the Data Tech holiday party, and then he’d had the entire rest of the day free.
He’d walked around the mall for a bit, delighting in his ability to take his time, to stroll without his crowd of bodyguards hurrying him along. It had been years since his experiments with time travel had been made public knowledge. And after that, as a target for terrorists and lunatics, he’d needed professional protection. He’d taken the time to learn to protect himself as well, and there was still a part of him that constantly checked in the glass windows and mirrors of the mall stores to make sure he wasn’t being followed.
But of course he wasn’t being followed. In this year, in this time, no one gave a damn about Dr. Charles Della Croce. He liked it that way.
That morning, he’d bought a ticket to the eleven-thirty showing of a movie whose name he couldn’t even remember now, and halfway through he’d been flooded with memories—new memories, double memories—of meeting Maggie Winthrop for the first time not at the Data Tech party, but rather at a little restaurant in Scottsdale.
The memory was fuzzy at first, and he really had to work to recall the incident. Even then, it didn’t seem to gel until he remembered that kiss. Somehow that sweet sensation brought the entire encounter into sharp focus. Then he remembered the conversation he and Maggie had had almost word for word.
He hadn’t bothered to watch the rest of the movie. He’d spent the time instead sitting there in the darkened theater with his eyes closed, replaying that second incredible kiss over and over in his mind, trying to make that memory stronger, willing himself to recall something that had happened seven years ago.
Something that had happened mere moments before.
But now Maggie was here, inches away from him, and he didn’t have to rely on memories. Her gaze flicked down to his mouth before she looked searchingly into his eyes. She smiled then, very slightly, and he knew she was thinking about that incredible kiss too.
“That was you, wasn’t it?” she whispered.
Chuck nodded. “Yeah. That was me.”
Maggie held her breath, entranced by the way, once again, just like this morning, he took his time leaning closer and closer until his mouth covered hers. He kissed her, slowly, sweetly, almost reverently.
Then he reached for her, pulling her tightly against him, burying his face in her hair as he held her close. “I’ve been dying to do that again for the past seven years.”
“Chuck—” Maggie lifted her head to look up at him, but instantly forgot whatever it was she’d intended to say. The heat in his eyes seemed to magnify all of the secrets revealed by the intimacy of their embrace. He wanted h
er. Badly. She couldn’t help but know that.
And when he lowered his head to kiss her again, she kissed him back hungrily, desperately, reaching up to meet him on the tips of her toes. She pulled him even more tightly against her, running her fingers through the nearly unbearable softness of his hair. All of her senses seemed to explode as she kissed him harder, deeper, as if all of the emotions of the past few days stood up in unison and cried out to be heard.
Heard and harkened to.
Maggie had had complete sexual encounters that were far less powerful, and far less meaningful, than this single kiss.
He pulled back, pushing her away to arm’s length, breathing hard, both alarm and elation written clearly on his face, as if he had been able to follow her very thoughts.
“Dear God,” he breathed.
As Maggie gazed into his eyes she knew that with that kiss, she had given far too much away—she had revealed way too much of her feelings. She took no comfort from knowing that Chuck had done the same.
“That was a mistake,” he told her.
She pulled free from his grasp so that he wouldn’t see the disappointment she knew was on her face. “Yeah,” she said. “You’re probably right. A big mistake.”
He was right. What was she thinking? What was she doing?
The last thing in the world she needed was to get involved with a man who took seven years to open up and tell her why he hated carrot cake. “Let’s find that dress and get out of here.”
“How’s this?” Maggie’s voice interrupted Chuck’s reverie, and he turned to see her standing in The Dress.
It was the one. He’d known from the moment he saw it on the mannequin in the store. He would have bought it right there and then, at quarter past ten that morning, but when it came to women’s clothing sizes, he was clueless. A fourteen seemed much too big, and a four was surely too tiny. Maggie was somewhere in between the two, but where, Chuck couldn’t begin to guess.
Time Enough for Love Page 5
