“Please don’t look at me like that,” she said tightly. “It’s making me nervous.”
“I’m not sure I can be in the same room with you and not look at you like this,” he admitted. “You look … amazing.”
She’d pulled her hair up off her neck, holding it in place with one of those bear-trap-like clip things that she’d no doubt had in her purse. Several tendrils had escaped, hanging down around her shoulders, accentuating the sheer elegance of the strapless gown.
The dress itself was a rich shade of brown, made of some kind of fabric that managed to be both velvety and silky. It clung intimately to the soft curves of her breasts, yet fell smoothly, gracefully across her stomach and hips, cascading all the way down to her ankles.
It had a neckline that was shaped with the swell of her body, dipping down to meet between her breasts. And it had a slit up the side, all the way to her thigh. He couldn’t tell it was there now, while she was standing still, but when she moved, he knew it would reveal tantalizing glimpses of her legs.
She turned away, going back into the changing room.
Chuck could see himself reflected in the store mirror. From a distance, he looked the same as he ever did, nearly the same as he did seven years ago. But he wasn’t the same. The road he’d taken over the past years had been a rough one, fueled by his obsession to find a way back to the past.
He’d sold his soul for the chance to develop and test his theories. He’d danced with the devil that was Wizard-9, and soon he was going to have to pay the ultimate price.
Maggie came out into the store, dressed once again in her sleeveless blouse and denim skirt, the dress on a hanger, the long skirt looped over her arm. She didn’t do more than glance at him, as if she were afraid to meet his eyes, and Chuck knew that his talk of mistakes had hurt her.
But it was true. Getting involved with him—physically or otherwise—was surely the last thing she needed.
Chuck followed her over to the cash register and took the dress from her. She wandered around the front of the store as he used cash to pay, as the store clerk wrapped the dress in tissue paper and put it into a shopping bag with handles.
Maggie looked up as he headed toward her, and together they left the store.
“My car’s over by Sears,” she told him. “On the lower level.”
They walked for a moment in silence, and then, as if she couldn’t stand it another moment, Maggie spoke. “You know, it wasn’t a mistake.”
She was talking about that kiss. “Yes, it was,” he said gently.
“Why?”
Chuck had to close his eyes briefly at the impossible irony. He’d wanted this woman for years. Years. He’d kept his distance when she dated and then married Albert Ford, but he’d never stopped wanting her. If anything, the years and their continued friendship had made him want her more. Yet now here he was, about to talk her out of the kind of relationship he’d only ever dreamed of having.
“Because I need you to help me change Charles’s future.”
She forcefully pushed open the door and he followed her out into the warm night air. “But you’re Charles, and Charles is you,” she argued.
Yes, he was Charles, but Charles wasn’t him. Charles hadn’t made the mistakes that he’d made. Charles hadn’t put an entire nation in jeopardy. Charles hadn’t been tainted by his connection to Wizard-9.
“Here’s what I think we should do,” Chuck said to Maggie as they crossed the car-filled parking lot. “You take this dress and go home, and tomorrow night wear it over to Data Tech and …”
Chuck had seen the car approaching the moment they exited the mall. He’d been watching it out of the corner of one eye, his wariness a habit that was impossible to break. The car was moving too fast, bouncing jarringly over the speed bumps. But it was the fact that the windows were tinted and the front passenger’s window—the side nearest them—was rolled slightly down that made the hair stand up on the back of his neck.
He was reacting even before he saw the slight movement at the window, even before his mind registered the fact that that was, indeed, the barrel of a gun being aimed at them.
He caught Maggie around the waist, pulling her down between two cars, dragging her to cover as an assault rifle was fired from the open window of the car. Bullets slammed into the cars around them, breaking windows and tearing into the metal with a terrible screeching sound.
And as quickly as it had started, it was over. The car was speeding away with a squeal of tires.
The explosive racket of a weapon being fired at close range still rang in Chuck’s ears as he took one shaky breath and then another. He realized he had thrown himself on top of Maggie in a ludicrous attempt to shield her from the bullets with his body. He was probably crushing her, grinding her into the rough asphalt. But she didn’t move beneath him, didn’t protest, didn’t make a sound.
A drowning wave of panic washed over him as he pushed himself off of her, terrified that the future was repeating itself. Please God, don’t let her have been hit.…
But Maggie moved then, throwing her arms around his neck and clinging tightly to him. She was alive. His relief nearly knocked him over, and as he sat up he pulled her with him, cradling her in his arms. He ran his hands over her, reassuring himself that with the exception of a slightly skinned knee, she was all right.
She seemed only to want to hold him tightly. He could feel her trembling, or maybe that was him, he wasn’t sure anymore. But then, God, she lifted her face, and just like that, he was kissing her. Kissing her as if the world were coming to an end.
In some ways, it was.
This was what he should have wanted more than anything else in the world. Maggie, with all of her passion and joy and those smart-aleck comments that always made him smile. Maggie, with her million-watt grin, her husky laugh, and her sparkling eyes. Maggie, not just his best friend, but the keeper of his heart and soul—his lover, his only, his wife.
If only he had fought as hard for her as he’d fought to develop his theories on time travel …
But what ifs weren’t any use to him now. Chuck had come too far down his own path ever to turn back. But Charles, Charles still had a chance to choose heaven over hell.
Only Chuck was finding out firsthand just how very hard it was to let go once he held heaven in his arms.
Especially since heaven was responding to each kiss he gave her with a fierceness and intensity that damn near took his breath away. She wanted him as badly as he wanted her. Chuck couldn’t stop his feelings of elation. He wanted to sing, to dance dizzily with her in circles, spinning and jumping and whirling like crazy until they fell, laughing, together on the ground.
But what he had to do instead was stop kissing her.
It took everything Chuck had in him to pull back. And even then, it was only the fact that they were in danger that made him stop.
“We have to get out of here.” His voice sounded hoarse.
“We can go to my place.” He could hear her desire in her voice, see it in her eyes. God, she thought he was talking about …
“I mean, we can if you want,” she added more softly, almost uncertainly.
I want, he wanted to tell her. God, do I want.… “No, Mags,” he said instead, “I meant whoever did this might come back. And if they do, I want us far from here.”
“Who was that? Who would shoot at us?” Maggie started to get up, but he grabbed her wrist and kept her down, her head lower than the hoods of the cars surrounding them.
As Chuck got to his feet he stayed in a crouch, too, reaching around the car to grab the bag that he’d dropped. “Not us—me.” Taking her hand and staying low to the ground, he started moving between the cars.
“But why?”
She figured it out herself, and as he answered they spoke in unison. “The Wells Project.”
She was quick to add, “You said the men from Wizard-9 didn’t follow you here. You said they couldn’t.”
“I didn’t thi
nk they could. I know I disabled the prototype.” Chuck frowned. “I also know they destroyed my lab at Data Tech. I assumed the working model of the Runabout and the other equipment were in there at the time.” He glanced back at her. “And you know that old saying about the word assume.”
“You mean, when you assume, you and me get a bullet in the ass?”
Chuck had to laugh. Somehow the direst, most serious thing that could have happened had happened. Wizard-9 agents had followed him into the past, using techniques he himself had written about to find him. The ripple effect. Or the displacement theory. It was possible to trace the Runabout as it traveled through time using either of those theories. Neither was one hundred percent accurate, but obviously Wizard-9 had been close enough.
But despite the danger, Maggie had still managed to make him laugh.
Still, the situation was extremely sobering. The latest working model of the Runabout could hold four travelers for each leap in time. The technology was still in its early stages, and for the first time since the Wells Project went on-line, Chuck was grateful for that. Even in this advanced version of the Runabout, the energy source required at least ninety-six hours for its various components to cool and reset before another jump through time could be made.
He had to figure it had taken the Wizard-9 agents a full twenty-four hours to track him here to the mall. It had probably taken them a whole lot less than that, but he estimated high just to be safe.
That left him only seventy-two hours. After seventy-two hours, he’d be a dead man. After seventy-two hours, Wizard-9 would be able to make another leap through time. This time, they’d arrive before him, and when he made the jump, when he arrived naked and disoriented in Maggie’s backyard, they’d be there waiting. And they’d kill him.
Maggie tugged on his hand. “My car’s over this way.”
He shook his head. Seventy-two hours. God, the clock was ticking. “We can’t risk taking it. If this is Wizard-9, then they’ve already found your car and rigged it with some kind of tracking device. Or a bomb.”
“A bomb!” Even Maggie couldn’t make a joke about that. “Like … a bomb?”
“A bomb,” Chuck told her. “Like the one they planted that took out most of the White House.”
“If they could find my car in this parking lot, then they’ve surely found my house,” Maggie said.
“That’s right,” Chuck said, moving down the line of parked cars, looking quickly at each one they passed. “We can’t go there.”
“Where are we going to go?” Maggie asked. “An even bigger question: if we can’t take my car, how are we going to get there? Wherever there is.”
He glanced back at her. “We’ll have to borrow someone else’s car.”
Maggie dug in her heels. “Borrow someone else’s car? It’s not as if we’re going to find one with the keys in the ignition,” she said. “What are you going to do? Hot-wire it?”
Chuck nodded. “Absolutely.”
FIVE
“I CAN’T BELIEVE you know how to hot-wire a car.”
Chuck glanced away from the road and over at Maggie, his face dimly lit by the green dashboard light. “It’s all a matter of understanding how things work.”
It was obvious to Maggie from the ease with which Chuck had started the engine of this white, late-model Taurus with only the Swiss army knife he had in his pocket, that he had a clear understanding of how things worked.
It was obvious, too, that he had an understanding of how to keep things working when he not only switched license plates with the car next to the white Taurus, but stopped in another badly lit corner of the parking lot and quickly switched plates a second time.
It was likely that while someone coming out of the mall would notice that their car was missing, they probably wouldn’t notice that their plates had been switched. And while the state police would be on the lookout for a white Taurus with the original plates, they wouldn’t be looking for a white Taurus with this third set of plates.
Chuck glanced at her again, and Maggie realized she was staring at him, but she couldn’t seem to stop. His face looked angular in the shadows, his cheekbones in sharp relief.
There was more than mere age that made him look different than Charles. There was a hardness to his mouth, an edge to him that made her wonder with a shiver just where he’d draw the line in his quest to set things right.
They were traveling north on Route 17, heading up into the mountains, toward Sedona and Flagstaff. The tires of the car made a low humming sound on the highway as they moved at a speed slightly over the limit.
They’d made only one stop—right before they left the city limits. Chuck had pulled up to a roadhouse-style bar, and he and Maggie had gone inside.
They weren’t there to quench their thirst. No, in just a matter of minutes after walking into the place, they were seated at a table in the back, across from a man who looked as if he hadn’t bathed since Jimmy Carter was in office. As Maggie incredulously looked on, Chuck paid a hundred and fifty dollars cash for a deadly-looking handgun, a shoulder holster, and a box of ammunition.
The two men shook hands, and then—cool as a cucumber, as if he wore an illegally obtained, unregistered handgun underneath his jacket all the time—Chuck slipped the leather straps on over his shirt. Somehow he knew how to fasten it all together to make it work as a holster. He checked the gun—for what, Maggie didn’t know; to see if it was loaded?—then slipped it into the holster, putting his jacket back on to hide it. The box of bullets went into his pocket.
Maggie didn’t say a thing.
Chuck suggested they make use of the facilities before they hit the road again, and when she came out of the ladies’ room, he was talking on the pay phone. He hung up as she approached. He didn’t tell her who he’d called, and she didn’t ask.
She didn’t say a word as they walked back out to their stolen car. She still didn’t speak as once more he used his knowledge of how things worked to restart the Taurus.
Now, though, she cleared her throat. “Where are we going?”
Chuck glanced at her. “Maybe you should close your eyes, try to get some sleep. We’ve got a long night ahead of us.”
“Yeah, right. I always get the urge to take a nap after nearly being gunned down at the mall.”
He looked at her again, longer this time. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry I got you involved in this. I should have stayed far away from you. If I’d been thinking straight, I would have realized that Ken Goodwin would never let something like the Wells Project be destroyed.”
“Ken Goodwin?”
“Out of all the Wizard-9 agents I dealt with, he seemed to be the one in charge. If he’s here, if he’s behind this …”
“What?” Maggie prompted softly. “Talk to me.”
His eyes seemed to flash as he shot her another quick look. “This whole situation has just gone from difficult to near impossible. Goodwin knows that I need to get close to Charles to keep him from developing those time-travel theories.”
“Charles!” Maggie said suddenly, turning in her seat to face him. “Wizard-9 can get to you through Charles. If they kill him, you’ll be dead too.”
“No, that’s not a problem.”
“But the way you explained it to me—”
“They won’t risk hurting Charles,” Chuck reassured her. “They need him alive to develop the time-travel theory. My bet is they won’t even get near him, for fear of interfering with the natural course of events. No, I’m the one Goodwin needs to get rid of. If I get within fifty feet of Charles, Wizard-9 is going to be there to stop me cold.”
“What about me?” Maggie asked. “I could approach Charles—”
“No. They’ll be looking for you too. They know who you are. They know what you did in the future.”
She studied his profile. “What exactly did I do?”
Chuck was silent, his eyes fixed on the road ahead of him. When he finally spoke, his voice was almost unnatur
ally matter-of-fact. “I told you what you did. You warned me. You saved my life.”
“How?”
He shifted slightly, impatiently in his seat, glancing briefly at her. “You said, ‘Chuck, look out!’ You know, Mags, when we’re talking, I can’t think, I can’t plan. I need to think this through and figure out what Goodwin would expect me to do. And then I need to figure out if I should do that, or do the opposite, depending on whether or not he’d expect me to second-guess him and—”
“Okay, okay! You’ve convinced me. I’ll shut up.” Maggie’s voice shook very slightly as she added, “I’m sorry.”
“No.” Chuck’s voice was barely audible over the hum of the engine. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for getting you into this. And I’m sorry I can’t be the man you need me to be.”
Maggie reached out, lightly touching his denim-clad leg. “I think if we want to stay alive—and I don’t know about you, but I sure do—you’re exactly the man I need you to be.”
Chuck didn’t say anything. He didn’t even look at her. But he did take her hand, intertwining their fingers.
They headed north into the Arizona night in silence, holding tightly to one another’s hand.
They had to walk from the bus station to the motel in the early-morning sunshine. It wasn’t more than a few blocks, but to Maggie, it seemed like a thousand miles. It had been years since she’d pulled an all-nighter like this one.
They’d left the stolen car at the Flagstaff airport and had taken a shuttle across town to the bus station. They’d had to wait nearly three hours for the next bus heading back to Phoenix.
As they’d snacked on candy and cans of sodas from the vending machines in the bus station, Chuck had explained why they were heading back south—doubling back on their six, as he called it.
They had to return to Phoenix because Charles was there, because he was the key to changing Maggie’s future and Chuck’s past. Ken Goodwin and his agents from Wizard-9 would expect them to return, but Chuck was banking on the fact that Wizard-9 wouldn’t be ready for them to return this soon. Over the course of the next twenty-four hours Wizard-9 would set up roadblocks and spot inspections on the routes leading into the city in an attempt to intercept them.
Time Enough for Love Page 6
