And he and Maggie would waltz in through the front door, hoping to be lost in the crowd.
Chuck took the stairs up to the second floor and stood leaning on the railing overlooking the sculpture of a flock of birds in flight. He pretended he was part of a conversation between two vice-presidents and an office manager. He laughed when they laughed, nodded when they nodded, all the while scanning the crowd in the lobby below.
And then he saw them—Maggie in that incredible dress. The sight of her made his heart stop. She had her hand in the crook of Charles’s arm as they walked toward the building from the well-lit parking lot. Despite their differences in height, they made a very handsome couple.
Chuck felt a surge of jealousy and anger that he didn’t bother to squelch. With a sudden flash of clarity, he could remember what he was thinking, what he was feeling down there as he walked with Maggie on his arm. And he wasn’t thinking about Maggie’s safety. He wasn’t thinking about Maggie hardly at all. He was focusing on his damned theories and equations, on the prospect of meeting his future self and having all of his questions answered. He was an idiot, a fool.
And Maggie … Maggie was looking through the glass front of the lobby, searching for him. She found him almost right away, and their gazes locked. Despite the distance and the pane of glass between them, it was as if she had reached out and touched him.
She was angry, she was hurt, she was scared. He could see all that in her eyes. And she loved him. He saw that too.
She wanted to be with him, and God, he wanted the same. But the only way that could ever happen was by talking Charles into giving up his work with time travel. Only then did they even have a chance. He wanted to grab his past self by the neck and shake him until he realized what he had right underneath his nose. Maggie. He had Maggie.
Chuck saw two different cars pull up directly behind Charles and Maggie, and then everything seemed to switch into slow motion.
The doors of both cars opened and several very big men dressed in dark suits burst out. Charles spun around in surprise as they grabbed both him and Maggie and began pulling them toward the open doors of the cars.
As Chuck watched in horror Maggie fought to get away, and one of the dark-suited men grabbed her around the waist. She fought even harder, kicking and scratching and biting. And screaming.
Chuck couldn’t hear a thing. The glass windows that separated them kept all outside noise from the lobby.
It was surreal. Inside, the party guests sipped their drinks, talked, and laughed, while just outside an abduction was taking place.
It was as if he were watching a silent movie. He couldn’t hear Maggie, but he could read her lips.
She was shouting his name, over and over again.
As Charles and Maggie were shoved none too gently into two separate cars, Chuck couldn’t help himself. “Maggie!” He sprang over the side of the railing, dropping heavily to the tiled floor of the lobby below.
Someone screamed, several other people dropped their drinks in alarm, and a murmur of voices rose up.
He scrambled to his feet, rushing out toward the parking lot.
But all he saw were taillights as the cars sped away.
Chuck turned back to the lobby doors, well aware that he was the subject of a great deal of attention. In a flash of realization, he knew that he’d given himself away. Sure enough, he could see at least one of the Wizard-9 agents fighting to get to him through the crowd.
Chuck turned and ran.
“It occurs to me that you might be of more use to us dead than alive.”
Maggie lifted her chin, giving the man who sat having a late lunch at the poolside table her best version of the evil eye. “My tax dollars pay your salary, don’t they? What a terrible waste.”
Ken Goodwin just smiled. He had a bland, almost round, friendly face. His wire-rim glasses made him look doubly harmless. Maggie knew he was anything but.
“Dr. Della Croce is very attached to you,” he noted in his vowel-flattened New England accent. “And you to him.”
Maggie gave nearly all of her attention to a rough spot on her thumbnail. “So?”
Goodwin laughed. “Did he tell you that in his time line, you were married to someone else? He must’ve yearned for you for years—it’s very romantic. Still, he managed to hide his feelings quite well. I’d known him for quite some time, and I didn’t suspect a thing.”
The afternoon sun was warm on the back of her neck. It felt good after being locked in the chill of the house since last night. Maggie looked up. “What’s your point?” she said flatly.
“By killing you, we seem to have sent Dr. Della Croce into a state that I call self-righteous rage. It appears most commonly in war zones, when an entire platoon of soldiers is decimated by a single man. That man is usually defending his farm or his family. Or avenging their deaths. He’s got the advantage of knowing the territory and he’s driven by this inhuman power, this self-righteous rage.”
Ken Goodwin motioned to his men, both of whom carried lengths of rope, and they hoisted Maggie to her feet. They were neither rough nor gentle—they were simply intent upon getting the job done. And that job seemed to be to lash her hands behind her back and tie her feet together.
Maggie pulled away. “Get away from me!”
But her hands were already tied, and strain as she might against the rope, she couldn’t get free. Together, the two men had no trouble binding her ankles.
They lifted her up, but Ken Goodwin stopped them with a single gesture. “Not yet,” he told them, then turned back to Maggie.
“What we’ve got to do,” he continued, “is push Dr. Della Croce—the one you call Chuck—further over the edge. We’ve got to make him react rather than act. We’ve got to lure him here into our territory. Then we can take care of him and clean up this nasty little mess he’s made.”
“Take care of him? You mean, kill him.”
His smile didn’t warm his eyes. “He’s already dead. He was listed as one of the missing in the Data Tech lab explosion.”
Goodwin looked up toward the house, toward a large picture window on the second floor. “Good, now we can continue,” he murmured.
Maggie turned and saw Charles standing in the window, one of the agents holding tightly to his arm. Thank God he was safe. She hadn’t seen him since last night, when the Wizard-9 agents had pulled him into one car and her into another. She hadn’t even been sure that he was here, at this luxurious ranch well on the outskirts of town.
“I’ve read Dr. Della Croce’s work on double memories,” Goodwin told her. “Fascinating concepts. Apparently since Charles here is a younger version of the other Dr. Della Croce, everything he experiences—everything he sees and hears and feels—appear as memories in the older man’s mind.”
It had worried Maggie that they hadn’t blindfolded her as they brought her here, but now she realized that Ken Goodwin wanted her and Charles to know where they were—so that Chuck would know too. So that he would come here, to rescue her. So they could catch him and kill him, here on their own territory.
Maggie felt fear slice through her as she gazed up at Charles. She had to talk to him. She had to tell Chuck, through him, not to come.
As she watched through the window Charles turned to the man holding his arm and spoke to him questioningly, gesturing down at her. The man said something back, with a grin.
Goodwin nodded to the men who had tied Maggie up, and they each took hold of one of her arms.
“Hey!” Maggie said as they began dragging her backward. “What are you doing?”
Up at the second-floor picture window, she could see Charles break free from the man who was holding him. He rushed toward the glass as if he were trying to go straight through it. But it stopped him and he pressed his hands against it as he shouted her name, loud enough for her to hear.
And then Maggie felt nothing behind her. Nothing but air as the two men pushed her out and back. With a splash, she went into the swimming poo
l.
Her hands and feet were tied.
She was in water over her head, and her hands were tied securely behind her back.
Panic engulfed her as completely as the water surrounded her.
She tried to kick her legs, to push herself back to the surface, but the weight of her long dress only dragged her down.
Maggie fought as her lungs burned and her heart pounded. She fought on, knowing that this was a fight that would be very hard to win.
· · ·
“Get her out of there! Right now! Goddammit, get her out of that pool!”
Charles felt the Wizard-9 agent’s nose break as he drove the heel of his hand hard into the man’s face. It was enough to make the man loosen his elbow lock around Charles’s neck. Another hard jab to the man’s throat, and he was free. There were no rules. This was street fighting at its harshest, its dirtiest.
And Charles had the advantage. From the way his opponent was pulling his punches, he suspected it was a priority that he be kept alive—and not just alive, but in good health.
He didn’t stop yelling at the top of his lungs, screaming his rage like a madman, as he scrambled away from the Wizard-9 agent. He grabbed a chair and swung it with all of his strength across the room at the door as it opened. Two more Wizard-9 agents ducked to avoid being hit. “You bring her up here to me right now!”
The room was trashed. And what furniture hadn’t been bumped into or knocked over in his fight with the first bruiser, Charles went for now, throwing end tables and lamps—anything that he could pick up—toward the open door. “Now, goddammit! I want her up here now!”
He’d never experienced such a surge of fear as when he’d watched Maggie tossed so casually into the swimming pool, her hands and feet tied. He barely knew her, and most of what he knew about her was based on sheer attraction. Yet the thought of her death made him crazy. He’d never felt this kind of anger before. Or this kind of helplessness.
The agent he’d been fighting lumbered groggily to his feet inside the room, blood streaming from his nose. He turned toward the door, and Charles turned to look, too, brandishing a floor lamp, ready to use it as a weapon against whomever might be trying to come in.
But it was Maggie. Soaking wet and coughing up water, she was pushed into the room, like some sort of sacrificial virgin sent to appease his monstrous anger. Her hands and her feet were still tied, and she fell heavily onto the floor.
Charles’s relief was dizzying. Maggie was alive. She wasn’t still lying on the bottom of that swimming pool. He dropped the lamp with a clatter and went to her, pulling her up into his arms.
She was shaking and gasping and getting him nearly as wet as she was, but he didn’t give a damn. She was alive!
He looked up toward the still-open door and into the eyes of the man who had introduced himself as Ken Goodwin—the head of Wizard-9.
“We weren’t really going to harm her,” Goodwin said chidingly, looking around at the mess and shaking his head. “We were just trying to get a little message to your future counterpart.”
He was lying. Charles knew it. Goodwin was lying. He’d had every intention of letting Maggie drown at the bottom of that swimming pool. It was only because Charles had gone ballistic that they’d pulled her out. Goodwin had been afraid that Charles was going to injure himself in some way, and rather than risk that, he’d let Maggie live.
Charles looked away from Goodwin, afraid the other man would see his sudden realization in his eyes. He had the power. Goodwin and his men from Wizard-9 may have been the captors, but Charles had the ultimate power.
They needed him, and they needed him alive.
Goodwin held up a thickly bound set of papers. It looked like the reports the R&D staff at Data Tech often put together. “I have all the answers to your questions about time travel right here, Dr. Della Croce.”
Maggie struggled to sit up. “No! Don’t look at it, Charles—”
Goodwin stepped closer. “Why don’t we let Miss Winthrop get dried off while Dr. Della Croce and I talk?”
“You can’t look at it,” Maggie continued, her voice as urgent as her eyes. “Charles, please. It’s important that you don’t ever allow yourself to know how the Wells Project works.”
“But, Maggie—”
“Maggie is obviously not a scientist, Doctor,” Ken Goodwin interrupted. “She doesn’t understand your need to know. Let my men take care of her while you read this report.” He motioned two of the agents forward.
Charles would’ve sold his soul to see inside the covers of that report. But he wouldn’t sell Maggie’s. He pushed her behind him. “No. She stays here with me or we don’t talk at all.”
Goodwin sighed.
“Call your men off,” Charles said warningly.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Goodwin told him.
Charles didn’t hesitate. “The hard way. She stays with me.”
Goodwin motioned to the other agents, and they backed off. “All right,” he said. “The hard way it is.”
TEN
MAGGIE’S HANDS AND feet were still tied, and even after Charles set her down on the floor, he held on to her to keep her from falling over. The door shut, but only after Ken Goodwin tossed the Wells Project report into the closet after them.
They were locked in an empty walk-in closet. A single bulb burned overhead as a full set of bolts were thrown on the outside of the door.
This was Ken Goodwin’s hard way. He was pitting Charles and Maggie against each other by putting them here, in such close quarters, with nothing but a light and the report that Charles so desperately wanted to read.
The report that Maggie so desperately didn’t want him to read.
In the meantime Goodwin was sitting tight, waiting for Chuck to show up and attempt to rescue them. Waiting for him to come into Wizard-9’s territory. Waiting to kill him.
“Are you all right?” Charles asked, his eyes dark with concern.
“Charles, you have to help me get a message to Chuck,” Maggie said as he helped her down into a sitting position on the carpeted floor. Her dress and hair were still soaking wet, and she blinked water out of her eyes as she looked up at him. “We have to warn him not to come here.”
He looked around the tiny closet. “We have to find a way out of here.”
“I was locked in here last night,” Maggie told him. “The air-conditioner vent is too small—believe me, I already tried. The only way out is through the door. No, we’re in here until they let us out—until you read that report, or until Chuck comes and they kill him. And that’s why we have to warn him to stay away!”
“Warn him through double memories.” Charles bent down and worked to untie the rope that lashed her feet together. His fingers were warm against her chilled skin. He glanced at her. “Can they really be that clear? Clear enough to remember a conversation—a warning?”
“Double memories can be pretty faint. At first it feels like a weird kind of déjà vu. But Chuck said that once you get used to—” Maggie broke off, remembering something else Chuck had said. Something about …? “Charles, kiss me.”
He glanced up at her in surprise.
“There was something Chuck told me about double memories and glandular activity. If you kiss me, he’ll remember.”
Charles hesitated. “Maggie, I don’t—”
She pulled her still-bound feet away from him and struggled to her knees. It wasn’t easy with the sodden weight of her dress dragging against her legs and with her hands still tied behind her back.
“This will work,” she insisted. “Kiss me.”
He leaned forward, obviously doing this only to humor her. Softly, gently, almost chastely, he brushed his lips against hers.
“Oh please,” Maggie scoffed. “I’m not your grandmother. Kiss me, Charles. Come on! Make it memorable!”
His eyes flared with heat and he pulled her against him so forcefully that nearly all the air was squeezed from her body. And th
en he kissed her, sweeping his tongue possessively into her mouth, stealing all that was left of her breath.
It was a kiss of pure fire, pure passion. And Maggie kissed him back just as fiercely, just as hungrily, opening herself to him.
He kissed her harder, deeper, inhaling her, consuming her, and her heart pounded wildly as heat surged through her veins.
It was a kiss that she would never forget.
“Don’t come here, Chuck,” she murmured breathlessly, kissing him again and again, praying that her words would stand out in his memory. She had to believe he’d remember. Chuck had remembered their conversation when she’d met Charles at that lunch place in Scottsdale. He’d remembered telling her about carrot cake. He’d remembered that kiss. “It’s a trap—Goodwin and his men are ready for you. They’re hoping you’ll make a mistake, that you’ll lose your temper and patience. But there’s still time. I’m all right. I’m with Charles now and we’re safe for the moment. Whatever you do, be careful. Think it through.”
She kissed Charles again, telling herself it was only to drive home her words. It wasn’t because she wanted to lose herself in the strength of his passion, in the heat of his hunger for her.
Charles was breathing hard as he pulled back to gaze down into her eyes. He cupped her face with the palm of one hand and traced her lips with his thumb. “What is it about you?” he breathed. “What is this power you have over me?”
Maggie lost herself in the midnight depths of his eyes. Eyes so like Chuck’s. “Maybe it’s destiny,” she whispered. “Or maybe it’s knowing that in the future we’ll be lovers.”
He lowered his mouth to hers and kissed her again, so softly this time, so sweetly. Maggie felt herself melt.
“For you, we’re lovers right now,” he told her. “But I’ve got to wait seven years. Seven years.” He gave her a crooked half smile that was so like Chuck’s. “Something tells me, as much as I’d like to, it’s a little too soon to start the foreplay.”
Time Enough for Love Page 11