Chapter 10 #3
He kept his hands on Cal’s arms, needing the simple and tangible contact. “The same way as you, but with more finesse. You look good.” Somehow he’d expected to find Cal pale and thin and tired from coping with the twentieth century. Instead, his brother was tanned, alert and obviously happy.
“You, too.” His smile faded a bit. “Mom? Dad?”
“They’re fine.”
Cal nodded. It was a hurt he had learned to live with. “You got my message. I couldn’t be sure.”
“We received it,” Jacob said dully.
“You’ve met Libby, then.” Regret vanished. Turning, he held a hand out for his wife. She didn’t move.
“We’ve met.” Jacob inclined his head and waited. She could take the first step.
“You’ll both have a lot to talk about.” Using every ounce of effort, she managed to keep her voice steady.
“Libby.” Her name was a murmur as Cal crossed to her. He laid a hand on her cheek until she lifted her eyes to his. He saw the love and the fear in them. “Don’t.”
“I’m fine.” Calling up more strength, she squeezed his hand. “I have some things to do upstairs. You two should catch up.” She shifted her glance to Jacob. “I know you’ve missed each other.”
Turning, she fled up the stairs.
Sunny shifted her gaze from her sister’s retreating back to Cal’s unsmiling face and then to Jacob’s angry eyes. “What the hell is going on here?”
“Go up with her, will you?” Cal laid a hand on her shoulder but continued to look after his wife. “I don’t want her to be alone.”
“All right.” She could already see, just by looking at the two of them, that she’d get no explanations here. She’d damn well get one from Libby.
Cal waited until Sunny had climbed the stairs. Facing his brother again, he recognized the fury, the passion, and the hurt in him, “We have to talk.”
“Yes.”
“Not here.” He thought of his wife.
“No.” Jacob thought of Sunny. “We’ll go to my ship.”
Sunny paused outside the bedroom door. Taking a deep breath, she pushed it open. Libby sat on the edge of the bed, hands folded. There were no tears. Tears would have been less heartbreaking than the despair on her face.
“Honey, what is it?”
Libby felt as though she were in a dream. Looking up, she focused on the reality of her sister. “How long has he been here?”
“About three weeks.” Sunny sat on the bed to take Libby’s hand in hers. “Talk to me. I thought you’d be happy to finally meet Cal’s brother.”
“I am—for him.” Hoping that much was true, she pressed a hand to her jittery stomach. “Did he explain to you why he’s here? Where he’s from?”
“Of course.” Puzzled, Sunny gave her a little shake. “Come on, Libby, snap out of it. J.T.’s a little rough around the edges, but he isn’t a monster. He’s just concerned about Cal, and maybe a little hurt that he chose you and settled here.”
“Oh, God.” Unable to sit, Libby rose to pace to the window.
She heard the hum of an engine and saw the Land Rover disappear into the forest. “I would have let him go,” she said quietly, and closed her eyes.
“Back then I was prepared to. I couldn’t have asked him to give up his family, his life. But now I can’t let him go. I won’t.”
“Where would he go?”
Libby rested her head on the cool glass of the window. “Back.” She laughed a little. “Forward. Jacob must have told you how impossibly complicated it all is.”
Rising, Sunny walked over to lay her hands on Libby’s shoulders. They were taut, like bundles of wire. Automatically she worked to relax them. “Cal’s a grown man, Libby, and staying here was his choice. J.T.’s just going to have to accept that.”
“But will he?”
“When he first got here, J.T. was angry and resentful. He just wasn’t able to understand Cal’s feelings. But things have changed. For both of us.”
Slowly Libby turned. What was in her sister’s heart was clearly written in her eyes. Libby felt a lurch of panic. “Oh, Sunny.”
“Hey, don’t look at me like that.” She grinned. “I’m in love, not terminally ill.”
“But what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to go back with him.”
With an inarticulate cry, Libby threw her arms around Sunny’s neck. She clung, rocking.
“For Lord’s sake, Libby, you’re as bad as Jacob. It’s only Philadelphia. You’re acting like I’m going to set up housekeeping on Pluto.”
“There aren’t any settled colonies on Pluto.”
With a strangled laugh, Sunny pulled away. “Well, I guess that leaves that out. We’ll have to make do with a condo in Philly.”
Libby studied Sunny’s face, and her expression gradually changed. The tears that had dampened her eyes dried. “You don’t understand, do you?”
“I understand that I love J.T. and he loves me. We haven’t talked about life commitments yet, but it’s only a matter of time.” She stopped, wary. “Libby, why are you looking at me as though you want to wring my neck?”
“Not yours.” Libby’s voice had firmed. She might be the quieter of the two, but when those she loved were threatened she could put an queen to shame. “The bastard.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said he’s a bastard.”
Sisterly love notwithstanding, Sunny’s hackles were rising. “Now look, Libby—”
She shook her head. She wasn’t about to be stopped now. “Did he tell you he loved you?”
Nearly out of patience, Sunny snapped off an oath. Then: “Yes.”
“And you’ve gone to bed with him.”
Sunny’s eyes narrowed. “Have you been taking lessons from Dad?”
“Of course you’ve gone to bed with him,” Libby muttered, pacing the room. “He’s made you fall in love with him, taken you to bed, and hasn’t had the decency to tell you.”
Sunny’s foot was tapping a rapid tattoo. “Tell me what?”
“That he and Cal are from the twenty-third century.”
Sunny’s foot stopped. In the sudden silence, she gaped at Libby. All that sun, she thought. Her poor sister had had her brain fried in Bora Bora. Slowly she crossed the room.
“Lib, I want you to lie down while I get you a cold cloth.”
“No.” Still fueled by fury, Libby shook her head. “You sit down while I go get you a brandy. Trust me. You’re going to need it.”
***
When Cal stepped onto the bridge of the ship, the wave of nostalgia rolled over him like warm water. The cargo planes he piloted in the life he’d chosen satisfied his need to fly, but they weren’t much of a challenge. Unable to resist, he ran his hands over the command console.
“She’s a beauty, J.T. New model?”
“Yes, I thought it best to have it designed specifically for this trip. We made some adjustments for heat and maneuverability.”
Cal couldn’t prevent his hand from gripping the throttle. “I’d like to take her up, see what she can do.”
“Be my guest.”
Cal laughed. “We’d be spotted in the first thousand miles and find ourselves on the front page of the National Enquirer.”
“Which is?”
“You have to see some things for yourself.” Reluctantly he turned away from the console and temptation. Again he studied Jacob’s face, feature by feature. “God, it’s good to see you.”
“How could you do it, Cal?”
Blowing out a long breath, he sat in the pilot’s chair. “It’s a long story.”
“I read the report.”
Cal gave him a long, steady look. “Some things don’t come through in reports. You’ve seen her.”
“Yes, I’ve seen her.”
“I love her, J.T. I couldn’t begin to tell you how much.”
Jacob felt a spark of empathy and banked it down. He couldn’t think of Sunny now. “We thought you were dead. Almost six months.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Are you?” Jacob swung to the viewscreen to stare out at the snow.
“Five months and twenty-three days after you were reported lost, your ship crash landed about sixty kilometers from the McDowell base in the Baja. Empty. We had your reports.” His gaze flashed back to his brother.
“And I had to watch Mom and Dad grieve all over again.”
“I wanted you to know where I was. And why. J.T., I didn’t plan this. You saw the log.”
“I saw it.” His jaw set. “You should be dead. I calculated the probability factor of you pulling out of that void in one piece. There was none.” For the first time he smiled. “You’ve always been a hell of a pilot, Cal.”
“Yeah, but you can’t input fate into computer banks.” He’d thought about that long and hard over the past months. “I was meant for Libby, J.T. You can calculate into the next millennium and that won’t change. As much as I love you, I can’t leave her and go back.”
In silence, J.T. studied him. He hated most of all that he understood. Weeks before, only weeks, he would have argued, shouted. He would have locked Cal in a cabin and taken off for home without giving him a choice. “Does she love you as much?”
A ghost of a smile played on Cal’s lips. “She never asked me to stay. In fact, she did everything she could to help me prepare for the return trip. She even asked to go with me. She would have given up everything.”
“Instead, you stayed here. You gave up everything.”
“Do you think it was easy for me to make the choice?” Cal demanded.
He pushed himself out of the chair, driven by fury and frustration.
“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
Damn it, there was no choice. I didn’t know if the ship would make it back, and I couldn’t risk her life.
I was prepared to risk my own, but not hers.
If I had left her, I would have been right back in the void again. And I wouldn’t have cared.”
Jacob didn’t want to understand. But he did.
“I’ve spent two years working on perfecting this time-travel procedure, having this ship designed, fine-tuning all the equations.
I’m not saying that more work, more study, isn’t necessary, but I made it without any major problems. The success factor is 88.
57. Come home, Cal, and bring her with you. ”
Cal stared at the viewscreen. He’d learned a great deal over the past year. The most important lesson was that life was not simple. The choices to be made could not be made lightly.
“There’s another piece of data you haven’t considered, J.T. Libby’s pregnant.”