Nora Roberts - Times Change

“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.”

Chapter 11

She didn’t speak. In the past thirty minutes, Sunny had gone from believing her sister had a wicked case of sunstroke to wondering if she herself had gone quietly mad without noticing it.

The twenty-third century. Black holes. Spaceships. Sunny had finally lapsed into silence as Libby had recounted a story about a mission to Mars—dear Lord, Mars—and Cal’s fateful encounter with an uncharted black hole, which, through a combination of luck, skill and the mysterious hand of destiny, had shot him backward from the middle of the twenty-third century to the spring of last year.

The confused Cal, an intergalactic cargo pilot with an affection for flying and poetry, had become a time traveler.

Time travel.

Oh, God, she thought. Time travel.

She remembered clearly the faint smile on Jacob’s face when he had told her of his current experiments. But that didn’t mean— No. She took a steadying breath, determined to control her wandering imagination.

It had to be some sort of joke. People did not, accidentally or otherwise, zoom through time and fall in love. Jacob was from Philadelphia, she reminded herself as she gulped down brandy. He was a scientist with a bad attitude, and that was all.

“You don’t believe me,” Libby said with a sigh.

Care and patience, Sunny told herself as she dragged a hand through her hair. Her sister needed care and patience. “Honey, let’s just take this slow.”

“You think I’m making it up.”

“I’m not sure what I think.” She took a cleansing breath. “Okay, you’re trying to tell me that Cal, a former captain in—what was it?”

“The International Space Force.”

“Right. That he crashed his spaceship in the forest, after being sent through time by an encounter with a black hole.”

She’d hoped that when she said it herself, when Libby heard it repeated, her sister would come out of whatever spell she was in. But Libby just nodded. “That’s fairly accurate.”

“Fairly accurate.” Sunny tried again. “And now Jacob, going about it through more organized methods, followed the same route so he could visit with his brother.”

“He wants to take him back. I could see it by the way he looked at me.”

The misery on Libby’s face had Sunny reaching out a hand. “Cal loves you. Nothing J.T. did or didn’t do could change that.”

“No, but . . . Sunny, can’t you see? He didn’t pop up here on impulse. He must have worked for months, even years, to find the way. If a man’s obsessed with something—”

“All right,” she interrupted. “He didn’t pop up here on impulse. For reasons I’ve never fully understood, he’s angry that Cal married you and decided to live in Oregon.”

“Not just Oregon,” Libby shot back. “Twentieth-century Oregon.”

“Now, take it slow, honey. I know you’re upset, but—”

“Upset?” Libby countered. “Damn right I’m upset. The man traveled over two hundred years, and he’s not going to want to go back without Cal.”

At a loss, Sunny flopped back on the bed. “Libby, you’ve got to get ahold of yourself. You’re the sensible one, remember? You have to know this is all nonsense.”

“Okay.” Deciding on a different tack, she took a deep breath. “Can you tell me, honestly tell me, that you haven’t noticed something odd about J.T.?” She held up a hand before Sunny could answer. “Not just eccentric, not just endearingly different, but downright odd?”

“Well, I . . .”