Free Time Enough for Love by Suzanne Brockmann Page A

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 herseat 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 unnaturally 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. Andthen 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 airportand 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.
    But by then, Chuck and Maggie would have already returned to