Free Time and Again by Nora Roberts Page B

that was tomorrow. He was coming to understand that time was too precious, and too capricious, to waste.
    "I like it here." It was true. He enjoyed sitting on the cool grass, listening to the water. It made him wonder what it would be like to come back to this same spot two centuries later. What would he find?
    The mountain would be there, and possibly part of the forest that closed in around them. This same creek might still rush over these same stones. But there would be no Libby. The ache came again, dull and gnawing.
    "When I'm home again," he said very slowly, "I'll think of you here."
    Would he? She stared at the water, at the play of sunlight over it, and wished it didn't matter. "Maybe you'll come back sometime."
    "Sometime." He toyed with her fingers. She would be a ghost to him then, a woman who had existed only in a flash of time, a woman who had made him wish for the impossible. "Will you miss me?"
    "I don't know." But she didn't draw her hand away, because she realized she would miss him, more than was reasonable.
    "I think you will." He forgot his ship, his questions, his future, and concentrated on her. He began to weave the flowers he'd picked through her hair. "They name stars and moons and galaxies for goddesses," he murmured. "Because they were strong and beautiful and mysterious. Man, mortal man, could never quite conquer them."
    "Most cultures have some historical belief in mythology." She cleared her throat and began to pleat the baggy material of her slacks. "Ancient astronomers-" He turned her face to his with a fingertip.
    "I wasn't talking about myths. Though you look like one with flowers in your hair." Gently he touched a petal near her cheek. " 'There be none of Beauty's daughters/ With a magic like thee;/ And like music on the waters/ Is thy sweet voice to me."
    It was a dangerous man, she knew instinctively, who could smile like the devil and quote poetry in a voice like silk. His eyes were the color of the sky just before dusk, a deep, dreamy blue. She'd never thought she was the kind of woman who could go weak just looking into a man's eyes. She didn't want to be.
    "I should go back. I have a lot of work to do."
    "You work too much." His brow rose when she turned her head aside and frowned. "What button did I
    push?"
    Restless, more annoyed with herself than with him, she shrugged. "Someone always seems to be saying that to me. Sometimes I even say it to myself."
    "It isn't a crime, is it?"
    She laughed because his question seemed so sincere. "Not yet, anyway."
    "It's not a crime to take a day off?"
    "No, but-"
    "No's enough. Why don't we say 'It's Miller Time?' " At her baffled look, he spread his hands. "You know, like on the commercials."
    "Yes, I know." Hooking an arm around one upraised knee, she studied him. Poetry one moment, beer commercials the next. "Every now and again, Hornblower, I wonder if you're for real."
    "Oh, I'm real." He stretched out to watch the sky. The grass was cool and soft beneath him, and the wind played lazily through the trees. "What do you see? Up there?"
    She tilted her head back. "The sky. A blue one, thank goodness, with a few clouds that should clear by evening."
    "Don't you ever wonder what's beyond it?"
    "Beyond what?"
    "The blue." With his eyes half-closed, he imagined- the endless sweep of stars, the pure black of space, the beautiful symmetry of orbiting moons and planets. "Don't you ever think about the worlds up there, just out of reach?"
    "No." She saw only the arc of blue, speared through by mountains. "I suppose it's because I think more about worlds that were. My work usually keeps my feet, and my eyes, on the ground."
    "If there's going to be a world tomorrow, you have to look to the stars." He caught himself. It seemed foolish to pine for something that might be lost. How odd it was that he was thinking so much of the future, and Libby so much of the past, when they had the here and now.
    "What movies and music?" he asked abruptly. Libby shook