Time Enough for Love Read Free Page A

was already sitting down. But now he towered over her.
    He sat down quickly, as if he could read the sudden fear in her eyes. “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I didn’t mean to—”
    “I have to go,” she told him. It was the truth. She’d already lost more than an hour of her workday thanks to him, and she had a deadline to make, writing copy for an upscale landscaper’s brochure. She should be thinking of ways to describe mulching and privacy shrubbery instead of wasting her time with incredible tales of presidential assassination and Wizard-9 agents told by a too-handsome escapee from a mental hospital.
    She was a fool for coming in the first place. It was her attraction to this man that made her meet him here—and that made her an even bigger fool. What did she honestly think? That he was potential boyfriend material? A lunatic who walked around naked and thought he came from the future?
    She’d never considered herself a particularly good judge of character when it came to men, but this situation was a no-brainer.
    He was trying to hide his desperation the same way he’d tried to hide the fact that his hands wereshaking. He was good at hiding things. When he spoke, his voice was calm, and when he looked up at her again, his manner was cool, almost distant. He’d even managed to lose some of the heat in his liquid brown eyes. “Maggie, what can I say to make you believe me? To make you stay?”
    He was remarkably attractive with the restaurant’s dim mood lighting casting shadows across his rugged features. He was good-looking despite the grim set to his mouth and the clenched tightness of his jaw.
    It was funny, she’d never found the Clint Eastwood type of man so attractive before. She usually preferred a Tom Hanks. Sensitivity with a healthy dose of good humor usually won out over ominous, smoldering danger any day.
    And this man sitting across from her
did
exude danger with the start of a five o’clock shadow darkening the lower half of his face, his damp longish hair swept back from his forehead, and blood from his wounded shoulder seeping through the thin cotton of his borrowed T-shirt. Fortunately, from where she was sitting, she couldn’t see the Santa pants.
    She pulled the strap of her handbag over her shoulder. “Well, you might’ve tried telling me that I’m going to win the lottery next year rather than all that doom and gloom about a failed marriage.”
    He shook his head. “But that wouldn’t be true.”
    Maggie felt a flash of pity. Poor crazy guy. He actually believed all that he’d told her.
    “I really have to go.” She looked down at her half-empty glass of beer and his barely touched coffee. “I don’t suppose you have the money to pay for this.”
    He looked embarrassed. “Not at this time, no. I used an early prototype to make the leap back. It was in my basement—the Wizard-9 agents didn’t know about it. It was less sophisticated than the final version of the Runabout, and because of that I could take nothing with me—not even my clothes.”
    “Well,
there
’s a convenient explanation for why you were walking around naked.” Maggie opened her purse, took a twenty-dollar bill from her wallet, and set it down on the table. “Keep the change, Nostradamus, all right?”
    “I’ll pay you back.”
    “Don’t bother.”
    “I will. I’ll bring it to you tomorrow.”
    His quiet words stopped her, and she turned to look back at him. “I’d rather you just stayed away from my house. In fact, if I see you again, I’m going to have to call the police and—”
    “Then maybe I better warn you. We’re going tomeet for the first time in just a few days,” he told her. “At Data Tech’s Thanksgiving party.”
    Maggie took a step back toward him, startled. Data Tech. She’d recently signed a contract with Data Tech to write a prospectus for a public offering. And the ink on a second contract with the software giant—this one for editing an annual report—was barely