Time Enough for Love (22 page)

“I don’t care what they think,” Maggie told him. “I’m just glad that it’s over.”

Charles nodded. His eyes were soft as he touched her hair, as his thumb stroked her cheek.

“So,” she said a bit breathlessly, “you’re off to New York.”

Something shifted in his eyes. “I am.”

Silence. Maggie broke it by clearing her throat. “So,” she said again. “I guess I’m wondering if you’re going to ask me to come along, or if you’re going to let me slip away. What’s it gonna be, Charlie? Are you going to spend the next seven years pining away for me the way you did the first time around?”

Her words didn’t get the smile she expected. In
fact, he took them dead seriously, not as the rather lame joke she’d intended.

“I think,” he said slowly, “I’m the only man in the world who can learn from mistakes that I haven’t even made yet.” He paused, and Maggie nearly drowned in the midnight darkness of his eyes. “Maggie, please do me the honor of becoming my wife and come to New York with me.”

Maggie laughed, then grimaced in pain. Of all the things she’d suspected he’d say,
that
wasn’t one of them. Marry her. He wanted to
marry
her. Was it possible …?

Maggie searched his eyes and found what she was looking for.
Yes.
He loved her. It wasn’t like Chuck’s love—fueled by years of disappointment and frustration and pain. Instead it was new and fresh, like her own love for him, accompanied by wonder and delight and that ever-burning heat of desire. Her eyes filled with tears. “Oh, Charlie—”

He leaned over and kissed her gently.

“I love you, Maggie,” he told her, almost as an afterthought. “You have no idea how much.”

Maggie smiled. “Yes, I do. And yes, I’ll marry you.”

She knew that he loved her just from looking into his eyes.

But she sure did like to hear the words.

H
E STOOD IN
the bedroom, dizzy, wondering what he was doing there. He’d come upstairs to get something and then …

The room seemed somehow different to him. The carpeting softer, the colors more subdued, the floral-patterned bedspread unfamiliar. And the view out the window …

It wasn’t the desert. Instead of the flat arid landscape, he found himself looking out at snow-covered hills. New England, he remembered suddenly. This wasn’t Arizona. It was Massachusetts.

It was Thanksgiving in Massachusetts. It was their third Thanksgiving in this house in this little town that he and Maggie loved so much.

Maggie …

He turned as he heard her push open the door, as she came into the bedroom.
Their
bedroom.

She was wearing a dark blue velvet dress that swept all the way to the ground and almost entirely concealed her softly swelling abdomen. Their second baby. She was pregnant with their second child. She wore her hair down around her shoulders, and as she gazed at him she looked so beautiful, his breath caught in his throat.

His wife. Of nearly seven years now.

“Are you okay?” she asked softly.

He nodded, unable to speak. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been this happy. Yet, at the same time, he
could
remember. He could remember every single day of the past seven years, waking up with Maggie in his bed. He remembered the joy of shared mornings and the quiet intimacy of late nights spent talking and making love.

He remembered the afternoon nearly three years earlier when he’d helped his wife give birth to their daughter, Annie. He remembered holding their precious baby in his arms, of rocking her to sleep. He remembered the chubby toddler Annie had become, the way she raced to greet him every day when he came home from work. He remembered it all. It was
so good, so sweet. It was the life he’d always dreamed of having.

He could tell from the way Maggie was standing, from the look in her eyes, that she knew. She stepped forward unhesitatingly, into his embrace, and he held her tightly, so much so that he was afraid he might hurt her. But she held him just as close.

“Hello, Chuck,” she whispered.

“Mags.” It was all he could manage to say before he kissed her.

It was funny. The pain in his leg. The fever from the bullet wound. Gone. All gone. All of the anger and resentment and bitterness he’d carried with him for so long was gone. Just like that. Gone. He’d thought he’d simply be gone as well, but he’d been wrong.…

He wasn’t gone. He was back in his own time. But it was a different time. A better time.

And he was Chuck, but … he wasn’t. He felt so different. So happy. So at peace and so content with his life.

He’d thought that wanting Maggie so desperately for seven years, that loving her from a distance, had made his love so powerful, so sharp and strong.

But he realized now that the love he felt in those rapidly fading memories was nothing compared
with the incredible love that had grown from having and holding her for the past seven years.

He didn’t want to be Chuck. And he wasn’t. Not anymore. Not ever again.

She pulled back to gaze into his eyes, and it was as if she could read his mind. She gave him one of her wonderful, gorgeous smiles. “You’re Charlie now.”

He managed to smile, too, despite the tears in his eyes. “I am. Thank God.” And he was. The memories he had of the past seven years of his life with Maggie were so much stronger, so much more real than the ghostly echo of that other life he’d had.

Maggie stood on her toes to kiss him again, and Charlie felt himself sigh.

He was Charlie Della Croce, and he was home.

Turn the page for a sneak peek at the first original paperback romance from
New York Times
bestselling author Suzanne Brockmann in more than six years

Infamous

Available from Ballantine Books in September 2010

Jubilation, Arizona
Present day

T
HE SON OF
a bitch was going to make her lie.

Sons of bitches, Alison Carter corrected herself, because her adorable new friend Hugh was part of this hideous charade. In fact, it was rapidly becoming crystal clear that this—her impending lie—was the young production assistant’s reason for bringing her here, to this undetermined level of hell. Oh, it looked like the dusty street outside of movie star Trace Marcus’s huge trailer, but it was definitely hell.

The morning sky was clear and so blue it hurt Alison’s eyes. It was barely 8:30, and the desert sun was already much too hot on the back of her neck.

“Who is she?” Trace’s wife demanded through her tears, her mascara making black streaks down what had once been a ridiculously pretty face. Now she just looked ridiculous, the plastic surgery she’d had leaving her looking perpetually surprised as she confronted her philandering husband. “I want to know—I
deserve
to know!”

“I hate you,” Alison murmured to Hugh, who, with his tastefully messed red hair, hazel eyes, and athletically trim body, remained adorable despite his dragging her into this.

“Trace needs to be in makeup in twenty minutes,” he murmured back as he pulled her closer to this snake pit of domestic non-bliss. “Ninety-seven thousand dollars an hour …”

That was his default answer to almost anything—his recitation of the enormous amount of money it was costing director Henry Logan’s production company to bring this movie—
Quinn
—to the big screen.

And it was true that if an actor were late to the set, money would, indeed, pour from the company’s veins as dozens of crew members stood around, uselessly waiting for the star to undiva his or her ass and get down to work.

So far, it had happened four different times, courtesy of Trace Marcus.

“Who is she, Tracey?” Marcus’s wife asked him again. His creepy and ever-present personal assistant, Skip, mumbled something in his low-talker’s voice that Alison couldn’t hear, but the wife could and she snapped, “Shut up, Skippy, I wasn’t asking
you
.”

Alison couldn’t remember Mrs. Marcus’s name, but she, like her husband, had been a huge star back when she was in her late teens, early twenties.

Which really wasn’t
that
long ago.

Trace had started celebrating his thirty-third birthday last night. Thirty-three, and he was in desperate need of a “come back,” which playing Silas Quinn was designed to provide.

No doubt about it, this was a crazy, crazy business Alison was dipping her toe into here. And she’d always thought the academic world was a little nuts.

But here she was, standing in the dust beneath the blistering hot sun, ready to provide an alibi for a man who wasn’t just a crazy actor, but was also a card-carrying moron. It was his freaking birthday. Today. A degree in rocket science wasn’t needed to theorize that since it was his birthday, it was highly likely that his loving wife was going to show up here on location, to surprise him with a visit.

Instead Trace had surprised her. Eleanor. That was her name. Although it really shouldn’t have been that big of a surprise for Eleanor to find her husband’s trailer rocking, not after ten long years spent married to the man. He was a dog. Surely she knew that by now. He couldn’t keep his pants zipped to save his life; forget about saving his marriage.

The day Trace had arrived on set, not five minutes after stepping into the much smaller trailer which was Alison’s new office, he’d hit on her—and she’d been so startled she’d laughed in his face.

Which was a mistake, because he now avoided her like the swine flu.

As the official historical consultant for this film, as the author of the latest definitive book about the shoot-out at the Red Rock Saloon, Alison had a wealth of information about the details of Silas Quinn’s life. She had a file with newspaper clippings and rare photos. Pictures of Quinn with Melody, taken shortly after their wedding. Pictures of the deceptively pleasant-looking Kid Gallagher gambling in San Francisco. Pictures Trace should want to see as he worked to bring Quinn back to life in this big-budget, high-profile movie.

Alison even had an actual cigar box that the marshal had once kept upon his desk, along with the
Bible that the man had carried with him for most of his too short life, even though he’d never had time to learn to read.

Filming had started, but Trace wasn’t interested in seeing any of that material, because Alison had thought he was joking when he’d offered to do her on her desk, the way he’d done to Gina Gershon’s character in
Last Cowboy Standing
.

And yes, the man was almost freakishly handsome with his dark hair and brown eyes, with that trademark Marcus smile. All of the excess weight he’d put on in his late twenties had finally turned into man-muscle. True, he no longer could play a scene without his shirt, but he was now the perfect size to play Silas Quinn, who’d been a full-grown, incredibly attractive bear of a man.

Still, Trace’s offer had been absurd.

And maybe Alison was unused to the ways of Hollywood, coming as she had from Boston College’s history department, where doing it on one’s desk with a married man was usually frowned upon, independent of whether or not one was a Gina Gershon fan.

And so she’d laughed at his proposal. Loudly.

In Trace’s handsome face.

She’d seen, right away, that he was affronted, and she’d immediately apologized and even thanked
him—which felt beyond strange—telling him that casual sex just wasn’t her thing.

Which was not a lie. It was just not usually something she had to tell a man within five minutes of meeting him.

“Let’s move this inside,” Hugh suggested now, talking to Skippy, who tried to herd them toward the trailer door, but Eleanor clearly liked having an audience.

“I heard him in there, fucking some slut,” she told them, the crass language oddly jarring, spoken as it was in her little girl voice. She spoke loudly enough so that the growing crowd of extras and crew could hear her, too. “So I left, but then I thought, Why am I always the one running away? So I came back, but she was already gone, and now he says it wasn’t him in there, that he was at a meeting—at eight o’clock in the morning when his call isn’t until eleven … Like I’m supposed to believe that?”

“Trace
was
in a meeting,” Hugh lied effortlessly as he tried to pull Alison even closer.

But she’d gone as far as she was willing to go. She pinched him and he released her, giving her a look that meant … what? That she was disappointing him? Seriously?

“See, I
was
in a meeting,” Trace echoed, the slightest tinge of relief making his words rush together as
he looked at Hugh and realized that they had come to rescue him. Particularly after Hugh pointed surreptitiously toward Alison. “Researching my character. With Professor, um …”

“Carter,” Hugh helpfully filled in, because the man had apparently forgotten Alison’s name. He thumbed his BlackBerry as if the star’s schedule were on his personal calendar. “It was … Yes, at seven thirty.
A.M.
A breakfast meeting. In Dr. Carter’s office. Which is over with the rest of the production trailers.”

And now Eleanor was looking at Alison, sizing her up with her neon blue contact lens–enhanced eyes, her fading suspicion mingling with her hope and relief as Hugh kept spewing his bullcrap.

“She’s tremendously busy. Dr. Carter. She needs to approve the costumes for every extra—and we’ve got a lot of them on set for the next few weeks. Plus she looks at every single script revision, every tweak in the dialogue. The only open time she had to talk to Trace was early this morning.”

Alison stayed silent, holding her breath, praying that Eleanor didn’t ask her outright about this alleged breakfast meeting—uncertain as to whether or not she’d actually go along with Hugh’s bald-faced lie when pressed.

Except, really, she was already going along with the lie, just by standing there as Hugh’s exhibit A.

But Eleanor turned back to Trace to ask, “Why didn’t you just say so?”

“I did,” he lied again, indignant now at the injustice of her accusations. What a prick. “I said,
Someone must’ve been in my trailer, because it wasn’t me
, but you weren’t listening. You were blah, blah, blah, bitching and moaning, ready to assume the worst the way you always fucking do—”