Page 112 of Flirting with Forever

She laughed.

He handed it back to her, and she unhooked the clasp, slipped the ring off the chain, and placed it on her finger. “Thank you, Jacket.”

He reached out and pulled her into a tight embrace. “I love you, Cam.”

“I love you too.”

With a final squeeze, he shook himself loose. He started for the door, then stopped himself. “Do you need help with Ball?”

She shook her head. “Nah. I’ll be fine. What’s a couple million between friends, right?”

He smiled. “Right. I’ll see you downstairs, then.”

“Yep.”

When he reached the hall, he turned. “He’d better fucking deserve you.”

Yep. He’d better.

Fifty-three

Peter stumbled blindly out of Anastasia’s office, ashamed of the trouble he’d caused and furious that he was powerless to rectify it.

No one—not the lowest brute—deserves what I’ve wrought.

He’d devised the plan with the sangfroid of a spider, dictating the wording to Van Dyck and placing the letter in his pocket sketchbook before going to Mertons’s workshop. He’d regretted the plan as blackguardly almost as soon as he’d begun it and changed his mind about going through with it before arriving on Cam’s doorstep, but that carried no weight with him in the moral calculation now. If the letter hadn’t been in his sketchbook, Anastasia would not have had the opportunity to steal it that day at the coffee shop. His selfish maneuvering had deprived Cam of a future and her profession. Mertons had been right when he’d said traveling to his future was akin to yelling “fire” in a crowded theater. Peter had destroyed her happiness, and she didn’t even know the extent or the cause—that is, until he could tell her and beg her forgiveness.

He stopped, unsurprised even in his distracted state to find himself at Cam’s office door.

His breath caught. Jacket had Cam in his arms. It was not a lover’s embrace, but it was filled with an abiding affection, and Peter tried to convince himself to be glad. This, after all, was the man who would care for her when he was gone.

He pulled himself away from the door. One thing settled. But there was more he needed to do for her. He turned and headed for the stairs.

Fifty-four

Alone, Cam slumped against the desk and stared, unseeing, at the small unfinished painting sitting there. The events of the day were threatening to overwhelm her, and the gala hadn’t even begun. Saying good-bye to Jacket felt like a door had closed in her life with an abrupt slam. She felt adrift, rudderless, uncertain of Peter or her future. More than anything, she longed to see Peter, to find out what he knew about that letter and to be reassured that what she had jettisoned everything for still existed.

She sensed a presence in the doorway and turned expectantly.

But it was Mertons, who regarded her with curiosity.

“Good evening, Miss Stratford. Do you know where I might find Peter?”

There was an undercurrent there she didn’t like. Her time with Peter couldn’t be over after only a few hours. It would be too cruel. “No,” she lied. “I haven’t seen him. Why?”

But the effusive, deferential Mertons of a few days ago was gone. He entered her office as if she were not present and scanned each of her bookshelves in succession. He was a man on a mission, and Cam could guess what it was. She had to work hard not to look at her laptop.

“Something I can do for you?” she asked.

“Miss Stratford, I’m going to be honest with you. We know how you’re traveling.”

“You do?” She forced her eyes forward.

“Yes. We’ve fixed the time tube to a book. Inside the Artist’s Studio.”

Cam felt a faint sweat rise on her scalp. “Really?”

“We believe there’s a time tube linked to a book in Romania. But we’ve had that copy under observation for years, so we thought you were relying on some other method, some hole we hadn’t yet discovered. However, the most recent calculations show a very similar Brown coefficient. Obviously you have found a way to get a copy.”