Page 81 of Flirting with Forever

“Drop my book?”

“Yes.”

“Did Peter send you?”

“No. In fact, he would be considerably unhappy to know I was here.”

“Well, I’d certainly hate to be the cause of any unhappiness for him.”

Mertons paused, clicked his pencil a time or two. His gaze cut to the rolled-up paper, then back to Cam. “May I show you something?”

“Sure.” She picked up her wine and tossed back a large gulp. It seemed only a moment ago that the Cabernet had had flavor.

He turned the paper facedown on the table and went over to the suitcase. It was a large beige hard-sided valise with leather straps and buckles, the sort her grandfather might have traveled with. “Gee, where are you heading? Nineteen forty-two?”

He gave a weak laugh, but only enough to remind her that that might be exactly where a time-jump accountant was traveling. She wondered if he used Amazon too. Jeanne swore the laptop had been turned off the night he and Peter arrived, which had baffled Cam. But he must not know about Amazon’s unique “Look Inside!” feature, since he clearly didn’t have the faintest idea how she traveled.

He opened the buckles and cracked the top. Using both hands, he pulled a painting out of the case and set it on the table.

It was her. Done by Peter. She wore the olive dressing gown she had worn that night, but it was not quite the pose she remembered. Her hair, which had been pinned up that night in his studio, fell loosely over her shoulder. Instead of frank eroticism, the look in her eyes was one of relaxed delight. And most important, she was clothed. The painting was an imagined moment of quiet joy, one that had not occurred, and she looked at it without knowing quite what to say.

“That’s not the painting from that night, is it?”

“No, but it was painted soon after. And many more were painted here.”

“Here? Peter’s still here?” She’d assumed Peter had left. “Why?”

“He says his desire is to stop you from writing your book.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? You’re not going to suggest that that isn’t his desire, are you?”

“No. I just wondered if there might be another reason for his single-mindedness.”

Her gaze went from the painting to the veiled hint in Mertons’s eyes. “Look,” she said with an iron edge, “the man gave me a bullshit story that nearly ruined me as a writer.”

“He did it for a friend. Under duress. I know. I helped make it possible.”

“Well, thanks a hell of a lot. You and Peter can take your little two-man Mean Boys act and go back to the seventeenth century.”

“Peter can’t go back.”

“What? Is his foot caught in a time crack? Tell him to hook that DeLorean up to a lightning rod. One-point-twenty-one jiggowatts of electricity shooting up his ass is just the thing to get him moving on his way.”

“You’re thinking of the Peter of 1673. The Peter you and I know lives in another place. The Afterlife. He’s dead.”

She nearly dropped her wine. “What are you saying?”

Mertons sighed. “The Afterlife is where we go when we die. You, me, Peter, anyone you’ve ever known. Some stay forever, but only if they’ve reached the end of all the lives they were meant to live. Most wait for a new life to be assigned. While Peter was waiting for his new-life-to-be, he was asked to return to his former life for a short assignment—stopping you. He had no wish to return and accepted the task with great reluctance.”

“He didn’t appear very reluctant.” She thought of those lips as she and Peter stood on the balcony that night. There wasn’t a movement he’d made that had seemed even remotely hesitant.

“Then I’d assert you don’t know him very well.”

She made a peremptory sniff, and her eyes returned to the painting. It certainly seemed to have been drawn with honest regard. She looked at the curls framing her shoulders and felt a shiver as she remembered him removing that hairpin. “And this is what he’s been working on?”

Her companion’s moral superiority appeared to weaken. “Peter’s been working on a number of projects,” he said obscurely.

“So what are you telling me? I should stop the book because Peter found a conscience and now has feelings for me?”