He didn’t know what the child was talking about, and in his hesitation Erica leaned over him and reached for some sort of wide belt hidden beside his shoulder, which she pulled across him and fastened into a metal holder that lay between their two seats.
He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply as she did so, taking in the pleasant scent of what could only be her warm, feminine body. Scents that had all but disappeared in his time.
What a mistake that was.
She drove out into the street and Sean turned his attention to the business at hand. “Where is the boy’s father?” he asked Erica. Even her name was sensual, the sound of it resonating through his brain almost as much as her enthralling scent.
“My daddy went to heaven before I was born,” Andrew said.
Sean tried to mask his shock. He knew that the father of the man who’d developed Fusion XJ had died a few months prior to his son’s birth. Which meant that the child –this child –was the inventor.
And Sean was meant to stop him, using whatever method he deemed necessary. Many of the members of GreenPiece believed Andrew Gibson-Booth would have to be killed.
Sean swallowed hard. He was no child-killer. But what was he supposed to do? GreenPiece had sent him back to deal with the scientist who’d invented Fusion XJ. Clearly, the records they’d pieced together were wrong. Gibson-Booth must have patented the process years later, certainlynotin 2015, as they’d concluded. Sean had come twenty or thirty years too early.
The boy resembled his mother – he had fair skin, though his hair was more yellow than red. His bright, intelligent, green eyes watched the road.
Sean could easilyslideahead in time in order to deal with Andrew as an adult, but he could not quite bring himself to leave the Erica Gibson-Booth of 2010, possibly to face her twenty or thirty years in the future.
She drove through traffic, and Sean’s attention was violently whipped away from his quandary by the speed they were travelling in her uncontrolled vehicle. There were no laz-tracks to keep thisand the rest of the speeding vehicles in place, nothing preventing them from careening into one another.
“How fast does this vehicle travel?” he asked.
Erica shot him a sidelong glance and he felt more than a small degree of alarm, wishing she would keep her eyes on the road. “You’re not from Chicago, are you?”
He swallowed, hanging on tightly to the sides of his seat. “Why do you say that?”
“Your white knuckles,” she responded with a laugh. “Don’t worry, I’ve been driving in this kind of traffic for a long time.”
He shuddered as Erica pulled to a stop in front of an old house and got out of the car. Andrew did the same, so Sean followed suit.
“I’ll pick you up in the morning, sweetheart,” Erica said to her son, “as usual.”
“OK,” the boy replied.
“I love you, baby,” she said, crouching down to pull the boy into a tight hug.
“I’m not a baby,” Andrew said as he kissed his mother’s cheek. “I love you, too, Mommy.”
“Behave for Carolyn.”
Even at a distance, Sean could feel the strength of their bond and the power of their emotions. And he realized that it was yet another aspect of humanity that had been lost with the development of Fusion XJ. Love wasn’t a highly valued item in his time. Logic and progress, intelligence and order were the qualities that mattered.
As Erica turned her son over to the smiling woman at the house, Sean tried to sort out the situation. Erica was on her way to work, and she had just dropped her son at a place where he would be under supervision overnight. Now she would go to her lab, and she obviously believed that Sean was associated with her work there. He was not going to disabuse her of that belief until he could figure out what to do. About Andrew.
“Ready?” she asked him.
It must be an idiom, because of course he was ready. She was the one who’d needed to stop. He nodded and got back into the vehicle. Reluctantly. She resumed driving, and he found himself adjusting to the speed, and becoming even more aware of her.
The vehicle’s cabin was small, the seats close together. His thighwas touching hers, and the slight contact made the electrons in his skin switch charges.
At least, that’s what it felt like.
Her scent intrigued him, as did the sway of her hair. She glanced at him, her gorgeous eyes appraising him, looking at him in a way that was completely unfamiliar. Sean wondered if—
No. She could not possibly be showing sexual interest. Could she?
“Where are you from?” she asked.
