Page 552 of Cold Case, Warm Hearts

Oh.Oh.

He put the baggie down, set his jacket back on the chair and said, “We’re going on a bean hunt.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I’m rewriting history.

That’s my only explanation for the fact we’ve found a twenty-year-old lead to a case I’d poured over a hundred times.

The thought has me buzzing, as if I’ve downed too much coffee, jittery and on fire. I’m not sure why we never saw the connection before, but I can’t ignore the old rush of a hot theory filling my veins.

“Let’s Google it,” I say, holding up the baggie with the burlap label, and when Eve just looks at me, I realize I’ve made yet another time-warp blunder.

Not unlike my suggestion for a digital facial recognition search. Good job, Slick. I’m not sure how much of my inadvertent future knowledge will affect the past, or,uh,the future. Except, now might be the time to invest in Google stock, right? Too bad they don’t exist yet.

Eve shoots me an appropriately odd look. “Do what?”

I rack my brain for a few seconds. “I mean Yahoo.”

She frowns but nods. “Sure. Yahoo.”

She pulls up a chair to a desktop computer stationed in a nearby cubicle and I flip around a folding chair and straddle it, leaning on the back.

I can feel the heat of the spark still lingering between us, the one I lit with my words,“I think I would start all the good things sooner.”

For a crazy second, the smell of her, the look in her eyes, something of surprise, even hope, ignites a different sort of buzz under my skin. Because Iknowthat look. It’s the same expression I get when she puts down her book, late at night, when she just wants me to ease away the ache of the day.

It’s the hint of vulnerability Eve so rarely shows. The hard-wrought intimacy we fought to find after our many dating starts-and-stops.

However, while my twenty-eight year old body stirs with the memories in my head, in that moment it’s the fifty-two year old, well-married man inside me that longs to wrap my fingers through her hair, pull her close, anchor myself to something familiar.

Something known. Something mine. No. Ours.

Except for Silas. His timely appearance brought me up short, reminded me that Eve is not mine. Yet.

She’s young and eager, still relatively innocent and I am, in experience, if not in body, a much older man.

Which makes my impulses suddenly awkward and not a little creepy, and I’m possessed with the strangest urge to protect her.

From myself.

This is really getting weird.

She searches forGood Earthcoffee and finds a listing. Not a website, apparently the world isn’t quite that sophisticated yet, but a piece of data with relevant info.

“The company is located in Brazil, with distribution worldwide,” Eve says, reading from the site.

“There has to be a connection,” I say, not because it’s such a rare and unique deduction, but I’m reaching a point of desperation. “It’s our only known link between the two bombings.”

I don’t continue my thought that it’s also the only link to tomorrow’s horror. Unfortunately, yesterday’s search didn’t raise even a sliver of memory.

At this rate, I’ll need some kind of miracle to stop tomorrow’s bombing.

If I even can. Because suddenly every time paradox I’ve ever read whirls through my brain.

Is my failure already written into the timeline, no more than fated scenes about to play out and etched in stone? Or, can I stop it, and if so, does all of history change? Will I wake up to a new life tomorrow?

That brings me to the conundrum that I might actually be stuck here, right? How does one return to their time when they don’t know how they got here in the first place? Art said only,I think so,to my question. I don’t know about you, but in my book that isn’t the reassurance I was hoping for. My watch is still ticking, so, that has to mean something, but what if I’m stuck here forever?

---