“Oh.” The disappointment in her eyes was brief but sincere. “Well, I hope we can get together one day. Where’s Will?” she asked Sunny.
“Making tea.”
“Of course. Please, sit down. You’re an astrophysicist?”
“That’s right.” He settled back on the sofa, with Caroline Stone opposite him and Sunny on the floor with the baby.
“J.T.’s into time travel at the moment.”
“Time travel?” Caroline smiled and crossed her slender legs. “Will’ll go crazy. Though I think parallel universes are his current interest.”
“What happened to reincarnation?”
“He’s still a staunch disciple. He’s convinced he was a member of the first Continental Congress.”
“Always the revolutionary.” Sunny tickled her brother’s belly as she smiled up at Jacob. “My father likes to pick controversial subjects so he can argue about them. Oh, look! Sam’s crawling!”
“A newly acquired skill.” With two parts pride and one part wonder, Caroline watched her chubby, towheaded son pull himself across the rug. “Will’s already taken a caseful of videos.”
“I’m entitled,” William said as he wheeled in a tea cart. “As I remember, Sunny went from crawl to walk to run so fast we hardly had time to blink.”
“And you recorded it all on that secondhand movie camera.” Caroline rose, stepped over her son, and kissed Will before she helped him with the tea.
“So...” William had already gone over his list of questions in the kitchen.“... did you just get into Portland?”
“This afternoon,” Jacob told him, and accepted his cup of tea.
“You were looking for Cal when you tracked down Sunny.”
“That’s right.” He sipped, trying to resolve himself to the fact that he was drinking Herbal Delight with the man who had invented it. “He’d given me the—” coordinates nearly slipped out “—directions to the cabin.”
“The cabin?” The teacup paused on the way to William’s lips. “You’ve been to the cabin—with Sunny?”
“We had a hell of a snowstorm last week.” Sunny laid a hand lightly on her father’s knee. “Lost power for a couple of days.”
“Together?”
She managed to keep her expression bland. “It’s hard to lose it separately in a space as small as the cabin.”
Amused, Caroline watched her son crawl over Jacob’s feet. “It’s a shame you missed Cal and Libby. I hope you plan to wait until they get back.”
The baby was chewing on his pant leg. After setting his teacup aside, Jacob reached down to set Sam in his lap. “I’ll wait.”
“Where?” William wanted to know. Sunny dug her fingers into her father’s knee.
“Did you know that J.T.’s experimenting with time travel?”
“Time travel?” Fascination warred with paternity. Paternity won. “Just how long were you two together in the mountains?”
Jacob let Sam gnaw on his index finger. “A couple of weeks.”
“Really?” His eyes narrowed, and he laid a proprietary hand on Sunny’s shoulder. “I suppose the snow kept you from making more suitable arrangements?”
Sunny rolled her eyes. Caroline sighed. Jacob ran a hand over Sam’s fine, pale hair.
“The arrangement suited me well enough.”
“I’ll bet it did.” William leaned forward, then hissed as Sunny dug again, shooting for the worn denim at his knees.