A Witch In Time by Madelyn Alt Page B

much, all you had to do was say so,” he quipped, backing me up to the elevator wall and moving in to nip playfully at my neck. “I’m more than happy to oblige.”
    For once, his flirtation didn’t faze me. Impatient, I brushed him away. “Shh.” I pressed my ear tightly to the closed crack in the door.
    Marcus lifted his brows ever so slightly. “Maggie . . . what are you doing?” he asked in the slow, exceedingly patient way a person might address someone who had suddenly gone off the deep end. “Don’t you want to select a floor?”
    I waved my hand at him in a shushing gesture. “Shh! I’m trying to see if I can hear them. Oh, I hope they haven’t disappeared.”
    “Who?”
    “Shh!”
    “Okay, okay. Shushing.”
    I listened, hard, pinching my eyes and straining with the effort to hear the voices that had carried to me before on the wings of... what? Fate? Kismet? Or just plain bad luck?
    “Maggie.” When I didn’t answer right away, Marcus tried again more insistently, tugging at the hem of my blouse. “Maggie? Hey, what’s going on?”
    Frustrated, I eased back away from the closed door. “I think they’ve gone,” I wailed. “I can’t hear a thing. Damn. Damn, damn, damn. Maybe we should go down a few floors and try again.”
    Marcus turned me toward him and put his hands, warm and soothing, on my shoulders. “Who has gone?” he prompted.
    “I don’t know who. I don’t know!” I shook my head in frustration. Of course they’d gone. Clearly my questionable luck of the evening was holding steady.
    “Shh, shh.” He pressed a kiss to my forehead, his lips remaining in place until the strength and reassurance they at once conveyed pulsed through me in a calming wave. “I think you’d better tell me what happened. What has you so worked up, hm?” He cast an eye around us in the closed elevator. “I think I’d prefer another spot, though.”
    So would I, now that I realized there was no chance of discovering the identity of the two men who had been so blithely discussing heaven knows what.
    And that was partly the trouble, and the reason I wanted so desperately to understand. I didn’t know what they were talking about, and yet it had me worried. Was that so unreasonable ? After all the cumulative... experiences of the last ten months, I think I had earned the right to be wary.
    Marcus punched the button that opened the doors and led me by the hand out onto the Labor and Delivery floor to a quiet grouping of comfy chairs at the end of the hall—away from the waiting room that held my mother, father, and grandfather, thank goodness. I needed a breather. “Okay. Now. Tell me. Beginning to end. What’s going on?”
    It all came out in a rush, the conversation I’d overheard and the sinister tone of it. Marcus was frowning as I finished recapping the tale.
    “And you don’t know where the two men were speaking from?” he asked. I was glad that my hands were still held sheltered within his, because mine were trembling and I couldn’t make them stop.
    I shook my head. “No. I have no idea. I don’t know if they were on the same floor that the elevator was stuck on or whether their voices were carrying from some other floor. I just don’t know.”
    “But you’re worried.”
    “Why wouldn’t I be? With everything that the two of them said? That was not a normal conversation to be having, Marcus.”
    But my lovely new boyfriend seemed all of a sudden determined to play devil’s advocate as he hedged, “I can see how upset you are. And in light of everything else that was going on at the time I can see how it would have sounded bad. Suspect, even. Come on, Maggie.” He playfully joggled my hand around in an attempt to get me to loosen up. “Don’t you think you’re getting yourself all worked up for nothing? You have absolutely nothing to go on here. Did they really say anything at all? If you had a chance to think about it, you would see that it could feasibly be, and