Read Online A Wife in Time (Silhouette Desire) by Cathie Linz - Free Book Online

herself trying to explain things to her boss. It wouldn’t go over well at all. She could almost hear him saying, “We’ve all got problems, but we don’t let them interfere with our work.”
    “I’ll be missed, too,” Kane said, interrupting her thoughts.
    “Leave a girlfriend back home, did you?” The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them.
    “I meant missed at work,” he replied.
    “Oh. I meant the same thing. And I’ll be missed by my family.”
    “Same here.”
    So there was no girlfriend for him back home. Interesting. “How do you think this time-travel thing works? Do you think that time is going on back there as it is here?”
    Kane shook his head. “If you’d have asked me that question yesterday, I’d have said that a situation like this was impossible. But clearly it is possible. From what I remember about Einstein’s theory, time is progressing at an equal pace. Damn, I wish I had my laptop with me! I could access that information in an instant. But who knew when I left the hotel this evening, that I’d end up here?”
    “Don’t tell me you’re helpless without your computer? Let me guess, I’ll bet you don’t know anyone’s phone number, either. Only their number on your memory bank. Am I right?”
    As if on cue, his watch chimed again.
    “Boys and their toys,” she murmured with a shake of her head.
    “I’ll have you know this watch stores thirty different phone numbers, can be set for sixty different alarm settings, and shows the time in twenty-seven cities worldwide.”
    She wasn’t impressed. “So what? It’s not going to do you any good here.”
    “I wouldn’t say that. It helped me win at tonight’s card game.”
    “Even so, you’d better take it off before anyone else notices how strange it is.” Squinting at it, she said, “How can you even read it with all those little dials and things on there?”
    “I’m not taking it off, but I will turn the alarm function off.”
    Realizing that was as much of a compromise as she was likely to get from him, she went on to the next item on her agenda. “Listen, after your comment about Lincoln, I think perhaps I should fill you in on a few important basics regarding this time period. As I said, I edited a book on the Victorian era not too long ago. I’ll try and go over a few of the high points. The period is named after Queen Victoria, of course.”
    “I know that much,” he said irritably.
    “Well, actually it’s better known as the Gilded Age in this country. Mark Twain gave it that label, as I recall. And he wasn’t being complimentary. This is the start of a period of excessive consumption and a ruthless pursuit of profit.”
    “Sounds like the 19 80s,” Kane noted.
    Susannah nodded. “There are a lot of similarities, actually. Both were periods of great innovation and invention. Electricity, the telephone, moving pictures, recordings—all these things come about in this era.”
    “The same way computers and cellular communications and other technologies were developed in the seventies and eighties of our century.”
    “That’s right. There was also a lot of fraud among the bigwigs. Fortunes were made and lost. The stock market was manipulated.”
    “Sounds like Ivan Boesky and the junk-bonds scandal. So who is the president of the United States now?”
    “Arthur.”
    “Arthur who?”
    “Chester A. Arthur.”
    “Get out of here. I don’t remember anything about a President Arthur. How can we have had a president I didn’t even know anything about?” Kane demanded, clearly not liking the feeling of being at an intellectual disadvantage.
    “He wasn’t all that memorable. The poor man didn’t even get his own party’s nomination to run for president again. He only had the three years in office, after Garfield’s assassination, because he was vice president.”
    “Jeez, and Bush thought he had it bad.”
    “Let me see, what else can I tell you...?”
    “Baseball was