It was a fantastic story, fantastic in the most literal sense of the word. Perhaps it wouldn’t seem quite as fantastic in Cal’s time. How would his people react to him when he returned, when he told his tale? The accidental explorer, she thought with a smile. Well, Columbus had been looking for India when he’d discovered the New World.

She liked to think that he would be treated as a kind of hero, that he was a man whose name would be in history books.

He had the look of a hero, she mused, daydreaming a little as her glasses slipped down her nose. Tall and tough. The bandage over his brow added a rakish look—as the week’s growth of beard had before he’d shaved it. For her, she remembered, and felt the deep glow of pleasure.

He was, perhaps, an ordinary man in his time. A man, she supposed, who did his job as others did, who groaned over getting up in the morning, one who occasionally drank too much or forgot to pay bills. He wasn’t wealthy or brilliant or wildly successful. He was simply Caleb Hornblower, a man who had taken a wrong turn and become extraordinary.

To her, he would never be just a man. He would always be the man.

Would she love again? No, Libby thought with the calm of absolute certainty. She would be content, somehow, with her work and her family, with her memories. But to love again would be impossible. She had, even as a child, believed that there would be only one man for her. Perhaps that was why it had always been so easy for her to concentrate on studies and career while her contemporaries had drifted in and out of relationships and fallen in and out of love.

She hated making mistakes. Libby smiled a little reluctantly at the admission. It was a flaw, certainly, one of pride, but she had always detested the idea of taking a misstep, personally or professionally. That was why she studied harder than most, researched more thoroughly, considered more carefully.

It had paid off, she reflected as she pushed a few buttons and had her dissertation flashing onto the screen. She was young for the degree of success she’d achieved. And she intended to achieve a great deal more.

She was old, perhaps, to be having her first love affair. But caution and care hadn’t led her astray. Loving Cal would never be a mistake.

Content, she pushed her glasses more securely on her nose, leaned forward and went to work.

***

He found her there hours later, her posture long forgotten, absorbed in a culture as different from hers as hers was to Cal. She’d switched on the desk lamp at dusk, and the light slanted across her hands.