Shades of the Past (3 page)

She managed a smile. “I’ll be sure to keep a look-out.”

“They’re supposed to be lucky, so you do that, miss.”

She smiled again. “Well, I guess I’ll go home now. Good night
,
Fred.”

“Good night, miss.”

She suddenly felt the need to quit the theater as quickly as possible. A gray lady and a one-eyed cat? She’d just seen many more theater ghosts than
two
!

She hurried back to the dressing room, grabbed her coat and other things, then left, hardly noticing the January wind and rain as she stood on the sidewalk to call a cab. Nor did she notice the lingering intrusion of the past in the form of Lady Lowestoft’s carriage further along Haymarket.

Estelle saw her, though. Not the Laura of the future, but Regency Laura, her hood raised as she took leave of Miles and Stephen by the alley to the stage door. It amused Miles to delay her by drawing her fingers to his lips in false gallantry, cupping her hand in both his, as if in adoration. To Estelle it seemed the tender gesture of a man in love.

Lord Sivintree’s carriage drove past, and the earl glanced out, observing the scene by the theater door. The moment Miles released her hand, Laura seized her chance to get away. She hurried across the cobble street to the line of hackney coaches drawn up by a nearby corner.

Estelle lifted her veil for a moment. There was anguish in her too-bright hazel eyes, and her hand shook as she pressed the unicorn ring to her trembling lips. Then she lowered the veil again and ordered her coachman to follow the hackney coach, but the hired vehicle had already disappeared in the crush of horses and vehicles at the end of Haymarket.

Tendrils of the past still reached out beguilingly to modern Laura as she got out of the modern cab in Berkeley Square, but she was determined to find a rational explanation for what had happened. The whole company had been working very hard getting ready for tonight’s gala, and she’d just overdone it a little. Ghosts didn’t exist, nor time travel, but an overactive imagination certainly did!

“You need that vacation in the Cotswolds, Laura, my girl,” she muttered as she let herself into the apartment.

The exquisitely furnished Art Deco rooms were deserted; Jenny wouldn’t get back until dawn, and Lily and the fourth girl, Davina Huntley, were on a skiing vacation in Gstaad.

Well, Laura Reynolds wasn’t going to dwell on imaginary goings-on! Taking a deep, determined breath, she forced the whole business from her mind, undressed, and took a shower. Luxuriating in the splash of warm water over her body, she closed her eyes and raised her face to the spray, remembering times when she and Kyle had showered together. How handsome he’d been, with his golden curls and vivid blue eyes. And that come-hither smile ...

She could almost feel him with her now, his strong body pressed to hers, his knowing fingers teasing her nipples with caresses that filled her with desire. She remembered how she’d soaped her hands and run them all over him.
All
over him! Erotic thoughts drifted deliciously into her head as she slid her soapy hands sensuously over her wet skin. She trembled as the seductive memories became so real she could almost feel his erection, as hard as rock, pressing urgently between her legs. Almost, but not quite.

With a sigh, she turned the shower to a lower temperature. “Cool down, Laura, the only hot thing for you tonight is a mug of cocoa,” she muttered wryly.

She finished the shower and dried herself, wishing she didn’t yearn for so many aspects of her time with Kyle. It was the simple things, like waking up beside him in the morning, or cuddling up to watch a movie on TV. And the sex. Yes, there had been good times, but Kyle McKenna was a shallow cheat. True love—deep, emotional, and complete—was something he’d never encountered, and wasn’t much interested in. She, on the other hand, had always yearned for such a love, and stupidly believed she’d found it with him. She
would
find it one day, though, and wouldn’t let it slip through her fingers.

She went to make the promised cocoa, and was about to go to bed when she noticed the telephone answer machine blinking. It was a message for Jenny from Alun. His lilting Welsh voice was rushed.

“Jen, sweetheart, it’s Alun. I have to nip over to Dijon for a week or so—business, I’m afraid—so unless you can get down here to the hotel earlier than planned, we won’t see each other until I get back. Try to come, there’s a love. I know you won’t get this message until after your big night at the Hannover, so I’ll just say I hope it all went magnificently. See you very soon, I hope. Oh, and tell Laura I've created a mocha dessert just for her, because I know what a sweet tooth she has. I’m going to call it
Meringues Laura
. Anyway, bye
cariad
, sleep tight.”

Laura smiled, and turned toward her bedroom, but then something made her glance toward the mirror over the drawing room mantelpiece. What she saw reflected in it wasn’t the dazzling Art Deco room she stood in, but a candlelit Georgian bedroom with a bed that was sumptuously hung with gold-fringed grey velvet.

Her heartbeats quickened uneasily as she crossed to look more closely. The alien room remained, as she slowly put her cocoa on the mantelshelf, next to a Lalique figurine. At any moment she expected to find the reflection as it should be, but even though she blinked deliberately, she still saw the Georgian bedroom. Instinct told her she was seeing the house as it had been in 1818. There were half-packed trunks standing against one of the walls, and the dressing table was almost bare. Whoever lived in the house was clearly about to leave. Had they sold up? Where were they going? Come to that, who the heck were they? This wasn’t like the green room; instead of being part of things she was just an observer. What was the quotation?
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face...

Face to face. Her lips parted as she saw a naked man sleeping on the bed. He was dark-haired and breathtakingly handsome, and she guessed he was about thirty-four or five years old. His body was pale, supple, strong, and perfect in the light from the candle. There were soft dark hairs on his chest, and in a thin line down his flat abdomen to his groin, where they thickened into a forest around the swelling of his dormant masculinity, which lay long, vulnerable, and soft as silk against the top of his thigh.

Laura gazed into the mirror, mesmerized by powerful sensations of sexual attraction. A little more knowledge came to her, and she knew that this was Sir Blair Deveril, the man her Regency counterpart was to deceive and seduce, and she had to concede that far from being an ordeal, the thought of making love with him was enticing beyond belief.

Feeling a little like a voyeur, she looked at his face again. It was rugged, but at the same time almost beautiful. His lashes were long and dark, his nose straight and his lips finely formed. His hair was ruffled and thick, and worn just a little longer than she knew was really the fashion in Regency times. It was hair through which she longed to run her fingers.

There was a movement in the reflected doorway, and she looked toward it. Then her breath caught as she saw...herself! At least, not herself exactly, but her Regency counterpart, and what was more, that Regency counterpart could see her looking in the mirror, for she smiled conspiratorially. Yes, conspiratorially. That was the word.

But then the nineteenth-century Laura looked toward the bed, and the sleeping man. She slipped out of her gown and went to lie down with him, leaning over to caress his skin and then put her lips to his thigh. He didn’t stir, and her fingers moved gently and caressingly between his legs.

An erotic craving shivered through modern Laura as she watched. She held her breath as her
alter ego
grew bolder, moving her lips up his thigh toward his slumbering virility, so defenseless and inviting. She kissed it, running her lips and tongue along its length and then taking the tip into her mouth.

He stirred then, his hands moving to lovingly stroke her hair as she besieged his manhood. There was nothing soft and slumbering about him now, he was hard and needful, steel encased in warm velvet. His body arched with pleasure as she took him to the very edge of ravishment. Then he suddenly rolled her on to her back and straddled her, pinning her arms back and smiling down into her eyes as he penetrated her.

Watching from the loneliness of the future, Laura had to close her eyes because she was trembling so much. She felt as if hers was the body that lay so                               eagerly beneath him on that long-gone bed. She wished it were, for it would be ecstasy to be possessed by Sir Blair Deveril...

She opened her eyes again, but to her dismay the images in the mirror had disappeared. There was only the Art Deco room, and her reflection.

What was going on? Why was she seeing these things, feeling these things... ? A dreadful possibility struck her. Was it the onset of a breakdown? She had been under a strain since the breakup with Kyle, but was it enough to cause something like this?

Leaving the cocoa untouched on the mantelshelf, she went to the window and looked out at the rain-drenched January night. Berkeley Square was busy, a modern scene of wet traffic, city noise, and streetlights. She found herself wishing she and Jenny were already in the Cotswolds, as far away as possible from the pressures of London.

It was then she remembered something truly startling. It had slipped her mind until now because Jenny always referred to her parents’ hotel as simply ‘the hotel’, but out of the blue the real name came winging back. The Deveril House Hotel!

Chapter Three

Laura decided not to say anything to Jenny. It was all so wild and far-fetched, she felt a little like someone who’d seen a UFO—deciding to keep quiet rather than be thought crazy. She’d had a close encounter of the weird kind, and chose to keep it to herself.

She was curious about it all, though. Was it entirely the product of her imagination, or was there a basis in truth? Had any of the people actually existed? The fact that the hotel bore the name Deveril suggested the latter might be the case. Unless, of course, it was her subconscious. At the back of her mind she’d known the name of the hotel, and her brain had done the rest. It was all she could come up with to explain the apparently inexplicable.

Jenny didn’t prove any help concerning the origins of the hotel’s name, or indeed of its general history. A search on the internet didn’t prove helpful either. The house’s past seemed destined to remain a mystery. It turned out the Fitzgeralds had bought the house some ten years ago from a reclusive rock star, who in turn had bought it from an elderly, equally reclusive spinster. Beyond that, nothing. Jenny hadn’t spent much time there because of her stage career, and the only piece of interesting information she could come up with was that the nearest village was called Great Deveril. She thought her parents might know more, and then, in response to Alun’s message, she set off immediately. Laura had an important last-minute audition to attend, and followed two days later.

That was how things stood the morning Laura herself at last drove out of London for the Cotswolds. The audition had gone well and it felt good to be setting out on vacation. There hadn’t been any further close encounters and she was beginning to relax, determined not to let it become anything more than a fleeting blip on her otherwise clear horizon.

In spite of the cold, overcast weather, she intended to do a little sightseeing on the way, and left the M4 freeway at Reading to use back roads to Cirencester, a market town about five miles from the hotel.

She drove into the town square at about two in the afternoon, and parked close to a central hotel called the King’s Head, the age of which suggested it was the same King’s Head where her Regency self was to stay on her way to be interviewed by Blair Deveril. It was market day, and the street was thronged with people and canvas-topped stalls. Everyone was hunched against the biting cold, so she turned up her coat collar before getting out of the warm car, but the moment she stepped onto the sidewalk, she experienced another close encounter.

The sun seemed to suddenly come out, almost as if someone had switched on a giant electric light, and the temperature rose perceptibly, changing from winter cold to balmy May warmth in the space of little more than a heartbeat. The clamor of the modern market and traffic was silenced to the more muted sounds of the past.

She halted in dismay. Not again! Please, not again! But as she looked nervously around her, she saw the Cirencester of 1818, where the King’s Head was a posting house. She was part of events again, and wore an emerald and white floral gown made of thin cotton, and a little emerald velvet spencer. Her hair was piled up beneath a wide-brimmed emerald hat, and several long ringlets fell over her left shoulder.

She and Stephen Woodville had just alighted from his carriage, and he had gone into the King’s Head to confirm that a room had indeed been reserved for her. He wore a braid-trimmed brown coat and cream trousers, and his top hat was tipped back on his head. He looked disheveled and out of sorts, and the deeper they’d driven into the Cotswolds, the worse he felt. He looked forward to his reunion with Marianna, but his unwilling involvement with Miles’ plot spoiled everything. He didn’t want to ruin Marianna’s love for him, and this present deceit would certainly do just that. He despised himself, knowing he wasn’t worthy of such an angel’s glance, let alone be granted her heart.

Another private carriage approached from the London direction. Laura was sure it had been at the Oxford inn where she and Stephen had halted earlier. In fact, the more she thought about it, the more convinced she was that it had also been at the Tyburn turnpike when they’d left London. And had it been in Haymarket on opening night too? The blinds were lowered as it passed, but she caught a brief glimpse of a woman’s hand and a glint of signet ring. Who was she?

Remembering she’d left her parasol on the carriage seat, Laura turned to retrieve it. The summer sunshine vanished, and the cold January afternoon and modern market returned. She stood there, both disoriented and frightened, and her modern self’s interest in sightseeing had evaporated. Getting into the car, she drove quickly out of the town en route for the Deveril House Hotel.