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Excerpt...
The darkness
lasted for only a moment. Adriana remembered the weakness that had
flashed through her body and turned her muscles and bones to mush. She
remembered the shiver of shock that raced up her spine as lights
twinkled before her eyes, and she remembered everything turning black.
She didn’t remember falling, though, or Trevor Montgomery--the Trevor
Montgomery--kneeling on the floor to cradle her head in his lap.
"Feeling any
better?" he asked in that deep, warm voice she knew so well. It was a
voice she’d heard so many times in the movies he’d made a long time
before she was born.
Taking a deep
breath, she struggled to sit up, but he held her close, smoothing warm
fingers over her cool cheeks and brow.
"Did I faint?"
He nodded, and
the smile she remembered from those very same films touched his lips.
"I’ve had women pass out on me half a dozen times, but only in the
movies. I didn’t think it happened in real life."
"I guess shock
can do it to a person."
He cocked one
dark, well-defined brow. "Have I shocked you?"
Adriana laughed
nervously. "You’re Trevor Montgomery."
"I’ve told you
that at least a dozen different ways."
"You should be an
old man."
"I should be dead
. . . but I’m not."
Again Adriana
pushed away, and this time Trevor let her go, but his long, sensuous
fingers trailed over her arm and down the length of her hands as she
stood, sending a different kind of shock through her body, one she
rather enjoyed even though she knew she shouldn’t.
She went to the
sink, filled a glass with water, and took a sip, staring out the window,
trying to make sense of her feelings and of what was going on.
"Is it the rose
that made you believe me?" he asked, standing now at her side with the
bedraggled flower in his hand.
It was the rose;
it was the scratches on his back, too, but those she didn’t want to
think about. The thought of Trevor Montgomery and all his romantic
escapades angered her. How could a man of his charm, his class, hop into
bed without thinking of anything but a moment’s fun? His sexual appetite
hadn’t bothered her much before--it was all part of his mystique. But
now, with him standing near, that was all she could think of. It had
cheapened all those charming things he’d said to her because he probably
said them to all the women he met.
Her father would
have despised this man. He would have chastised her for allowing him
into her home.
Why, then, did
she find him so appealing?
She took the rose
from his fingers. The red petals were crushed, some had fallen away, but
a trace of the fragrance remained and she held it to her nose. "Never in
my wildest dreams did I think I could pull a man through time simply by
tossing a rose into a pool and making a crazy wish."
"So, that’s how
you dragged me sixty years through time."
His voice was
filled with laughter, but Adriana could only frown.
"It doesn’t sound
possible, but I can’t think of any other explanation."
"What did you
wish for?"
Adriana gazed at
Trevor for a moment, then turned away, afraid of what he would think.
"Tell me," he
implored, lightly touching her chin with an index finger and tilting her
face toward him. "Please."
"It was silly,
really."
"Tell me," he
repeated in that spellbinding voice that made her want to divulge all
her secrets, things she’d never told a soul.
She walked away
from his touch and sat down at the table. Lifting her fork, she picked
at the now wilted salad on her plate. "I was standing at the pool," she
said, trying to remember that moment. "I’d closed my eyes and seen a
vision of you lying facedown on the water. It wasn’t the first time. It
seemed to happen every year on the Fourth of July, and always when I was
standing beside the pool."
Adriana looked up
at him. She feared she’d see a grin on his face, but instead, he had the
softest of smiles. "I remembered the movie where you threw a rose on
your lover’s casket."
"Desperate
Hours," he added, supplying the name of the film that most people rarely
remembered when they thought about Trevor Montgomery’s roles. It was too
obscure, but it was one of her favorites, a movie that showed the depth
of his emotions, the strength of his talent.
He sat across
from her, rested his elbows on the table, and leaned forward. "What
happened then?"
"I kissed the
rose." Again she looked at her plate, knowing he’d laugh when she told
him what she’d said. "I didn’t say much. Just . . ." She sighed deeply.
"Come back to me. Please. Come to me."
All she saw was a
trace of a smile on Trevor’s face when she raised her eyes. He wasn’t
laughing, not in the least.
"Why did you want
me to come back?"
She couldn’t tell
him the truth. He’d laugh for sure if she told him she’d been in love
with him--with Trevor Montgomery the movie star--since she was six years
old.
"It doesn’t
matter . . ."
"It does to me,"
Trevor interrupted softly.
Adriana shook her
head. "The important thing right now is to figure out what we’re going
to do."
"You mean figure
out how to send me back to 1938?"
Send him away?
That was something she hadn’t even considered. But he’d been pulled away
from friends and family. Maybe he wanted to go home. "Do you want me to
try to send you back?"
He shrugged, and
his brow furrowed into a frown. "I don’t belong here," he said, shaking
his head. "I don’t know anything about your time. I want to live the
life I was supposed to live. But I’ve read those books of yours. They
don’t paint a very pretty picture of me. If I could go back and change
things, then yes, I’d want to go back. Unfortunately, the only things
waiting for me in my own decade are prison bars and the scorn of old
friends. I don’t know if that’s what I want. Then again, what if . . .
what if I wake up tomorrow and I’m old and wrinkled and looking like I’m
ninety-four years old? What kind of life is that?"
"I don’t know."
She left the
table, but Trevor grasped her fingers before she could walk out of the
room.
"Don’t leave me,
Adriana," he said, not only his words but his dark brown eyes imploring
her to stay.
She tried pulling
her hand away, but he held on tight.
"I need to be
alone for a while," she told him, wanting to get away to digest this
craziness about a man traveling through time, about Trevor Montgomery
being in her home, in her life. "I need to think."
"About what?"
"Things."
"Like whether or
not I’m a murderer?"
"Are you?"
His eyes flashed
briefly with anger, then he looked away. He pushed up from the table and
crossed the kitchen, staring out the window. His deep sigh filled the
room. "I don’t know."
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