I called an estate agent in England (real estate to us Americans) and started searching for a thatched cottage that had been a farmhouse in the Elizabethan age. It wasn’t all that difficult to find and, somehow, it didn’t surprise me that it was for sale. I was long past being surprised by anything. I bought it for £120,000, about $180,000. Cute little farm cottages with medieval origins aren’t cheap, but I knew that under the floorboards were six jewel-encrusted goblets and a silver candlestick, all of which Meg and William had stolen from the Hadley family. I was going to see my name on a plaque in a museum as a donor, and I was going to have a holiday cottage in England.
Speaking of Meg and Will, I called Milly in Texas and told her that I desperately needed to see her. I told her that I was so depressed I couldn’t write. She was on a plane for New York almost before I finished the sentence.
Then I called my dear publisher, William Warren. It was easy to make him move. All I said was, “Another publishing house is offering me lots of lovely things.” We made a dinner date immediately.
I wasn’t home when Milly arrived at my apartment with her suitcase. I’d left her a note saying I’d meet her in the dining room of the Plaza Hotel, then gave the headwaiter a twenty to show Milly to William’s table.
I would have liked to have hidden behind the palms to see the faces of Milly and my publisher when they first saw each other, but I knew I’d be caught, so I stayed in the apartment and waited with my most smug smile ready.
I got a little worried when Milly didn’t come back that night, and the next day when she still hadn’t shown up or sent word, I was angry as well as worried. I called my publishing house and was told my publisher had not shown up that morning nor had he called in with an explanation for his absence—but that wasn’t unusual, as publishers do what they please.
By the second night when Milly still hadn’t returned, I was ready to go to the police. Then I got a fax from Milly at 3 A.M. She and William were in Las Vegas and they were leaving any minute on their honeymoon. She hoped I was well and I was not to worry. She’d tell me everything when she returned.
“Ha!” I said aloud, laughing. “I’ll tell you everything.” At last Meg and Will were together again, and I was the cause of it.
I was very proud of myself for what I had accomplished, but the weeks turned into months and still I heard nothing from Tavistock. I was bugging poor Nora until I think she was ready to paint a few 666’s on my living room floor and start chanting in order to get rid of me.
As for me, I was ready to give up hope. I found myself bursting into tears for no reason at all. Was it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all? I dreamed about Jamie, about Talis, about Tavey. I thought about them all the time as I stayed in my apartment and waited. But with each day that passed, I became more sure that Talis was not going to appear on my doorstep.
Then one afternoon I told myself that I had to start living again. I couldn’t keep disassociating myself from the rest of the world. Maybe Jamie was waiting for me just outside my door. Maybe—
I filled the tub full of hot, scented water and soaked myself clean, my hair slicked down with some peach-scented stuff guaranteed to make it like an angel’s. I carefully shaved my legs, then rinsed my hair, got out of the tub and slathered my body with some ridiculously expensive body cream. When I was finished, I knew that no flower garden smelled better than I did, but I refused to allow myself to acknowledge the fact that I had no man to nuzzle my neck and tell me how good I smelled.
Wearing nothing but a thick terry cloth robe, I opened my apartment door to get the mail that was brought up to me every day. Since I live on the top floor of the building, the elevator opens only to my apartment, and no one is allowed up without first being announced. So when the elevator door opened, I gasped in surprise.
“Excuse me,” the man in the elevator said in such perfectly spoken English that he had to have studied the language rather than grown up speaking it. “I think I have the wrong floor. My colleague is on floor eighteen but this is—”
He broke off because of the expression I was wearing as I stared at him. He was tall, at least six feet, and he was no blond-haired blue-eyed westerner. He had the kind of golden brown skin that usually meant a Mediterranean origin, and I doubted very much that he had grown up with the same religion that I had.
All in all, he was one gorgeous package. I looked into those dark chocolate-colored eyes and nearly drowned. In those eyes I could see Tavistock and when I looked really deeply, I could see Tally. And maybe if I looked really, really deeply, I could see myself. I could see the man who was the other half of me.
He started to say something but he didn’t say it because for the third time in my life I fainted.
45
Are you all right?” he asked.
I was lying on my couch in my own living room and he was sitting by me, a cold washcloth in his hand and he was pressing it to my face. With his other hand he was smoothing back my damp hair, fresh from washing, and he was looking at me as though he meant to memorize every inch of me. Had I not been through what I had, if I had not known who this man was, I would have been frightened. A stranger caressing my cheek and neck with the back of his fingers, his thumb running over my eyebrow, then down the side of my nose, was not something I would have willingly allowed.
But this man was no stranger. I knew all there was to know about him, except maybe a few things about this life such as his name and where he came from. But those things didn’t matter. This man was mine and had been mine throughout time.
I watched him as he looked at me. Would he remember me? Was the spirit of Tavistock just under the surface?
Abruptly, he seemed to come out of his trance. “Forgive me,” he said, sitting up straight. “I must introduce myself. I am Tariz—” He said several other names but I didn’t hear them. The sounds of his name were made in his throat, and as he sat by me, his hip touching mine, I felt every syllable of his name as he pronounced it. Tariz was all that I needed to know. Talis, Tavey, Tariz.
“You are not well,” he said. “Perhaps you should see a doctor.” His honey-colored skin paled and his voice whispered, “Perhaps you are with child.”
“No,” I said, smiling. “No baby. I’m not married. Not engaged. I am free.”
Tariz didn’t say anything but just kept looking at me intensely. “You will think I am a crazy man, but it is as though I know you. It is as though I…I don’t know how to say it. It is as though I recognize you. Can you understand such a thing?”
“Yes, I understand perfectly.”
“You will laugh, but it is as though I know things about you. But that could not be, since we have never met.”
“What do you know about me?” I asked.
He smiled softly and I thought my heart would melt. “You are afraid of high places and you like…” He hesitated. “You like small animals.” He glanced at a candleholder on the table behind me. “You like monkeys and you…You do something.” He ran his hand over his eyes. “You tell stories. You tell wonderful stories. You make people laugh. No, you make me laugh. You…”
He trailed off as he looked at me, his big brown eyes growing larger, his skin turning paler by the second. “I think…I think—”
I’d never seen a man faint before but I was afraid I was about to. I scurried off the couch, pushed him against the back of it, then went to fetch some brandy. Except that I didn’t have any because I don’t like brandy, so I poured a little Mandarin Napoleon in a glass and took it to him.
“You must excuse me,” he said, sitting up straighter. “I am sure it is, what do you call it? With the airplane.”
“Jet lag.” Or century lag, is what I wanted to say.
He was wearing a dark suit, which made his hair and eyebrows even darker, and more than anything in the world I wanted to touch him. I wanted to tell him everything there was to tell about us. I wanted to feel his arms around me.
“Why are you looki
ng at me like that?” I asked, wanting to force him to tell me what was in his mind.
He smiled and he had straight, even, beautiful teeth—and his mouth was something that made me ache. My robe was gaping open but I didn’t bother to close it. With even the tiniest hint from him, I’d have flung it to the floor.
“I do not know you,” he said softly, “and you do not know me. But, somehow, I do know you. I know all that is good and all that is bad about you.”
“Bad?” I said involuntarily.
He smiled. “You have a temper, I believe.”
“Only when you don’t do what I want you to do,” I answered. “I’m perfectly reasonable when you do exactly what I want when I want you to do it.”
Considering that we had just met, this should have been an incomprehensible statement, but he smiled and said, “Yes, I know. Your will is very strong.”
He took a deep breath and looked down at the tiny liqueur glass he held. I was sitting on the edge of the couch, about eight inches away from him, and the distance seemed almost intolerable.
“I am new to your country,” he said softly. “I have arrived only yesterday and I was to meet a man here in this building.”
“On the eighteenth floor, but you pushed the wrong button.”
He lifted his head and looked at me. “No, I think I pushed the right button.”
“Yes,” I whispered. “You pushed the right button.”
He looked back down at his glass and I could see a vein pounding in his neck, a neck that I longed to kiss. The air between us was like a bolt of electricity that stayed charged and grew stronger with each moment.
“I have come from my country to your country to talk to your people, your president, about misunderstandings between your country and mine.”
“A diplomat,” I said, knowing how very talented Talis would have been as a diplomat. He was so likable that he could make enemies at ease with each other.
“I do what I can,” he said modestly, then gave me a piercing look. “You are not one of these American women who is tied to a company and cannot move, are you?”
For a moment I didn’t know what he meant, but then my heart gave a little flutter. “I am completely mobile. I write for a living and I can live anywhere.”
“Good,” he said, smiling, then started to say something else but hesitated as he carefully put the still-full glass of liqueur on the table beside the couch.
“Why do you, ah, ask whether I can travel or not?”
“You would think me mad if I said what was in my heart.”
“No I wouldn’t!” I said fiercely, praying he wasn’t just going to ask me out to dinner.
When he looked at me his eyes were on fire and my heart leaped into my throat. “I do not know how or why, but I love you. I love you with all my heart, with all my soul. It is as though I have been waiting for you, searching for you all my life.”
All I could manage to say was, “Me too.” And now, I thought, we tear each other’s clothes off, and I made a bit of a move in that direction.
But when he looked at his watch, my heart fell. How could I have forgotten his meeting? He was here in America for a very important reason: peace between two countries, uniting two philosophies of life, maybe even trying to prevent a war. How could one fainting woman stand up against that?
“I am very late now, but I will finish my meeting by four o’clock. At that time I will return here and we will go to get married.”
My mouth fell open until my chin nearly hit my chest.
“You will not faint again?”
“I…Well, no, I don’t think I will. But…married?” For the life of me I couldn’t think of anything to say. “Couldn’t you delay your meeting for a while?”
At that he stood, and there was a twinkle in his eyes that I had seen many times on Talis. He knew very well what was in my mind and he was enjoying my exasperation. He put the tips of his strong fingers under my chin. “I will not touch you until you are legally mine. And then I will not allow you out of bed for the first six months.” He kissed my forehead. “And by then you will be too heavy with my child to go far.”
I could feel my knees buckling. There was only one thing I wanted as much as I wanted this man and that was to have our baby.
“Now go and dress and I will come for you in two hours.”
I couldn’t bear the thought of his leaving. What if he didn’t return? What if I’d just made him up? What if—“It takes three days to get married in America. We’ll have to wait. We can’t—”
He kissed both my cheeks in the way of Europe or the East. “I will make a few calls. There will be no waiting.” He kissed my neck but did not pull me close to him. I knew that he felt as I did and that if we got too close we would not be able to pull apart.
“Do you have any more questions?” he asked, his lips by my ear.
When I didn’t answer, he held me at arm’s length, but all I could do was shake my head no. No questions. None at all. He was mine and I was willing to follow him to the ends of the earth.
“Then give me your passport. There will be arrangements to be made.”
With shaking hands, I pulled the blue book from my desk drawer and handed it to him, then watched as he opened it. “We were born in the same year,” he said, “the same day.”
I just nodded as I followed him to the door, then stood there in silence as the elevator arrived.
“Do you doubt me?” he asked, his hand on the door.
“Never. I trust you. I believe in you.”
“And do you love me?” he whispered.
“With all my heart. With all my soul. From the beginning to the end of time.”
“Yes,” he said as the elevator door shut softly. “Yes. It is the same with me. I have loved you always.”
“Yes,” I whispered. “Yes.”
Books by Jude Deveraux
The Velvet Promise
Highland Velvet
Velvet Song
Velvet Angel
Sweetbriar
Counterfeit Lady
Lost Lady
River Lady
Twin of Fire
Twin of Ice
The Temptress
The Raider
The Princess
The Awakening
The Maiden
The Taming
The Conquest
A Knight in Shining Armor
Wishes
Mountain Laurel
The Duchess
Eternity
Sweet Liar
The Invitation
Remembrance
The Heiress
Legend
An Angel for Emily
The Blessing
High Tide
Temptation
Published by POCKET BOOKS
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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ISBN-13: 978-0-7434-5925-9
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; Jude Deveraux, Remembrance
(Series: # )