When the couple emerged in the Piazza della Signoria, Haven’s feet froze. The square was empty but for a man dressed in a black robe so long that it swept the street behind him. Beneath a wide-brimmed leather hat, he wore a hideous mask with a long white beak. Spectacles with red-tinted lenses shielded his eyes. He might have been a monster from the depths of hell. But Haven recognized his costume as the protective suit of a medieval plague doctor. She watched as the man stood over a motionless body that lay on the paving stones and poked at it with his cane. Then the doctor glanced up at Haven. His face was hidden, but she could sense his disapproval. She, of all people, didn’t belong in the plaza. Haven blinked and the whole scene disappeared.
“Come on. I have something to show you before it gets dark,” Iain urged, and Haven realized he’d seen nothing unusual.
EIGHTEEN MONTHS HAD passed since Haven had learned the truth about the strange visions that came to her. They weren’t hallucinations or fantasies. She now knew they were memories—scenes she’d witnessed in previous lives. The doctor in the terrible mask didn’t belong to the twenty-first century, but he had once been as real as the boy who was holding her hand.
The visions had started when she was just a small child. For years, Haven would faint and find herself inside another life—that of a beautiful young woman named Constance who had perished in a fire. Haven’s uncontrollable “fits” frightened most people who witnessed them. They insisted the girl must have been sick or disturbed. Only Haven’s father suspected that his daughter was visiting the past each time she fainted. When he died unexpectedly, he took that secret to his grave, where it had remained for almost a decade.
Shortly after Haven turned seventeen, the visions returned, and it was then that their true meaning was finally revealed to her. The glimpses of the beautiful young woman were memories of one of the many lives that Haven had led. Driven by the need to know more about Constance’s untimely death, Haven had fled her hometown in Tennessee and made her way to New York. There she discovered her murderer, her soul mate, and the dark figure who’d been chasing her across oceans and continents for more than two thousand years.
Still, the visions hadn’t stopped once the mystery of Constance’s death had been solved. Haven seldom fainted now, but at night she journeyed to distant times and exotic lands. In the darkness, her dreams were vivid, but they always faded at dawn. Most days, while the sun was shining, Haven remained free from her visions of previous lives. But the whiff of a familiar fragrance, the sound of a long-forgotten name, the sensation of Iain’s breath on her skin could blend Haven’s pasts and her present together. She would find herself giddy with love for a boy who had shared Iain’s lopsided grin. Or overwhelmed by a potent mixture of old fears and desires that she still couldn’t comprehend.
“DOES THAT PALAZZO REMIND you of anything?” Iain released Haven’s hand and pointed at a mansion at the end of a cramped little square. Haven looked up at his face before she followed his finger. She still felt a rush of excitement whenever she locked eyes with him. Even with his wavy brown hair tucked under a knit cap—and his nose red from the bitter cold—he barely passed for a mortal. For a moment she couldn’t have cared less about her former life in Florence. If she hadn’t been able to share it with Iain, it must not have been worth living.
Haven reluctantly turned toward the building in question. It looked more like a fortress than a palace. The bottom floor had been constructed with huge square blocks, and enormous metal doors were set in three separate arches. Each door was high enough for a giant to enter, and all three were tightly sealed. But Haven knew that beyond them lay a courtyard. And she knew the stairs that led to the living quarters on the second and third floors could be withdrawn if the house were ever attacked. The world had been a dangerous place when the building was erected, and the wealthy had been determined to defend their fortunes.
Haven’s eyes fluttered. She felt her legs pumping, fighting against heavy skirts that encased them. All around her, the walls were painted in dazzling colors, reds and golds. The wooden floorboards protested as she ran to the open window. She wasn’t quite tall enough to see out of it, so she hoisted herself up on the sill and surveyed the square below, her little body dangling dangerously over the edge.
A teenage boy was sprinting away from the palazzo. His blue tunic and red stockings looked two sizes too large for him. “Run! Run!” she shouted at the kid, laughing so hard there were tears in her eyes. “Don’t let them catch you!” The words sounded foreign to Haven’s ears, though she had no trouble understanding their meaning.
“Beatrice!” A woman’s sharp voice came from behind her. “Get down from that window. What has your brother done now?”
“I LIVED HERE,” Haven mumbled as the twenty-first century took shape once again. “My name was Beatrice, and I had a brother.”
“So you saw him?” Iain asked with his crooked grin. “Was it anyone you recognized?”
“Recognized? I didn’t really get a good look at the kid. I only saw him running away.” Haven stopped. “Wait, are you saying . . .”
Iain crossed his arms like a pompous professor and began to deliver a lecture fit for a history class. “The palazzo before you was purchased in 1329 by Gherardo Vettori, a wealthy wine merchant. Observe the Vettori family coat of arms above the door. It features three rather sinister dolphins carrying bunches of grapes in their mouths. . .”
“Drop the act, and stop teasing me!” Haven demanded, knowing that if she let herself laugh, it would only encourage him. “Are you telling me that my brother in that lifetime was . . .” She couldn’t quite say it.
“Despite a raging libido and a roving eye, Gherardo Vettori only managed to sire two children. You were one of them. Your friend Beau was the other. His name back then was Piero Vettori, and he was a world-class delinquent.”
For a moment Haven found herself at a loss for words. She’d known for some time that Beau Decker, her best friend from Tennessee, had been her brother in a previous existence. But she had never expected to find herself gazing up at the house where they had fought and played and consoled one another seven hundred years earlier.
“I’ve been meaning to bring you here since we came to Italy,” Iain explained. “I’ve been saving it as a surprise.”
“You knew Beatrice’s brother too?!”
“I was friends with Piero before I died. And I was madly in love with his little sister. He wasn’t terribly happy about that.”
Haven recalled the boy in the oversize tunic and the love his young sister had felt for him. Beatrice Vettori had worshipped Piero. He couldn’t have been more than thirteen at the time of Haven’s vision, but his sister would have told anyone who would listen that he was fearless and brilliant. She knew other things about her brother as well, secrets only the two of them shared.
“I wish I had seen more,” Haven said sadly. “I wish I had seen you, too. I hate that my visions are always so random.”
“Maybe someday you’ll see everything,” Iain consoled her. “And then you’ll be the one telling me stories.”
“Maybe,” Haven said, though she held no hope of that ever happening. She had managed to recall a few fragments of the many lives she’d led, but most of her memories were still lost in time. She might have tried harder to conjure them, but she suspected there were things she wouldn’t want to remember. Iain’s memories, on the other hand, were perfectly preserved. Of all the people who had returned to earth time and time again, Iain was the only one who could recall each of his incarnations. It was a skill that made him dangerous to all the wrong people—most notably the man in black.
“I should take a picture of the palazzo for Beau,” Haven said.
“In a minute. There’s something I need to get out of the way first. When you told me you wanted to take a trip, this is why I suggested Florence. Now I can do what I didn’t have the chance to do before I fell off that damn horse.”
“What?” Haven asked.
&
nbsp; Iain removed his gloves and stuffed them in the pocket of his coat. Then he gently took Haven’s face in his hands. Her eyes closed, and she could feel his warm breath on her skin. With his lips on hers, time came to a halt. She let her hand slip between the buttons of his coat until her fingers rested against his chest. It was something she did from time to time—just to prove to herself that he was real.
She had no idea how long they stood there, locked in an embrace that had waited seven hundred years to happen. But when Haven opened her eyes again, Florence was already dark.
CHAPTER THREE
Haven and Iain were greeted at the door of the restaurant by a pretty young hostess in a dress that must have inspired more drooling than the food being served. Haven took note of the woman’s surgically sculpted chest and leonine hair extensions and grinned. She knew exactly what was about to transpire. Just as she’d anticipated, the hostess ignored Haven and beamed at her handsome companion instead. Haven had watched countless females offer Iain the same smile, and it almost never meant “hello.”
“Good evening, signore,” the hostess flirted in beautifully accented English. “Do you have a reservation?”
Iain shot a quick wink at Haven before he flashed the hostess a rakish grin. “Buona sera, signorina. Do I need one?”
The young woman’s seductive smile turned scandalous. “Not tonight,” she whispered, as if they were sharing a secret.
The exchange was deliciously corny. Haven gritted her teeth and tried not to giggle. The Colosseum itself couldn’t have held all the bodies that were thrown at Iain every week. Whenever Haven left him alone in a store, she’d return to find him surrounded by salesgirls, all as hot and bothered as goats in a pepper patch. A policewoman had once slipped Iain her phone number while she wrote Haven a parking ticket. Waitresses plied him with free drinks and desserts. Haven teased Iain about his “fans,” and a year earlier she might have bristled at the hostess’s boldness. But now that she knew what Iain had gone through to find her, jealousy seemed completely absurd. There was no harm in letting silly girls flirt with someone whose heart belonged only to her.
“May I take your coats?” the hostess asked, her eyes practically fondling Iain.
“Yes, you may,” Haven replied with a smile, stepping between the two and finally drawing some attention of her own.
As she peeled off her gloves and removed her hat, Haven sensed she was being appraised like a sculpture at an auction house. Fortunately, the dress she wore underneath her coat was one of her own designs. Made of red silk and lacking all frills, it was cut so perfectly that Haven’s every flaw was hidden and every asset enhanced. Two men near the entrance turned to gawk when she and Iain were escorted to their seats. The restaurant’s tables were crowded together, and as Haven squeezed by, a hundred eyes traveled from her dress to her face to her wild black hair before returning to the plates on the tables in front of them. One man’s gaze remained locked on Haven’s chest until he received a subtle but unpleasant jab from Iain’s elbow as the couple passed by him.
It was hardly the first time that all eyes had been on Haven. Growing up in tiny Snope City, Tennessee, she’d always been keenly aware that the whole town was watching. But people had been scared of her then. A little girl with mysterious visions of other places simply couldn’t be trusted—particularly when the girl’s own grandmother claimed the visions had been sent by the devil himself. Now Snope City was five thousand miles and a whole year behind her. Haven was a different person, and for the first time in her life she was starting to enjoy attention whenever she received it. She liked the way people looked at her, with a mixture of admiration and envy. She welcomed their gazes and enjoyed dressing to draw them. Even though she and Iain were supposed to be hiding.
“Sorry the restaurant is so packed,” Iain whispered once they were seated. “My mother always said that the food here is much better than the atmosphere.”
“Aside from all your fans, the atmosphere isn’t that bad,” Haven said, breaking away from a staring contest with a love-struck girl on the other side of the room. “But I doubt there’s a chef in Italy who can cook anything as good as one of your omelets. Now, Mr. Morrow, no more small talk. It’s time to get down to business. You’ve made me suffer for three whole hours. Tell me more about Piero and Beatrice. How did you meet them? What were they like?”
“Wild. I met Piero on my fifteenth birthday. He tried to bash my brains in with a rock.”
“Charming,” Haven laughed. She loved Beau, but everyone knew he wasn’t exactly a pacifist.
“Yeah. Piero was a good guy, but he had the world’s worst temper. He accused me of stealing his horse. He’d left it untethered, and I happened to walk by just after it wandered off after a vegetable cart. We were pounding the pulp out of each other when the horse came back to search for its owner. Piero apologized, so we called a truce and decided to join forces. A few days later he invited me to his house, where I happened to spot his little sister slaving away on a gown for their mother. If I recall correctly, she was being punished for sneaking out of the house the previous night. Beatrice was always in trouble, just like Piero. They egged each other on. And, as you know by now, some things never change.”
“So when you found Beatrice, was it love at first sight?”
Haven had been trying to tease him, but Iain’s answer was serious.
“It always is. I didn’t even have to speak to her. I knew it was you the second I saw Beatrice with a needle in her hand. I spent the next few weeks loitering outside the Vettori house, trying to catch glimpses of her. It nearly drove Piero insane. He was always annoyingly overprotective.”
“What was your name in those days?” Haven asked.
“Ettore,” Iain said.
“Ettore,” Haven repeated, enjoying the way the name made her heart skip a beat. Haven loved nothing better than to listen to tales of her own romances. Every story was different and every setting unique. Just when she thought she’d heard them all, Iain would lead her into another existence in some faraway land. But exploring their pasts was not without peril. As many times as they’d found happiness together, there were just as many lives that had ended too quickly or were spent searching for each other in vain. Haven couldn’t remember those dark days, and Iain rarely spoke of them, but she knew the memories remained fresh in his mind.
“Did you ever have a chance to talk to Beatrice?” Haven asked more cautiously. “Did you tell her how you felt?”
“Yes, but it wasn’t easy. Beatrice’s parents were not pleasant people. They made her life miserable—and they were incredibly cruel to Piero. You would have been beaten if they’d seen us together, so we used to whisper though the hedges in the courtyard. Beatrice was terrified that her father would force her to marry one of his business associates. I promised her I’d never let that happen. But as you know, I didn’t live long enough to keep my promise.”
“So what did happen to Beatrice?”
“I’m not sure,” Iain admitted.
Haven leaned back in her chair as the waiter approached. Iain examined the menu and ordered for the two of them in fluent Italian. A question waited, poised on the tip of Haven’s tongue.
“You’re not sure?” she asked as soon as the waiter was gone. It wasn’t the first time Haven had wondered if Iain might be protecting her from an unpleasant truth.
“I guess Beatrice must have died of the plague,” Iain replied. “Most people in Florence did. All I know is that the Vettori family abandoned the house we saw today. From what I’ve read it was taken over by a bunch of rogue doctors who gave up trying to heal everyone and decided to save themselves. They hid out in the palazzo and drank all the Vettoris’ wine and ate all their food and then proceeded to drop dead of the plague. One of the doctors kept a journal until the day he died, but even he didn’t seem to know what happened to the Vettoris after they fled Florence. Chances are, the whole family’s in one of the mass graves outside of the city.”
??
?That’s a terrible story,” Haven said, suddenly sorry she’d asked.
“True,” Iain acknowledged. “But don’t dwell on it. We’ve had our share of happy endings as well. In our next lives we were peasants in Kathmandu. We got married when we were seventeen, and we lived together for more than forty years.”
“Did we have any kids?” Haven asked a little too loudly, and a man at the next table shot her a puzzled look. “Did we?” she repeated in a whisper.
“No, but we had three lovely yaks,” Iain said, as two glasses of water were set in front of them. “And thirty-six nieces and nephews.”
“Thirty-six?” Haven’s head ached just thinking of it. “Was it just our families or did everyone hump like bunnies back then?”
Iain choked on his water, barely avoiding a spit take. “Such a sweet little Southern belle,” he laughed from behind his napkin. “There wasn’t much else to do in fourteenth-century Nepal. It could get a little dull at times, but I’ve always considered it one of our best lives together. I still wake up some mornings craving yak-butter tea.” He seemed to savor the grimace on Haven’s face. “You used to love it too,” he insisted. “I’ll take you back to Nepal someday so you can acquire the taste again.”
“As long as I don’t have to milk any yaks,” Haven quipped. “I wouldn’t say I’m a princess, but I can’t see myself getting too friendly with livestock.”
“Is that right?” Iain teased. “I think you might be surprised to find out what you’re capable of doing.”
“Okay then, surprise me,” Haven challenged.