* * *
Walking her down the hotel steps, he tried to keep his gentle manner, but she couldn’t blame him for the glances he gave her. He was married. She had no chance at all with him now. Certainly she had nothing to lose by telling him the truth about how she felt, but before she could summon her courage, he spoke.
“It’s the woman, isn’t it?” He glanced at her nervously. “You thought I fancied you?”
As if it could still her vicious trembling, she wrapped herself tighter in her coat and nodded.
He swore under his breath. “I didn’t mean to be leading you on. If I’ve given you ideas an’ that, sayin’ you were my date the way I did…I mean, I’m a married man, for God’s sake.”
“Then why did you say that?” She sniffed back her tears. “How was I supposed to know you were married?”
“I’m wearing a ring, yeah?”
“I wasn’t exactly looking at your jewelry.”
“Well, I wasn’t lookin’ at yours.”
For an instant that expression came back into his face, the guilty burn of desire she’d seen him stifle so quickly in the bar. Then his eyes slipped away, forging straight ahead as she stared at him, astonished. “Why were you looking at me at all?” she asked. “If you’re married, why did you dance with me like that?”
His brows creased sharply. His gaze narrowed as he picked his way between parked cars, and the sound of his boots rang in the night as she waited, hurrying next to him, until at last he looked at her. Then the pain she saw tore into her heart. His eyes were sick with weariness. Just as he’d been when his friends had ignored him, when he’d lighted that cigarette so despondently, he seemed upset, exhausted. “It’s the woman,” he said soberly.
“Your wife?”
He nodded, forced a smile. “She thinks I should find a nice girl to settle down with. That’s what I meant by that. It’s sort of a joke around here.”
Ravenna slowed beside him, reached out to take his arm. “I don’t understand,” she said, pulling him to a stop. “Your wife wants you to have an affair? That’s why you flirted with me?”
His eyes rested heavily on hers. “She wants to go to London, she wants us to…We had a bit of a row two years ago. She wants a divorce.”
When he looked away, glanced down at her hand where she gripped his sleeve, Ravenna realized she’d caressed him ever so slightly, comforted him without meaning to. She didn’t take her hand away. “And you won’t go to London?”
His lips tightened. He shook his head. “I keep hopin’ she’ll come around someday.”
Seeing that love in his anguished eyes, that useless and bitter love for his wife, made the pain knot up in her heart. She doesn’t love you, she wanted to say, but I do, God how I do.
With an obvious step backward, he pulled out from under her hand. He looked around the parking lot uneasily. “Anyway,” he said, “I lost my head back there in the pub, coming on to you like that. It just never dawned on me that you didn’t know m’life story like everyone else. I mean, I’ve been married nine years now. I thought everybody knew that.”
“You feel like you know me, that’s why.”
“Yeah, and that reminds me,” he said, and gently he kicked her foot with his boot, “if you and I have been more than friends, you might at least fill me in.” He said this casually, even with a hint of a smile, but he was braced for her answer, she could see it.
“We were more than just friends, yes,” she said.
His features dulled instantly. His eyes darkened to guilty embers, and as if her answer could save his soul, he put out the question she knew would come. “Before Fiona, was it?”
“It was before everything,” she agreed. “You can feel it between us, can’t you? Don’t you feel it when you look at me?”
Hunching his shoulders, he leaned against a parked car as he considered. “There is something about you, I can’t…can’t quite put my finger on.”
“The way I look, maybe? What I’m wearing seems wrong?”
“It’s your voice, that’s what it is. Very low-pitched, very familiar. I ought to remember a voice like yours.”
She felt her pulses quicken. He remembered their past life together. Not just a talent for recalling twelve-year-old girls he’d once sat in an amusement park ride with, but he actually remembered Elizabeth as an adult. “I had an English accent,” she said, studying his expression. “Can you remember? My name was Mary Hallett, and we lived in a country house next to the sea. You took me to some ruins, and you and I were—”
“This was a schoolyard game?” Suspicious, the way he looked at her then.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean did you make this up? Little girls do things like that when they meet older boys. When I went to America in ’77, I was seventeen years old, and you must’ve been, what, half my age? Any eight-year-old girl would be impressed by a seventeen-year-old—”
“I was twelve in—”
“Then it was America, I was right. You probably saw me when I played at that college, what was it called? You really had me frightened there, tellin’ me I was your lover an’ that.”
“But you were,” she insisted. “We were lovers, you can feel it as much as I can.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head, “not if you were twelve years old, I’d never have—”
“I wasn’t twelve, I was, I don’t know, twenty-six or something in 1790, and you were—”
“1790?”
“Yes, in Devon, that’s why you can’t remember, because it was two hundred years ago and I didn’t have an American—”
Her voice wavered and abruptly broke, for he wasn’t looking at her. With hands still shoved in the pockets of his coat, he was staring at the ground, his jaw shifting in obvious vexation.
She couldn’t imagine what he thought of her then.
But when he lifted his gaze slowly to hers with the smallest fire of anger kindled in his eyes, she knew what he thought. “Why are you lying to me?” he asked her softly. “Where’s the sense in that?”
She was dumbfounded. She couldn’t answer. She stared uselessly at his boots while he went on sharply, “It’s best t’just let the truth come out. You’d a crush on me, yeah? It’s no reason to lie.”
“I’d never lie to you.”
“So you’re tellin’ me you really believe we were lovers in 1790? I’m just thirty-one myself, or maybe I’ve—”
“It was in another life,” she said, feeling the tears threatening to overwhelm her. “I know how stupid it sounds, I don’t blame you for not believing me, because I don’t even believe me, but…”
She lost the battle then. With her lower lip trembling, she let the tears come, knowing he couldn’t possibly accept it. The glower on his face would mean the end of their acquaintance. Paul took a deep breath as she stood there, crying, and tension moved in his eyes when he did what she’d been so afraid he would: He turned and walked away.
At that moment she was convinced nothing in her life would ever matter again. He was everything, every wish she’d ever made ‘round a driftwood fire, every dream lover she’d ever fantasized about. What use would it be, going on without him? What would be the point when she knew he was the one?
And then he called her, over his shoulder. “Come on, then,” he said with a nod.