by Joan Hohl
She gave him a strange look, but went on. “I simply said that life was similar to the present, in so far as I’ve lived alone, longing for you.”
“But you were not a virgin,” he protested. “You’ve known a lover’s possession.”
“One.” Sunny raised her index finger. “I indulged in a brief affair while I was in college.” A faint smile touched her lips. “He reminded me of you.”
Adam scowled. “You knew a man in college who looked like me?”
“No.” Her denial was emphatic. “I knew a man in college who reminded me of you... in a way.”
He pierced her with a narrow-eyed stare. “In exactly what way, then?”
Her green eyes sparkled with a teasing light. “Well, he wasn’t nearly as handsome as you are.” She paused.
Certain it was for effect, he didn’t rise to her bait, only maintained his drilling stare.
“Nor as tall.” She paused once more, the devilish glow brighter in her eyes.
He arched one eyebrow.
“Nor as fierce when upset or angry.”
“Nor as passionate?” he prompted.
She laughed. “That, either.”
“And you love it,” he suggested.
“Yes,” she readily admitted.
“Would do anything for it?”
“Probably,” she confessed, sighing.
“Peel me a grape.”
Sunny’s laughter filled the room—and Adam’s heart.
Thirteen
She was actually going to do it.
Adam stared in astonished amusement as, still laughing, Sunny got up and walked to the small table. She slanted a look at him over her shoulder.
“Do you want a refill of coffee, most fearsome and mighty lord of all you survey?” Her tone was one of awed respect, her attitude servile.
Adam lost it; laughter roared from his throat. God, he loved this woman, her sense of humor, her passion, her joy of life...even her unwavering beliefs.
“Ah...no, thank you,” he finally managed to choke out past his laughter. “I’d probably strangle on it.”
“As you wish, my liege,” she said demurely, lifting the tray and turning to come back to him.
Studying her, her gleaming eyes shielded by her partially lowered lids, her serenely composed features, the fluid suppleness of her movements, Adam felt the most incredible sensation of contentment filling all the nooks and crannies of his being.
It didn’t matter, the conflict of beliefs between them—mostly inside him—the short amount of time they had known each other. What was time, anyway? None of it mattered, he realized with an illuminating burst of insight.
Within two days that felt like a lifetime, Adam knew he had fallen irrevocably in love with this woman who claimed she had loved him forever.
Adam blinked out of his reverie when he felt her set the fruit tray on his lap. Bemused, he didn’t notice the small grape she held in her fingers. He opened his mouth to reveal his thoughts to her, confess his love for her.
Sunny struck with the speed of lightning. Her hand shot out, popping the grape into his mouth.
“Close your eyes and pretend it’s peeled,” she drawled, causing the tray to tilt precariously as she plopped down next to him “If you want one peeled, I suggest you peel it yourself...my lord.”
Controlling an urge to laugh and dump the tray by pouncing on her delectable body, Adam raised one eyebrow into an arch of arrogant annoyance.
“Are you trying to resurrect Magnus the Head Hunter?”
“Ahh...Magnus...” Sunny gave him an enthralled look and a heavy sigh. “Such a fierce, passionate, magnificent lover,” she said in simpering tones.
“You want fierce?” he growled.
“Actually, I want a piece of cheese,” she retorted, spearing a chunk of the Swiss.
Laughing, bantering, they devoured every morsel on the tray and every last drop of the coffee.
Replete, they set the tray aside, then sat close together, heads resting on the back of the settee.
“I’m stuffed,” Sunny said, groaning with satisfaction.
“Not completely... yet,” Adam murmured, turning his head to smile at her with leering, lecherous intent.
“Behave yourself, Mr. Grainger,” Sunny scolded, her lips quivering with amusement “It’s unseemly of you to make lewd suggestions to me at this advanced stage of our on-going, never-ending relationship.”
“No kidding?” Adam pulled a wry expression, but inside his mind was working on the content of her jibe.
Their ongoing, never-ending relationship. In retrospect, he asked himself if there could by any stretch of credulity be some substance to the strange and unsettling visions or memory flashes or whatever he had experienced earlier while on the college campus.
Sunny believed without question or doubt.
So, also, did Charles Lawrence.
The thought of whom activated another question.
“The man who spoke to you the day we met,” he said abruptly, noting the sudden surprise in her eyes. “The man you said was called Mr. White... this time.”
Sunny frowned. “Yes. What about him?”
“His name is Charles Lawrence.”
“I know.” Her frown gave way to puzzlement. “But how did you learn his name?”
“I met him here in the lobby,” he answered, amazed at the realization that it had been only the day before. Could it really have been just yesterday? he mused.
“And?” Sunny gave him a verbal nudge.
“What?” he asked, still pondering the seeming interactions of contracting and expanding time, his time, since he had first sighted Sunny strolling down the Palace Green.
“You said you met Mr. Lawrence,” she reminded him, her voice shaded by the colors of hope and expectation.
“Oh... yeah.” He shrugged. “He introduced himself and we had breakfast together.”
Odd, that meeting. Had it been mere happenstance or could fate have had a hand in it? Adam reflected. Now, less than two days later, he couldn’t recall tasting the food—or even ordering it, for that matter, he had been so startled by the man’s story. And he recalled that with perfect clarity.
Stories. Both Sunny and Charles Lawrence had stories to tell, stories of past lives, past loves.
“Adam?”
He started, blinked, gave her a self deprecating smile. “Er...I was thinking.”
“About what?” she probed, very gently.
“When you told me he had been here before, I had presumed you were referring to the present, current time.” His eyes delved into the open green depths of hers. “But you weren’t, were you?”
“No.” She gave a quick shake of her head. “He told you, didn’t he...about us, he and I, I mean?”
Alarm flared to vibrant life inside Adam. Sunny and Charles Lawrence? A sour, sick feeling invaded his stomach. His imagination went into overdrive. Had they been lovers at some distant period of time? Lawrence and...his Sunny?
“What about you and Lawrence,” he demanded in a gritty teeth-bared snarl.
“Adam!” She laughed and her eyes took on a brilliance, as though a powerful light had been switched on inside them. “I do believe you’re jealous,” she crowed.
Adam grunted.
She relented. “He was my tutor,” she explained, her glittering eyes revealing her delight. “During that oh-so-pampered-and-empty lifetime I told you about... The Charles Lawrence of today was Mr. James Carleton then, my very respectful and proper teacher.”
“Oh.” The sense of relief Adam felt was nearly unbearable, in light of his having endured a moment of almost insane jealousy over the mere possibility of Sunny being intimate with another man in a previous existence.
It was insane. Adam told himself. Unless... His thinking process came to a screeching halt on a preposterous idea. Unless he was on the verge of accepting...
Adam shook his head, but the thought refused to be banished. What if? What if... He was almost afra
id to ask, and yet he had to know.
“Do you have any more stories to tell me?”
“Yes, many,” she said, her voice softened with patience and compassion. “But for the present, I’ll relate just one more, the most recent of my memory flashes.”
Adam didn’t wince at the term “flashes.” How could he, having experienced them himself.
“When and where did this...lifetime take place?”
“Right here. Oh, not right here, in this motel, but here in Williamsburg, the original Williamsburg.”
Naturally, Adam immediately thought of the flashes he had had, but they had not been together then. With another sudden burst of insight, he knew that it had been Sunny he had been searching for at the time.
Logic followed that she had to be referring to yet another time in Virginia.
“And when did this take place?” he repeated.
“Before the revolution,” she said. “During the time Patrick Henry was making himself heard.”
No wonder she had remarked on the bust of the patriot in the lobby that first evening. She had known it was a good likeness of Patrick Henry.
Had that also been the reason he had felt drawn, been so riveted by the portrait of the man in the capitol building the other day?
Had he, perhaps, actually known the man, too?
The thought inspired a compelling sense of recognition in Adam...recognition and sheer awe.
“We were happy, then, but also disappointed.”
“What?” With some difficulty, Adam refocused his sight and attention on Sunny. “I’m sorry, but I missed all of what you said. Did you say we were disappointed?”
“Yes.” Sunny nodded. “Happy together, but disappointed by our failure to procreate.”
“We couldn’t have children?” While he posed it as a question, some inner knowledge knew he had no need to ask; he already knew the answer.
“No.” Sunny’s eyes, those incredible windows into her thoughts and emotions, were sad. “It was my fault. I was barren.”
“Because you were frightened.” Again not a question, but absolute certainty.
Surprise flared to life in her eyes, surprise and shining hope. “How do you know that?”
How often had he asked himself that same question recently? Adam mused. How often had he avoided facing the answer? he chided himself. Had he deliberately closed himself off in his determination to remain logical, rational?
What would happen if he let himself go, opened up, accepted the possibility?
It happened swiftly.
It all came together, the memory flashes zipping through his mind, then pouring from his lips.
“There was an energy moving through the colonies. Many appeared infected by a spirit of revolt.” Adam could no longer see Sunny as she was today. With his memory’s eye, he saw her as she had been, every inch as beautiful, but not as bold and intrepid. Shy and uncertain, afraid of the future, that other Sunny had been terrified by the heady sense of independence permeating the land.
“Though I found that energy exciting, challenging, much as my former selves, the fierce Celt and Magnus, would have, the energy, the talk frightened you, frightened you so badly, you were terrified—at a deep, unconscious level—of bringing a child into the world. Unknowingly, you rendered yourself barren and unable to conceive.”
“Andrew.” Barely a whisper.
He heard, and automatically responded. “Yes?”
A soft sigh. “You know.”
“Yes, now I know.” He had been Andrew, and the young student of over a hundred years before Andrew, and Magnus the Head Hunter, and the fierce Celt, and who knew how many others in between.
“And now that you know,” she hesitated, moistened her lips, looked anxious. “Do you still resent me?”
That jolted Adam. “Resent you? I never did,” he denied with soft vehemence.
“Yes, love, you did.”
Yes, he had. Adam could feel the old emotion stirring, rising to the surface. It no longer had the power to effect his judgment. Well, how about that, he reflected with wry understanding. Living almost half of this lifetime in the pursuit of reasoned thinking and logic had been beneficial in more than the ways of commerce.
“Adam?” The tremor in Sunny’s voice alerted him to the agony of uncertainty she was suffering.
“Do I still resent you?” he asked. “A secret resentment I had tried to hide from you, because you were so delicate, so fearful, so unsure?”
As if afraid to speak, she gave a quick, jerky nod.
“Have I been acting like a man who resents you?” He arched his brow. “A man harboring a secret?”
“No.” She swallowed—it looked painful and tore at his heart. “But... but that was before you knew, before you remembered our time together.”
“That’s true.” Adam nodded, then went on, “But it was also before I remembered our other times together. How I screamed with the pain and grief, when rather than live without me, you died with our child already dead within you. How you labored to present a son to please Magnus, after having labored to produce four daughters for him.”
“You remember that, too?” she whispered.
“Yes, just now,” he admitted, “It came to me in a flash.” Smiling into her fabulous eyes, Adam reached for her, drawing her into the gentle protection of his embrace. “I remember something else, as well.”
Sunny raised her tear-drenched eyes to his. “What do you remember, love?”
“I remember how you always called me love. And how much I have always loved you.” Lowering his head, Adam kissed the tears from her cheeks. “How much I love you now.” He brushed his lips over hers. “How I will continue throughout eternity to love you.”
“Promise?” Sunny sniffed, and smiled.
“Do you continue to love me?” he countered, only half teasing, half terrified.
“With every fiber of every being,” she vowed.
“As God is my witness, I promise to love you, only you,” he renewed his ancient vow. “Throughout eternity.”
Epilogue
It was the July Fourth weekend, and it was blazing hot in Virginia.
Sunny stood quiet and pensive in the Bruton Parish churchyard, in the pool of deep shade cast by a large, old magnolia tree.
Colonial Williamsburg was overflowing with a flood of tourists of all ages, all of whom had gathered in the restored area to celebrate the official anniversary of the country the founding fathers had named the United States of America.
Yet, while the surrounding area buzzed with the excited hum of humanity, calm serenity prevailed within the walled cemetery yard of the old church.
A few of the tourists ambled along the paths, their voices hushed in deference to the past residents buried in the shaded cemetery.
While fully aware of the others, Sunny only had eyes for the tall man strolling the grounds, pausing here, then there to examine a headstone or marker, and where legible, read the inscriptions chiseled upon them.
Adam.
A tender smile curved Sunny’s lips and she slid her palm over her extended belly, as if in tactile communication with the child growing inside her womb.
Adam, her child’s father. How she loved him, had always loved him, would always love him, be he known as Adam or Andrew or Magnus or her fierce Celt or any other name—pronounceable or not
Every so often in his wanderings, Adam’s body would give a slight jolt and he would stretch out his hand to trace his fingers over an inscription.
At those times, Sunny’s lips were tugged into a faint, sad smile, knowing he had read, recognized the scripted name of a former friend or acquaintance.
A pang of compassionate understanding pierced her each and every time, for he would turn to look at her, his expression one of pain and sorrow.
Sunny knew that expression, had felt the pain and sorrow during her own first examination of the inscriptions. But she knew, as well, that the pain and sorrow would pass. She knew the tru
th of the adage about time healing all wounds.
In the background, Sunny noted the crackling noise of exploding small fireworks, probably set off on the Palace Green by enthusiastic youngsters. She smiled in anticipation of the day her own child might be celebrating in the same way.
The crackling noise must have reached Adam, too. Returning her smile in near perfect communion, he turned to resume his stroll through the grounds.
Her gaze fastened on him, Sunny kept watch, her pulse rate increasing as Adam, almost as if guided, headed deeper into the cemetery yard.
Her breath caught in her throat when he came to halt along the outer side of the yard, near the farthest corner of the cemetery.
He went steel rigid, as if turned to stone.
Sunny knew why he stood transfixed.
She drew a quick, shallow breath when Adam bent forward, then crouched to peer intently at a long, flat, rectangular stone marker, raised but a few inches above the ground.
He crouched there, still and silent, for some minutes. Then, his broad shoulders heaving with a deeply indrawn breath, he rose, made a half turn toward her and held out a hand, mutely imploring her to come to him.
Leaving the relative coolness of the pool of shade, Sunny stepped into the searing July sunshine. Her bright smile rivaling the sparkling sun rays, she went to him, her own hand outstretched. She slid her palm into his, shivering from a thrill of delight when his hand curled around hers, warm, secure, protective.
Adam canted his head, directing her gaze to the old, barely legible inscriptions.
“Us,” he murmured in an emotion-roughened voice.
“Yes,” she whispered, matching his tone.
“Andrew Morgan,” he read the script aloud in a hushed tone. “Beloved husband of Katherine.” His eyes sought hers. “It’s a pretty name.”
“Yes.” She nodded.
Shifting his gaze back to the stone, he continued to read aloud. “Katherine Morgan. Beloved wife of Andrew.” He was quiet a moment, then he murmured, “You were, you know. Beloved, I mean. Even while I was resenting you, I loved you more than my own life.”