by Jackie Braun
Devin Abernathy secretly dreams of escaping to a simpler time. It’s why she owns a vintage clothing shop, fulfilling her lifelong fantasy of surrounding herself with period style. All she has to do is slip on a garment to be spirited away to a bygone era—in her imagination, anyway. But lately she’s also dreamed at night of a passionate affair with a handsome World War II naval officer named Gregory Prescott, who seems oddly familiar.
Fantasy becomes reality when Devin dons a mysterious estate-sale coat and is suddenly whisked back in time—to New York City in 1945 on V-J Day, where she’s welcoming Gregory home with open arms and ruby-red kisses…. All she wants is to stay in his powerful embrace, but to do so means choosing between his past and her future.
Mine Tomorrow
Jackie Braun
www.millsandboon.co.uk
In memory of my dad, Walter Braun, who was drafted into the U.S. Army Air Corps as a teenager and honorably served his country during World War II.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter One
“Devin! Devin!” The handsome young man shouted her name, reaching out his hand as he ran alongside the bus she was on. The gap between them widened and his voice grew desperate. “Come back! Please don’t leave!”
She stood and, gripping the edges of the seats to keep her balance, staggered up the aisle of the moving vehicle. It seemed to take forever to reach the front.
“Please, you must stop,” she begged the driver. “I must get off.”
The man merely shook his head. “Next stop is Grand Central. You need to take your seat, ma’am.”
When she looked out the window again, all she saw were cars. The man was gone.
“No! No! No!”
Devin Abernathy shot up on the mattress, gasping for breath. Her throat ached from screaming. She was alone in her apartment, a glance at the clock confirming that it was time to get up for work. But she couldn’t. Not yet. Lying back on the pillow, she covered her face with her hands and wept.
It was already nine o’clock when she arrived to open Yesterday’s Closet, the vintage clothing store she owned in New York’s East Village. Her younger sister was waiting outside, blowing on her bare hands and shuffling her feet to ward off the November chill. Emily was a sophomore at New York University, but she worked at the shop three mornings a week.
Seven years earlier, their parents had died in a car accident on their way home from a New Year’s Eve party. Devin, in college herself at the time, had moved from campus housing to a tiny efficiency apartment in Lower Manhattan to ensure that she and Emily, who had been barely thirteen, were able to stay together. It had been just the two of them ever since.
“I was getting worried,” Emily said.
“Sorry.” Devin unlocked the door and deactivated the alarm. As they walked inside, she added, “I overslept and missed my train.”
Another person might not have thought anything of the excuse. Emily, however, stopped in the process of unwinding the hand-knitted scarf from around her neck. Her expression reflected concern. “Everything okay, Dev?”
“I had the dream again.”
No need to be more specific than that. Her sister knew exactly the dream to which Devin referred. Devin had told her about it often enough. It featured a man, a very handsome man, who seemed achingly familiar, even though Devin couldn’t recall ever meeting him in real life.
It always began with him calling her name. She would turn and spy him a short distance away. As soon as their gazes connected, he would smile and start toward her. The situation was always different. One time they were on opposite sides of a street that had been closed for a parade. Another time she had been seated on a subway train while he stood on the crowded platform. And now the bus.
Regardless of the scenario, the dream appeared to take place during her favorite decade, the 1940s, and it always ended the same. He was never able to reach her before she woke.
The first time Devin had the dream she’d been a senior in college. She’d experienced it a couple more times before graduation, and then off and on ever since. During the past year, however, it had begun recurring more and more frequently.
“That makes three times this month,” Emily remarked.
“I know.”
“What happened this time?”
“Same thing as always. We never got together.” Lost in recollection, Devin frowned. “He seemed more frustrated in this one. As if the situation was…urgent.”
“Urgent how?”
Devin sighed and shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“I still say you should undergo hypnosis. Your subconscious is trying to tell you something.”
“Yes. It’s telling me I haven’t had a date in nearly a year.” Devin said it dryly, but in her heart she knew it was more than that. She couldn’t shake the feeling that time was running out. But for what?
Doing her best to push thoughts of both the handsome man and the dream aside, she told her sister, “Come on. I want to get the new inventory catalogued before we open today.”
“An estate sale, right?”
“Of a sort. The elderly owner was recently moved to a hospice facility, and he had no immediate family,” Devin said as they made their way to the back room.
“That’s sad.”
Devin nodded. It was sad.
“You said it was on the Upper East Side.” Emily smacked her lips and grinned. “Ritzy.”
“Exactly. I still can’t believe how lucky I was to spot the sign.”
Devin had been on her way back from another sale in the same neighborhood when, on a whim, she’d taken a detour and had come across the hand-lettered notice out front of a stately looking brownstone.
Walking inside the second-floor apartment had been like walking back in time. Despite a flat-screen television and a few other bows to modern convenience, so much of it was straight out of the middle of the previous century. And when she’d opened the closets, she couldn’t believe her good fortune.
“Wait until you see the gorgeous clothes I scored for next to nothing.” She frowned, remembering.
“What is it, Dev?”
“It was the oddest thing. I felt like I’d been there before.”
“For another estate sale?”
“Maybe,” she said, though she knew that wasn’t the case. She would have recalled the building. Indeed, she’d felt drawn to it, almost as if the detour she’d taken hadn’t been a spontaneous act but a subconscious choice. “The note added to the strangeness.”
“What note?”
“I didn’t tell you?” After Emily shook her head, Devin continued, “When I was paying the woman who was running the sale, she commented on my name. It seems that when they were cleaning out the owner’s personal effects, they came across a secret cubby hole in a desk in one of the rooms and found an old letter addressed to someone named Devin. She thought it was quite a strange coincidence since it’s an uncommon name for a woman.”
“Did she tell you what the letter said?”
“Actually, she gave it to me to read.” The paper had been yellowed with age, the pen strokes faded from a crisp black to an antique brown.
“Well, don’t keep me in suspense!” Emily exclaimed.
Devin shrugged. “It was short and to the point. It started with ‘My Dearest Devin’ and then simply read, ‘Come back to me.�
�”
Saying the words aloud now, Devin experienced the same shiver of anticipation she had upon first reading them.
“Wow. That is bizarre.”
“Yeah.”
“But romantic, too, don’t you think?”
“I guess.”
“How was the letter signed?” Emily wanted to know.
“‘Your loving husband, Gregory.’”
Her sister sighed. “I wonder if after that Devin read the letter she came home.”
Devin frowned. That shiver of anticipation turned to trepidation. “I don’t think she ever returned.”
“Why?”
“The lady at the sale told me the envelope had still been sealed when they found it.”
“Oh! That’s so sad.” Emily’s crestfallen expression mirrored the way Devin had felt. “But at least there’s a silver lining.”
“And what might that be?”
Emily spread her arms wide and grinned. “Well, you got all this great vintage stuff for a steal.”
Her sister had a point. Devin pushed thoughts of the note, its author and its intended recipient aside. Their shared name was a coincidence. As for the fact that the letter was worded so similarly to what the man in her dreams always said, well, that was a coincidence, too. What else could it be? Devin was too practical to believe anything else. She glanced at the wall clock. It was nearly quarter after nine. Time to get to work.
“Once everything is catalogued and pressed, I’m going to put some of the nicest pieces on display in the front window. I think they’ll go over big and draw a lot of foot traffic.”
The shop was small, less than seven hundred square feet, most of which Devin had opted to use for sales racks and displays. That meant the back room was minuscule and claustrophobic, especially now that it was filled with new inventory. While Emily started the coffee, Devin began opening the flaps on the first of six large boxes.
She pulled out a dove-gray, 1940s skirt along with a matching jacket that was cinched at the waist and padded at the shoulders.
Emily came over to inspect the garment. “I smell mothballs.” She scrunched up her nose.
“Be thankful for that. It’s why everything is in such excellent condition.” And because they were, they would fetch a decent sum. Devin’s mood began to improve. The shop needed the revenue.
“Ooh, check out this hat,” Emily said. Reaching into the box, she pulled out a small blue derby that was decorated in feathers dyed in a similar shade. She set it on Devin’s head and stepped back. “It’s totally you.”
Devin laughed, even though she agreed. She loved hats, and already had quite a collection of them. Unfortunately, she had few places to wear them.
She picked up the jacket and held it in front of her torso. “Can you imagine wearing an outfit like this to church or out to the movies on a date?”
“Can I imagine it? No.” Emily was twenty and lived in jeans. Her appreciation for vintage pieces was limited to accessories, such as scarves, broaches and handbags. “But for some reason, I can imagine you in it.” She whistled between her teeth then. “Women sure were a lot fancier back then.”
“Everyone was a lot fancier back then.” Devin’s tone turned wistful.
Not for the first time, she felt she’d been born in the wrong era. She was out of step with her own times. Old-fashioned, as her last boyfriend dubbed her. Perhaps she was romanticizing the 1940s, given that the rigid societal norms of the times had allowed for wholesale discrimination based on sex and race. She couldn’t condone either, of course. But the coarseness of the present day was everywhere. In movies and music lyrics. In advertisements that didn’t subtly hint at sex to sell a product, but bombarded the buying public with overt images.
And then there was what passed for women’s fashion. If it didn’t look as if it belonged on a streetwalker, then the fabric had been purposely ripped, frayed or faded. Stand the test of time? Most of these items would be lucky to survive a few turns in the wash cycle.
Nothing these days was intended to last, whether clothing, jobs or marriages. Everything had a shelf life, an expiration date. Meanwhile, Devin, who still mourned her parents and was beginning to wonder if she’d ever find herself in the sort of relationship her mother and father had enjoyed before their untimely deaths, craved permanence. She craved something that could withstand the passage of time.
The man in her dream came to mind in a dizzying rush. She could see him in formal attire, his hair worn short and neat. He was smiling, eyes lit with a mix of emotions so potent it caused her breath to catch.
I do.
She gasped a second time.
“Dev?” Emily was watching her, concern evident in her eyes.
“I—I was just thinking about…about men and how they wore suits and ties.”
“For more than weddings and funerals, you mean?”
Weddings. Devin smiled weakly, but nodded.
“People didn’t go around in ripped jeans. They didn’t wear jeans at all, unless they were doing menial labor. And any holes would have been patched.”
“Now you pay more for holes.” Emily’s wry tone dissolved in laughter.
From across the room came a gurgling sound, followed by a hiss of steam.
“I think the coffee’s ready,” Devin said.
God knew she could use a cup. Setting aside the jacket and skirt, she went over to pour mugs for both of them. When she returned, Emily was pulling something else from the box.
“What’s this?”
“Ooh, that’s an overcoat. Wait till you see it. Here.” She handed her sister both mugs so she could take the coat.
After shaking out the wrinkles, she held it in front of her. Like the jacket, it was fitted at the waist and had padded shoulders. Devin fingered the placket of buttons that ran down the middle and stroked the soft wool gabardine. The quality was evident.
“Wow! I’m not a fan of the Forties, but that coat is gorgeous. And it hardly looks worn.”
“I know.” Devin decided to put it on, going so far as to fasten all of the buttons. It fit perfectly. More than how it fit, it felt perfect.
“Gosh, Dev, that looks like it was made for you.”
“You’re right.” Even though Yesterday’s Closet could use the income, she murmured, “Maybe I’ll keep this piece for myself.”
At the front of the shop was a trifold mirror bracketed by a pair of dressing rooms. Devin picked her way through the boxes and went to stand in front of it so she could study her image in triplicate.
Her brown hair was straight and fell even with her shoulders, rather than being swept up in a fashionable Forties ’do. Still, the hat looked pretty good on her. Maybe she would keep both pieces.
On a sigh, Devin dipped her hands into the pockets. Her fingers brushed against something in the right one. It was round and cool to the touch. She pulled it out. A lady’s watch? Before she could make out the time, however, the room exploded in light.
Chapter Two
A blinding light engulfed her. Devin closed her eyes against its brightness and winced at the loud, soniclike boom that followed.
What had just happened? Some sort of freak power surge? When she opened her eyes, however, the scene that greeted her was surreal and caused her to doubt her sanity.
She was no longer standing in front of the trifold mirror. In fact, she wasn’t in her shop at all or even in the East Village. Despite some cosmetic differences and the absence of electronic billboards, she recognized the spot as Times Square. It was packed with people, all of whom were celebrating.
Women were cheering. Men were clapping one another on the back. Sailors in uniform sauntered in their midst, randomly tossing their white caps high into the air. All of them were absurdly happy, but what struck Devin most of all was how they all looked. Their hairstyles, their clothing…vintage 1940s, an era she knew well.
Something about the scene tugged at her memory. It was as if she’d seen it before. In one of her dreams perh
aps? But she was awake now and at her shop, or at least she had been. So that didn’t explain why she was seeing it now. Not just seeing it, she thought, as an older gentleman bumped into her. It was as if she was experiencing it, right down to the acrid smell of smoke coming from the cigarette clamped between the man’s lips.
He pulled it away, puffed out some smoke that she swore had her eyes stinging. With a polite tip of his lightweight fedora, he added, “Pardon me, ma’am.”
When he was gone, Devin discreetly touched her forehead, almost hoping to find a wound that would explain things. A concussed person might succumb to detailed delusions such as these, but there was no wound, not even any tenderness.
Had she suffered some sort of blackout or seizure then? Neither seemed to be the case. She felt fine, if confused. Other than that blinding light and hearing the thunderous boom, she’d experienced no other physical symptoms.
That left two possibilities, only one of which was rational, so she eagerly latched on to it: This was another one of her dreams—a dream within a dream. She had never begun to unpack the boxes or even gone to her shop that morning. She was still in her apartment, sound asleep in her bed. The alarm on her nightstand had not yet gone off. She dipped her hand back into the coat’s pocket. The watch that had seemed to start it all wasn’t there. She sighed. A dream within a dream. That made sense.
Especially when she spied him in the crowd.
He was taller than most of the men in the square, his shoulders broader. His mouth was wide and sensual, the kind of mouth that looked just as good in a relaxed line as it did curved with a grin. His cheeks were lean and sculpted. At this distance, Devin couldn’t make out the color of his eyes, but suddenly she knew. They were blue. Not an icy light blue, but the fathomless midnight of the deep ocean.
He wore a brimmed hat over his brown hair and was dressed in dark trousers, a crisp shirt and tie, and a dark blue blazer with brass buttons that ran down the placket. The uniform she recognized as United States Navy, vintage World War Two. Devin wasn’t up enough on the other details to know his military rank, but suddenly, in addition to his eye color, she knew his name.