Nothing threatening. Nothing dangerous. Relax. Listen to the doctor’s advice. Stop and regroup.
Her rigid body slowly went soft and pliable again.
Easy. There’s no danger here. Only love.
Glorious love.
Craig was there, touching her, kissing her, igniting blazing embers in her very soul.
This is where she belonged.
Safe in his arms.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-FOUR
She lay, cuddled closely against his damp nakedness, wonderfully spent.
My first orgasm! I don’t count that one at his apartment. This is the first I’m actually aware of, and I had it as Ashley Bradford, not Victoria du Chevalier.
She grinned, realizing she had just used her maiden name. She no longer thought of herself as an Easton. She would shed that name as quickly as she would the man. Didn’t know how she would handle that with the children, but she’d figure it out.
Right now, she didn’t give a damn. Maybe she’d be Mrs. Thornton so soon it wouldn’t matter anyway. Craig could even adopt the kids. Keith might like not being responsible for child support.
They lay together, hands gently venturing over the other, not erotically, but full of wonder at the reality of their nearness. This was no dream, no hopeful fantasy. They were here together, openly and without shame, right where they belonged.
Ashley wiggled around, blissful that he seemed unwilling to release her. Her fingers outlined his eyes and nose, followed by gentle kisses.
“Happy?” he asked.
“Deliriously. You?”
“Like a dream. Makes all those years with Toni seem so hollow. Even the relatively good, early ones.”
“Know what you mean. First time I felt like my real self.”
“I noticed. No French today, huh?” He grinned mischievously.
“Nope. Just me. At least I now know where the French things come from. Want to hear about it?”
“Sure. I want to know everything about you.”
“Okay. But promise not to laugh. It’s kinda strange.”
“Scouts honor.” He made the familiar two-finger salute. She sighed, taking his hands in hers, thumbs gently stroking his palms.
“Well, I told you I’ve been seeing a therapist. These visions… riding on a real fox hunt, the French, and especially this weird terror when making love. It… it scared me. I needed to work it out. To understand it, or it could cripple our future. Was that foolish?”
“Oh, no, darling. I told you I’ve been in and out of therapy for years. Mostly about dealing with Toni. You know I’ve gone back again too, for that very reason.”
“Right. Well, remember I said we tried some hypnotic regression, to see if there were some traumatic incident from my childhood… and I landed in a past life. Two lives, actually.” She paused, searching his face.
“Past lives? Wow!” His eyebrow arched.
“You’re not laughing at this, are you?”
“I promised I wouldn’t, didn’t I?” He grinned. “You can’t imagine how well I understand this.”
“Why? You don’t think that’s strange?”
“Not when you hear what happened to me. But you tell me your story, then I’ll tell you mine.”
“Okay. Anyhow, the doctor says past lives are only a mechanism of the subconscious to help explain other fears, or something like that. Actually, I’ve seen two therapists who both say the same thing.”
She curled into him, legs tucked under her, the sheet pulled like a cloak around her against the air conditioning.
“Two? Why?” he asked.
“The first referred me to the second. Maybe he felt I’d be more at ease with a woman. She’s really very good. And these apparent memories, or whatever, they seem so real. They start so wonderfully, and end so terribly. It’s… it’s really scary.”
She searched his eyes, perplexed, as he shook his head in apparent denial. He’d think she was a flake.
“Really stupid, huh?”
“Oh no. I’m not doubting you. Not a bit. It’s just a strange coincidence. In fact, I was looking for reasons for something bugging me, so my therapist regressed me, and I dropped into some past lives, too. Really weird, isn’t it?
“Gave me the same story about it not being real, but now I know why I love fox hunting so much. I was doing it in one of these supposed past lives.”
“How funny! Me, too.” She caressed the side of his face, a wondrous smile splitting hers. “See how much alike we are. Tell me about yours.”
“I will, but I want to hear who you were first.”
“Okay, but remember, you promised not to laugh.”
“Cross my heart,” he said, drawing his finger across his chest.
She beamed, much more relaxed. Why had she ever doubted he would understand? This was Craig, not Keith.
“I do love you.” She grinned, planting a swift, tender kiss on his nose.
“Anyway, I’ve already told you that in this so-called memory I was riding through the woods. It was a fox hunt. I’m French, a fearless rider, totally into the chase. That’s where my French thoughts and the hallucination of riding in the forest seem to come from.
“It’s sort of amazing, though, ‘cause, while I did study French for two years in high school, I was never very fluent. In these dreams, I’m rattling it off like a native.”
“Funny. I thought fox hunting was much more an English thing than French.”
“You’re probably right, and I was in England, riding my britches off after the furry little buggers. My husband and I were apparently visiting, spending time with various noblemen throughout southern and central England.”
“Noblemen? How interesting.” One eyebrow rose. “And were you royalty, as well?”
“My husband was a Count in that first memory, and I, of course, was a Countess, but our marriage was just political. There was no passion in it. I’d fallen secretly in love with my handsome host, a wonderful, masculine man. All things my husband was not.”
“Your host?” A strange look was slowly transforming Craig’s face. “Was he also a nobleman?”
“Of course, silly. I already said that. Don’t be jealous.” She laughed, reaching out, tenderly touching his cheek again.
“Anyway, a countess would never fall in love with just anybody. He was Charles Wallace, Earl of Devonshire, also in an arranged marriage to an icy bitch named Clarice.”
She watched with rising concern as Craig’s jaw dropped open, and his eyes took on a wild cast. He drew back slightly, as if to see her better. An Arctic chill flooded her, raising mountainous goose bumps. Something was wrong.
“And you? Your name?” His voice was a choked whisper.
“Craig! You’re scaring me. Are you all right?”
“Yes.” His voice broke. “Your name, Ashley? What was it?”
“I was the Countess of Beaujolais.....”
“Victoria du Chevalier,” he interrupted, his face sliding from shocked wonder to an almost silly happiness. It was her turn to drop a jaw. She had told no one but her therapists.
“How in the Hell did you know that?”
They were sitting upright on the bed, each staring at the other with quizzical grins, the sheet she had been wearing like a cape now discarded.
“You’ll never believe me.” His eyes were drinking her in with a new ardor, a look she had not seen before.
“Try me. I could surprise you.”
“Okay.” He was still grinning foolishly. “I told you I also found past lives. Two, actually. In the first, I was also on a fox hunt… in England. I was in love with someone other than my wife, a passionless harpy from an arranged marriage. This new object of my dreams was a beautiful, exciting young woman… a French countess.”
He took her face gently in his two hands.
“Her name was Victoria, and mine was Charles Wallace, Earl of Devonshire.”
Ashley, who had risen slowly to her knees as Craig unfolded his tale, sat down hard,
clamping a hand over her mouth, her smoky gray eyes as big as half-dollars.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-FIVE
Bruce Feldman paused, battling last minute indecision. Shrugging resolutely, he slid the key into the lock, listening for the click as the deadbolt slid home. He studied the polished brass plate on the stained oak door:
Dr. Bruce Feldman, M.D.
Psychiatrist
And murderer?
Slipping his glasses into a leather case, he sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose, trying to massage away the aching imprints. The aspirin were just starting to kick in, and none too soon. His struggle with himself over the last hour had yielded little more than a splitting headache.
Finally, realizing that there was really nothing else he could do, he left a message for his secretary to cancel and reschedule all his appointments for the rest of the week, and leave the next week as open as possible.
He was taking a week, possibly two, as a sabbatical. He’d some important research to do.
He would go home, take a stiff brandy… or three… and try to relax. He needed a good night sleep… something missing over the last several days… with no alarm set.
He’d work for a few hours in the morning with his stamp collection. Nothing else absorbed his total concentration as sorting and examining his new acquisitions. He must be totally at ease when he again faced his ancient deadly past.
He intended to learn what really happened in those final, gory minutes, so many centuries ago. All previous doubts were jettisoned. He was totally convinced these were actual memories.
Rachel Caslow joined his camp as another convert after her recent sessions with Ashley. And old archives had verified the redheaded woman’s memories, as well as Craig Thornton’s.
Feldman visited the library again the previous day. A lot of digging into the Who’s Who of 19th Century Philadelphia had uncovered that shipping magnet, Jonathan Denton, had died in the Spring of 1845. In another book of recorded legal filings, Feldman discovered shortly after Denton’s death, his daughter, Morgana Quincy, filed for divorce from her husband, William, alleging physical abuse.
He was becoming a regular detective! It took searching two other volumes to discover that in the summer of 1846, while on picnic with attorney, Robert Isaac, Morgana and Isaac were savagely attacked, apparently by a rouge bear. Their bodies were horribly mutilated.
Back to the legal records, he learned since she was childless, and with the divorce not consummated, all of Denton’s fortune fell into the hands of Morgana’s soon to be ex-husband, William.
It was all exactly as Ashley “remembered.”
In the elevator, swooping toward the parking garage, he shivered at the thought.
Exactly as Ashley remembered!
That final piece of the puzzle, combined with Rachel’s call that afternoon, and his terrifying visions, had scrapped any last vestiges of doubt.
People are reborn, again and again. He could only assume these two kept finding each other in a heretofore futile effort to live full lives together. Why he, along with his mysterious companion, kept showing up to perpetrate these horrible acts of death and destruction, was still beyond him. Could it again be a struggle for wealth denied?
He started at the swoosh of the elevator doors sliding open to the underground parking lot. He blinked as he stepped onto the concrete floor, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the gloomy surroundings. It was well after office hours, and only night safety lights were still burning.
He peered carefully into the shadows, suddenly uneasy. Victoria du Chevalier and Charles Wallace were here, 300 years after they were first murdered. They had found love together for the third time, and he had found them.
It was reasonable to suspect his accomplice in their deaths may be nearby, too. The who-where-why of that person were still a mystery to him. A mystery he was intent on resolving. He doubted the library would tell him much about that. It was up to him and his own regressions to sift through the potential culprits. Unfortunately, there were many to choose from.
Reaching his car, he fumbled with the keys, fingers numbed by sudden fear. An intuitive panic of the prey. Strange for one who had seemed the predator in those terrible times. Somehow, he knew there was more to it… a lot more!
Those details were exactly what he needed time to more fully discover.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-SIX
Ashley crouched, legs tucked under her, the sheet draped across her lap, one hand clasped across her mouth. She was still as an alabaster sculpture, a wood nymph caught by surprise, hanging motionless for what seemed an eternity, eyes flared wide, starring at a whimsically smiling Craig. He shrugged.
“You?” She finally found her voice, a bare whisper. “Charles Wallace? But how… ?”
“Don’t have the foggiest. Bruce regressed me to that life, 300 years ago, totally by accident. Told me it was all just a figment of my mind.”
“Bruce? Dr. Bruce Feldman?”
“Yeah. D’ya know… ? Wait a minute! Was he your therapist, too?”
“Yes. No wonder he referred me to Dr. Caslow.”
“You gotta be kidding! He regressed us both to the same life, to the same incident, and was still feeding us the ‘it’s all in your mind’ crap. Jesus.”
“Wow! It may have been traumatic for him, too.”
He shook his head, lips curled in a thin snarl. “I can’t imagine why?”
“Because he doesn’t believe in past lives, and here we are, shoving it down his throat. He couldn’t ethically tell us about the other’s experience, could he?
“So he passed me off to Dr. Caslow, which has worked out fine. She’s easier for me to talk with. Dr. Feldman seemed very disturbed by all of this.”
“I can imagine. We musta knocked the foundation right out of something he apparently was very sure of. No wonder he seemed so stressed.”
He took her in his arms and she scrunched up tightly against him, resting her head against his chest.
“There were two lives, weren’t there?” he asked. “The second time, were you Morgana Quincy, in Philadelphia? About 1845?”
“Yes, and of course, you had to be Robert.”
“Ahh, so that’s why my being Jewish wasn’t an unpleasant surprise for a dyed-in-the-wool WASP like you.” His chuckle was soft and teasing.
“Maybe so.” Smiling, she laid her hand gently on his cheek. He drew it to his lips, absorbing her delicate odor as his tongue traced her fingers.
“But, what was there for you to fear from those lives? Loving you then seemed so glorious.”
“You don’t know?”
“Only that we were perfect together. Making love was delirious Nirvana. Just like now.” He grinned impishly, but she frowned.
“Didn’t… didn’t you see the end of our lives?”
“No, did you? Was it wonderful, all those lovely years together?”
“Hardly!” She shivered, steadfastly avoiding his eyes.
“You saw us both times, making love in the woods?”
“Yeah. In little meadows, surrounded by tall trees. We were just beginning to make love a second time when he brought me back. Very disappointing, too, ‘cause I was having such a wonderful time.”
“It didn’t last.” She shuddered, wrapping her arms around herself, unable to dispel a sudden chill. Goosebumps flowered on her neck and back as she visualized those final minutes.
“I don’t understand.” He was no longer smiling. “Did we have a falling out?”
Trapping her face between palms, he turned it toward his.
“More like a falling down. Down and out.”
“I still don’t get it. You’re talking in riddles. I remember that we had some outside conflicts in our lives, other spouses and my being Jewish, but the way we loved each other, what coulda possibly gone wrong?”
“How about… our murder?” She choked out the words, a muted hiss.
“Murder?”
“We were brutally murdered, twice, while we wer
e making love in those idyllic little meadows.”
“Murdered?” His face screwed up, somewhere between doubt and anger. “But why didn’t I see that?”
“Dr. Feldman knew what would happen. It probably shocked him, and he brought you back before you had a chance to see it all. Believe me, he did you a favor.”
“And in the second life... ?”
“I guess he wanted to double check that the whole thing was real. That we really were Victoria and Morgana and Charles and Robert. He must have been stunned, having his beliefs scrapped like that.”
“Son-of-a-bitch! He coulda told me. Murdered together twice, and here we are again, and I never knew.
“Maybe that was the basis for my recent anxiety, when we were… together. Feldman knew and never told me. He supposed to be helping me, not hiding the truth!”
“Ethical restraints again, I suppose,” she said. “All he could do was let you experience it yourself. And for some reason, he seemed almost as distraught as me.”
She hadn’t really thought about that until now. He had seemed so shaken, especially after her first regression. He had no reason to believe these were actual past lives at that point.
He didn’t hypnotize Craig until much later, yet he seemed almost… what? Frightened? Yes, terrified. But why?
“Hey,” Craig said, taking her head between his hands. “What’s going on inside that gorgeous dome of yours? You look like you’re mile away.”
“Sorry. I was just visualizing that first lifetime. I wonder why he was so upset?”
“Yeah. And why he didn’t let me finish mine, murdered or not? Maybe those lives have some influence on my problems, too.”
“I think we should ask him.”
“What?”
“We should go to his office together and ask him. What does he think of all this, and why does he feel so… so involved?”
“Y’know, you’re right. Ask him point blank. I think there may be more going on here than we know.”
A 3rd Time to Die Page 24