Always

by Jude Deveraux

  “Feeling better?”

  Turning her head, she looked into the beautiful face of her husband, Adam Montgomery. For a moment she just gazed at him, drinking in what, to her, was the most beautiful face ever created. His hair was as black as she remembered, and there were the wings of gray just above his small, flat ears. Her stare moved from his deep-set blue eyes down to his soft lips, to his cleft chin. She glanced down at his strong body, the body that had given her so much pleasure for the few years they’d had together.

  She looked back up to his eyes. They were Adam’s eyes, still seeming to carry the weight of the world in them—but yet, there was a light inside them now, something new that she’d never seen before.

  When she lifted her hand and put it to his cheek, he turned and kissed her palm. For a moment she closed her eyes, then held out her arms to him. “Come to me,” she whispered. “Come to me.”

  Adam looked as though he meant to envelope her in his strong arms, but the next moment the door opened and Jack stood there. Adam moved away.

  “How are you?” Jack asked, genuine caring in his voice. He took Adam’s seat beside the chaise where Darci lay.

  Puzzled by everything, Darci looked past Jack to Adam and he put his finger to his lips for her to be quiet. She tried to get the frown off her face and look at Jack, but all she wanted to do was put her arms around her husband.

  “What happened?” Darci asked.

  “You passed out on us again,” Jack said, smiling. “Lavey and I came back with half a boar’s head and Mr. Drayton was carrying you out the front door. We put you in the buggy, let Lavey drive, and you were here faster than an ambulance could have done it. I think she ran over four chickens, a cat, and two pedestrians.”

  Darci managed a smile at his joke. “Where is here?”

  “At my house,” Adam said. He was wringing out a white cloth in a basin of water. “I should introduce myself. I’m Adam Drayton and I found you in my old house.”

  “He’s been great,” Jack said. “He caught you trespassing and when you fainted he still helped you.” His eyes were warning her not to say too much and screw things up.

  “I think she should rest now,” Adam said. “Perhaps you and Miss Shay would care to dine with me.”

  Jack’s back was to Adam, and he winked at Darci. “Please get well, dear sister,” Jack said, then leaned forward as though to kiss her cheek. “He likes you, he’s rich, and he’s a widower. Maybe we’ll stay here after all.”

  Jack stood up and looked at Adam with a little smile. “We’ll have dinner, then we’ll all go back to Camwell.”

  “It’s much too late to be on the roads,” Adam said. “You must be my guests for the night. I’ll send my driver to tell your families where you are.”

  “How kind of you,” Jack said facetiously, still making faces at Darci. “Well, I guess I’ll just mosey on downstairs and see what Lavey’s up to. You two behave now. Just like we’re going to.”

  Both Darci and Adam watched the door close behind Jack, then Adam said, “You can’t choose your relatives.”

  Darci laughed—and cried at the same time. It was so wonderful to again hear Adam’s sarcastic humor. She opened her arms to him. “Come to me.”

  Adam sat down on the chair beside her, but he didn’t take her in his arms. “We must talk. You were in your faint for nearly an hour so I had time to think. I don’t know what cruel trick fate has played on us, but we must lift ourselves above it.”

  When Darci tried to sit up, Adam put a pillow behind her head. As he leaned near her, she could smell the fragrance of his skin. She inhaled it, closing her eyes for a moment.

  Adam moved away from her, and stood behind the chair. “I am not who you think I am, and you are not my Diana.”

  “Diana?” Darci asked, still trying to understand what was going on. It had been easier to adjust to having awakened in a different time in history than it was to understand what Adam was saying. “You are my husband,” she said.

  “No, I’m not.” He walked to the far side of the room.

  Darci lay back against the pillow, watching him, and trying to understand. She tried to look at the room they were in. It was a pretty sitting room, much like the ones in the other houses she’d seen since she’d traveled back in time. But there was a subtle difference here. The carvings on the furniture were finer, the porcelains over the fireplace had the look of art rather than what could be bought at the local flea market. Here and there was the sparkle of silver. The paintings on the walls looked to be one of a kind. Lavender had said the Draytons were wealthy and this room showed it.

  Just like at home, she thought. If her Adam had lived in the 1840s, he would have lived in a house like this one.

  She watched Adam go to a cabinet on the wall, open it, and reach inside. “I brought you up here to this room to show you something,” he said as he withdrew a beautiful silk case from inside the cabinet. Slowly, he began unbuckling the straps from around it.

  “As I said, I’ve had more time to adjust to this than you have. When I first saw you in that room I thought you were another intruder, one of the sick people in this town who can’t allow a man to have any peace. But then you looked up at me and I saw…”

  Turning, he smiled at her. “I saw what I think you see in me.” From the package he withdrew what looked to be a framed picture, but she could only see the back of it. “You say that I look like your husband. This is my wife,” he said, and handed the picture to her.

  It was a portrait of Darci. It was her as she looked in modern times, with strawberry-blonde hair and dark lashes and eyebrows. She doubted if the woman in the portrait was wearing makeup, but she looked like Darci did after about an hour’s worth of work.

  “Your wife?” Darci managed to ask. If she had her powers now maybe she’d be able to see that this Adam was not her Adam. Their auras were probably so different that anyone with any psychic ability would never confuse them. Looks are superficial, she told herself.

  As Darci looked at the portrait of a woman who was as much like her as this man was like her husband, she knew that being sent back had been no accident. It looked as though Jack and Lavender’s problems might be secondary, or maybe they were the catalyst to get Darci back to this time.

  “Is she the woman who haunts the old house?”

  “She haunts nothing!” Adam said fiercely. “Don’t you think that if there was a chance she was there that I’d never have moved from that house? If I could see her for another moment…if I could touch her…” For a long moment he looked at Darci with such longing, with such lust, that her heart seemed to leap into her throat.

  Adam looked away. “Is this God’s sense of humor to play such a trick on me? To give me a woman to love then take her from me, then to give me a replica?”

  Darci put the portrait on the table by the chaise and lay back. She felt defeated. Was this why she’d been sent here? To find a man who looked like her husband? Or was she to make a choice? Adam was in one century, but her daughter was in another century.

  “My husband disappeared,” she said slowly. “He and his sister left one day and never came back. I’ve been searching for them for years, but I can’t find them.”

  Adam was frowning at her as he took the portrait and carefully put it back in its silk sheath. “But I thought you lived in Camwell. Your brother—”

  “Jack isn’t my brother. He’s—” How could she explain something that she didn’t understand? “Will you call the local witches’ council if I tell you that I’m from another time period?” she asked, trying to sound lighthearted.

  Adam sat back down on the chair near her and crossed his legs in a way that was so familiar to Darci that she wished she could faint again. How many times had she sat down on her husband’s lap and wiggled until he…?

  “Time travel? It’s been debated, of course, but it’s not possible.”

  “I wish it weren’t,” she said, trying not to look at him.

  “Al
l right,” he said, leaning back and smiling, “tell it to me as a story. I rather like stories.”

  She smiled back at him. Where should she begin? “I am born” as Charles Dickens did in David Copperfield? No, that would take a lifetime, and she didn’t have…It was difficult to think of time when she was in this man’s presence. It was difficult to think of trying to find a man when he seemed to be sitting in front of her.

  “Jack and I were working together and—”

  “As his secretary, perhaps?”

  “Not quite. I was the boss.”

  Adam looked at her in astonishment. “I see. And what year do you come from?”

  “Two thousand and four,” she said, then watched the blood drain from his face. In the next second he got up and poured himself a drink.

  “I want to say here and now that I know this could not possibly be true, but there is something odd in all this. I look like your husband and you look like my dear wife. I think there’s more to this than mere coincidence. Please go on.”

  She didn’t comment on the fact that he didn’t offer her a drink. “Jack and I were searching for his father, who has disappeared, and by accident we found a room that contained four objects, one of which I could feel had magic powers.”

  “Feel?” Adam asked. “How did you feel this?”

  “I had certain abilities that…” She trailed off. How could she explain all this? “Why do you think this has happened to us?” she asked. “Whether I’m from this time or not, why do think this has happened? Or do you believe it’s just coincidence?”

  He set down his drink and looked at her. “I don’t believe in chance or coincidence. Everything is for a purpose, but I don’t think either you or I know what that purpose is. I think you and I have been put together for a reason.”

  “All I know for absolutely sure is that I want to find my husband and sister-in-law.”

  “Are you sure they aren’t dead?”

  “Yes, I could tell that much.”

  “You could tell this through these—what did you call them?—abilities you have.”

  “Had.”

  “Ah, yes. Had.”

  She didn’t like his tone. She didn’t put up with it from Adam Montgomery and she wasn’t going to put up with it from this man. “I could do wonderful things,” she said. “I could paralyze people, make them do what I wanted them to, see things that other people couldn’t.” His expression was mocking. He was laughing at her, and not believing one word she said—which made her say too much. “I killed people and I raised a man from the dead. I went into the light, grabbed his hand, and pulled him back to earth.”

  “I see,” Adam said.

  “Stop that! I told you that you sound like Abraham Lincoln when you say that.”

  “And who is he?”

  “The man who will be president during the Civil War.”

  “Civil War? And when is that?”

  “Soon. But maybe not so soon to you. Twenty years,” Darci said, her anger subsiding. This was the North and they wouldn’t be affected much by what was coming, but she hated to think about what was going to happen in the South.

  “Slavery,” he said.

  “Yes,” she whispered. “And economics.”

  Adam began to pace the room in a way that she’d seen her husband do a thousand times. She thought he was thinking about the coming war and wondered if he’d want her to tell him of the future, but he asked nothing. He kept pacing and she knew to leave him alone and let him think. At least that’s what her Adam needed.

  Why? she wanted to scream. Why had this been done to her? Why dangle this man in front of her? He was food to a starving woman, but she couldn’t have him.

  At last he turned to her. “What you said just now, it couldn’t be true.”

  “About the war?”

  “No, I know that’s coming. I can’t believe that it’ll hold off for a whole twenty years. The institution of slavery must stop, but the Southerners—”

  “It’s you Yankees—”

  He looked at her in surprise, then waved his hand. “No, not about that. I mean about the other. You say that you raised a person from the dead. Can you do that?”

  “I did it, but I had help. A lot of help. Two of the people who helped didn’t have bodies.”

  “No bodies. Ah, I…I mean, I understand.” He gave her a small smile. “Is this Jacob Lincoln so bad?”

  “Abraham Lincoln. Great man, but you wouldn’t want to look like him, and you wouldn’t want his wife. Spends much too much money. The man I raised from the dead had been dead only minutes, not…” She stopped, unable to say what was in her mind: I couldn’t raise your long-dead wife from the grave even if I had my full powers.

  “I understand. You need a healthy body.” For a moment he looked at her in speculation.

  “No, you can’t put your wife’s spirit into me,” she said calmly. “I have my own spirit and I plan to keep it in this body.”

  He grinned at that, then sat back down in front of her. “Can you do things such as you said? Really?”

  “I did,” she said cautiously. When he was so close to her, all she could think of was touching him.

  He got up again. “Tonight has made me remember how much I missed my wife. She was a funny little person, always happy. Sometimes I think she knew she wouldn’t be on this earth long. Shall I tell you how I met her?”

  Darci nodded.

  “A cousin of mine was interviewing for the job of governess. She wanted a young woman from a good background and well educated, and in came Diana. She was so small and delicate-looking that I didn’t think she could handle those horrible children of my cousins, but she did. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” Darci said. “It’s just that your meeting is much the same as my husband’s and mine. He hired me to work for him.”

  “As what?”

  “A sort of secretary,” she said, then smiled when Adam nodded, as though things were once again in their proper order. She couldn’t help but think how much fun it would be to teach this man that women could and did do things besides cook and clean.

  What if I stayed here? she thought. What could I do for the future, knowing what I do? She had no power in this century, but she had a good knowledge of history. Could she prevent some of the more awful things from happening?

  For that matter, did she remain in the nineteenth century? Did she remain and maybe help Abraham Lincoln? Or did she work with suffragettes? Did she help in hospitals with her fundamental knowledge of medicine?

  Stay with this man? Here in this time? Her woman’s instinct told her that it wouldn’t take much to put herself in the place of his late wife.

  While she was thinking, the door burst open and two little girls wearing beautiful white cotton nightgowns came into the room. Darci collapsed back against the chaise because the girls were the exact replicas of her daughter and niece. She watched Adam swoop both of them up in his arms and twirl them about. She heard the girls’ squeals of delight, could see their adoration of their father.

  Gradually, the girls became aware of Darci. Standing in the doorway was a stout woman with a disapproving look on her face, obviously the nanny, and obviously she didn’t think the master should be alone in a room with a woman. Or maybe she disapproved of Adam’s horseplay.

  One of the girls, the one who looked like Darci’s daughter, Hallie, stopped laughing and stared at Darci, then the other girl also became still. Adam set the girls on the floor, took a hand of each, and walked toward Darci.

  “May I introduce my daughters, Miss Marshall? This is Henrietta, who we call Hitty, and this is Isadora.”

  “But I’m not Izzy!” the girl said.

  “Certainly not,” Adam said formally.

  Darci felt weak from all the emotion going through her, but she managed to sit up and held out her hand to shake. “How do you do? I have a daughter very like you, Hitty, and I have a niece who is like you, Isadora.”

  “What are their
names?” Hitty asked.

  “The name for you is Hallie, and your name is Isabella.”

  The girls smiled at that and looked at their father. “They’re very like our names.”

  Adam’s eyes locked with Darci’s and he seemed to say, There is a reason for this.

  “I think the girls should be in bed now,” the nanny said from the doorway, and hurried forward to take the girls.

  “May I put them to bed?” Darci asked, her eyes on Adam’s and pleading. “I haven’t seen my own children in a while and…”

  “Yes, of course,” Adam said. He gave the nanny a dismissive look and she left the room.

  Darci had to hide her smile. It had always been that way with her Adam. He could make an employee obey him with a mere glance. For Darci, the only way she could get the cleaning lady to get off her cell phone and actually clean was to use her True Persuasion.

  “Thank you,” Darci said as she took a hand of each girl and led them out of the room. “Show me where your bedroom is.” She knew without asking that the girls shared a room. Her own Hallie and Isabella wouldn’t be separated. The girls pulled her down the hall to a beautiful room with a big four-poster bed. On one wall was painted a woodland scene, with little bunnies peeking out of the trees and deer in the distance.

  “Are you going to be our mother?” Isadora asked as she climbed into the bed beneath the hand-embroidered coverlet.

  “Why would you ask that?”

  “Because our father never talks to ladies. They want him to but he won’t. He’s rich, you know.”

  “Yes, I know, but rich doesn’t make a person good or bad.”

  “I know, but the ladies don’t know that. Papa says that all they want is what he has in the bank.”

  Chuckling, Darci tucked the coverlet about both of them. “What makes you think I’m any different from them? Maybe all I want is his money, too.”

  “No, you look at him differently and he looks at you differently. We know about these things.”

  At that, Darci’s eyes widened. Know? What did they mean by that? “Do you two ever play games that are unusual, not like the other children play? Like making your dolls dance about?”