Shades of the Past Read Online Free Page A

encountered, and wasn’t much interested in. She, on the other hand, had always yearned for such a love, and stupidly believed she’d found it with him. She would find it one day, though, and wouldn’t let it slip through her fingers.
    She went to make the promised cocoa, and was about to go to bed when she noticed the telephone answer machine blinking. It was a message for Jenny from Alun. His lilting Welsh voice was rushed.
    “Jen, sweetheart, it’s Alun. I have to nip over to Dijon for a week or so—business, I’m afraid—so unless you can get down here to the hotel earlier than planned, we won’t see each other until I get back. Try to come, there’s a love. I know you won’t get this message until after your big night at the Hannover, so I’ll just say I hope it all went magnificently. See you very soon, I hope. Oh, and tell Laura I've created a mocha dessert just for her, because I know what a sweet tooth she has. I’m going to call it Meringues Laura . Anyway, bye cariad , sleep tight.”
    Laura smiled, and turned toward her bedroom, but then something made her glance toward the mirror over the drawing room mantelpiece. What she saw reflected in it wasn’t the dazzling Art Deco room she stood in, but a candlelit Georgian bedroom with a bed that was sumptuously hung with gold-fringed grey velvet.
    Her heartbeats quickened uneasily as she crossed to look more closely. The alien room remained, as she slowly put her cocoa on the mantelshelf, next to a Lalique figurine. At any moment she expected to find the reflection as it should be, but even though she blinked deliberately, she still saw the Georgian bedroom. Instinct told her she was seeing the house as it had been in 1818. There were half-packed trunks standing against one of the walls, and the dressing table was almost bare. Whoever lived in the house was clearly about to leave. Had they sold up? Where were they going? Come to that, who the heck were they? This wasn’t like the green room; instead of being part of things she was just an observer. What was the quotation? For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face...
    Face to face. Her lips parted as she saw a naked man sleeping on the bed. He was dark-haired and breathtakingly handsome, and she guessed he was about thirty-four or five years old. His body was pale, supple, strong, and perfect in the light from the candle. There were soft dark hairs on his chest, and in a thin line down his flat abdomen to his groin, where they thickened into a forest around the swelling of his dormant masculinity, which lay long, vulnerable, and soft as silk against the top of his thigh.
    Laura gazed into the mirror, mesmerized by powerful sensations of sexual attraction. A little more knowledge came to her, and she knew that this was Sir Blair Deveril, the man her Regency counterpart was to deceive and seduce, and she had to concede that far from being an ordeal, the thought of making love with him was enticing beyond belief.
    Feeling a little like a voyeur, she looked at his face again. It was rugged, but at the same time almost beautiful. His lashes were long and dark, his nose straight and his lips finely formed. His hair was ruffled and thick, and worn just a little longer than she knew was really the fashion in Regency times. It was hair through which she longed to run her fingers.
    There was a movement in the reflected doorway, and she looked toward it. Then her breath caught as she saw...herself! At least, not herself exactly, but her Regency counterpart, and what was more, that Regency counterpart could see her looking in the mirror, for she smiled conspiratorially. Yes, conspiratorially. That was the word.
    But then the nineteenth-century Laura looked toward the bed, and the sleeping man. She slipped out of her gown and went to lie down with him, leaning over to caress his skin and then put her lips to his thigh. He didn’t stir, and her fingers moved gently and caressingly between his