Shades of the Past Read Online Free Page B

legs.
    An erotic craving shivered through modern Laura as she watched. She held her breath as her alter ego grew bolder, moving her lips up his thigh toward his slumbering virility, so defenseless and inviting. She kissed it, running her lips and tongue along its length and then taking the tip into her mouth.
    He stirred then, his hands moving to lovingly stroke her hair as she besieged his manhood. There was nothing soft and slumbering about him now, he was hard and needful, steel encased in warm velvet. His body arched with pleasure as she took him to the very edge of ravishment. Then he suddenly rolled her on to her back and straddled her, pinning her arms back and smiling down into her eyes as he penetrated her.
    Watching from the loneliness of the future, Laura had to close her eyes because she was trembling so much. She felt as if hers was the body that lay so                               eagerly beneath him on that long-gone bed. She wished it were, for it would be ecstasy to be possessed by Sir Blair Deveril...
    She opened her eyes again, but to her dismay the images in the mirror had disappeared. There was only the Art Deco room, and her reflection.
    What was going on? Why was she seeing these things, feeling these things... ? A dreadful possibility struck her. Was it the onset of a breakdown? She had been under a strain since the breakup with Kyle, but was it enough to cause something like this?
    Leaving the cocoa untouched on the mantelshelf, she went to the window and looked out at the rain-drenched January night. Berkeley Square was busy, a modern scene of wet traffic, city noise, and streetlights. She found herself wishing she and Jenny were already in the Cotswolds, as far away as possible from the pressures of London.
    It was then she remembered something truly startling. It had slipped her mind until now because Jenny always referred to her parents’ hotel as simply ‘the hotel’, but out of the blue the real name came winging back. The Deveril House Hotel!
     

Chapter Three
     
    Laura decided not to say anything to Jenny. It was all so wild and far-fetched, she felt a little like someone who’d seen a UFO—deciding to keep quiet rather than be thought crazy. She’d had a close encounter of the weird kind, and chose to keep it to herself.
    She was curious about it all, though. Was it entirely the product of her imagination, or was there a basis in truth? Had any of the people actually existed? The fact that the hotel bore the name Deveril suggested the latter might be the case. Unless, of course, it was her subconscious. At the back of her mind she’d known the name of the hotel, and her brain had done the rest. It was all she could come up with to explain the apparently inexplicable.
    Jenny didn’t prove any help concerning the origins of the hotel’s name, or indeed of its general history. A search on the internet didn’t prove helpful either. The house’s past seemed destined to remain a mystery. It turned out the Fitzgeralds had bought the house some ten years ago from a reclusive rock star, who in turn had bought it from an elderly, equally reclusive spinster. Beyond that, nothing. Jenny hadn’t spent much time there because of her stage career, and the only piece of interesting information she could come up with was that the nearest village was called Great Deveril. She thought her parents might know more, and then, in response to Alun’s message, she set off immediately. Laura had an important last-minute audition to attend, and followed two days later.
    That was how things stood the morning Laura herself at last drove out of London for the Cotswolds. The audition had gone well and it felt good to be setting out on vacation. There hadn’t been any further close encounters and she was beginning to relax, determined not to let it become anything more than a fleeting blip on her otherwise clear horizon.
    In spite of the cold, overcast weather, she intended to