Yesterday's Love

by Sherryl Woods

  Opposites attract in this unforgettable favorite from New York Times bestselling author Sherryl Woods

  Victoria Marshall was an incurable romantic with her antique shop and rustic farmhouse, love poems and yesterday’s fashions. She was yearning for a Prince Charming to sweep her off her feet. The dashing Tate McAndrews fit the bill, but alas, the IRS representative overseeing her audit had the soul of a stuffy realist.

  Tate was so…sensible, so practical…without an impulsive bone in his gorgeous body. How could she yearn with such heated longing for a man her mind knew was wrong for her? Could they share more than a brief romance without driving each other crazy? Love, Victoria knew, would find a way.

  YESTERDAY’S LOVE

  SHERRYL WOODS

  Sherryl Woods Booklist

  The Sweet Magnolias

  Stealing Home

  A Slice of Heaven

  Feels Like Family

  Welcome to Serenity

  Home in Carolina

  Sweet Tea at Sunrise

  Honeysuckle Summer

  Midnight Promises

  Catching Fireflies

  Where Azaleas Bloom

  Swan Point

  Chesapeake Shores

  The Inn at Eagle Point

  Flowers on Main

  Harbor Lights

  A Chesapeake Shores Christmas

  Driftwood Cottage

  Moonlight Cove

  Beach Lane

  An O’Brien Family Christmas

  The Summer Garden

  A Seaside Christmas

  The Christmas Bouquet

  Dogwood Hill

  Willow Brook Road

  The Devaney Brothers

  The Devaney Brothers: Ryan & Sean

  The Devaney Brothers: Michael & Patrick

  The Devaney Brothers: Daniel

  The Calamity Janes

  The Calamity Janes: Cassie & Karen

  The Calamity Janes: Gina & Emma

  The Calamity Janes: Lauren

  The Adams Dynasty

  A Christmas Blessing

  Natural Born Daddy

  The Cowboy and His Baby

  The Rancher and His Unexpected Daughter

  The Littlest Angel

  Natural Born Trouble

  Unexpected Mommy

  The Cowgirl and the Unexpected Wedding

  Natural Born Lawman

  The Unclaimed Baby

  The Cowboy and His Wayward Bride

  Suddenly, Annie’s Father

  The Cowboy and the New Year’s Baby

  Dylan and the Baby Doctor

  The Pint-Sized Secret

  Marrying a Delacourt

  The Delacourt Scandal

  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 One

  Tears streaming down her pale cheeks, Victoria flipped off the television by remote control and reached blindly for the box of tissues beside her on the huge brass bed. When her groping fingers met the empty slot, she muttered a soft expletive, tossed the useless container across the room and wiped away the tears with the back of her hand. Now, Voyager always did this to her.

  “You’d think by now I’d be prepared, wouldn’t you?” she said to the fluffy gray cat that was purring contentedly in her lap. How many times had she sobbed as a resigned Bette Davis pleaded with Paul Henried not to ask for the moon, when they already had the stars? Surely more than a dozen.

  Of course, it wasn’t just this movie that affected her that way, she noted ruefully. She’d cried through everything from Jane Eyre and Camille to Terms of Endearment. She’d even been known to sniffle a little when two obviously long lost lovers were reunited in a shampoo commercial.

  Being a sentimental, hopeless romantic in a world of hardened cynics sometimes seemed to be a wretched curse. She recalled with more than a little dismay the number of times her embarrassed dates had exited a movie joking that they might be able to buy her diamonds, but they doubted they could afford to keep her supplied with Kleenex. Well, to hell with the emotionally uptight men of the world, she thought darkly. They’ll all probably wind up with much deserved ulcers.

  Climbing out of bed, she ignored Lancelot’s outraged cry of protest at being displaced from his comfortable spot in her lap. After she pulled on the long, old-fashioned skirt and scoop-necked blouse she’d found during her last secondhand store excursion, she wandered barefoot into the kitchen. The fragrant scent of lilacs and freshly mowed grass was drifting in with the spring breeze that ruffled the curtains on the open windows. This was her favorite room in the decrepit old farmhouse she’d bought and begun remodeling bit by bit the previous year. Her parents had nicknamed her home Victoria’s Folly, but once they’d seen what she’d accomplished with the kitchen, even they had to admit there was hope for the place.

  Like the rest of the house, the kitchen had wide-plank hardwood floors, but in here she had stripped away layers of paint and wax and had polished the wood to a soft gleam. The huge windows, cleansed of the thick grime that had accumulated during years of neglect, now let in so much light that the room seemed bright even on the grayest Ohio winter day. She had scoured the once disreputable looking white tile countertops until they sparkled. The crumbling walls had been patched and painted a cheerful yellow, against which she had hung shiny copper pots and pans. She had refinished the round oak table and chairs in the middle of the room herself. And in the center of the table stood an antique blue-and-white water pitcher filled with daffodils from her garden.

  “Okay, old guy, what shall we do about lunch?” she asked the cat who was now staring at her patiently from the sun-warmed windowsill. “Tuna? Liver? Chicken?” She waited for a responding meow. There was none. “You’re not helping, Lancelot.” She opened a can of the liver he seemed to love, wrinkled her nose in disgust and put it in his dish.

  “You have no taste, cat,” she said, as he arched haughtily and then made his way slowly to the dish of food she’d placed on the floor.

  While Lancelot methodically devoured the liver, Victoria searched in the back of the huge, walk-in pantry for her picnic basket. The day was too incredibly gorgeous to waste one more minute of it indoors. She filled the wicker basket with chunks of Gouda and cheddar cheese, two freshly baked poppy seed rolls she’d bought at the bakery on her way home from her antique shop the previous afternoon, a bottle of chilled mineral water and a container of strawberries. She tossed a dog-eared volume of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetry in on top, took her floppy, wide-brimmed straw hat from the peg by the back door and set out across the rolling field behind the house. Lancelot, through with his meal, trailed at her heels sniffing hopefully amid the buttercups for the scent of a field mouse.

  When she reached the huge, ancient oak tree that shaded the back corner of her property, she spread out her red-checked tablecloth and settled down for her picnic, barely noticing the taste of the food as she lost herself in the sad, poetic spell Browning had woven.

  How do I love thee? Let me count the ways

  I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

  My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

  For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

  For the second time that day, she felt misty-eyed. Would she ever love someone this much, she wondered despondently. Nothing in her twenty-eight years indicated that she had the potential for such deep emotion. Certainly none of the men she’d met up until now had ever stirre
d a passionate response from her. Their kisses, their practiced touches had been mildly enjoyable, but nothing more. Maybe she was doomed to a life of lukewarm relationships. The thought was incredibly depressing, especially for someone who truly believed it was love that made the world go around.

  Sighing heavily, she glanced up from the sonnet she’d been reading just in time to see Lancelot spring into the tree above her with surprising agility for a cat his size and age.

  “Lancelot, no!” she shouted futilely, as he landed on a limb high above her head. “Lancelot, you know you’re terrified of heights. Now what are you going to do?”

  She shook her head as the cat uttered a pathetic meow.

  “You got yourself up there,” she reminded him unsympathetically. “Now get yourself down.”

  Lancelot seemed to shiver, then meowed again more loudly. He sounded pitiful, far too pitiful to ignore.

  “Okay. Okay. I’m coming,” she said resignedly, dropping her book onto the tablecloth and hiking up her skirt. She shinnied up the tree in the awkward, uneasy manner of someone who’d done this often in the past but never grown accustomed to it. To be perfectly truthful, she wasn’t one bit fonder of heights than Lancelot was. To top it off, the minute she got near him, the cat backed out of her reach. “Lancelot, how can I rescue you if you keep moving away from me?”

  She tested the strength of the limb and shifted until her body rested along the length of it. Stretching as far as she could, she tried again to grab the cat, whose cries had grown more shrill. Taking a deep breath, Victoria crept another few inches. “Here, Lancelot. Come on, fellow,” she whispered encouragingly, just as she heard the branch creak and felt it waver beneath her. The tremor shook her confidence and her patience. “Lancelot, get over here right this minute!”

  The cat didn’t budge, but the limb dipped precariously and Victoria glanced nervously down at the ground. It seemed much farther away than she’d remembered. Clinging tightly to the branch while she tried to decide whether to risk a retreat or spend the next fifty years of her life right here living on bark, acorns and oak leaves, she looked off in the distance and spotted the welcome sight of someone heading in her direction.

  With his determined, long-legged stride and squared jaw, the unfamiliar man looked like someone with a definite and probably unpleasant mission. Even from this distance and this crazy, sort of upside-down angle, she could tell he was physically impressive. His broad shoulders, beneath a pale blue shirt that was shadowed with perspiration, were obviously well formed and muscular. The tan slacks were slung low on slim hips, the fit emphasizing the curve of his thighs, the length of his powerful legs. His tie was askew, and he was carrying a tan jacket slung over his shoulder. He was definitely not dressed like someone who’d planned to go for a stroll in the country.

  She shaded her eyes and squinted into the sun, studying what she could make out of the chiseled features of his face and the dark brown hair that needed cutting. Her breath caught in her throat.

  “Good Lord, if I’m dreaming, don’t let me wake up,” she murmured under her breath as he approached, his expression growing puzzled as he noted the tablecloth, the picnic basket and the book.

  “Hi,” she said cheerfully, trying to keep a nervous tremor out of her voice. The last crack of the limb had tilted it until her head seemed nearly perpendicular to the blanket. As soft as the ground had seemed when she’d been sitting on it, she had no particular desire to land on it headfirst and test its resiliency.

  Startled by the husky, whispered greeting, Tate McAndrews looked around for the person whose entrancing voice had seemed to come to him from the heavens.

  “Up here.”

  He gazed up and stared into a pair of very wide, very blue eyes that glinted with suppressed laughter. His heart took an unexpected lurch.

  “Hi, yourself,” he said, his irritation at the rotten way the day had gone suddenly vanishing in the presence of such unabashed, impish humor. Perhaps this wild-goose chase he’d been sent on would have an unexpected dividend after all. “Do you always perch in trees after lunch?”

  “Hardly,” she said with a grimace that wrinkled her pert nose in a delightful way. “By the way, my name’s Victoria Marshall and I’m very glad to see you. I seem to have gotten myself into a bit of a predicament.”

  Tate groaned and a pained expression replaced the quirk of amusement that had played about his lips. So much for any thoughts of pleasant diversions. His wild-goose chase had ended. “I should have known,” he muttered.

  “Is something wrong?”

  He shook his head. “No. In fact, I was looking for you.”

  “You were? Do I know you?”

  “Not yet, but you will,” he mumbled ominously. “I’m Tate McAndrews. Internal Revenue Service.”

  Usually people panicked at the mere mention of the IRS, but Tate had to give Victoria Marshall credit. She didn’t even flinch.

  “Oh, that’s nice,” she said brightly and with such sincerity that Tate had to believe she had no idea what he was doing here. “But do you suppose you could help me get down before we continue this conversation? My head is beginning to spin.”

  “What are you doing up there in the first place?”

  “Lancelot saw a squirrel.”

  “Lancelot? A squirrel?” He felt strangely light-headed, as though he were rapidly losing the capability of rational thought. It was either this unseasonably warm weather or this perky woman he’d discovered hanging upside down in a tree with her skirt hitched up in a decidedly provocative way. He preferred to think it was the weather.

  “Lancelot is my cat. He’s twelve and he mostly just lazes around now, but a squirrel will get to him every time.”

  “I see.” Actually Tate didn’t see at all. But he was beginning to understand that this assignment that Pete Harrison had foisted off on him was not going to be quite as easy and straightforward as he’d anticipated. He berated himself for not guessing that any woman who would demand that the IRS send her a refund for 15,593.12 more than she had paid in taxes was not exactly your run-of-the-mill evader. She was a kook. Everything that had happened in the last few minutes only confirmed the fact. She might be very attractive in an offbeat sort of way, but she was a kook nonetheless.

  Still, she was also up in the tree, and he couldn’t wrap up this absurd business about the refund until she came down. It would probably be best if she didn’t do it headfirst and shake any more of her screws loose.

  “Let go of the branch,” he suggested.

  “Are you crazy?” she replied in a horrified, hushed whisper, her eyes widening as the branch tipped a bit more. “I’m twelve feet off the ground. I’ll break every bone in my body.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m going to catch you.”

  “Then I’ll break every bone in your body.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” he retorted. “Come on. Just let go and drop down.”

  “But what about Lancelot?”

  “I don’t think you need to worry about him,” Tate replied dryly.

  Victoria followed his gaze and saw that the traitorous cat was sitting serenely in the middle of the tablecloth eating the last of the Gouda cheese. “Lancelot, how could you?” she muttered.

  “You might as well jump.”

  Sighing nervously, Victoria swung her legs around, allowing them to dangle as she clung tightly to the increasingly unsteady branch. She glanced down uneasily into Tate McAndrews’s upturned face. “Are you sure about this?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Okay,” she said, closing her eyes as she let go. There was no point in looking. It was up to Tate McAndrews to make good on his promise to catch her. She tried to think of herself as weightless, a butterfly floating on air, but it wasn’t working. She felt as though she were plummeting like a rock. Her heart thudded against her ribs in anticipation of the crash landing that would leave them both in a tangle of broken bones.

  Suddenly, just when she was sure it was too la
te, that she’d only imagined someone was going to save her from cracking her skull, she felt strong arms break her fall. As the breath whooshed out of her, her own arms instinctively circled Tate’s shoulders. She hung on for dear life.

  “You can open your eyes now,” he said, his husky, laughter-filled voice a whisper of disturbing warmth against her flushed cheek.

  Victoria wasn’t sure she wanted to if it meant he would put her down. She was surprised to discover that she rather liked his tangy male scent, the rippling strength of his arms, the warmth that radiated through his clothes. He appealed to so many of her senses: touch, smell and—most definitely she decided, peeking at his chiseled profile—sight. The man was even more gorgeous than he’d appeared from her perch in the tree. Definitely romantic hero material, she thought, sighing unconsciously.

  Tate heard the sigh and realized with a sense of shock that he was apparently having a very similar reaction. It was a reaction that was both unexpected and totally inappropriate. Ten years with IRS had hardened him, made him cynical about human nature in general and especially about the type of people who tried to bilk the government. They were thieves, and it was his job to catch them and see that they paid. Nothing more, nothing less. It was all very businesslike, very impersonal. Sometimes he spent months on a case, shadowing a subject’s every move, getting to know the most intimate secrets of his or her life, but never before had he responded to one of them on a personal level.

  Then again, he had to admit that none of his previous subjects had ever looked like Victoria Marshall. He lowered her gently to the checked tablecloth, then sat down beside her, unable to shift his gaze away. She was like no woman he had ever seen, except, perhaps, in a Renoir painting. She was wearing a long, ruffled cotton skirt in a bright shade of pink that made her seem daringly oblivious to the long red hair that framed her face in a profusion of untamed, golden-highlighted curls. Though those incredibly blue eyes met his gaze with an appealing, interested expression, she was fiddling nervously with a floppy, white straw hat. Her off-the-shoulder white blouse revealed an extraordinary amount of creamy flesh, he noted breathlessly before glancing quickly away only to encounter the enticing sight of her slender, bare feet peeking from beneath the folds of her skirt.