Only Yesterday

by Webb, Peggy

  In her art she relied heavily on her instincts. She accepted magic without question. She reveled in the mysterious, the fanciful, the whimsical.

  But in her personal life, unconventional though she was, she still tried to keep everything balanced and in some semblance of order. A sense of normality was her anchor. Otherwise she sometimes felt as if she might break into a million pieces and fly off into space.

  o0o

  "Checkmate," Colt said. "That makes four games I've won."

  "Don't get cocky. I'm having an off day. That's all." She grinned impishly at him. "Besides, I haven't been cheating."

  "You cheat?"

  "Not exactly. But sometimes I make up my own rules."

  "I've always admired a woman who wasn't afraid to live by her own rules."

  "Don't do that."

  "What?"

  "Keep heaping outrageous compliments on me."

  "Why?"

  "You know why," she said quietly as she began to gather the games.

  The candles they'd lit cast shadows on the walls, and outside the water rushed by in the darkness as if it were on some errand that required haste.

  He reached across the chessboard and covered her hand.

  "Annie . . . Look at me."

  He had the kind of eyes a woman could drown in if she weren't careful. And Ann was feeling more than a little reckless.

  "Don't you want to know what happened? Aren't you curious?"

  "Yes, I'm curious."

  More than curious. She was fascinated, but it was the same kind of fascination that drew a moth to his death in a flame.

  "Remember the H. G. Wells stories," he said. "Time travelers always climbed inside a machine."

  Ann knew where the conversation was leading. She knew she should pull back, both physically and mentally, but there was comfort in his touch, and magic, a magic she couldn't ignore.

  "I think the clock was the key," he added.

  "You're saying that when we touched the clock, we went back in time?"

  "Maybe. But I think there was more." He turned her hands over and traced the pattern of lines, then lifted them and planted an openmouthed kiss in each of her palms.

  There are some things in life that you learn, and some that you simply know. Ann knew the kiss was right. Reason might try to deny it, but her heart knew the truth.

  "Are you saying what I think you're saying?"

  "What do you think I'm saying, Annie?"

  "That we wanted to go back."

  "Yes."

  Mesmerized, they studied each other. The candlelight cast them in gold, and dust collected over the years rose like mist from the attic floor. Colt kissed her hand once more, then released her and strode to the darkened shelves, plucked off the old clock, and set it on the floor between them.

  In the candlelight the cat looked alive. Its tail wagged steadily, and one eye winked at them.

  "We both wanted to know the truth, Annie. But I think there's more we need to learn."

  She couldn't move, could barely breathe.

  "This is all speculation," she whispered. "Sheer madness."

  "I agree. Wonderful, remarkable madness."

  He put one hand on the black plastic head and held the other toward her, palm up. Slowly, Ann stretched out her hand.

  She felt the energy even before her fingertips touched his, and then she was swirling through mists, hurtling through time and space.

  From a distance she heard him calling her name, "Annie . . ." He was saying something else, something she could barely hear.

  "I'm here, Annie, and I won't ever let you go."

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  In her dreams Charlotte Ann was tumbling through space, free-falling, without a safety net to catch her. She cried out, then sat straight up, eyes wide, heart pounding.

  Strong arms circled her waist

  "I'm here, Annie, and I won't ever let you go."

  She looked up into the dear smiling face of Anthony Chance, and suddenly her world righted.

  "I shouldn't have eaten all that apple pie. Too much sugar made me sleepy." She raked her long hair behind one ear. "Why didn't you wake me up? I hate to sleep and miss everything."

  "I love to watch you sleeping, and you haven't missed a thing." Anthony took her hands and pulled her up. "This is where we'll build our house, Annie."

  They had come to Fairhope for the weekend. Leaving behind the crowded streets of New Orleans, they'd driven as far as Mobile Bay, then boarded his boat and sailed across the waters to the most perfect spot in all of south Alabama.

  Shading her eyes with her hands, she studied the land they'd chosen—the green hill that sloped down to the sea where sail boats glided by, the copse of hardwood trees with branches fanned out, canopy-like, over the Johnny-jump- ups and the wild roses, the endless blue sky dotted with puffy white clouds.

  "Yes," she said. "It's perfect."

  "So are you." Anthony bent over her hand and kissed it.

  "You've just made my toes curl under."

  "Thank God."

  He threw his head back when he laughed. Back-lit by the sun he looked like someone she'd imagined, a dream man who had come to her in the dusty stacks of the public library in New Orleans.

  "What would you have done if your toes hadn't curled under that day we met?" He had a knack for reading her thoughts.

  "What would I have done?" She kicked off her shoes and walked away from him, swinging her skirts and smiling at him over her shoulder, teasing him. "I would have walked away, just like this."

  Then she began to run. Her hair blew behind her, and the wind caught her skirts so that they billowed around her like an umbrella.

  She heard footsteps pounding behind her, and the sound of his laughter, then she felt his strong arms around her waist. He pulled her down onto the grass, and she tumbled into his arms, her nose buried in his neck as she inhaled the fresh, masculine scent of him. She breathed deeply, as if she could absorb him by smell.

  "You smell like spring," she said.

  He tangled his hands in her hair and rubbed his nose over her skin, starting with her temples and ending with the indentation at the base of her neck.

  "You smell like rose petals." Propping himself on his elbows he gazed down at her. "Did you know that rose petals are edible?"

  She loved it when his eyes darkened like that. Her own passion stirred in response, and she held up her arms to him.

  "Taste me," she said.

  And he did, starting with the tender skin at her throat and working his way slowly downward. On that sun-swept hill in the middle of summer with nothing but birds as their witness, they pledged their love for each other in a dozen ways, all of them exquisite.

  So eager was she for his touch that Annie helped him with the tiny buttons on her bodice, though he needed no help at all. He had the sensitive, skilled fingers of an artist.

  He traced the soft contours of her breasts, his fingers as familiar with her skin as her own. She arched her back, and, cupping her breasts, offered them to him. Circling her arms around his shoulders, she pulled him close.

  "I don't ever want this to stop," she whispered. "I don't ever want to let you go."

  Lifting onto his elbow, he gazed down at her, the tumbled hair, the flushed cheeks, the bright eyes.

  "I want to paint you this way."

  She felt like a piano wire strung too tightly. In the stillness of the summer she could almost hear her body humming, crying out for release.

  "First, love me."

  "I do love you, Annie. Forever and always." He captured her lips, spent a small eternity tasting their sweetness, then moved his attention back to her breasts.

  She murmured his name over and over, "Anthony, my love."

  "I want you, Annie. Now."

  She lifted her skirts, and they flared around her like the petals of some exotic flower. And there on the windswept hill where they would build their house, Charlotte Ann Harris and Anthony Chance merged bodies, mi
nds, and hearts.

  When the sun began its descent, flinging banners of rose and gold and purple across the sky, Anthony set up his easel and took out his paints.

  "Where shall I sit?" she said.

  "I want you standing. You're too strong a woman to paint sitting down."

  "Let me rephrase that question. Where shall I stand?"

  "There." He pointed to the highest peak of the hill, presided over by a solitary magnolia with a trunk wider than the girth of three fat men and with huge white

  blossoms perfuming the air. "Stand there, facing the sea.”

  The wind caught her hair and her skirt as she turned her face to the sea.

  "Perfect." He made the first brush stroke on canvas. "You're standing exactly where we'll build our house."

  "How long will this take?"

  "Forever."

  "I'm serious. How long?"

  "I plan to paint you in all your moods, in all the stages of your life, of our life together." His paintbrush moved swiftly on the canvas. "Forever," he said with great conviction.

  Overlooking the bay, watching people from Mobile and New Orleans sail toward the summer cottages that dotted the shoreline, Annie imagined what her life would be like, married to Anthony and living in Fairhope, Alabama.

  They'd discussed children one sultry night in the French Quarter not long after they met.

  "I'm going to sing at our wedding," he'd said.

  "Is this a formal proposal?"

  "Not yet. When I propose I'm going to do it in grand style, with moonlight and music, riding in a carriage with the fringe on top."

  "Suppose I say no?" She loved to tease him. Saying no to this man was as far from her mind as traveling to the moon.

  "You won't."

  "You're right. I won't." She sipped her mint julep. "Do you want children?"

  "I want you. Everything else is icing on the cake."

  The band struck up "It Had To Be You," and reaching across the table, Anthony took her hand and sang the song in a baritone voice so good he could have had a career in music.

  She told him so.

  "You're prejudiced."

  "Guilty," she'd said, laughing, and now standing on the knoll where someday their house would be built, she felt her heart swell with such love, she feared it might burst.

  "I never tire of painting your face. You never hide your feelings, Annie. What were you thinking?"

  "That you'd made me a fallen woman."

  "Liar," he said, teasing her. "You were thinking about the night I proposed."

  "How did you know?"

  "Magic."

  "You're magic, all right." She stalked him.

  "Annie. Wait. What are you doing? I'm not finished with you."

  She wrapped her arms around him, then her right leg, decadent, shameless, and so very much in love.

  "I'm not finished with you, either, Anthony Chance."

  His protests turned to kisses, then passion that they played out underneath the canopy of the giant magnolia tree. By the time they were sated, the sun had dropped into the bay, leaving behind a purple dusk that softened the land and turned the trees to ghostly sentinels.

  "We'll build our bedroom there," Anthony said, pointing just beyond the magnolia, "with our bed facing this tree so that every time we look out our window, we'll remember this moment."

  "Yes," she said. "But I don't need a tree as a reminder, my love. I'll remember this moment and all our moments together, always."

  o0o

  Annie was so young, and still had her architectural schooling in front of her. If it hadn't been for the events unfolding in Europe, Anthony would have waited until she was almost out of college before he started the house. He would have waited until she was only months away from her degree, instead of years, to lay the foundation of their future home.

  But in a world threatened with madness, he wanted stability. He wanted a place to come home to, a place where he could picture Annie waiting for him at the window.

  There were nay sayers who predicted that the United States would never be involved in the war, that Roosevelt would never agree to engaging America in the struggle. Isolationist Colonel Charles Lindbergh took to the airwaves in praise of Nazi Germany's sense of decency, calling Hitler undoubtedly a great man.

  But Anthony sensed something different, an insidious evil that would spread like cancer, encompassing them all. Like all great artists, Anthony followed his heart, listened to his inner voice, and all his intuitions were telling him that his time with Annie would be brief.

  Using his summer cottage in Fairhope as a base, he built her house that summer, a house she designed, a house they would fill with love.

  And she was by his side, wearing a hard hat and a pair of her daddy's old combat boots, white dress swirling about her legs, long hair blowing in the breezes off the bay, looking as feminine as if she were decked out in dancing shoes for a ball.

  As the carpenter nailed the last rafter into place Annie squeezed Anthony's hand.

  "Can you believe it?" she said. "It seems like only yesterday the house was a dream, and now look at this." Lifting her skirts, she raced around the skeleton of the house, spinning and twirling in each room, planning colors and fabrics and furniture, laughing.

  He had never loved her more.

  "The nursery will be blue, the kitchen yellow, like sunshine, and we'll fill the house with roses. Can we plant roses, Anthony?"

  "I thought you might say that."

  "Is that a yes or a no?"

  "Wait and see."

  Annie pulled off her hard hat and tucked a stray curl behind her left ear.

  "Does that mean you have a surprise for me, Anthony?"

  "It wouldn't be a surprise if I told you."

  "Oh! You!" She stalked around for all of two seconds, then her impatience turned to song as she toured her house once more, this time at a more sedate pace, planning and dreaming. He could follow her progress by a trail of off-key notes. Anthony smiled. Annie was singing their song: "It Had To Be You."

  The surprise arrived early on Saturday morning, a delivery truck filled with roses, climbers and hybrids and rugosas, pink and white and red so dark it looked like blood. There was even a rare blue rose in the lot.

  So much beauty made Annie cry. Instead of being alarmed, Anthony understood. Kneeling in the dirt, he kissed her hand.

  "Sometimes beauty makes me cry, too," he said, and she noticed tell-tale moisture in his eyes.

  "We'll plant the blue rose right there, right where you're kneeling."

  He got the shovel and lifted the first spade of dirt.

  "It's my turn," she said.

  He knew her too well to protest. Instead he wrapped his arms around her from behind and helped her ram the shovel into the earth.

  She leaned against him, sighing. "Did I ever tell you how much I love you?"

  He kissed the top of her hair. "Not since this morning."

  Annie closed her eyes for a second, inhaling the scent of him, fresh, masculine, a combination of sea wind and summer sun and virile male. And while she had her eyes shut she said a prayer of thanksgiving that she had this summer in Fairhope with Anthony.

  It hadn't been without a struggle, though.

  Her mother had been aghast when Annie had revealed her plans.

  "You are not going to spend the summer with a man?" she'd said.

  "Not just any man, Mother. Anthony Chance."

  Laura Ellen Harris worried the pearls at the neck of her yellow lawn dress. Beautiful, elegant, timid, and sheltered by her late husband's money, she seldom had the courage or the spirit to defy her headstrong daughter.

  "Well, I know he's famous and all." She cut her eyes to the portrait of her daughter he'd presented Annie as an engagement present. "But how am I going to explain you spending the entire summer with him to my friends? New Orleans may be sophisticated, darling, but even a Harris is not immune to criticism when morals are involved."

  "New Orlea
ns society be hanged. I don't give a fig for convention."

  "Well, I know that, dear."

  Her mother had looked so lost and uncertain that Annie gathered her close the way she might a weeping child.

  "Nobody has to know I'm with Anthony. Just tell them I'm supervising my first big job."

  "Do you think they'll believe me?"

  "Your friends are too polite not to believe you, Mother."

  Remembering, she watched Anthony set their first rosebush into the hole they'd dug. And when he had finished, he kissed her on the cheek, sedate and whisper-soft. It might as well have been filled with sizzling desire judging by Annie's reaction.

  Anthony chuckled. "This calls for a celebration."

  "I couldn't agree with you more."

  And they'd celebrated right there beside the newly planted bush. With the fragrance of rose perfuming the air and the soft sea breezes caressing their skin, they'd made slow, sweet love till hunger drove them to delve into the picnic basket they'd brought to the house site.

  "You realize we still have eighteen rosebushes to plant?" Leaning toward him, she licked a bit of fried chicken crust off the corner of his lip.

  "Are you lobbying for another celebration?"

  "Always."

  o0o

  By the end of summer, the house was complete. Annie returned to New Orleans and to her studies, and Anthony moved back into his apartment in the French Quarter to be near her.

  Every chance they got they browsed in antique shops and furniture stores and fabric shops, selecting items for their house and shipping them to Fairhope, where Anthony's cousin Waylon arranged them, as instructed.

  By early December the house was furnished, everything except the bed. Though neither of them could describe what they wanted, they agreed they'd know it when they saw it.

  "If we don't find the bed before June, does that mean the wedding's off?" she teased.

  "Come June, I'm marrying you, with or without the bed."

  The day was balmy, the hybrid camellia Fragrant Pink perfumed the air, and the lovers could hear the murmur of the river as they entered the antique shop. And there it was. The bed. Their bed.

  They spotted it at the same time.