Читать книгу Yesterday's Love - Sherryl Woods - Страница 5

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 stirred 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 late, 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.

He drew a deep, shuddering breath. This wouldn’t do at all. Obviously, Victoria Marshall was smarter than he’d thought. She was probably deliberately trying to appeal to him, to seduce him so that he’d forget all about the little matter of her bizarre tax return. She wouldn’t be the first woman to try that. True, most of them were considerably more worldly than she seemed to be, but perhaps this wide-eyed innocence was all an act.

Victoria watched the play of expressions on Tate’s face and wondered about them. Warmth. Anger. Determination. She had the feeling that he’d just made a decision about something or someone. Was it her? She didn’t want to think so, because his brown eyes were glittering now with a cold hardness that she found almost frightening in its dark intensity.

“Did you bring my check?” she asked hopefully.

He shook his head. “Sorry. The IRS doesn’t underwrite bad business debts. Why haven’t you answered any of our letters?”

Victoria was puzzled. “I haven’t seen any letters.” She brightened. “Of course there is a stack of mail on the desk in the shop. They must be there. What were they about?”

“We’re auditing you. You were supposed to report with all your records.”

“Oh, dear. When?”

“Last week.”

“Oh, dear,” she repeated contritely. “Would you like some cheese?”

“What?”

“I asked if you would like some cheese,” she explained patiently, holding out a chunk of the cheddar that Lancelot hadn’t discovered during his raid on the picnic basket. “It’s very good.”

“Sure. Thanks. About the audit—”

“Couldn’t we talk about that later?”

“Look, Ms. Marshall—”

“Call me Victoria.”

Tate closed his eyes. His head was beginning to reel again. “Victoria. I drove all the way up here from Cincinnati to straighten out your tax problems. I don’t have time to sit under a tree and eat cheese and make small talk with you.” She blinked at him rapidly and his determination wavered.

“Much as I might like to,” he added to soften the harsh effect of his very firm words. She’d looked as though she might cry and he couldn’t stand that. He had come here to find out how much she’d been holding out on the government, not to make her cry.

“But I don’t have any tax problems,” she insisted stoutly. “I’ve always sent my return in right on time.”

She hesitated, her very kissable pink lips pursed thoughtfully. “At least I think I have. I’m not sure. Paperwork is so boring, don’t you think? Anyway, I’m almost certain that I haven’t missed a single deadline. I make it a point to put a big red circle around April 15 on my calendar so I won’t forget.”

“But you asked for a refund of money you’d never paid.”

She regarded him indignantly. “How can you say that? I’ve paid year after year. This last year, when I opened my shop, I lost more money than I earned.”

Tate, to his dismay, was beginning to follow her logic. That scared the life out of him. Unleashed on an unsuspecting world, this woman would be dangerous. Beautiful, but kooky as they come. “So you figured the government should reimburse you out of funds you’d previously paid?”

Her eyes sparkled, and she gave him a smile that could light up a skyscraper. “Exactly.”

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“It doesn’t?”

“I’m afraid not.”

Her smile wavered. “Oh. Well, I guess I’ll get by. Business has been picking up lately. Now that it’s spring more people seem to go for drives in the country. Most of them can’t resist browsing through antiques.”

“Do they buy anything?”

She shrugged. “Sometimes. More often than not, they drink a cup of coffee, chat awhile and then go on. That’s part of the fun of owning an antique shop…meeting new people.”

“You give your customers coffee?”

The look she gave him was withering. “Usually I have a homemade cake, too,” she said defensively. “Yesterday I had apple pie, but the crust was soggy. I haven’t quite mastered pie crusts yet. I’m not sure what the problem is. Maybe the shortening.”

Tate shook his head. He’d obviously been dealing with powerful, cold-blooded corporations too long. He was not prepared to deal with someone who spent more money most days feeding her customers than she took in and then worried about the quality of her cooking on top of it.

“Do you suppose we could take a look at your records?” he said, suddenly impatient to get this over with. He was getting some very strange feelings from this woman and, unfortunately, most of them were very unprofessional. Right now she was looking at him with wide, cornflower-blue eyes filled with hurt, as though he’d rejected her or worse. His pulse rate quickened, and he had the oddest desire to comfort her, to hold her and tell her he’d take care of everything. He drew in a ragged breath and reminded himself sternly that IRS agents, especially those with his reputation for tough, relentless questioning, did not comfort individuals they were about to audit.

“Of course,” Victoria replied stiffly. Her first impression obviously had been correct: this man did have a mission, and it seemed he wasn’t the type to be dissuaded from pursuing it. It was such a waste, too, she thought with a sigh. With his dashing good looks and trim build, he’d seemed exactly the sort of man she’d been waiting all her life to meet, the type who’d sweep a woman off her feet in the very best romantic tradition. Instead, he seemed to have the soul of a stuffy realist. He was going to wind up with ulcers by the time he hit forty, just like the rest of them.

Disillusioned and disappointed at having to abandon her fantasy so quickly, she gathered up the remnants of her picnic, perched her hat on top of her head and took off across the field, her long skirt billowing in the breeze. She didn’t wait to see if Tate McAndrews followed. She knew instinctively that he wasn’t about to let her out of his sight. He apparently thought she was some sort of criminal. She huffed indignantly at the very idea. A criminal indeed! Well, he could look at her records, such as they were, from now until doomsday, and he wouldn’t find anything incriminating. Once he’d finished, he could apologize and go on his way.

She glanced over her shoulder and caught the frown on his face, the hard, no-nonsense line of his jaw. On second thought, he probably wouldn’t apologize.

When they reached the house, Victoria opened the kitchen door and stood aside to allow Tate to enter.

“Why don’t you have a seat? I’ll get the papers and bring them in here,” she suggested. “There’s lemonade in the fridge, if you’d like some.”

Lemonade? The corners of Tate’s mouth tilted up as he watched her disappear into the main part of the house, the long skirt adding a subtle emphasis to the naturally provocative sway of her hips. He couldn’t recall the last time anyone had offered him lemonade. Most of the women he knew had a Scotch on the rocks waiting for him when he walked in the door. He picked up two tall glasses from the counter by the sink, went to the refrigerator and filled them with ice. He found the huge pitcher of fresh-squeezed lemonade and poured them each a glass. He took a long, thirst-quenching swallow of the sweettart drink. It was perfect after that damnably hot trek through the field. He’d forgotten how good this stuff was. Maybe he was getting a little too jaded after all.

He sat on one of the high-backed chairs, tilted it on two legs and surveyed the room. It had a cheerful, homey feel to it. It was nothing like the pretentious glass and high-tech kitchens he was used to. In fact, he had a feeling Victoria Marshall had never heard of a food processor, much less used one. She’d probably squeezed every one of the lemons for this lemonade with her own hands. The thought proved disturbingly intriguing.

“Slow down, McAndrews. This woman is strictly off-limits,” he muttered aloud. Not only was Victoria Marshall the subject of an official IRS investigation, she was totally inappropriate for him. He liked his women sophisticated, fashionable and, most of all, uncommitted. From what he’d seen of Victoria she was about as worldly as a cloistered nun. As for her fashion sense, it would have been fine about one hundred years ago. And, worst of all, she was definitely the type of woman who needed commitments. She’d been reading Sonnets from the Portuguese, for crying out loud.

But she was gorgeous. Fragile. Like the lovely old porcelain doll he remembered his mother keeping in a place of honor in her bedroom. That doll had been his great-grandmother’s and would be passed along to his daughter if, as his mother reminded him frequently, he would only have the good sense to marry and settle down. He was suddenly struck by the fact that his mother probably would approve thoroughly of someone like Victoria.

“Uh-uh,” he muttered emphatically, irritated at the direction his thoughts had taken. He’d better get this over with now before he did something absolutely ridiculous and totally out of character, such as asking Victoria Marshall for a date. His mother might cheer, but Pete Harrison would have his hide for that breach of ethics.

“Where the hell is she?” he groused, lowering the chair to all four sturdy legs with a thud and stalking out of the kitchen. As he went from room to empty room looking for her, his dismay grew. How could she live like this? The place was a shambles. No wonder she’d left him in the kitchen. The wallpaper in the rest of the downstairs was peeling, the floors were warped and weathered, as though they’d spent weeks under floodwaters, and there wasn’t a stick of furniture in any of the rooms, unless you counted the old Victorian sofa which had stuffing popping out through holes in the upholstery. It looked as though it would be painfully uncomfortable under the best of repair.

“Victoria!”

“I’ll be right down. I’m just trying to get everything together.”

“I’ll come up.”

“Don’t do that,” she shouted back and he sensed an odd urgency in her voice. “The stairs—”

But before she could finish the warning, Tate had already reached the third step. As soon as he put his weight on it, he felt the stair wobble and heard the wood crack. His ankle twisted painfully and he fell backward, landing with a thud. The crash echoed throughout the house, followed by an explosion of exceptionally colorful curses as Tate lay on the floor, his ankle throbbing, his ego even more bruised than his body.

“Damn Pete Harrison and his so-called breeze of a case!” he growled ominously, completely undone by the emotional and physical shake-up of his life ever since he’d found Victoria Marshall in that damned tree. “I have a feeling I’d be in less danger checking out the head of the mob.”