Now and Forever (3 page)

An odd sensation moved its way up his spine, raising the hairs on the back of his neck. Sweat broke out at his temples as an almost unbearable sense of destiny gripped him by the throat and refused to let go. He could almost feel the weight of the garment across his shoulders, the pull of something way beyond his control.

#

Emilie's sharp exhalation of breath echoed throughout the room as the centuries came to life beneath her fingertips. She'd handled old garments before and the rush of history always made her weak in the knees but this was different. This felt like coming home.

It's just your imagination playing tricks on you.
But that didn't explain the sound of drums beating cadence in her ears or the icy winds of Valley Forge raising goosebumps on her arms and legs despite the fact that it was mid-summer on the Jersey Shore.

I know this uniform,
she
thought
.
It didn't make sense, not even a shred, but there was no denying the bone-deep connection she felt to the garment laid out before her. Each decision
made
by
that long-ago tailor was one she would have made herself. Each stitch had been formed in a way her fingers understood. The alterations had been skillfully rendered, made even more unusual by the fact the sleeves had been altered to fit a taller man. The way the thread ends were finished . . . everything was as it should be. As she'd known it would be.

Zane broke the silence. "So what do you think?"

She swung around to look at him, her eyes flashing fury. "If this is some kind of joke, so help me I'll--"

"It's not a joke."

"Tell me again about the provenance."

"The attic," he said. "I'd left it behind."

"Is there a story that comes with it?" There had to be a reason that out of a mansion filled with treasures, this one remained.

"It's a family thing," he said with a shrug. "Passed down from son to son."

She tried to imagine him as part of a loving, if small, family but the image was difficult to sustain. The Zane she knew was eternally restless, always searching for the next adventure. Come to think of it, that described the Sara Jane Rutledge she'd read about, but no one could deny that his grandmother's roots ran deep and long. Sara Jane might have embraced the future with open arms but she didn't let go of the past, not for a moment.

This amazing garment was proof of that.

Emilie traced the collar of the uniform with her fingertips. She'd always favored that method of rolling a collar, although she'd never seen it used in colonial era garments. "I hate to say this but I think this might be a reproduction. The color is too rich...the weave is still tight...."
 
She shook her head. "Two hundred years of light and air leave their mark on a garment, no matter how carefully it's preserved. I've made a career out of undoing the damage time can cause and, trust me, decades in a musty attic takes a toll."She turned the uniform over and held the back seam up to the light. "Look at this. The fibers are long and supple. Very little stress on any of the stitches. This wasn't worn more than a handful of times."

"I suppose now you're going to tell me that it's polyester."

She shook her head, her lovely face serious as a heartbeat.

"That was a joke, Em."

"It's wool, all right. Tight weave...." The texture and weight and smell of the wool used in colonial army uniforms. The drums beat louder inside her head. "I just don't see how this can possibly – I mean, logically it just can't be." She pressed the uniform to her nose, inhaling the heavy smell of wool and vegetable dye. It couldn't be...it simply couldn't.

"But you're not sure."

"There's one way to find out," she said, looking up at him, "but I'll need an hour." She sounded cool and self-possessed but inside her stomach was twisted in sailor's knots.
There's something happening here...something I don't understand.
Everything about the uniform seemed strangely familiar, from the braid of stitches that formed the buttonhole to the hand-finished seams.

He nodded and she breathed easier. "I'll run a few tests on a fabric sample and see what we come up with." She pointed toward a wooden stool to the left of an enormous spinning wheel. "You can sit over there while I get started."

"Do you really use this thing?" he asked, inclining his head in the direction of the wheel.

"Of course I do," she said, casting a curious glance at him.

He spun the wheel, listening to the creak of wood. "Seems like a lot of work to make a piece of thread."

"It is a lot of work." She filled a basin with liquid from a brown bottle then stirred the mixture with a wooden spoon. "It's also a lot of fun."

He looked skeptical but Emilie ignored him. He was a fast-food, fast-car type of man while she longed for the days of butter churns and coaches-and-fours.

She worked quickly, easing open a seam and snipping a tiny swatch of fabric. She was painfully conscious of every detail in the room, from the scratchiness of the wool, to the sound of his breathing, to the way she couldn't quite shake the feeling that the adventure of a lifetime was about to begin.

#

Zane had no idea what she was doing at the worktable and he didn't care. He liked watching the way she moved, the graceful line of her shoulders and back, remembering how she had felt beneath him, all warm and open and ready....

He shifted position on the stool, grateful she had her back to him.

She wasn't being particularly friendly, and she'd been anything but flirtatious, still he found himself content to sit there and breathe the same air.

But she'd always had that effect on him. The only thing they'd ever had in common was a major physical attraction and they'd leaped headfirst into marriage, refusing to believe they'd ever need anything else.

She'd never been comfortable in his Manhattan apartment. He'd never been at ease in her small shorefront cottage.

You can't put down roots in mid-air
, Sara Jane had warned him the first and only time she visited his fiftieth-floor Manhattan aerie and he'd smiled and told her that was exactly why he'd bought the place.

He'd never wanted a home, not in the way that Sara Jane had defined one, and definitely not in the way Emilie needed one. His apartment was base camp, the place where he stowed his supplies and picked up his mail and made plans to move on to somewhere else. He'd learned that lesson as a child and it was one he never forgot. As soon as you grew attached to a place, to a person, you were in trouble. Nothing stayed the same, not places, and definitely not people. The smartest thing a man could do was keep moving.

Emilie was different. She could put down roots in a hotel room. She had a talent for turning a cold bare space into something warm and alive with nothing more than the sound of her voice. She was smart and stubborn and talented in ways he barely understood. They had fought hard and loved hard and through it all nobody had ever made him feel luckier to be alive than she had.

When she walked out, she'd taken the best part of him with her.

He should have followed her. He should have dropped his guard for once in his life and fought for what he wanted, what he needed. There must have been a moment when it could have made a difference but he'd been too blind to recognize it as it flashed by.

But it was too late now. What they had shared was nothing more than a distant memory, as old and useless as the uniform on the work table in front of her.

Who do you love, Em
? Not that it was any of his business but the thought of her in the arms of another man made his gut twist. He glanced around the work room looking for clues. No photographs hanging on the walls. No men's clothes or shoes anywhere. He considered excusing himself to use the john and taking a quick look through the rest of the house for any telltale signs of an active love life but, all things taken into account, he'd rather just sit there and watch her breathe.

#

He was watching her like she was the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl and his team was behind six points. Emilie could feel the heat of his gaze burning through the thin fabric of her shirt. For a man who claimed disinterest in the uniform she was examining, he hadn't taken his eyes from the proceedings...or from her.

"It's getting awfully hot in here," Emilie tossed her hair over her shoulder as she positioned a tiny scrap of fabric on a glass slide. She tried to sound matter-of-fact but had the feeling she'd failed miserably. "Would you raise the air-conditioning, please?"

She heard the scrape of the step stool against the tile floor, followed by Rutledge's footsteps as he walked across the room to the thermostat on the far wall.

"Thanks," she mumbled, not looking up. "

She waited for the sound of the stool scraping against the floor again as he sat back down, but it didn't come.

"I'll be a while longer," she said, struggling to sound casual and unconcerned. "Make yourself comfortable."

"I'm comfortable."

She jumped at the sound of his voice so close to her ear. "Don't stand over me like that, Zane. This is very precise work."

"I won't get in your way."

"You
are
in my way." She gestured toward the overhead fixtures. "You're blocking the light."

"I thought you were using the microscope."

"Would you please sit down?" she persisted, her voice unnaturally high. "This is serious business." And she was having a terrible time remembering that fact with him standing there next to her, close enough for her to breathe in the smell of his skin.

He retreated to the wooden stool. "Is this good enough?"

"It's fine."

"I don't want to get in your way."

"You're not in my way any longer."

There was no way on earth the air-conditioning system could keep pace with the heat building inside her body. They'd been divorced for almost five years. Wouldn't you think she'd be immune to him by now?

She cleared her throat. "There's
 
a TV in the front room."

"I'll pass."

"You could catch the end of local news."

"Not interested."

She bent lower over the uniform, squinting against the harsh glare of a high-intensity light clamped to the side of the work table.

He didn't like the way she made him feel, off-balance and hungry for something he couldn't put a name to. Something he knew he could never have.

The hunger was soul deep and it scared the living hell out of him. From the first moment he'd seen her, pinning a satin dress to a skin-and-bones model in a Hollywood costume studio, he'd known Emilie represented the one thing in the world he could never have.

Their courtship had been as swift and wild as a summer storm and their impulsive wedding had been the act of a desperate man, hell-bent on hanging onto something he really didn't understand but couldn't live without.

Yet somehow she'd always managed to elude him. He'd known her body intimately but he'd never quite managed to touch her soul and he probably never would.

"Look," he said, approaching the work table again, "maybe this wasn't such a great idea. I've got a long drive ahead of me. I better get going."

"What about the uniform?"

"Keep it," he said. "I'll pick it up when I get back."

"Don't trust me with this, Zane." She turned around to face him. "This might be a piece of history."

He arched a brow. "I thought you said that was impossible."

"Lots of things are impossible. That doesn't mean they don't happen anyway." She smoothed her hands over the chest of the uniform jacket, palms tingling from the scratch of wool. "Try it on. I need to see how it drapes."

He gestured toward a mannequin in the far corner of the room. "Let your pal try it on."

"I need to see it in motion."

She held up the jacket for him to slip his arms into the sleeves. "I know it's none of my business any more, but you really should do something about that attitude of yours."

"I assume that's a rhetorical statement." He rotated his shoulders, settling the regimental jacket into place. "It fits."