Yesterday's Love
Authors: 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 soâ¦sensible, so practicalâ¦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.
SHERRYL WOODS
Sherryl Woods Booklist
The Sweet Magnolias
Chesapeake Shores
Willow Brook Road
The Devaney Brothers
The Devaney Brothers: Ryan & Sean
The Devaney Brothers: Michael & Patrick
The Calamity Janes
The Calamity Janes: Cassie & Karen
The Calamity Janes: Gina & Emma
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
Chapter One
T
ears 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.