Timeless (A Time Travel Romance) Read online

  She still didn’t turn around. “I’m not good at decoding subliminal messages,” she said, and her voice sounded as cool and crisp as ever. “Is this an invitation to sleep with you, Zach?”

  Her ramrod-straight spine suggested that she viewed the prospect of having sex with him about as favorably as she viewed the prospect of starting an affair with a tarantula. He thought he might just possibly possess sufficient self-control to take her home and refrain from throwing her on his bed and making love to her until they were both comatose from multiple orgasms.

  “This is an invitation to dinner,” he said huskily. “Nothing more, and nothing less.”

  “Then I accept.”

  He let out a long, slow breath. “Do I have to talk to the back of your neck for the rest of the evening, or is a view of your face included as part of the deal?”

  She turned around, but she didn’t come any closer, and she didn’t say anything. Zach tried to think of some warm, witty remark that would put them both at their ease. Nothing came to mind. All he could think of was that his life right now was an irredeemable screwup, and he had no right to invite Robyn into it.

  “I have to get my coat,” she said.

  “Me, too. I’ll meet you in the lobby.”

  “Give me five minutes.”

  When he came downstairs, she was already waiting, wearing the dove-gray woolen coat she’d worn to La Grenouille. Zach didn’t want to remind her of Friday’s fiasco, but courtesy required him to mention the cleaning bill.

  “I see you managed to get your coat cleaned,” he said. “They seem to have done an excellent job.”

  “My local cleaner is pretty efficient. He has same day service even on weekends.”

  “I wish you’d send me the bill. It’s the least that I owe you.”

  “Zach, forget it, please.”

  He saw that to press the issue only made her uncomfortable, so he changed the subject. “I’ve called for a limo. It’s raining again, so we can’t walk.” He didn’t admit that since Friday he’d stopped walking anywhere in Manhattan.

  “Shall we wait by the door so that we can see when the car arrives?” she suggested.

  “Good idea. It shouldn’t be more than a couple of minutes; the driver’s on call for me.” Zach put his hand under her elbow to guide her to the front of the lobby. The gesture was instinctive, nothing more than a courtesy taught since childhood. The moment he touched her, they both jumped back as if they’d been jolted by live electric cables.

  “Sorry,” Robyn muttered.

  Zach’s self-control snapped. “Dammit, this is ridiculous,” he said. “Robyn, you’re driving me totally crazy.” He swung around, pulled her into his arms, and brought his mouth down on hers in a hard, demanding kiss.

  God knew what he’d expected her reaction to be, but it certainly wasn’t a momentary stillness, followed by a passionate acquiescence that heated his blood to the boiling point in about ten seconds flat. He’d always known he found her desirable, but he hadn’t known that desire could be this crazy mixture of hot, sharp need and aching tenderness.

  They broke apart, flushed and panting. “The limo’s here,” Zach said, but he didn’t move.

  Robyn didn’t move either. “Where were you going on Friday night?” she asked.

  His brain was still blurred with desire, so the question seemed less out of left field than it should have done. “On Friday night?” he repeated, confused.

  “Yes. When we came out of the restaurant, we were on Fifth Avenue at Fifty-second. We walked up to Fifty-fifth before you flagged a cab. When the cabbie drove off, you turned around and started walking downtown, away from your apartment. Where were you going?”

  He never could think worth a damn when Robyn was near, and right now, his functional IQ level was about twenty-six and sinking fast. So he told her the truth. “I was going back to the corner where we were shot at,” he said. “I was looking for spent bullets.”

  “I see.” Robyn’s voice was carefully neutral. “And did you find any bullets, Zach?”

  “Just one,” he said. “But that was enough.”

  He felt her body tense, heard the tiny catch of her indrawn breath. If he hadn’t been holding her, he would never have realized how strongly his words affected her. Robyn’s face was in some ways so transparently expressive, he’d never considered how good she might be at concealing her deepest, most important feelings. She spoke quietly.

  “You mean someone really was shooting at us? The noise I heard wasn’t just a car backfiring?”

  “Someone was shooting at me,” he corrected. “And apparently they didn’t care if you were in the line of fire. It’s the second time this month that someone’s taken a shot at me.”

  “Good grief, how can you sound so calm! Thank God they missed!”

  He grimaced. “I’m not sure whether that’s my good luck, or whether the gunman intended to miss.”

  “You’re making no sense. Why would he shoot to miss?”

  “A warning, maybe. The bullet I found was embedded in the doorpost almost seven feet above the ground. Way over both of our heads even if I hadn’t sent you diving for the pavement.”

  Robyn finally moved out of his arms. She looked up at him, her eyes stormy, her expression troubled. “Zach, don’t you think it’s time you told me what’s going on?”

  He didn’t say anything for a very long time. “Yes,” he said finally, feeling relief wash over him in a deep, slow wave. Until this moment, he hadn’t realized how badly he wanted to confide in her. “Come back to my apartment and I’ll tell you what’s happening.”

  * * *

  Zach’s apartment occupied the entire penthouse floor of a building near the corner of Park and Sixtieth. Robyn couldn’t find much to talk about during the short limo ride uptown from the Gallery, and even when they stepped out of the mahogany-paneled elevator into Zach’s private foyer, she wasn’t sure what she was doing there, or why she’d agreed to have dinner with him. Her common sense warned that just because he’d given her a kiss that sent her hormones spiraling into maximum overdrive, she couldn’t assume their attraction was mutual. One thing Robyn knew for sure. Her Master Plan was demonstrating a significant failure to cope with Zach’s sudden transformation from fantasy sex object to flesh-and-blood man. A man, moreover, with problems he wanted to share.

  His apartment was impressive enough to distract her momentarily from the wreckage of her Plan. For an antiques dealer, Zach’s home was as intoxicating as a distillery for an alcoholic. Scarcely knowing where to look first, Robyn drank in the rich scarlet weave of the Persian Konya carpet, the elegant, almost flirtatious craftsmanship of an ormolu side table, and the earthy splendor of a Delacroix painting of a peasant woman, lazily scratching the throat of her parrot.

  “This is magnificent,” she said. “It looks like a very grand townhouse in nineteenth-century Paris.”

  Zach grinned. “My mother claims it looks like an upscale brothel, but I’ve loved the place ever since I was a kid.” Zach loosened his tie and tossed his suit jacket onto a chair. “But you ain’t seen nothin’ yet, kid. Come on inside.”

  She followed him into an inner vestibule, peering upward to admire the elaborate plaster moldings on the twelve-foot ceiling. Amused rather than envious, she reckoned that her entire apartment would fit into less space than Zach’s entrance hall and foyer.

  “Why didn’t your mother change the decor if she doesn’t like it?” Robyn asked.

  He chuckled. “She’d have given her eye teeth for the chance. My mother spent the past thirty years mentally redecorating from the walls out, but this apartment belonged to my grandparents. Grandma Bowleigh was French and my mother is strictly New England Puritan, so they consumed a great deal of time and energy inventing ways to drive each other crazy. My mother loathes Manhattan, and would hate to live here, but she was furious on principle when Grandma Bowleigh died and left this place to me.”

  He flicked a switch and the living room f
looded with light. “I haven’t changed much since I inherited the place, although I added a couple of comfortable sofas.” He smiled, and Robyn could see he was remembering someone well loved. “Grandma Bowleigh believed that straight spines and upright morals went together. Her chairs were what you might call uncompromising.”

  Robyn chuckled. “People didn’t sprawl about in the good old days, did they? However many times I look at one of those steel and whalebone corsets I can never quite believe that human beings voluntarily strapped themselves inside such instruments of torture. No wonder they sat up straight!”

  “It’s the shoes that get me,” Zach said. “I guess they must have been more comfortable than they look or our ancestors would all have been cripples.”

  “Nothing will convince me the shoes or the corsets were comfortable!” Robyn stopped to admire a selection of painted fans displayed in a cleverly back-lit cabinet. “Are these the fans your grandmother collected?”

  “Yes. She refused to let my father or grandfather help her with any of the purchases, and as you can see she had superb taste.”

  “It’s hard to believe she had no professional training,” Robyn said, admiring an exquisite confection in ivory and painted kidskin. “How long did your grandparents live here?” she asked.

  “More than fifty years. Back in the thirties, normal middle-class families could actually afford to live in central Manhattan. Even so, my grandfather only managed to scrounge up enough money to buy this building because the stock market crash in ‘29 had reduced real estate prices so much. He considered he’d acquired a major bargain.”

  “And he was certainly right.”

  “Long-term, as it turned out. But during the Depression, rent income barely covered the expenses of upkeep. And business at the Gallery was so bad that this building was mortgaged to the hilt in order to meet Gallery payrolls. He and my grandmother came close to losing everything on a couple of occasions, but Grandpa Bowleigh was a wily old bird, and he hung on through World War II until the boom years in the fifties and sixties made him rich.”

  Zach was standing in front of the fireplace at one end of the long living room. Moving to join him, Robyn’s gaze was caught by the portrait of a blond, blue-eyed woman holding a tiny, lace-gowned and bonneted baby. Hung in a commanding central position, with the rest of the wall left empty, the painting had a powerful impact on the entire room.

  “What a stunning portrait,” she said, crossing to Zach’s side for a better view. She studied it in silence for several minutes. “Is it a Gainsborough?” she asked finally. “From the woman’s dress, the dates would be about right.”

  “Yes, it’s a Gainsborough, one of his earliest portraits.”

  “You’re lucky that it’s in such a good state of preservation.”

  “This seems to be one of his few early paintings where he didn’t experiment with paints or techniques. Fortunately for us.”

  “She looks a little bit like you,” Robyn said. “I think it’s the shape and color of her eyes. Is she an ancestor?”

  “Yes. Her name is Lady Arabella Bowleigh, and she was married to William Bowleigh, the third Baron of Starke.”

  “I’m impressed. Does that mean you have a real British lord for an ancestor?”

  Zach grinned. “Our blue blood turned normal Yankee red several generations ago.”

  “The Bowleighs—your relatives—are the people in England who offered you the chance to buy their porcelain collection, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, the current baron is more interested in prize Guernsey cows than in old china. He’s a nice, down-to-earth kind of guy, who can’t imagine why anyone would pay several thousand pounds for a vase that’s too valuable to put flowers in, when you could buy a vial of prize bull semen instead.”

  She chuckled. “Sounds as if he should be living in Texas.”

  “As a matter of fact, his son is studying agriculture at Texas A and M.”

  “When did the American branch of the family split off?”

  “Arabella and William had several children and one of the excess sons was shipped off to America to make his fortune. That son was my several times great-grandfather, and he brought this portrait with him.”

  “Is he the baby in the picture?”

  “We believe so. A letter has survived that suggests the baby is my ancestor, the Honorable Zachary.”

  “You were named after him?”

  “Along with a slew of relatives in each generation. It’s a Bowleigh tradition to name sons William or Zachary.”

  “Doesn’t that make for major confusion at family reunions?”

  “Not really. We use a lot of nicknames. My brother is called Will, and my grandfather was Bill. Fortunately, my grandmother insisted on giving all her children French names, so the family had a break from tradition for an entire generation. My father, much to his disgust, is called Piers.”

  Robyn looked at the possessive curve of Lady Arabella’s arm around her baby. “How sad she must have been when her son grew up and left for America. Imagine knowing you’re never going to see your child again.”

  “Actually, Arabella never knew what happened to him. She was already dead by then.”

  Robyn grimaced. “That’s better for her, I guess, but rough on the Honorable Zachary. Life must have been hell on the emotions in those days.”

  “Don’t you think they must have trained themselves to accept death and separation more easily than we do? They didn’t focus their emotional energy on the nuclear family as strongly as we do today. Extended family connections were more important.”

  “You may be right. On the other hand, I don’t believe basic feelings like maternal love can change from generation to generation. Look closely at Lady Arabella. Her smile may be warm, but you can see in her eyes that she’s not entirely happy.” Robyn paused for a moment. “She looks as if she’s hiding secrets.”

  Zach smiled. “Is that what you see? Personally, I’ve always felt the painting reeks of subdued eroticism. I look at Arabella and I wonder who her lover is. I doubt if the poor old third Baron of Starke was actually the father of that baby she’s clasping with such fond attention. That’s probably why the kid was banished to the colonies. A convenient way to get rid of the cuckoo in the nest.”

  “Good heavens, Zach, you’re too cynical by half. How in the world can you conclude Lady Arabella was an adulteress just because her smile is enigmatic?”

  “I didn’t do all my leaping to conclusions on the basis of this portrait alone. Lady Arabella is something of a mystery woman. You can see how compelling she appears in this portrait, how intelligent her expression is, how sparkling her eyes are. And yet the English branch of the family has several other portraits of her, and in those she seems a uniformly cold and shallow woman. I’ll show you her other pictures when we’re in Starke.”

  “That’s probably a testament to Gainsborough’s skill as an artist rather than a commentary on Arabella’s character.”

  “Could be. But the composition of this whole painting is rather odd when you think about it. We know Arabella already had three older children at this time, twin sons and a daughter, and yet none of them was included in the picture. Why not?”

  “I agree, that is strange.” Robyn stared at the painting, intrigued by the minor mystery. One of the reasons she loved working with antiques was the way they could sometimes open a tiny window onto the vanished past. “I’m no expert on Gainsborough, but that must be one of the youngest babies he ever painted.”

  “It’s definitely the youngest, so the portrait has a unique curiosity value, quite apart from the sentimental value to our family.”

  “Baby Zachary looks surprisingly human.”

  “He does, doesn’t he? Most people nowadays don’t realize how unusual that is. The baby probably isn’t more than three or four weeks old, and yet, if you look at his hands and mouth, you can see Gainsborough has taken the time and trouble to individualize him. We’ve no idea why he bothered. In th
ose days, infants less than six months old were barely considered human, let alone unique individuals.”

  Robyn frowned, feeling curiously sad. “I guess that ties back to what you said earlier. You can understand why parents kept their emotional distance when you remember that more than half the newborns died before their first birthday.”

  Zach shook his head. “Nowadays, it’s hard to grasp the full impact of statistics like that.”

  “Thank heavens.” Robyn was beginning to find the portrait oddly disturbing, and she turned away. Her nipples had tightened and her breasts tingled as she looked at the rosy-cheeked baby with his unusually large hands and puckered, hungry mouth. It was an extraordinary sensation, and she hugged her arms around her waist in an attempt to make the tingling go away.

  Zach reached out, then allowed his hand to fall without actually touching her. “It’s late, we should think about dinner,” he said. “Come into the kitchen and tell me what you’d like to eat.”

  She followed him out of the living room, happy to be away from the disquieting portrait. Zach held out his hand, and after a tiny hesitation, she took it. She smiled up at him. “Are you one of those intimidating men who can whip up a gourmet meal in between nailing down the business deal of the century and running five-minute miles at the health club?”

  He laughed, pushing open the swing doors that led into the kitchen. “Nope. It takes me six minutes to run a mile even on a good day and my cooking skills are what you might call sub-basic. I can grill steaks and I’m terrific at dialing out for pizza.”

  “Great, now I feel superior because I can cook at least three more recipes than you. What gourmet selection are you making for us tonight? Pizza or steak?”

  “You’re the guest. You choose.”

  Somehow his arm had curled around her waist and her head was resting on his shoulder. Robyn liked the casual feeling of intimacy. Too much, in fact, but she didn’t move away. “If you broiled steaks, I could impress you with my tossed green salad.”

  “Is that one of your three recipes?” he asked.