Flirting With Forever by Gwyn Cready (new books to read TXT) 📕

and tal landscape. On one side of the river beside which Jeanne drove the houses were smal and close, sitting in row upon row along a rising hil , not unlike Cornhil or Hampstead Heath. But on the other side, the structures were almost magical—massive silver and glass things rising hundreds of feet in the air. He spotted a breathtaking building, right out of a storytel er’s imagination, al of shining blue glass, with pointed peaks and battlements around its towers. “Is that a castle?”

Jeanne laughed. “Wel , it was designed to look that way.

It’s the PPG Building. A glass company.”

The glaziers Peter had known were not so wel compensed, though Donovan, the glass merchant he frequented most, had raised his prices sometimes twice a year, so it was not beyond reckoning that by the twenty-first century they would have acquired great wealth.

“What about artists?” he asked. “Where do they live?”

“Depends how wel you do. Cam’s lives in a row house in Notting Hil .”

Cam’s artist. His heart sank. Campbel did have an artist fiancé. He had hoped, foolishly, that that part of her deception had been untrue. His hand went to his emerald, and he thought of Ursula. He did not want Ursula to be shamed by Campbel ’s book. Someday, at the end of Ursula’s new life, she would return to the Afterlife, and while he himself had no recol ection of the other lives he’d lived on Earth, he had heard of those who did.

His plan was to stop the book and return to 1673.

Charles would sign that writ if it was the last thing Peter accomplished. How foolish he’d been not to just hand Campbel over that night. ’Twould have been exactly what the minx deserved.

Oh, Ursula. In whatever life you’ve been reborn, I hope you are happy.

Jeanne maneuvered the car into place in front of a smal er version of the buildings he had admired in the vicinity of the glass castle. There was a sign on the front that read 650 WASHINGTON ROAD.

She towed him toward the door at a run.

“Why are you hurrying?”

“I’m parked il egal y.” Through the door they went and on a wal at the end of the low-ceilinged entry hal she pressed a button, which promptly lit up.

Peter gestured toward the entrance. “Look. Someone is admiring your carriage.”

She turned and let out a surprisingly vivid oath. “She’s not admiring it. She’s going to write me a ticket.”

The door before them opened. Jeanne pul ed him inside the tiny room, inserted a key into a lock at the bottom of a row of numbered buttons and turned it. Then she jumped off, stopping the door, a sort of sideways portcul is, with an arm, while the door registered its unhappiness with loud bel s.

“Go up,” she instructed. “Her place is at the top. When you get there, remove the key and the door wil open. I’l be up as soon as I can.”

The doors closed. For an instant he looked for a way to ascend, then the floor jerked upward. His heart jumped to his throat, and he grabbed the narrow railing that ran the circumference of the space.

After a moment that seemed to last a lifetime, the room stopped. He dove for the key and turned it as the woman had said. The portcul is slid back, and the space before him had transformed from a tiny room to a high-ceilinged space lit from floor to ceiling with windows. The sun had set, and the view, past a dining table with high-backed chairs, was of a horizon sparkling with stars. A church sat high on a hil in the distance, and around it dozens and dozens of charming cottages were visible.

He thought of the view from his attic and of the moments he’d shared with Campbel Stratford there. She had captured his heart, joined him in his bed, then varnished it al with a veneer of lies. It had been a cruel punishment for his dormant heart. The nearly spent candle had fluttered weakly to life, then been pinched out and destroyed.

But that wasn’t why he was here, he reminded himself.

He had been a fool, but men do foolish things. The evening had served as a painful reminder that his place was not in his old life, but in a life that had yet to be chosen