All In Good Time - A Time Travel Beatles Fanfiction

Track 6 - Dream Until Your Dreams Come True

Neil was pleasant enough on the short drive to the hotel, although he didn't say much beyond asking Lainey where she was from and how long she intended to stay.

The hotel was a charming Victorian building in a quiet neighborhood. Lainey walked straight to the front desk to ask about availability. The clerk asked her name, nodded and pulled an index card out of a wooden box. "Miss Spencer, we have your reservation, for two nights, is it? I'll need you to fill in your home address if you would please."

Lainey stared at her name printed on the card he'd handed her. Someone...Neil...or Paul...had already made a reservation for her? "How much is the room?" she asked. This lovely place might be a little too swanky for her to afford with her bag full of coins.

"It's already been taken care of, Miss Spencer."

What??

The clerk handed her a pen. Lainey filled in her address in Virginia, not sure how she felt about Paul paying for her room and wondering what he expected in return. She'd have to settle up with him later. In coins.

"Room 32, third floor, the lift is just behind and to your left."

The room was tiny, but it had a wonderfully high ceiling and a four-poster bed which gave it the feeling of opulence. It looked out over a courtyard with outdoor tables and colorful umbrellas.

She had hours to kill before dinner and decided to check out some of the shops she'd noticed on the way to the hotel. In a wonderfully fragrant and oh-so-British shop that sold only bath products, she picked up a bottle of rose-scented bubble bath. At a newsagent's shop she browsed the new books section and purchased a paperback copy of The Spy Who Loved Me and a postcard of Piccadilly Circus to use as a bookmark. On the way back to the hotel she grabbed a cinnamon scone and a paper cup of tea. Under a yellow umbrella in the hotel courtyard, she settled in to read her book and enjoy the pleasant weather.

People-watching proved to be even more interesting than James Bond, so Lainey donned her sunglasses and observed the scene on the street. All the men wore dark suits and ties, many of them sporting classic bowler hats and holding black umbrellas at their sides. Ladies strolled by in short-sleeved dresses with tight bodices that buttoned up the front and flared out to just below their knees, kitten heeled pumps on their feet, carrying shopping bags and leather pocketbook purses with short straps. Little girls wore miniature versions of their mothers' dresses, with little white socks and black patent leather Mary Janes. It was like watching a colorized episode of Leave It To Beaver, if Mayfield also had uniformed au pairs pushing babies in prams with oversized wheels.

The sun came out and heated things up, and Lainey realized how tired she was after missing sleep the last two nights. She wandered up to her room and pulled back the covers of the four-poster bed and was asleep in minutes.

She awoke disoriented, and it took several seconds to remember where she was, and when she was. The wind-up alarm clock next to the bed read 4:25. Lainey sat on the edge of the bed, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. She was in London, in 1963, in a hotel room that Paul McCartney had paid for, and he was picking her up for dinner. Could her life get any more strange?

After a bubble bath in the amazing tub, Lainey put on her only other dress, a sleeveless shift in a psychedelic pattern, slipped on her sandals, and applied the powder, mascara, and lip gloss she'd brought with her. There was no hairdryer in the room, and she didn't even know if they existed in 1963, so she toweled her long hair dry and fluffed it with her fingers, then pulled it up in a messy knot on top of her head.

She sat by the window, waiting for Paul to telephone, and began to think about how she would approach George. He already thought her strange, the way she'd stared at him and spoken to him as if she knew all sorts of personal details. She wanted desperately to tell him the things her grandmother had said, but how could she do that without lying about her relationship with the Marie he knew of as a young girl? Paul knew she wanted to talk to George. Maybe he would bring him to dinner tonight. George had seemed so standoffish, and Paul's effervescent personality would break the ice.