The Last Time I Saw Her (19 page)

“You want me to check your house for you?” Plank asked as she walked down the porch and felt along the ledge over the living room window to find the spare key she kept there.

“Thanks,” she replied, locating the key and heading back toward him. Michael would be there in a few minutes, but given the events of the day it was difficult to imagine being too cautious. “And thanks for driving me home.”

“You're welcome,” he said, waiting for her to get the door open. It was so dark that she had a little trouble fitting the key into the lock, and as she stepped inside she had to slide a hand along the wall to find the switch for the entry hall light. When she found the light switch, she hit it and stood back as Plank entered. Ordinarily she would have turned the porch light on if she was coming home so late, but of course when she'd left the house she'd had no idea that it would be the early hours of the next day before she made it home again.

As she accompanied Plank on a quick walk-through of her house, Charlie felt cold all over. Tabitha Grunwald, Ben Snider, Josh Watkins, the rest of the dead—their faces flashed unbidden into her mind's eye. They'd had no idea when they'd left home the previous morning what their day would hold, either. That yesterday would be the last day of their lives.

The thought brought a lump to her throat. She muttered a quick prayer for them, and for the teens still out there on the mountain.

But as she'd learned over the course of most of a lifetime spent in the close proximity of violent death, making herself sick over the things she couldn't change did nothing but make her sick.

With the house inspection complete, she walked Plank back to the door and said goodbye to him.

When Plank left, she locked the door and shed Hughes's jacket, which she hung up in the closet that was right there. Then she went into the small bathroom off the hall to down two more ibuprofen before her scrapes and bruises could start making themselves felt again. The nap must have given her a second wind, because she felt reasonably rested. A glance in the mirror shocked her by how pale and nervy her reflection looked. Quickly she washed her face, splashing it with icy water in hopes that it would wake her up further as well as put some color back in her cheeks, then brushed her teeth, brushed her hair, and used the cosmetics she kept in the cabinet to apply a vitally necessary little bit of makeup.

Michael's quiet tap on the door came just as she was eyeing the new and deeper neckline of her shirt. As long as she didn't move suddenly, the gap created by the two missing buttons stayed closed, not that it really mattered at this point: there was no one to see but Michael, and he'd already seen that and far more. A final glance in the mirror reassured her that she was looking almost normal, and for that she thanked the miracle of blush. Restoring her things to the cabinet, she hurried to let him in.

“Hey,” he said as she opened the door. It was only as she saw him standing there on her porch in the spill of light from the hall that she realized that he had never before been to her house in human form. Tall as he was, he cast a long shadow back down the steps.

Wordlessly, she stood back to let him in.

Having him step through the front door did something to the atmosphere inside the house. Before, it had felt cold and empty. As she shut the door behind him, locked it, and turned to look at him, the place crackled to life.

Now that he was back she was able to inhale inside her own house without the air feeling so thick it threatened to choke her.

He wasn't looking at her. Before him, she'd lived alone for a long time, and she'd decorated the house the way she liked: with pretty furniture and airy fabrics and light, feminine colors. He was entirely too masculine for it. He was glancing around, at the slice of living room he could see through the doorway with its pale linen couch that he'd stretched out on countless times, at the old-fashioned staircase, down the hall toward the kitchen. In that brief moment in which he didn't realize she was watching him, his expression was unguarded.

In it she could read what he was thinking as clearly as if he'd said it out loud.

It's good to be home.

Her throat was suddenly tight.

She went to him, wrapped her arms around his waist, and rested her forehead against his chest. He felt warm, and solid as a wall against her. Being so close to his broad-shouldered, powerful body felt as right and natural to her as breathing. Then she caught a whiff of that fresh woodsy smell she'd noticed on him before and reminded herself that the body wasn't his and certainly wasn't his to keep.

It didn't matter. However he'd gotten here, he was home. However he was able to stay, she would take him.

He'd said
You're mine, Doc.
Well, that worked both ways. He was hers now, too.

God help them both.

Michael's arms circled her as she hugged him. He pulled her more tightly against him, his hold on her hard and possessive. Charlie felt the brush of what she thought were his lips in her hair.

“So what is it Dudley wants you to think about?” he asked.

Still in his arms, she tilted her face up to consider him. The top of her head didn't quite reach his chin. From the angle at which she was looking at him she could see the darkening shadow of stubble on his square jaw, the beautifully cut, unsmiling mouth, the straight nose, the flat planes of his cheeks and the hard curves of his cheekbones, the sweep of his forehead. His eyes were still coal black as he met her gaze. For all she knew, they would remain black for as long as he stayed in Hughes's body.

There was absolutely no expression on his face.

“He'd like us to have a relationship,” she said.

“He looked pretty serious.”

“
He
kissed
me,
not the other way around.”

“I caught that.”

“You are not jealous.”

“No man likes it when some other guy kisses his girl. I'm trying to rise above it.”

His girl.
She was a grown woman, thirty-two years old. A self-supporting, highly successful doctor. How stupid was it that her heart skipped a beat when Michael called her his girl?

She said, “He and I are going to talk. And I'm going to tell him I'm not interested in being anything but friends.”

Michael looked at her for a long moment without saying anything. Then he grimaced and said, “Dudley's a good guy.”

That was a surprise. “Tony
is
a good guy. I like him a lot. What's your point?”

“You might not want to be so quick to turn him down.”

That was wrong in so many ways that Charlie pulled back to frown at him. “
What?
Seriously?”

“Yeah.”

“You're encouraging me to have a relationship with Tony?”

“Babe, if I wasn't dead things would be different, but I am dead, so there you are. You want a
life,
you're not going to be able to have it with me. I'm just saying Dudley's not a bad choice.”

Charlie knew she had to be gaping at him.

“I'm hungry,” he said, before she could find the words with which to respond to
that.
He wasn't looking at her anymore as his hands found her upper arms and he put her away from him. “I'd almost forgotten what that feels like. You got anything to eat?”

She frowned after him as he started for the kitchen.

What on earth…?

“Eggs. Cheese. Cereal.” She did a quick mental review of the contents of her refrigerator and cabinets as she trailed him down the hall. She continued, “Wait, there's no milk. Protein bars. Peanut butter. No bread.”

“No bread?”

“I haven't even been back three days. I haven't had time to go to the store.”

He was in the galley area of her kitchen, and as she watched from the doorway he delved into the cabinet where she kept her nonperishable staples, i.e., peanut butter and cereal and protein bars. He pulled out a protein bar.

“Want one?” he asked over his shoulder.

Charlie shook her head. “No.”

She hadn't pulled the shades closed before she left, because she'd expected that it would still be daylight when she returned. Outside the kitchen windows, the night was black as ink. She couldn't see the sunflowers or the mountain rising behind them, or anything. Remembering how easy it was for anyone outside to see in, she shivered, crossed the kitchen, and pulled the shades down, then headed for the breakfast bar. Perching on one of the stools, she eyed Michael across the counter as he filled a glass with water from the sink just a few feet away. His back was to her, and in the grimy white shirt his shoulders looked impossibly broad. The well-cut gray pants hugged his tight athlete's butt and the long, strong muscles of his legs. All that was left of the protein bar was a wrapper on the counter. She assumed he'd eaten it.

“Okay, enough with the cryptic stuff,” she said. “I want to know what's going on with you.”

Turning off the water, he turned around to look at her.

“What are you talking about?” Resting his hips back against the sink, he chugged about half the glass of water.

“What happened to you in Spookville?”

“I told you: nothing worth talking about. Spookville is what it is: purple fog, monsters. Jesus, you can't just let things lie, can you?”

“You were gone a long time.”

“It's getting harder to get back.”

“There's something you're not telling me. I need you to tell me what it is right now. We're both in this together, you know.”

“What, do you want me to write it in blood? There's nothing. Look, could we talk about something else? What happened with you while I was gone?”

She looked at him thoughtfully and lied, “I slept with Tony.”

That got to him. She saw it in the sudden rigidity in his body, in the tightening of his jaw, in the narrowing of his eyes as they lasered in on her face. Then his mouth twitched. The fierce gleam in his eyes went away and the tension left his long muscles. He took another drink of water. “How was it?”

“Fantastic.”

“Uh-huh.”

Okay, he didn't believe her. Of course he didn't. She'd known he was going to know she was lying when she said it. She didn't want him to believe her. She just wanted to try to gauge his reaction. Conclusion: for the briefest of moments there, before his brain had actually kicked in, he'd been pissed.

“It's obvious from your reaction that you don't want me to sleep with Tony. So why are you trying to push me into a relationship with him?”

“We've been over this. I'm dead. Body's a loaner. You can't have one with me.”

“Let me get this straight: I'm going to have a relationship with—as in, have lots and lots of sex with—Tony, and you're going to hang around and watch?”

He swallowed the last of the water, then turned to put the glass in the sink. Without replying.

“Michael—”

“What are you, part bulldog?” On that exasperated note, he was turning back to face her when his attention was caught by something on the refrigerator. Following his gaze, Charlie saw that he was looking at the letter she'd received from NARSAD. She'd hung it up there with a clip-on magnet so she wouldn't forget to RSVP to the awards dinner invite by the specified date. The bright gold letterhead had apparently caught his eye. It gleamed in the overhead light—and he was looking for something to change the subject.

He wasn't getting out of the conversation that easily, but…she still felt a warm little glow as she remembered what the letter said. Until that moment, she'd forgotten all about it, which said way too much about the chaotic nature of her life.

“You won a prize?” Having clearly read the letter, he was looking at her now.

Charlie nodded. “A NARSAD.” She could feel the smile spreading over her face. Whatever miracle it had taken to bring him back, the one person she'd wanted to share the news with was here. “It's a big deal.”

“Tell me.” He came to stand on the other side of the breakfast bar directly across from her. Leaning toward her, he placed his hands flat on the counter and fixed his eyes on her face.

“I won the Goldman-Rakic Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Cognitive Neuroscience.” Even saying the words gave her a thrill. She told him all about it, not holding anything back, no false modesty, no downplaying the magnitude of it, because the thing about their relationship, she realized as she talked, was that with him she felt like she could be totally herself. After all they'd been through together, he knew her better than anyone else in her life. As she finished, he was smiling broadly at her. Then he came around the breakfast bar and caught her around the waist and plucked her up off the stool like she weighed nothing at all, making her squeak with surprise and grab on to his shoulders for balance.

“That's great.” His arms were tight around her waist as he swung her in a series of wide circles. Her feet weren't touching the ground, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and hung on, laughing a little at his exuberance and at the sheer unexpectedness of finding herself being twirled around her own kitchen. His hard, handsome face was alight with pleasure in her achievement. “I am so damned proud of you. You're a remarkable woman, Charlie Stone.”

Their eyes met, and everything he was flashed into her consciousness in a single burst of absolutely clearheaded awareness. A dead man in another man's body. A spirit who'd apparently done something so terrible in life that the universe had decreed his soul should be destroyed. A man who'd wound up on death row in the earth plane because he'd been convicted of murdering multiple women. Sometimes short-tempered. Occasionally scary. An intermittent jackass who was smart and funny and caring and, yes, sexy as hell. A badass protector who'd saved her life a number of times. A friend. A lover. Someone she could confide in. Someone she could count on.
The
someone she could count on.

In a word: Michael.

She was smiling at him and he was smiling back, but she guessed he must have been able to read something of her thoughts in her eyes—he could always read her eyes—because his expression changed. The broad smile died, and his face tightened fractionally and he stopped twirling her.

As he set her back on her feet she kept her arms around his neck and her face lifted to his. Still faintly breathless, she said, “I haven't told anybody else. I—when I opened the letter, the one person I wanted to tell was you. But you weren't here, and so—”

She didn't get to finish. He bent his head and kissed her. It was an achingly tender kiss, a careful molding of her mouth that made her heart lurch, that made her return his kiss as tenderly. Then his lips hardened in a way that had her tightening her arms around his neck, that had her going up on tiptoe to fit her mouth to his and her body to his with an ardency that was her own silent acknowledgment of how she felt about him. His tongue came into her mouth, and she answered it with her own. The fire that was always there between them blazed up so fast and hot that she could feel the scorching heat of it blistering her skin and turning the air around them to steam. Her heart pounded and her pulse raced and her body quickened, conditioned responses to him now that had her melting like superheated plastic in his arms.

Kissing him, she faced the terrible truth: she was absolutely, irrevocably his. Nobody else had ever been able to make her feel like this, and she was as sure as it was possible to be that nobody else ever would.

When he lifted his head she looked up at him. She was tingly, fuzzy-headed, plastered against him like peanut butter on bread—and she had a terrible feeling that her heart might be in her eyes.

So be it.
Truth was truth, and sometimes you just had to face up to things.

“I love you,” she said.

He took a breath. She could feel his body tense. His arms around her were suddenly as taut as iron bands. Those unholy black eyes blazed down at her.

He said, “I know.”

Charlie blinked. Not exactly the words of deathless romance she'd been longing to hear. Then she waited, thinking that it might take him a moment to build up to it, to get his act together. Nothing.

He was still breathing unevenly, and there were dark slashes of color high on his cheekbones. She could feel the rise and fall of his chest against her breasts. His body was hard with wanting her: there was no mistake about that. He stood very still.

Her eyes searched his.

“ ‘I know'?” she repeated. Quietly. Calmly. Not ominously at all. “What kind of response to ‘I love you' is that?”

His face hardened into brutality. “The only one I have.”

Because she hadn't seen it coming, the pain blindsided her. It was sharp and physical, and it lodged squarely in the region of her heart. If he hadn't been holding her, she might have doubled over with the intensity of it.

Her instinctive, thankfully silent response was a pitiful:
You don't love me?

She had her pride. She refused to let him see that he'd just burst the magical bubble she'd been living in since his return. She refused to let him see that there'd been a magical bubble at all.

Grow up, Cinderella. When you lose your shoe at midnight, you're not getting it back.

She managed
not
to take a deep breath.

“Really? Good to know.” Her tone was even borderline polite. A little chilly, maybe, but she couldn't help that. Oh, God, her arms were still around his neck. She lowered them, shoved—not angrily or anything; actually, in a very controlled way—against his chest in a silent demand to be released. “Excuse me, I'm going to go take a shower and go to bed.”

He let her go without a word.

If he watched her leave the kitchen, she didn't know it, because she didn't look back.

Head high, back straight, she climbed the stairs and walked through the bedroom into the bathroom and stripped off her ruined clothes and got into the shower. It was a large unit that she'd had built into a corner of the bathroom when she'd remodeled. Glass doors took up the entire side facing the bathroom, while the other three sides were tiled. It was separate from her big claw-foot tub and she actually used it a lot more, because she was usually in a hurry. It had lots of small nozzles that shot spray in every direction and a big central showerhead that sent torrents of water cascading down.

She made the water as hot as she could stand it and then stepped under it, soaping herself, vigorously washing her hair with her floral-scented shampoo, enduring the sting of the water and soap and shampoo sluicing over all the scratches and scrapes the day had left her with.