Nothing Like the Sun

by Megan Hart

  He waved his hand dismissively. “No worries, love. It’s true.”

  She got up on one elbow to look at him. “But what are you doing here?”

  He twirled a lock of her hair around his finger. “I couldn’t stop thinking about you. About Shakespeare and Wilde. About chocolate bars. I’ve met a lot of women, Georgie, but none like you.”

  “Ah.” Georgie nodded, then ducked her head a bit. “It was all an act, though. That’s not me.”

  Julian sat up suddenly, looking shocked. “What? Not you?” He looked so shocked she had to laugh again. “Who was it then?”

  “Hush,” she scolded. “That’s not what I meant.”

  He pulled her to him for another kiss. “Why don’t you let me figure out who you are then?”

  It was tempting, but Georgie wasn’t so sure she was ready for that. “Julian—”

  “Cassie told me about him. The ass-crack, Comatose Joe, she called him. I don’t blame you for being wary. And if you were just out for a night of good fun, Georgie, I understand. Believe me, I do.”

  He gave her a rueful smile. “And if what just happened was nothing more than an extension of that fun night, well, I guess I understand that, too. But if you’ve a mind toward it, I’d like to see you again.”

  Georgie sat up, pushing her hair behind her ears. “I’m sorry, Julian, it’s not that I don’t want to.”

  “I understand,” he said, reaching for her hand. He squeezed it gently, then brought it to his lips to kiss her knuckles. “But do you believe me when I tell you that instead of sitting somewhere in a posh hotel sipping champagne, I chose to drive my sorry arse from Ohio to here, and I’ll have to drive to New York tomorrow to catch the next gig? And that I did that because I couldn’t stop thinking about you?”

  He was here, which meant that was true. “I believe you.”

  “We’re playing the East Coast for the next three months,” he told her. “And my daughter’s birthday is in two weeks. She and her mother live in Virginia. I’ll be back and forth for three months, Georgie, never more than a few hours drive or a short flight away from you. All I’m asking is that you consider letting me see you. If, at the end of three months, you’ve decided you can’t stand the sight of me, well, I’m off to Asia anyway and you’ll be shut of me.”

  “And if I don’t decide that?” she asked quietly, studying him. He looked sincere.

  Julian’s grin sent a tingle all the way down to her toes. “Then I’d say there’s always phone sex, love, and the food in Japan’s fucking fabulous.”

  Georgie laughed. “Has anyone ever been able to resist you?”

  “Sadly, yes,” he told her seriously. “But I’m hoping you won’t.”

  Georgie looked down at their clasped hands. She’d meant to have only one night. But nothing said things couldn’t change, right?

  She leaned forward to kiss him. “All right. Let’s give it a shot. Cassie’ll kill me, but okay.”

  Julian laughed. “Cassie’s got her own business to concern her, I think.”

  That was true, too.

  She kissed him again, then touched the mark she’d left on his shoulder in much the same place she’d done the first time they’d been together. “Sorry about that.”

  “Oh, that,” Julian scoffed. “Bloody vampire, you are.”

  “I heard you liked vampires,” Georgie teased, and ducked away from him as he made to grab her.

  “I’ll show you what I like, and it does deal with sucking,” he told her. “But not blood.”

  Laughing, she let him pin her. He kissed her, but softly, the looked into her eyes.

  “Nothing like the sun,” he murmured. “Will Shakespeare knew what he was talking about, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” Georgie said. “But I told you before, I like Oscar Wilde.”

  “Well, then,” said Julian. “Let’s see what I can do about helping you get a little wild.”

  She groaned at his pun, but a moment later groaned, when his fingers found her clit and began to circle it just the way she liked.

  “Didn’t Wilde say each man kills the thing he loves? I think you’re going to kill me, Julian.”

  “Well,” said Julian sliding lower, “it’d be a bloody fucktastic way to go.”

  Then they stopped talking for a while, and made poetry of a different sort.

  About the Author

  I was born and then I lived awhile. Then I did some stuff and other things. Now, I mostly write books. Some of them use a lot of bad words, but most of the other words are okay.

  I can’t live without music, the internet, or the ocean, but I have kicked the Coke Zero habit. I can’t stand the feeling of corduroy or velvet, and modern art leaves me cold. I write a little bit of everything from horror to romance, and I don’t answer to the name “Meg.”

  * * *

  Megan Hart is a USA Today, Publisher’s Weekly and New York Times bestselling author who writes in many genres including mainstream fiction, erotic fiction, science fiction, romance, fantasy and horror. Learn more about her by visiting her website, MeganHart.com. Find her on Twitter at twitter.com/megan_hart and on Facebook at facebook.com/megan.hart. If you liked The Resurrected, please tell all of your friends to buy it. If you hated it, please tell all your enemies to buy it. If you’d like to tell the author about it, drop her a line at readinbed@gmail.com, but remember that your mom told you if you don’t have anything nice to say, it’s best to say nothing at all.

  Lost Our Forever

  Natalie J. Damschroder

  “No frickin’ way.”

  “Why?” Georgie turned plaintive eyes on Cassie, who did her best to ignore them.

  “Because it’s a very bad idea, that’s why.” For the first time in six months, she craved a cigarette. Images flashed into and out of her mind so fast she couldn’t have described them, but they left behind a sensation of the past, how it had felt to be in the midst of that world. A world where she had smoked. And done and been a hundred other things she wanted no part of now.

  But Georgie was her best friend. Had been in high school, and was again now, despite the years in between. She’d forgiven Cassie for abandoning her along with Pennsylvania, and they’d picked up where they left off a little more than a year ago, when Cassie returned to their hometown. She’d helped Cassie find her center, just by being her.

  And she was so fucking sweetly persistent Cassie knew, no matter what she said, Georgie wouldn’t give up.

  “They’re not coming anywhere near here.”

  “Ha!” Georgie crowed, pointing at Cassie. “I knew it! Pleeease. They’re doing Columbus. They could easily come here first. You’re still in touch with Seth, aren’t you? You know the tour schedule. You’ve got to want to see them.”

  “I really don’t.” She studied her friend. Georgie had made some big changes recently, with a trendier haircut and contacts, and a hipper wardrobe, but it was still obvious to anyone looking at them that they were extreme opposites. Georgie was a good girl, a librarian who’d taken care of her injured fiancé and been unceremoniously dumped as soon as he was well enough. Despite that, she still was sweet to the core, and looked it.

  Cassie was well aware she looked exactly like what her life had made her. Hard. Damaged. Vibrant in a way that attracted and excited, but would hurt like touching a live electrical wire. She, too, had made changes. But she was sour to the core, and looked it. Revisiting the life that had set her on that path was not something she aspired to.

  “Why do you want to see them?” she asked Georgie, just for amusement. She didn’t need to hear the answer—that lost night, when Arliss had gotten them tickets to the concert of British band Blue Silver, complete with backstage passes. The Silverettes, as they’d called their little fan club, had been crushed by the missed dream, courtesy of a broken-down limo. It represented, to Georgie, all the other dreams she’d lost, and the new beginning she so desperately wanted.

  “Cassie, be honest.” Georgie wound down from the passi
onate speech she’d already given to Cassie twice, once on the phone when she’d pitched the idea, and again last week on Cassie’s answering machine. “You want to see Seth. You need to see him. And you miss the guys, the music. I know you do.”

  “I don’t.” Unlike the others, Cassie had managed to capture the dream. She hadn’t been much different from Georgie back then. She had decided Blue Silver was her only way to get out of Hellsburg. She wasn’t smart enough for college, even if her parents could have afforded it. She had no talent for anything in particular. Except at sixteen, she started to get men looking at her. By eighteen, she’d honed the ability to make them look, even if they didn’t want to. And that got her things. The day after graduation, it got her a ride to New York City, where Blue Silver was launching their new tour. It got her into the show, when she teased a guy into losing his girlfriend and taking her instead. And with a lot of work, it got her backstage and into Seth Graham’s bed.

  To her everlasting regret.

  She hated to bust Georgie’s bubble, but it was better to do it now than to let disillusion do it for her. She leaned forward across the table. “Hon, you don’t want this. It’s not what you think it is. It’s not what you want it to be. It’s dark and grim and degrading and soul-sucking, and it will ruin you forever.”

  “I’m not you.” Georgie dropped the girlish pleading and rhapsodizing and fixed Cassie with a look of clear-eyed determination. “It’s one night, Cassie, not years. I’m thirty-five, not fifteen. Getting an opportunity to watch Julian Manchester use those hands, up close and personal, is not going to ruin my life.” She flashed a grin. “It’s going to spice it up.”

  “Fine.” Cassie sighed. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Squealing, Georgie leaped up and ran around the table to hug her, bouncing her whole body. Cassie gritted her teeth and endured it. What else was she going to do? She felt guilty a few minutes later when her friend finally went out the back door, knowing she wasn’t going to try very hard. She loved Georgie. Her purity helped Cassie keep her despair at bay, and she wasn’t going to let anything destroy it.

  Better for her to be disappointed than ruined.

  Behind the Mask

  Jody Wallace

  Later that night, the phone rang, startling Arliss’s attempt to open the damn jar of peanut butter. The screwdriver slipped off the edge of the lid and jabbed her thigh.

  “Shit!” She threw it onto the floor, along with the plastic container of peanut butter, which bounced and rolled under the table, and hobbled over to the telephone. No blood, but there’d be a bruise. She was as pale as milk and she bruised easy.

  “This better not be a telemarketer,” she snarled into the mouthpiece because she figured it would and she liked to scare them off as soon as possible. After all, nobody else called her land line. Mother wasn’t allowed to make calls after the last incident.

  “I’m looking for Arliss Edgeworth,” said a soft female voice. “I think it’s still Edgeworth. She might have gotten married.”

  “Fat chance. Who’s this?” Arliss asked. She almost recognized the voice but couldn’t be sure. If it was another mistress of Dad’s from before he was in prison, she hoped the woman wasn’t expecting a handout. The one with the kid, Arliss’s supposed half-sister, had been the most recent to track Arliss down.

  At least she’d tracked Arliss down and not Arliss’s poor mother.

  “This is Georgie. Georgie Davis. From high school. Is this Arliss?”

  “Holy crap, I mean, wow! Really?” Georgie had been one of the four reasons Arliss had made it through high school without murdering anybody. Also one of the four reasons she had a head full of Blue Silver trivia and zero French, but you could forgive people some sins.

  “Really,” Georgie said. “It’s me. How are you?”

  “Well, I’m…”

  Arliss paused before finishing—before automatically blurting out how much her life sucked. She stood straighter, almost unconsciously, and tried to calm the butterflies in her stomach. She and her high school pals had drifted apart after the fiasco with her Dad’s company. If Arliss were honest with herself, a nasty habit her therapist encouraged, she could admit the parting was her fault as well, for not trying harder.

  Trying harder, of course, was synonymous with trying at all. She’d been so humiliated at that point in her life she hadn’t wanted to face anybody or anything. The fiasco with her Dad wound up with him in jail, her mom in a mental institution, and Arliss in foster care. That was preceded, only slightly, by the tragedy of the missed Blue Silver concert, a tragedy Arliss figured the other girls in the Silverettes fan club blamed her for.

  But still, to have one of those girls, once her favorite people in the world, reaching out to her…

  “I’m good,” she said finally. “It’s been so long. How are you?”

  “I’m fine. How are…” Georgie laughed. “Sorry to be a parrot. I’m worn out. I’ve been making phone calls all day. I might sound like a halfwit, but I do have a reason for calling.”

  Arliss felt a twinge of disappointment that Georgie hadn’t looked her up for fond, nostalgic reasons. “Are you in charge of the twentieth year high school reunion?” she guessed. “It’s about that time.”

  “Better.”

  Though countless things would be better than her twentieth year high school reunion, Arliss could hear an undercurrent of excitement in the other woman’s voice. What would make the shy, brainy girl Arliss remembered sound so happy? “Are you getting married?”

  “No.” It was Georgie’s turn to pause and Arliss thought she sensed a dark weight in that single syllable.

  Damn it, what a stupid question! At least she hadn’t asked if Georgie was pregnant or something. She heard the woman breathe deeply on the other end of the phone and then say, “Much, much better.”

  This time, she’d try for levity. “You won the lottery and want me to be your personal accountant?”

  “You’re an accountant?” Georgie asked, sounding a little surprised.

  Arliss waited for the snarky comment about how it was her Dad’s accounting practices that put him in jail, but it never came.

  “Well, you were the club treasurer,” Georgie continued. “And good at math.”

  “It’s a job.” A job she despised. Hated. Loathed. “What’s better than winning the lottery?”

  “It’s all thanks to Cassie. It was my idea, but you know how Cassie makes things happen.”

  “Do you still see Cassie?” Cassie and Georgie had been best friends in high school. Faith and Marci had been equally inseparable, leaving Arliss to play an odd fifth wheel. But that had been preferable to being alone or clinging on the ass of the in-crowd who’d tolerated her for her Dad’s money.

  That invitation had definitely been rescinded after the trial.

  “Cassie and I grew up together, so of course I see her. She moved back to Harrisburg to… But we can talk about this later. Have you heard about the tour?”

  Arliss frowned. “I guess not.”

  “Don’t joke with me. I know you loved them. Are you sitting down? There’s going to be a special Blue Silver concert right here in Harrisburg! It’s the first stop in their reunion tour. It’s a smaller venue, a little club downtown, but that means it’ll be more intimate. It’s for charity. Cassie set it up. She and Seth are divorced, of course, but it’s for a good cause.”

  Arliss wanted to ask, “The divorce or the concert?” but the answer was likely both, so she didn’t interrupt. Georgie’s voice grew faster and more animated the longer she talked. She’d always been like that—she seemed so withdrawn, but loose her on one of her favorite topics, like Blue Silver, and she could out-talk a motivational speaker.

  “That’s…very nice,” Arliss said, when Georgie stopped for a breather.

  “It’s better than nice. It’s a dream come true. Finally, it’s going to happen for us.”

  Arliss risked some humor. “As long as I’m not in charge of transporta
tion, huh?”

  Georgie laughed, but to Arliss’s ears it sounded a little strained. “Right.”

  The last time Blue Silver had come close to Harrisburg, back in their heyday twenty years ago, Arliss had begged her then-millionaire father for front row tickets and backstage passes. The limo had broken down on the way to the show, and the girls had been stuck listening to the concert on the radio.

  Which had died right after the band dedicated a song to the local fan club, The Blue Silverettes.

  Arliss’s fault? No. She hadn’t known about Dad’s money troubles and the fact he hadn’t been paying bills. Or mechanics. But she’d always assumed the Silverettes resented her inadvertent ruination of their dream night. When her father’s white collar crimes were uncovered shortly thereafter, it had been the beginning of the end of the friendships, at least for Arliss.

  The whole thing with the concert, her dad, her dissolving friendships made her feel shame, not guilt, but if people blamed her, what was she supposed to do? Pick a fight? Who knows what else they’d scream at her if it came to that?

  She realized Georgie was still explaining and tuned in.

  “So can you come?” Georgie asked. “It won’t be the same without you.”

  “Sorry, I was…what did you say?”

  “Can you come to the concert in August? We’re going to do it right this time, and it’s going to be wonderful.” Georgie’s voice took on a steely tone that sounded like Cassie at her most determined. Okay, Cassie at her most bossy. “Nothing is going to go wrong this time. Nothing. Please say you’ll come. Everyone else is coming.”

  Rebuilding Forever

  Natalie J. Damschroder

  Cassie Bryant’s assistant, Beth, entered her office without knocking and flicked on the TV in the corner. “Beth, I’m in the middle of a budget review!”