The Last Time I Saw Her

by Karen Robards

  Charlie’s shoulders tightened. Her skin crawled as she imagined a bullet slamming into her spine. Blessing the swirling mist and the deepening darkness equally for the cover they provided, she raced into the doubtful protection of a stand of spindly pines. Their pungent scent filled the air as she shoved through the damp branches only to discover that the ledge ended abruptly just beyond them. Coming up short as her sanctuary fell away in front of her feet in yet another sheer drop, she looked down in horror—and heard a rustle of branches warning her that Fleenor was coming after her through the trees.

  Heart racing, practically teetering on the edge of the precipice as she whirled to face the copse of pines, she looked wildly around. Where she was, there was no concealment. The trees had run out, and she was standing in the open, with not even any mist in that particular spot, thanks to a cold updraft spiraling from below. It was dark, but not dark enough to hide her: the deepening charcoal of advancing dusk rather than the full-out blackness of night. The pale stone of the cliff rose starkly on one side. She was some ninety feet below the road now, and the climb up was impossible. Her only way out was back through the trees and along the path—and Fleenor, armed and murderous, was in her way.

  Oh, my God, I’m trapped.

  Panic had her heart pumping, reduced her breathing to ragged pants. Her palms were damp, she discovered, as her hands fisted at her sides. Turning, she looked down again. There was another ledge much like the one she was standing on some thirty feet below, down a wall of smooth, perpendicular rock. This one was maybe ten feet wide and held little in the way of cover: only a couple of large, scruffy bushes growing close to the face of the rock. Her stomach knotted as she evaluated her chances of reaching it. It wasn’t a straight shot, but was maybe eight feet over, with the prospect of a fatal drop hundreds of feet into a misty, wooded chasm if she lost her grip. No way could she climb—

  “Dr. Sto-o-one.” Fleenor’s mocking call made the hair stand up on the back of her neck. “Here I am. Good to see you decided to wait for me.”

  He could see her. His words, his tone, left Charlie in no doubt about that. A terrified glance back found him, a tall, dark form shoving his way through the trees. In the open as she was, she would be completely visible to him. From the deliberate way he was moving—no rushing for him now—he must realize that she was cornered.

  The knowledge was utterly terrifying.

  Go.

  Crouching, lowering herself over the side, she went down that cold, treacherous cliff like a lizard, pressing herself flat against the smooth rock, digging her fingers and toes into any tiny crack she could find, sliding on her stomach when there weren’t any cracks, and finally semi-falling the last few yards and pitching up in a heap on the ledge.

  Then she looked up to find that Fleenor stood on the ledge she had just abandoned, peering down at her.

  From her position he wasn’t much more than a dark shape against the paler stone, but there was just enough light left to allow her to pick out the gun in his hand. There was no mistake: he was aiming, pointing it at her, targeting her.

  Throwing herself sideways, Charlie screamed.

  A second figure, taller and broader of shoulder, merged with the first. A glint of silver whipped through the air and was yanked tight against Fleenor’s throat. A chain, Charlie realized, even as a choked cry was followed by a brief, violent reaction on Fleenor’s part. Then his knees seemed to give out, and he sank down out of her sight.

  Charlie practically dissolved with relief.

  A moment later, the taller figure was looking over the edge at her. She could see little more than his silhouette against the darkening sky. Sprawled on her back on the unforgiving rock, her elbows propping her up, Charlie stared at him.

  The outline of an elegant suit, the faint gleam of a white shirt, a suggestion of short, fair hair.

  Her pulse leaped. There was no mistaking Hughes. But—

  “Michael?” Her voice had a distinct quaver.

  “You hurt?” he called down to her. That laconic question was all she needed to tell her that she’d been right, it was him. The voice was dark and gravelly but unmistakably his. Oh, my God, she’d known it, although exactly how she couldn’t have said. Probably from the way he’d shown up to save her—typical Michael—or the way he’d dealt with Fleenor with such ruthless efficiency—also typical Michael—or maybe because she just did. Because she had developed a sixth sense where he was concerned. She could recognize him now at any distance, anytime, anywhere, under any conditions. She was a little fuzzy on the mechanics of how it all worked, but he’d managed to take over Hughes’s body.

  Thank you, God.

  “No,” she replied. And smiled, at him and at the universe, too, for sending him back to her and making such a thing as body takeovers possible.

  He didn’t say anything more, just lowered himself over the edge of the cliff and climbed down, far more efficiently than she had done. The fact that his wrists were cuffed together made the feat even more impressive, she decided. She watched without moving, and in just a few minutes he was stepping onto the ledge. By then her previously pounding heart had slowed to a near normal beat and her ragged breathing had more or less stopped being ragged. But her muscles were still jelly, and various aches and pains were starting to make themselves felt, and she was so mentally and physically drained that lying there on the cold stone was just about all she could imagine doing ever again.

  He came to stand over her.

  “Fleenor?” she asked, although she was 99.9 percent sure she knew the answer. She’d seen Michael in action before. He’d been Marine Force Recon once upon a time, and the finer points of breaking a man’s neck seemed to have stuck with him.

  “Dead.”

  She acknowledged that with a nod.

  “How’d you get the handcuffs in front?” she asked next. Because the last time she’d seen Hughes, his hands had been cuffed behind his back.

  “Stepped through them.”

  She was sure that was far more difficult than he made it sound, but she didn’t really care.

  “Ah,” she said.

  “You scared the hell out of me back there,” Michael said. His tone was flat, and she was unable to read anything in his face, partly because he was looking down at her, which placed his face deep in shadow. Menace radiated from him like rays from the sun. His powerful body was visibly tense. He looked impossibly tall and broad-shouldered, and formidable as hell looming over her like that. Charlie came to the conclusion, arrived at with all the objectivity of the research scientist she was, that she would never get enough of looking at him.

  “Yeah, well, payback’s a bitch,” she retorted with no heat at all.

  He hunkered down beside her. His eyes, she saw, were still that glittering, soulless black. Aggression came off him in waves, the result, she knew, of his recent sojourn in Spookville. “What’s that mean?”

  His face remained in shadow and was thus impossible to read, but he was looking her over carefully. Checking for injuries, she guessed, because for her to remain flat on her back on cold, uneven rock probably struck him as a sign that she wasn’t quite herself. She was taking it as a sign of that, too.

  “It means that for the last seventeen days I thought you were gone. Forever. Tam told me you’d probably been terminated. I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.” She said it conversationally, no drama there, while her eyes moved over what she could see of his face and her insides slowly loosened up so that her heart and her lungs and her stomach felt more or less the way they ought to feel, and her blood warmed to the point where it flowed easily through her veins. Which was when she realized just how frozen her body had been with grief since he’d disappeared.

  “Miss me?” he asked. His tone was as drama-free and casual as hers had been.

  To Charlie’s consternation, her throat tightened and her lips quivered.

  “Yes,” she said. Then, aches and pains and jellied muscles be damned, she sat up
and rolled onto her knees and threw herself against him and wrapped her arms around his neck and burst into tears.

  The thing about it was she never cried. Or, at least, she only ever cried over him.

  “Hey, hey, hey,” he murmured, pressing his lips to her ear and her cheek and the line of her jaw because she had her face buried in the crook of his neck and that was all he could reach. The feel of his mouth, warm and real, against her skin, destroyed the last of her defenses. She cried as though every ounce of the anguish she’d experienced over him had been building up and had finally exploded in this, a volcanic loss of control, which was, in fact, precisely what had happened. Despite the handcuffs linking his wrists, he somehow managed to maneuver them both so that he was kneeling with his arms wrapped tight around her. She was kneeling, too, and hanging on to him like she never meant to let go. As she sobbed and clung and gasped incomprehensible things into his neck while they knelt on that narrow lip of rock with the sheer cliff towering above them and the misty chill of the twilight enfolding them, he held her and rocked her and wisely didn’t try to reply, until finally the storm subsided enough so that she lay more or less quietly against him. Then he kissed her cheek for what must have been the hundredth time and said in her ear, “It’s all right. Everything’s all right. There’s nothing to be afraid of anymore. I’ve got you safe.”

  “I’m not crying because I’m afraid,” she growled into his neck, with the slight interruption of a maddening little hiccupping sob that she would have stifled if she could have. “I’m crying because you vanishing like you did scared me to death, you jackass, which you should know, and now here you are and—and—”

  She couldn’t go on. Her voice deserted her as her throat closed up again despite her absolute determination to stop with the waterworks already. You’re stronger than this, she told herself, but she wasn’t, not where he was concerned, which was what the period without him had taught her. Where he was concerned, she was weak and vulnerable and in so much trouble, because there wasn’t any possibility of a happy ending for them, and—

  “Charlie. Babe.” There was the briefest of pauses as he pressed his mouth to the sensitive place below her ear, to which her only response was a shuddering indrawn breath as she fought to get herself back on an even keel. Her skin tingled where his lips touched it and her heart beat faster. He kissed her neck and she shivered and tightened her grip on him. Then he lifted his head and said, “Now you’re making me cry.”

  What? That got her attention. Blinking away the hot tears that just would not stop welling up, rearing back so that she could see his face, she frowned suspiciously.

  She knew the hard, handsome face technically belonged to Hughes, but the man who was looking back at her was Michael. She’d thought Hughes looked identical to him, but now she saw that Hughes was only a pale copy. Michael was the vivid original, the oil painting to Hughes’s print. Temperament, character, life force—whatever it was that made one individual different from any other—sculpted a face as much as bone and muscle, she discovered. The crooked half-smile with which he was regarding her was his. The tightening of the skin over his cheekbones, the slight lift of one eyebrow—it was as if the soul inside the body had modified the exterior just enough so that, for her at least, there was no longer any possibility of mistake.

  “You are not,” she said accusingly. He was smiling. And those glinting black eyes held not the slightest hint of tears.

  “I was just trying to get you to look up,” he said, and kissed her.

  Fierce and possessive, his mouth slanted over hers in a way that made her heart lurch. Tilting her face up to his, she parted her lips in instant, instinctive response as everything else in the world receded. Hot and wet and intensely real, his tongue slid into her mouth. She shivered and closed her eyes, and kissed him back with an urgency fueled by those days in which she’d thought he was gone forever. The electric thrill that was always there between them had her arching up against him, sliding her fingers through his hair, responding to the controlled savagery of his mouth with a feverish hunger of her own. Heat blew through her, making her blood sizzle, causing her pulse to go haywire. Passion blazed up hotter than any wildfire, and she went all light-headed and marshmallowy as her body quickened and her mind lost focus and everything that wasn’t them got burned away.

  Michael. She must have said his name out loud, whispered it against his lips, breathed it into his mouth, something, because he lifted his head just long enough to make her blink questioningly up at him, just long enough for her to meet those scarily black eyes and have him whisper back, “I’m right here.”

  Then he kissed her again with a carnality that had her melting inside, that turned her blood to steam and liquefied her bones. His mouth was hard with wanting her and his body was hard with wanting her, and she was left with no doubt whatsoever about the strength of his desire. But there was tenderness for her there in his kisses, too, as well as a kind of angry desperation that echoed her own sense that the situation was getting away from them, that there was more at stake here than either of them had ever thought there would be, or had ever intended. Being in love with him absolutely blew, for a variety of reasons, but she was in love with him, no doing anything about that. He knew it, too, or at least she thought he did, although she had never officially told him so—yelling it after him when he’d disappeared didn’t really count, and she didn’t think he’d even heard—and she wasn’t sure if she would or should say it again. But now he was there with her and corporeal, which was kind of a miracle in and of itself for however long it lasted, and she was just going to go with what they both knew they had, which was this blazing sexual attraction. She kissed him as if he was everything she had ever wanted in this existence, which, come to find out and who’d a thunk it, he was.

  And he kissed her the same way.

  His mouth left hers to trail down her throat. The hot, wet glide of his lips on her bare skin made her dizzy, made her cling to him as if he was the only solid thing left in the world. Tilting her so that her head rested on the hard muscle of his upper arm, he kissed her collarbone, the soft upper swell of her breast, and then his mouth slid over the silky stuff of her blouse to open over her nipple.

  Charlie felt the moist heat of his mouth burning through the thin layers of her shirt and bra. Her nipple hardened instantly against what she realized was his tongue caressing it. She caught her breath at the exquisite sensation, at the scalding dampness that penetrated her clothes clear through to her skin. Her heart pounded and her blood raced and her body made a good case for the reality of spontaneous combustion. His mouth tightened, sucking at the aroused peak, pressing hard against her, until she was so totally turned on that if they’d been any place else she would have been ripping off his clothes and her own. She made an involuntary little sound of pleasure, surging up against his mouth while deep inside her body clenched and quaked.

  His arms tightened in response. His mouth pulled hungrily at her breast. She was on fire for him, blazing hot, wanting him—

  Then right in the midst of that blistering embrace a terrible thought hit her. Charlie pushed away from him like he’d suddenly erupted in a layer of thorns and looked at him in horror.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “What?” Michael growled. His voice was thick and low. His eyes smoldered at her. If ever a man had looked dangerous, he looked dangerous then. His face was set in brutal lines. His eyes were black and burning. She could feel the tension in his wide shoulders and muscular arms, feel aggression coming off him in waves, feel the intense sexual energy surging through the big body she was plastered against. He was rock-hard and radiating heat. Electrically charged sparks practically crackled in the air around him. The remnants of Spookville were still with him, making him all savage and primitive, as she knew from experience it did. Lust seemed to be intensifying the effect, but the immediacy of this simply could not wait.

  “Oh, my God, are you going to get snatched away again? The last
time you took over someone else’s body—” Charlie broke off, because she didn’t need to elaborate. He’d been there the same as she had and knew exactly what she was talking about. The last time he’d taken over someone else’s—actually, Tony’s—body, he’d been snatched right out of it by a hunter, and that’s what had led to the worst two and a half weeks of her life. As in the last two and a half weeks.

  Remembering, she cast a harried glance around the dark, mist-shrouded mountainside.

  “Relax. That’s not going to happen.” He sounded so certain that, having gone rigid in his arms, she allowed herself to slump against him the tiniest little bit. They were kneeling chest to chest still, and she had her hands braced against his shoulders and he had his arms wrapped around her waist. His grip was slightly awkward, she noticed now, because of the handcuffs. She could feel the chain linking them bunched against her back. She loved the physicality of it, the steely strength of his arms around her, the hard muscularity of his thighs, the unmistakable evidence of his arousal pressing urgently against her. She loved the heat of him, and the slightly ragged way he was breathing and the rise and fall of his chest against her breasts. She loved having him there with her in real, live, human form. She loved having him there with her, period.

  None of that stopped her from being scared to death about what might be getting ready to happen to him at any second.

  The cold breeze that she’d felt earlier blowing up the side of the mountain swirled around her, making her shiver despite the fact that she was wrapped in his arms. Easy to imagine a hunter swooping down and—

  She looked at him anxiously. “How do you know?”

  “I know, okay?” Meeting her gaze, he dropped another fierce, deep kiss on her mouth. She slid her arms around his neck and kissed him back because she simply couldn’t do anything else, but then resolutely broke it off.

  Their faces were inches apart. He was looking down at her, breathing unevenly. His face was dark with passion. His mouth was hard with it.