The Last Time I Saw Her

by Karen Robards

  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.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  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.

  Barely feeling any of it.

  I’m gonna wash that man right outta my hair: the showstopper from South Pacific rolled through her head. Song or no song, though, it wasn’t working.

  She was hurting so badly inside that there was no room for anything else.

  What she was not going to do was cry. Not over him. Not ever again.

  The thing about letting yourself fall in love with a jackass was—you might be in love, but he was still a jackass.

  With the power to break your heart.

  I’ll be damned if he’s going to break mine, she told herself fiercely.

  Even as she was thinking it, she heard a whoosh from the shower door. A rush of cooler air penetrating the steam reinforced her interpretation of the sound: the door had just been yanked open.

  Her eyes popped open. Water tinged with soap ran into them, making them burn, blurring her vision. Instantly she shut them again—but not before she saw Michael standing in the shower’s open doorway, scowling at her. Scowling at her. While, startled by his advent, she was stark naked and cringing in an instinctive pose of classic female modesty under the spray, and he stood fully dressed, with billows of steam escaping around him, inches away in her bathroom, watching her shower. She’d shut the bathroom door. Had she locked it? She couldn’t remember, but obviously not. Growling, she opened her eyes again just enough to allow her to see and snatch at the towel she’d flung over the top of the door.

  “You really are self-destructive, aren’t you?” he bit out before she could
say anything.

  She’d been scowling right back at him even before she’d opened her eyes.

  At that, her scowl deepened into a full-blown glower.

  She snapped, “Get out of my shower.”

  Stepping sideways, which took her out from under the full force of the spray, Charlie swiped the towel over her face, then clasped it to her body so that it at least covered the vital full-frontal view that she had no intention of allowing him to keep looking at. It was a pale blue towel, plush and pretty. A hand towel, positioned over the door so she could use it to dry her eyes if she needed to, while her bath towel remained safely tucked away from the spray over the towel rack just outside the shower. Water soaked the towel almost instantly; she could feel the thick terry cloth getting heavier because it was wet.

  “You say ‘I love you’ to me. What, were you thinking I was going to say it back?” He looked mad. He sounded mad.

  Well, welcome to the club.

  Her chin came up. Her voice stayed sharp. “We had an agreement. You stay out of the bathroom while I’m in it.”

  His eyes swept her. “That’s what you want. Admit it. You want me to say it back.”

  That stung. Because it was true. “Go the fuck away.” Her voice had risen in volume until it was perilously close to a shout. Only she never shouted. Plus, he was the one who was always saying “fuck.” She never did that, either. Except now, when she was suddenly furiously angry with him.

  His face was hard. His mouth was ugly. “What’s the point? How do you think this whole thing’s going to end, huh?”

  Stomping her foot in the inch or so of water swirling on the shower floor, Charlie tightened her grip on the towel, pointed a finger at him, and yelled, “I want you out of this bathroom. Now.”

  “Fuck that.” He stepped into the shower with her. Fully clothed. All hard-eyed and hard-jawed and badass, radiating attitude at her. Hot water poured down over him, soaking his hair, his clothes, running in rivulets down his face. In that confined space he looked huge. Intimidating. Menacing, even. The skin around his eyes was tight with anger. His mouth was grim with it. She could feel the aggression coming off his big body in waves.