The Last Time I Saw Her

by Karen Robards

  Their eyes met. She didn’t know what he read in hers, but something infernal gleamed at her from his.

  “Michael,” she breathed, arrested by that glittering look, and frowned as the smallest flicker of unease slithered through what little consciousness she had remaining to her.

  “You like getting fucked, babe. You remember that,” he said. Then he kissed her, a ragingly torrid kiss, and as she kissed him back she was once again lost in a haze of white-hot passion. He pressed her back against the wall and thrust into her with what felt like careful calculation until he had her burning for him again and crying out and clinging to him. Then he went all savage and uncontrolled, taking her with a ferocious intensity that made her wild, that turned her into someone she didn’t even know who did things and said things and felt things that were as far removed from her usual calm and careful self as it was possible to be.

  When she came this time, it was with a rapturous abandon that was like nothing she’d ever experienced. Blowing through her in long, explosive spasms of heat that rocked her to the core, that climax belonged to somebody who was hot-blooded and uninhibited and primitive. In other words, not her. Or at least not her with anyone else but him.

  “Oh. Oh. Oh. Michael,” she moaned, her arms tight around his neck, her face buried against the hard shelf of his shoulder, shuddering in his arms as her body convulsed around him.

  He groaned in answer and thrust deep inside her one final time as he found his own release. Then he leaned against her, heavy as a brick wall, buried to the hilt in her body, holding her like he was never going to let her go, as the world spun away around them.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  A few moments later Charlie slid down Michael’s body and her feet splashed into water that wasn’t as hot as it had been earlier. In fact, it wasn’t hot at all.

  Until then, she’d been so dizzy and replete with physical satisfaction that she’d had no room left in her head for anything except him and how pleased with him and herself she was in the aftermath of what had been some truly phenomenal sex. But the cooling water swirling around her feet brought her back to reality. The shower was still on: it sounded like a waterfall in that enclosed space. Abstractedly, she took in other small, unimportant details: his clothes, including maroon boxers that did indeed appear to be made of some kind of silky material and an expensive pair of black leather shoes, soaked through on the shower floor. Streams of water still pouring down her own body from the tails of her wet hair. How round and pale her breasts looked pressed against his chest, and how dark and puckered her nipples still were. How firm and solid his chest felt. That he was absolutely hung. That the fact was still apparent even now, when he was at half-mast.

  That she was getting cold.

  She would have pushed away from him, except she was absolutely spent, and her legs were showing an alarming tendency to refuse to support her. So, naked and wet, with the no-longer-hot shower sprinkling them with lukewarm droplets, she leaned against his equally naked and wet, yet warm-as-toast-anyway body, let her hands slide down until they were flat against his muscular chest, and looked up at him with a gathering frown.

  He wasn’t looking at her. He was looking around at the torrent pouring down from the showerhead, but he must have felt her gaze on him because he said, “Water’s getting cold,” without glancing her way as he reached over to shut off the shower.

  Then he looked back at her, saw the way she was looking at him, and his eyes narrowed.

  “We need to talk,” she said grimly.

  For an instant, his expression went all guarded and wary. Then it changed. He dropped a quick, possessive kiss on her mouth, making her tingle despite the fact that she should have been officially blissed out by that time, then lifted his head and cocked a sardonic eyebrow at her.

  He said, “As in, was it as good for you as it was for me?”

  “Ha, ha.” Although she had returned his kiss—she couldn’t help it—she didn’t smile at him. Instead, the look she gave him was severe. She was worried, and it was manifesting itself in a growing tightness in her chest. Exhaustion was beginning to kick in big-time, but there was something there, something going on with him, that she needed to get to the bottom of. She knew it with every atom of intuition she possessed.

  “ ’Cause I gotta say, for me it was fantastic. Incredible. Bombs-bursting-in-air good. You rocked my world there, babe.” Hooking an arm around her waist, he pushed open the shower door, hauled her out to stand shivering on the cozy white shower mat, snagged the plush blue towel hanging there, and started toweling her hair for her while she stood there naked and weak-kneed and shivering, grabbing for the towel.

  “Would you be serious?” She succeeded in snatching the towel from him, shook her tangled hair back from her face, and summoned her last reserves of strength to stay upright and frown direly at him.

  “What, bombs didn’t burst for you?” He was already pulling two more of the pale blue towels from a shelf. As he did she had a moment to appreciate the absolute eye candy that was him naked. He was tall and built and gorgeous. Tan except for the bathing suit area, which was pale. Absorbing that detail, which was different from Michael’s all-over golden bronze, she was reminded that the body she was viewing was not Michael’s. Hughes was leaner, with less muscle mass in the shoulders and chest and arms. He also, she saw as he turned toward her, was missing the cobra tattoo that adorned Michael’s ripped biceps.

  But except for the tattoo, the rest was a matter of degrees. Essentially, the man she was looking at was Michael. The man she’d just argued with, had the best sex of her life with, and was currently trying to prise information from was Michael.

  Vibrantly alive, naked in her bathroom, being his usual heart-stopping, aggravating self.

  It shook her to realize how much she wanted him to stay that way.

  “Nope,” she replied, just to be aggravating, too, her hands tightening on the towel she held.

  “Liar,” he said softly. He smiled at her and added, “You’re beautiful, by the way, in case I forgot to mention it.” As he handed her a second towel, she realized that he’d been checking her out that whole time, too.

  “Thank you.” Her voice now sounded blessedly composed. Okay, good, her emotions and thought processes and everything else associated with her cognitive functioning seemed to be getting back to normal. Wrapping that towel around herself, she finished blotting her hair with the other towel and moved over to the white pedestal sink, covertly watching him—he was toweling off—all the while. In the weeks before he’d disappeared, she’d grown accustomed to living with him, but there was, she discovered, a subtle difference between sharing space with a ghost and a living, breathing man. Being together like this with him in real live human form was new for them, but it also felt utterly right. It hit her that this was the relationship she’d been waiting for all her life without even knowing it—and it couldn’t last. The realization made the tightness in her chest worsen.

  Time to get to the bottom of what was up with him. “Michael—”

  “Got a spare toothbrush?” he asked, cutting her off. She was quite sure he’d done it deliberately.

  “You know I do. In the medicine cabinet.”

  The pale blue towel was hitched around his hips now, and he looked so sexy in it as he walked toward her that, despite her determination to have a very serious talk with him, she succumbed to a wry inner smile. All her life, when she’d tried to picture the man who would ultimately be “the one” for her, her thoughts had run toward academic types, physicians, scientists, nice-looking nice guys with whom she could have a nice life. Conventional. Straight arrows. Good potential family men. Never in her wildest dreams had she imagined that she could possibly fall crazily, head-over-heels in love with somebody like him.

  “You are so not my type,” she said, eyeing his surfer-god magnificence ruefully as he joined her at the sink. Her nightly pre-bed ritual was simple, and she had started in on it automatically, pickin
g up the bottle of moisturizer from the shelf over the sink and squeezing some into her palm, then smoothing the light lotion into her skin. He’d watched it many times before, so doing it in front of him now was as natural as breathing.

  Reaching past her to open the medicine cabinet, he slanted a look down at her.

  “Right back at you, Doc. But here we are. What’re you gonna do?” He extracted one of the extra toothbrushes she always kept on hand from the cabinet. Popping it out of its plastic wrapper, he grabbed the toothpaste. It was ridiculous that she could still be picking up an electric charge from the proximity of his body to hers, but she was. “Isn’t there some quote, something like ‘death makes strange bedfellows’? That’s us.”

  “I think it’s ‘misery.’ Misery makes strange bedfellows. It’s from Shakespeare.” At first she’d been surprised to discover how intelligent he was, and how widely read, which, she’d later realized, was as much stereotyping on her part as was the apparently common male assumption that a woman with her credentials would be unattractive. Now she just accepted it as one more way in which he wasn’t what she’d expected. Finishing with the moisturizer, she rubbed the residue into her hands as she spoke, and picked up her own toothbrush.

  He gave a slight shrug. “You’d be the one to know. You’re the brainiac.”

  Through the mirror, she gave him a slightly indignant look. “I am not a brainiac.”

  He passed her the tube of Crest and stuck his toothbrush in his mouth. “You just won a big ol’ whopping prize that says otherwise, babe,” he said around it, and grinned at her. “ ’Nuff said.”

  She met his gaze through the mirror, and suddenly she became pretty sure that she knew the answer to at least one thing she badly needed to know: how he really felt about her. There was too much pride in his face when he talked about her achievement to allow her to reach any other conclusion than that he loved her, no matter how reluctant he might be to admit it or to tell her so.

  Then she took in the bigger picture that the mirror framed, took in their side-by-side reflections as they stood together sharing the tube of Crest and jockeying for position in front of the sink. Watching him brush his teeth was new for her, and she loved the hominess of it, loved how easy they were together. His tawny hair was already almost dry, while her dark hair hung in a damp and tangled cloud around her face. His eyes were still Spookville black and his square jaw was shadowed with stubble, but he didn’t look particularly tired, while it was easy to read exhaustion in the pale oval of her face. His strong neck, broad shoulders, and wide chest formed a marked contrast to the slender column of her neck and her narrow shoulders above the towel. Her head didn’t quite reach his chin, and he took up about twice the amount of horizontal space she did. To use Lena’s description of him, which she was going to have to repeat to him one of these days just to see his reaction, he was pretty, prettier than she was. But they looked right together. Like a couple.

  The thought was so enthralling, and at the same time so shattering, that the tightness in her chest was suddenly almost painful.

  He rinsed and spit.

  Forget the mirror. Toothbrush in hand, she fixed him with a direct look. “What exactly did you mean when you said ‘You like getting fucked…Remember that’?”

  Glancing sideways at her, he responded, “That you like getting fucked?” Rinsing his toothbrush, he put it on the shelf over the sink.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Which, by the way, you do.” Dropping a kiss on her shoulder and giving her a wicked smile through the mirror—despite the shiver that both the kiss and smile sent through her, she responded with a narrowing of her eyes—he headed toward the bedroom.

  Charlie watched him go with a deepening frown. He might be beating a strategic retreat, but it wasn’t going to help him long-term: they were going to talk whether he wanted to or not. Quickly she slapped on a little cherry ChapStick and did the world’s fastest blow-dry of her hair because she hated going to bed with it damp. Then she picked up his watch from the back of the toilet where she’d deposited it on her original march to the shower, slid it onto her arm—it was the one piece of jewelry she was never without now—and followed him, turning off the bathroom light as she went. She’d left the overhead light on as she’d stalked through the bedroom earlier, but now only the bedside lamp was lit. The warm glow it cast over her pristine white bed faded the farther it stretched out into the big, high-ceilinged room with its white walls and dark wood floor. The ornate fireplace with the painting of a waterfall over it and her large mirrored dresser, at opposite ends of the room, were in shadow.

  “It was the ‘remember that’ part of what you said that I was specifically referring to, and you know it.” She paused in the bathroom doorway to look at him. He stood with his back to her in front of one of the long windows that flanked the fireplace, one hand pushing the drawn curtains a few inches aside as he looked out at the darkness that lay over her front yard and the street. The darkness that hid the serial killers she’d left behind on the mountain and—no, she wasn’t going to think about that. Not now. Now dealing with that was someone else’s responsibility, and she had other priorities—another priority—that was hers alone. At her words, he let the curtain drop and turned to face her. Under different circumstances, a smoking-hot guy wearing nothing but a towel in her bedroom would have equaled distraction. “That sounded like you don’t expect to be around to remind me. Then there was the ‘Dudley’s a good guy’ bit, when you’ve always been jealous of him.” When he looked like he was going to protest, Charlie pointed an admonishing finger at him and added, “Don’t even bother denying it. And the whole obsession with me finding a new line of work?” She paused and her eyes widened as she put it all together. “It’s like you’re trying to get me squared away for life without you.” He said nothing, just folded his arms over his brawny bare chest and looked at her. His face was shuttered, unreadable. “That’s it, isn’t it? That’s what you’re doing. Why?”

  Michael’s lips compressed. “You know why.” The tacit admission that she was right sent a bolt of fear through her.

  “I know you can’t keep this body. But you can still stay here in spirit form and we can—” Something in his face stopped her. The memory of the last time he’d possessed a body and how that had ended sent a shiver down her spine. “You’re thinking you’re going to be jerked straight back into Spookville when you have to leave Hughes’s body, aren’t you? And you’re afraid you’re not going to be able to get back again. But you got back this time. What makes you think you can’t do it again?”

  “I told you, it’s getting harder.” He started walking toward the bed. “Can we drop this? It’s after two. Come on, let’s go to bed. You’ve got to be out on your feet.”

  She headed toward him, bare feet padding across the smooth floor. No way was the conversation ending there. He was right, she was out on her feet, or at least she had been out on her feet until her fear for him had sent a spike of adrenaline shooting through her system. Now she was too anxious to be sleepy.

  He was pulling the fluffy white comforter down, reaching for the top sheet, on his side of the bed. It jolted her to realize that there was a “his side of the bed.” But since he’d started living with her, they’d developed a routine, even though in his ghostly state he’d usually stretched out on top of the covers and she’d been the one snuggling in between the sheets. There was a “his side of the bed,” and she was just now discovering that she loved that there was. Her heart stuttered as she remembered the last seventeen days when she’d gone to bed alone, and how bereft she’d felt, then looked at him getting ready to climb into bed with her now. This was what she wanted. He was what she wanted.

  And she couldn’t have it. Couldn’t have him. Not for keeps.

  Her chest felt like it was being squeezed in a vise.

  Reaching him, she put a gentle hand on his back as he pulled the top sheet down. She felt the warm sleekness of his skin, the flexing of the po
werful muscles beneath.

  “Michael. What happened in Spookville?”

  He rounded on her, catching her wrist. His hand was big enough that it could circle her wrist with inches to spare, and strong enough that it felt as immovable as a shackle. A few inches farther up the arm he held, the heavy silver of his watch circling her slender forearm caught the light.

  “Holy fucking Christ, you are a bulldog. You can’t ever let anything go, can you?” His face looked tighter, his features more chiseled now with anger. “I already told you. A couple of times.” Their eyes met, and his face softened fractionally. “All right, yes, unlike one of us who seems to be living in a damned Disney movie, I’m facing the reality that the next time I get sucked up in there I might not be able to get back. If that happens, when that happens, I want you to be able to go on with your life. I want you to be happy. I want you to be fucking safe.”

  Her eyes widened. “You’re being noble.”

  He looked mildly revolted. “I am not being noble.”

  “Yes, you are. You’re being noble.” She drew in a breath as she zeroed in on an underlying truth that, now that she saw it, made perfect sense. “When I told you I loved you down there in the kitchen, it would have been easy for you to say it back. From your point of view, it would have been the smart, expedient thing to do. It would have made me happy, it would have gotten you laid.” She paused, remembering that he had, in fact, ended up getting laid, before adding, “More quickly, and it wouldn’t have cost you a thing. But you didn’t say it, and the only reason I can see that you wouldn’t have said it back was because you’re being noble and you do.”