Walking After Midnight

by Karen Robards

  Only her arms wrapped around his neck held her upright as he abandoned his hold on her waist to cup her breasts with both hands. His mouth ate hers greedily as his hand stroked and molded, cupped and caressed.

  Summer felt as if she were falling. She was falling. No, she was rising, being swept off her feet in more ways than one, as he picked her up in his arms. Summer opened her eyes to find his bruised jaw hard and taut and his black eyes alight as he carried her off through the trees cradled against his hard chest.

  Pressing her mouth to the bristly underside of his chin, Summer clung to his wide shoulders and surrendered to the unaccustomed sensation of feeling small and helpless and entirely feminine. He carried her easily, as easily as if she weighed nothing at all. She’d known he was strong, but this display of effortless he-manism was impressive. His strength turned her on. She didn’t say a word. She couldn’t because she was beyond speech. But her eyes spoke for her. They were heavy-lidded with passion, alight with desire. She was alight with desire.

  She had never felt this way about any man in her life. To find herself, at thirty-six, gaga over Frankenstein was incredible.

  Clinging to him, Summer held tightly as he walked yards into the trees, until the delicate scent of flowers reached her nostrils and, glancing around, she saw that he had found a leafy bower. Kudzu, the invasive Japanese vine that was rapidly overrunning the south, covered the ground and the underbrush and the trunks of trees and everything else that did not move on a regular basis for as far as the eye could see. Creamy honeysuckle trumpets burst through the conquerer, winding upward around the lower branches of a circle of sturdy elms. The homely golden faces of dandelions appeared here and there across the carpet of vines. Vivid purple violets nestled cozily amidst the ground cover. Summer caught her breath as Steve bent to lay her down in a bed of flowers and dark green leaves.

  As a romantic setting, she thought, it was perfect. He couldn’t have done better if he had ordered it from central casting.

  Then he came down on top of her, and she quit thinking altogether.

  His kiss was hard and hot and slow, and almost unbearably sexy. It made the blood pound in her ears.

  When he lifted his head at last, she was gasping for air.

  “I’m hard as a spike,” he murmured, smoothing her hair back from her face with hands that were less than steady.

  “So what are you going to do about it?” she whispered back with a tiny, tremulous smile.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “This.” Summer took his hand and placed it on her breast. She pressed his hand to her, loving the warmth of his strong, masculine palm. Her nipple swelled almost painfully beneath his touch.

  “Ah,” he said. He watched her intently as his hand caressed her softness. The feel of his hand against her skin made her want to writhe. She wanted to feel it everywhere on her body—wanted to feel him everywhere on her body. She wanted him to make love to her until she begged him to stop. She remembered how he had touched her before, remembered the ecstasy he had given her with only his caressing fingers, and felt a hot, heavy throbbing start up between her thighs.

  She wanted him to touch her there.

  “Is that all?” His voice was hoarse, but a funny kind of half-smile quirked his mouth. How could he smile when she was going out of her mind for want of him?

  She meant to drive him out of his mind, too.

  “No,” she whispered, and caught his wrist, sliding his hand down. “I want you to touch me here, too.”

  She put his hand between her legs.

  He sucked in his breath. It was a rough, ragged-sounding inhalation.

  “And I want to touch you here.” Her voice was soft, barely above a whisper. Husky with desire. Her hand went to the front of his shorts. Closing her hand over his straining flesh, denim and all, she squeezed.

  “Baby, you go right ahead.” It was a growl, emerging from between clenched teeth and for a moment she obliged him. His hand pressed hard and hot between her legs. Then he was moving, shifting positions, sliding down her body. Through the barrier of black polyester his mouth pressed against the V between her legs and his hands closed over her bottom, his fingers seeking out and tracing the crevice between her soft cheeks.

  Summer stopped breathing as he opened his mouth against the rough cloth covering the apex of her legs. Her heart pounded so hard it sounded like a jackhammer in her ears. She could feel the damp heat of his mouth burning her through the polyester. He opened his mouth more, pressing his lips and tongue and teeth against her, nibbling at her, biting her. Summer moaned, her fists clenching on the cool crispness of kudzu and violets, releasing the flowers’ haunting scent to dance with the aroma of honeysuckle and sex in the air.

  Steve lifted his head for an instant and met her gaze, wildfire in his eyes. Then he yanked her pants down around her knees and repeated the exercise, finding the the secret nub that ached and throbbed with need and caressing it with the hot, wet slither of his tongue.

  Summer cried out. Of their own volition her thighs tried to part, to give him greater access to the part of her that wept for want of him, but her pants bound her at the knees. She lay flat, crushed by his weight, helpless to do anything to relieve her sweet agony as he brought her to the brink of ecstasy and beyond without even parting her legs.

  “Oh, stop. Don’t stop.” Summer’s hands closed into tight fists on the short strands of his hair, meaning to pull his head away. He reached up, caught her wrists, and brought them down, pinning them to the ground on either side of her undulating hips. She was left utterly defenseless. He was turning her into a writhing, needful, hungry object, reducing her to an abject, pleading thing.

  “Don’t stop!” Summer’s eyes were shut tight, and she moaned as his tongue and mouth took her higher and higher. That she was bound at the knees, held down by his body, unable to escape his potent brand of sexual torture made it all the sweeter. Made it unbearable, in fact. Never in her life had she imagined feeling anything like this.

  She came with a shudder that made her cry out, and brought her arching up off her bed of leaves to press against his mouth.

  When it was over, when she was herself again, Summer opened her eyes to find him watching her. His black eyes glittered, his battered face was hard and set, and his lips were fused into a straight, implacable line.

  “Now it’s my turn,” he said, and then he was on his knees above her. With quick, savage movements he removed her shoes and socks, yanked her pants the rest of the way down her legs, extracted her from her blouse, pulled his shirt over his head and shucked his shoes and shorts and briefs. Summer was too weak in the aftermath of passion to do more than watch as he stripped them both.

  She noted again that he had just the kind of body she liked—solid and muscular and covered with a profusion of hair.

  Then he was coming down on top of her. The weight of his big body crushed her into the ground. She discovered a pebble somewhere in the vicinity of the base of her spine. He was urgent and she was willing, but her own urgency was spent.

  Or so she thought, until he kissed her breathless and suckled her breasts and parted her legs with his thighs. He let her feel him, hard and hot and pulsing, just touching the place where he could enter anytime he chose. But he chose not to come in.

  Instead he played with her until she was once again as taut and quivering as the overtightened string of a violin.

  Then he entered. Slowly. He was hard and fiery hot and filled her to bursting. He kissed her mouth with slow, fierce passion, kept her still with his arms around her, and held himself deep inside her for long, slow seconds.

  By the time he pulled himself out and then slid in again, Summer was on fire. She would have done anything he wanted. Anything …

  She told him so.

  His hands braced on either side of her rib cage, he stiffened his arms until his weight was almost completely off her. Their only point of contact was where their bodies joined. Slowly he moved in,
then out, then in again, until she lifted her hips with involuntary anticipation each time. Then he bent his head and took a swollen nipple in his mouth.

  Summer groaned.

  He lifted his head and smiled then, a slow smile that acknowledged her passion, relished it, and promised more. The smoldering depths of his black eyes held all the knowing wickedness of the serpent.

  “Steve …” she whimpered, pleading for an end. His eyes flickered, and then he was lying atop her once again, wrapping his arms around her and holding her to him and taking her with hot, fierce urgency back to a fever pitch of passion. Only this time he came with her. When he pushed her over the edge, he fell, too. His hoarse shout joined with her cry as they hurtled through space together.

  It was a long, long time before he roused himself enough to roll away.

  26

  “The soul, like the body, lives by

  what it feeds on.”

  —Josiah Gilbert Holland

  She was starting to get the hang of this ghost thing, Deedee realized.

  At first it was disorienting to be always popping up here, there, and everywhere, without, she thought, much rhyme or reason. She’d found herself in the living room of her childhood home again, where she discovered her mother and her aunt Dot, who had lived together since both were widowed within a twelve-month span eight years before, trying to contact her via, of all things, a Ouija board.

  “I tell you I saw her. Just as plain as I’m seeing you,” her mother was saying.

  “I’m not sayin’ you didn’t, Sue. All I’m sayin’ is, this Ouija board ain’t pickin’ her up.”

  “Maybe you just don’t know how to use it.”

  “I’ve been usin’ Ouija boards all of my life, so I guess I know how to use one. A Ouija is what advised me to marry Jett, you know, when I would’ve taken Carl Owens.”

  “That don’t recommend ’em much to me,” her mother said.

  Indeed, Aunt Dot’s fights with Uncle Jett were legendary. Deedee had almost forgotten about them.

  This time, try though she might, she couldn’t seem to materialize. But she could take control of the pointer.

  “I-M-OK-A-Y …”

  “Would you look at that?”

  “Are you pushin’ that thing, Dorothy Jean?”

  “You know I wouldn’t do that! Oh, my heavens!”

  “I-L-O-V-E-Y-O-U-M-O-M.”

  “Deedee! Ohmigod, Deedee! It’s my baby! Deedee, Deedee!”

  “Sue, calm down! Sue, ask her what happened that night! Ask her, quick!”

  Deedee’s mother and aunt, work-reddened, unlovely hands poised on either side of the plastic pointer, frantically pushed the felt-tipped wedge around the board. But Deedee was already being sucked away.

  When next she surfaced it was on a Nashville sound-stage. A pretty blonde of maybe twenty-five, wearing headphones and a scarlet mini, was crooning into a microphone.

  Deedee found herself watching the singer from the Plexiglas-walled control booth, where two men listened, frowning, to what Deedee considered a reed-thin voice.

  “We need more volume out of her, Bill.”

  “Well, we ain’t gonna get it. That’s everything she’s got. It doesn’t matter, anyway. We can fix it. Hell, with the equipment we’ve got we can fix anything.”

  “She’s scheduled to sing on Nashville Live Saturday night. ‘Agony’ is already number eighteen with a bullet. Nobody’s ever heard her sing live before. The critics are gonna be after her with knives if we don’t get her to punch it up.”

  “Hell, I would if I could, and you know it. This little gal’s pretty, and she sings okay, but you and I both know she never would’ve got the first whiff of a recording contract if she wasn’t married to Hank Ketch urn.”

  “You gotta admit, marryin’ the head of Jalapeno Records was one hell of a career move. Too bad I didn’t think of it.”

  “I don’t think he would’ve proposed, in your case. Anyway, Ketchum signs our paychecks, so we’d best shut up.” Bill pressed a button and spoke into a mike. “Hallie, honey, try to hold those high notes just a little longer, would you? And see if you can put more emotion into it. Pretend your dog just got run over.”

  “I’ll try, Bill.”

  “Thanks, Hallie. That’s all I ask. Wanna take it from the top?”

  “Okay.”

  Bill pushed the mike button again, signaled to the musicians, and sank back in his chair. “For Nashville Live, we’re just gonna have to surround her with a lot of background singers, and hope for the best.”

  “Hurtin’, I’m hurtin’ so bad over you

  What did you think I would do?”

  The two men in the control booth came erect in their seats, stared hard at the blonde at the mike, and looked at each other in disbelief.

  “Well, bust my britches! The girl can sing!”

  “Hot damn! We’re in business!”

  Onstage, Deedee fought to retain control over the vocal cords she had appropriated, and gave the song her best. Following the words on the TelePrompTer, singing from the depths of her soul, she felt closer to Heaven in those few minutes than she ever had in her life—or death.

  “… Just lie down and die—that’s not me

  Still, I am in agony.”

  As the last notes died away, Deedee felt the familiar sensation of being sucked away. Vainly she tried to hold on.

  She wanted to stay.…

  The voice boomed out of the control room.

  “Hallie, honey, that was just fine! Just fine!”

  Once again in control of her vocal cords, Hallie answered breathlessly, “Thanks, Bill. Something just came over me …”

  But Deedee missed the rest of the exchange. She was hurtling through the maelstrom once more.

  When she came to rest again it was night, and she was in a small, tidy country cemetery. Her husband was crouched beside a grave.

  Perched cross-legged atop the tombstone, Deedee leaned way forward—being a ghost allowed her to do that kind of thing without falling on her nose, she had discovered—and read the inscription:

  TAYLOR

  DEIDRA ANN CUMMINS

  Born JANUARY 21, 1958—Died MAY 15, 1992

  Love Is Eternal

  Mitch was crouched beside her grave.

  Deedee regarded the bent blond head and wondered if Mitch had thought up the inscription. She guessed so; it sounded like Mitch. Certainly her mother would never have come up with anything so poetic.

  She had loved Mitch desperately from the time she was thirteen until almost the moment she died. They’d had their ups and downs—some ups, a whole lot of downs—but she had always loved him.

  Now she looked at him with fresh vision. Love really wasn’t eternal. At least, not in this case.

  Mitch glanced up then, and for a moment Deedee wondered if he could see her. She hadn’t felt the tingling that signaled when she had materialized, and he didn’t scream or faint or even turn pale, so she guessed he couldn’t.

  But she could see him. He was as handsome as ever, his blond hair wavy, his blue eyes keen, his lightly tanned features classical. He looked like he had lost weight since she’d last seen him, but then at six feet one he’d always been lean, so she couldn’t be sure.

  Kneeling beside her grave, dressed in slacks and a wind-breaker, he was the very picture of the grieving widower.

  Except for the fact that his hands were covered with earth. A shovel lay beside him, and her grave, while thick with grass, looked raw, somehow. Too raw for a three-year-old grave.

  It had been freshly sodded.

  What’re you up to, Mitch Taylor? she thought fiercely. Even as she felt the tingling, even as his eyes widened, she was sucked away.

  This time, when she stopped, it was a hot, sunlit afternoon. At least, it was hot and sunlit outside. She was in a cave, floating up near the ceiling, staring down at a sleeping couple entwined in a quilt on the ground about six feet below.

  The man was Steve—his
face still looked like hell; the woman she didn’t recognize. But they seemed mighty cozy together.

  Deedee was watching them with interest when Steve opened his eyes.

  He saw her. She could tell right away. So she waved at him, just to say hi.

  He let out a bellow and sat up. Startled, Deedee lost control of her atoms and vanished.

  When she got hold of herself again, she was in a corner of the same cave being stared at by a weird-looking little dog. Steve was once again lying down, with the woman cuddled on his chest. Steve was awake. The woman wasn’t.

  The woman definitely wasn’t Steve’s wife, Elaine.

  That was kinda surprising. Except for the fling with her, Steve had always been a straight arrow. Deedee doubted if he’d ever cheated on Elaine before. She would have added “or since,” but evidence to the contrary was right under her nose.

  Despite the attraction she knew he’d always felt for her, she had had to work pretty hard to seduce old Steve. She was ashamed to admit that she had done it deliberately, to teach Mitch a lesson. Mitch, who would unzip his pants with alacrity for any bitch in heat, had sorely needed a lesson.

  Her husband had been embroiled in another in his endless series of hot-and-heavy affairs when she’d decided to get even with him by getting it on with Steve. After fourteen years of marriage, Deedee had grown wise to the ways of Mitch; she knew all the signs. And she also knew that Steve was one of the few people on earth of whom her husband was genuinely fond. Mitch, handsome conniver and people-user that he was, generally stayed friends with people for just as long as he needed them. But his friendship with Steve had survived three decades. Between the two men there was a true bond.