It had begun the first time she saw him: love at first sight. And that love had deepened and broadened and grown with every step they took together.
Now she felt anxious, and her fingers curled into the fencing. She willed him to look her way, and at last he did.
She smiled.
He stood still, tossing the football up in the air, then catching it. At last he came toward her.
He stood by the fence, and they were just inches apart. She was in love. Head over heels in love. She felt as if she would never love again as she did at the moment.
“Hi,” she said, emotion making her almost shy.
“Hi.”
“Want to go for a ride?”
“Yeah.”
“I love you.”
“I love you….” His voice trailed away, his heart catching at the sight of her smile. “You’re the most beautiful creature ever to walk this earth. A fantasy creation yourself…”
She laughed, a husky sound that caught in her throat. Warmth raced through her. She was breathless, barely able to speak in return.
“You’re a liar. I look like a blimp! But I…oh, I love you. I love you, and I need you, and I want you….”
It wasn’t meant to seduce; it wasn’t even meant to be sexy. They were honest words, meant for a lifetime.
The breeze picked up, and a shadow, rich with dark warmth and promise, fell over the valley. He dropped the football, and his fingers curled over hers where they clung to the fence.
Finally he let go of her hand and walked through the gate to stand in front of her. A slow smile lit his face, and he raised his hand, palm flat, toward her. She put her own hand against his, and he watched her eyes as their fingers entwined.
“Do you have your car?” he asked her.
“Yes. Where do you want to go?”
“I know this wonderful place. It’s a cabin, up in the hills.”
She laughed, and they linked arms as they walked toward the car. In no time at all, it seemed, they were at the cabin.
While it was still light they wandered down to the stream, where they wound up laughing and showering each other with the cold mountain water. Naturally he built a fire as soon as they went back inside.
As they sat beside it, he touched her cheek, and in the gentle fire light they gazed into each other’s eyes. Finally their clothes were shed.
He’d never seen anyone more beautiful. She had wonderful hair, and it seemed to be a part of the fire, cascading in lustrous curls over her breasts, glowing against the ivory of her flesh. Her breasts were beautiful and perfect and full, and when he looked at her, he could barely speak. Yet when she was in his arms he did, telling her how much he loved her. Each time he touched her body he murmured of her beauty, and she laughed, and then the told her that it was true: she was more beautiful than ever.
Finally their laughter faded. Love led the way for her, a gentle, tender path to ecstasy, sweet and torrid. She felt dazzled, as if he were the sun and the air and the earth all in one.
She belonged to him, with all her heart.
No one had ever loved so well. And no one had ever made love as they did. So deeply, so completely. Heart and body and soul…
Love.
He wanted to run out of the cabin, stark naked. She made him feel so male and strong and wonderful. He wanted to proclaim to the world that she was his, his beloved, his forever.
She lay with her cheek against his chest, his fingers wound into her hair, and together they watched the flames playing softly in the hearth.
“Sometimes I still can’t believe it,” she murmured suddenly, turning to stare down at him.
“Believe what?”
“How happy we are. From such a beginning! All of us, really.”
He held her face tenderly between his hands and looked at her with a rueful grin. “Sometimes, just sometimes, life can be just a little like a fantasy. There can be magic. We’ve found that magic. At least, I have. It’s in your eyes.”
“Oh, that’s so nice.”
He grinned again. “Yes, I thought so. Rather good for a grim old historian, don’t you think?”
“Humph!” She would have said more, but her phone started ringing. They looked at each other with surprise, because no one should have known where they were.
Jarod. Of course! Jarod had seen them leave, and he must have guessed where they were going. Except that he wouldn’t have interrupted them—unless…
“Sandy!” they exclaimed simultaneously, staring wide-eyed at each other and jumping up, then colliding in their efforts to reach the phone.
Dan won the race, but he held the receiver away from his ear so they both could hear.
“Dan?”
“Jarod?”
“It’s a boy!”
“A boy! It’s a boy!” Dan repeated for Kelly.
“I heard!”
“Eight pounds, two ounces.”
“Congratulations! We’ll be right there.”
“Good.” Jarod hesitated just a second. “Put your clothes on first, will you, please?”
Kelly grabbed the phone from Dan. “I heard that, young man!”
“Sorry! Get here quickly. Mom, he’s beautiful!”
“Of course he’s beautiful. He’s my grandchild!”
She dropped the receiver and stared at her husband. “Oh, Dan! It’s true! We’re grandparents.”
He kissed her lips quickly. “Yes, it’s true.” He drew her against him. “And,” he whispered very softly to her, “thank God for those darling little procreationists! We might never have met without them.”
“Never loved.”
“Never married.”
She was able to smile up at him at last. “Let’s go see the baby.”
“Only if you calm down. Ours isn’t due for another two months, and I’d like it to wait until then.”
She made a face at him. “I am calm. Oh! My God! We’re grandparents!”
“I’ll go see that baby without you, Kelly,” he teased.
“You will not!”
She smiled sweetly, showing him how calm she was, while he helped her back into her clothes.
“Actually,” he told her, “you do look like a blimp.”
“You wouldn’t dare say that if I weren’t a grandparent!” she said reproachfully.
He laughed and told her that she was the most beautiful grandmother he had ever seen, and the sexiest. “Definitely the most beautiful pregnant grandmother ever,” he assured her.
And so, naturally, being sophisticated and mature this time around, she stuck out her tongue at him and preceded him out the door.
* * * * *
“[Heather Graham] stands at the top of the romantic suspense category.”
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The Night Is Forever
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Darkest Journey
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Keep reading for a sneak peek at New York Times bestselling author Heather Graham’s next thrilling novel,
A PERFECT OBSESSION
Join FBI agent Craig Frasier and criminal psychologist Keiran Finnegan as they track a madman who is obsessed with perfect beauty.
CHAPTER 1
“Horrible! Oh, God, horrible—tragic!” John Shaw said, shaking his head with a dazed look as he sat on his bar stool at Finnegan’s Pub.
Kieran nodded sympathetically. Construction crews had found the old graves when they were working on the foundations at the hot new downtown venue, Le Club Vampyre.
Anthropologists found the new body among the old graves the next day.
It wasn’t just any body.
It was the body of supermodel Jeannette Gilbert.
Finding the old graves wasn’t much of a shock—not in New York City, and not in a building that was close to two centuries old. The structure that housed Club Le Vampyre was a deconsecrated Episcopal Church. The church’s congregation had moved to a facility it had purchased from the Catholic Church—whose congregation was now in a sparkling new basilica over on Park Avenue. While many had bemoaned the fact that such a venerable old institution had been turned into an establishment for those into sex, drugs, and rock and roll, life—and business—went on.
And with life going on….
Well, work on the building’s foundations went on, too.
It was while investigators were still being called in following the discovery of the newly deceased body—moments before it hit the news—that Kieran Finnegan learned about it, and that was because she was helping out at their family establishment, Finnegan’s on Broadway. Like the old church/nightclub behind it, Finnegan’s dated back to just before the Civil War, and had been a pub for most of those years. Since it was geographically the closest establishment to the church with liquor, it had apparently seemed the right place at that moment for Professor John Shaw. They’d barely opened; it was still morning, and it was a Friday, and Kieran was only there at that time because her bosses had decided on a day off following their participation in a lengthy trial. She’d just been down in the basement or cellar, fetching a few bottles of a vintage chardonnay for her brother, ordered specifically for a lunch that day, when John Shaw had caught her attention, desperate to talk.
“I can’t tell you how excited I was, being called in as an expert on a find like that,” the professor told Kieran. “They both wanted me! They, I mean in Henry Willoughby, president of Preserve our Past, and Roger Gleason, owner and manager of the club. I was so honored. It was exciting to think of finding the old bodies—not the new body. But then…opening a decaying coffin and finding… Jeannette Gilbert! And the university was entirely behind me, allowing me the time to be at my site, giving me a chance to bring my grad students here. Oh, my God! I found her! Oh, it was….”
John Shaw was shaking as he spoke. He was a man who’d seen all kinds of antiquated horrors, an expert in the past. He fit the stereotype of an academic, with his lean physique, his thatch of wild white hair, and his little gold-framed glasses. He held doctorate degrees in archeology and anthropology, and both science and history meant everything to him.
Kieran realized that he’d been about to say once again that it was horrible, like nothing he’d ever experienced. He clearly realized that he was speaking about a recently living woman, adored by adolescent boys—and heterosexual males of all ages—a woman who was going to be deeply mourned.
Jeannette Gilbert. Media princess. The model and actress had disappeared two weeks ago after the launch party for a new cosmetics line. Her agent and manager, Oswald Martin, had gone on the news, begging kidnappers for her safe return.
At that time, no one knew if she actually had been kidnapped. One reporter speculated that she’d disappeared on purpose, determined to get away from the very man begging kidnappers for her release, her agent and manager, Oswald Martin.
Kieran hadn’t really paid much attention; she’d assumed that the young woman—who’d been made famous by the same Oswald Martin—had just had enough of being adored and fawned over and told what to do at every move and decided to take a hiatus. Or it might have been some kind of publicity gig; her disappearance had certainly ruled the headlines. There were always tabloid pictures of Jeannette, dating this or that man, and then speculation in the same tabloids that her manager had furiously burst into a hotel room, sending Jeannette Gilbert’s latest lover—gold-digger, as Martin referred to any young man she dated—flying out the door.
In the past few weeks the “celebrity” magazines had run rampant with rumors of a mystery man in her life. A secret love. Kieran knew that, but only because her twin brother, Kevin, was an actor—struggling his way into TV, movies, and theater. He read the tabloids avidly, telling Kieran that he was “reading between the lines,” and being up on what was going on was critical to his career. There were too many actors—even good ones!—out there and too few roles. Any edge was a good edge.
While all the speculation had been going on, Kieran couldn’t help wondering if Jeannette’s secret lover had killed her—or if, maybe, her steel-handed manager had done so.
Or—since this was New York City with a population in the millions—it was possible that some deranged person had murdered her, perhaps even someone who wasn’t clinically insane but mentally unstable. Perhaps this person felt that if she was relieved of her life, she’d be out of the misery caused by being such a beautiful, glittering star, always the focus of attention.
It was fine to speculate when you really believed that someone was just pulling a major publicity stunt.
Now, Kieran felt bad, of course. From what she knew now, it seemed evident that the woman had indeed been murdered.
Not that she any of the facts other than that Jeannette had been found in the bowels of the earth in a nineteenth-century tomb, but it was unlikely that Jeannette Gilbert had crawled into an historic coffin in a lost catacomb to die of natural causes.
“It was so horrible!” John Shaw repeated woefully. “When we found her, we just stared. One of my silly young grad students screamed, and she wasn’t the only one. We called the police immediately. The club wasn’t open then, of course—except to us, those of us who were working. I was there for hours while they grilled me. And now…now, I need this!” His hand shook as he picked up his double-shot of single malt scotch to swallow in a gulp.
He was usually a beer man. Ultra-lite.
It was horrible, yes, as Shaw kept saying. But, of course, he realized he’d be in the news, interviewed for dozens of papers and magazines and television, as well.
After all…
He’d been the one to find Jeannette Gilbert, dead. In a coffin, in a deconsecrated church now turned into the Le Club Vampyre. Well, that was news.
The pub would soon be buzzing, especially since it was on the other side of the block from Club Le Vampyre.
The whole situation, aside from the grief of a young woman’s untimely death, was interesting to Kieran. In her “real” job, she worked as a psychologist and therapist for psychiatrists Bentley Fuller and Allison Miro during the week. But, like her brothers, she often filled in at the pub; it was kind of a home away from home for them all. The pub had been in the f
amily—belonging to a distant great-great uncle—from the mid-nineteenth century. Her own parents were gone now, and that made the pub even more precious to her and her older brother, Declan, her twin, Kevin, and her “baby” brother, Daniel.
So, while Declan actually managed the pub and made it his life’s work, she was employed by doctors Fuller and Miro, Kevin pursued his acting career, and Danny strove to become the city’s best tour guide. And they all spent a great deal of time at Finnegan’s.
The tragic death of Jeannette Gilbert would soon have all their patrons talking about this latest outrage regarding Le Club Vampyre. They’d been talking about it now and then for six months, ever since the sale of the old church to Dark Doors Incorporated. The talk had become extremely glum when the club had opened a month ago. A club! Like that! In an old church!
The club had, of course, been the main topic of conversation yesterday, when the news had come out that unknown gravesites had been found—and Professor John Shaw had been called in.
Of course, people were still talking about the old catacombs today. Not that finding graves while digging in foundations was unusual in New York. It was just creepy-cool enough to really talk about.
Creepy-cool was fine when you were talking about very old gravesites.
Because they were old—they were the earthly remains of people who’d lived—and died—long ago.
Not the newly deceased.
At the moment, though, Kieran was one of the few people who knew that the body of Jeannette Gilbert had been discovered. Kieran was among the first to find out; that was because she knew Dr. John Shaw, professor of archeology and anthropology at NYU, famed in academic circles for his work on sites from Jamestown, Virginia, to Beijing, China, very well. He and a group of his colleagues had met at Finnegan’s Pub one night a month as long as she could remember.
When she’d see him looking so distressed, she’d ushered him into one of the small booths against the wall that divided the pub’s general area from the offices. She’d gotten him his scotch—and she’d sat down with him so she could try to calm him down.
“Oh, my God! I can just imagine when it hits the news!” he said, looking at her with stricken eyes. And yet, she recognized a bit of awe in them…
All in the Family Page 20