A Knight to Remember (33 page)

But nothing can destroy the magic of this moment.
 
“I’m alive,” she whispers back, “thanks to you.”
 
My toes curl in pleasure at the sound of that perfect voice, her words low and gravelly and full of velvet as she practically purrs, lifting me up again so that my mouth meets hers, her arms wrapped strongly about my waist, holding me tenderly but with such strength that my feet leave the ground.

“How did you find me?” I whisper breathlessly, then, when she sets me down gently, when her mouth moves down, down to my cheek and my chin and my neck.
 
She straightens, looking down earnestly into my face, searching my gaze, her bright blue eyes piercing me deeply as she gazes into the very heart of me.

“You call to me,” she says, lifting my hands to her mouth so that she can press a kiss to the back of each of them, her warm lips brushing over my skin and making me shiver in delight.
 
Her low tone is a growl as she breathes the words against my skin:
 
“And my heart answered you.”

Overhead, the very first star edges its way out of a purple sky, drowsy and swinging low to the west.
 
A waning moon, bright and beautiful, dips toward the horizon.

And far, far down below, on a planet I always thought was perfectly normal, my dog barks and makes crazy circles around us, bounding joyfully around her two favorite humans.
 

And my knight in shining armor literally sweeps me off my feet.

I honestly don’t know what the future holds or what lies ahead of us.
 
But I do know that there will be more adventures than I can even imagine.
 

And we’ll build our story together.

The End

If you enjoyed
A Knight to Remember
, you’ll love Bridget’s Sullivan Vampires.
 

The following is an excerpt from “
Eternal Hotel
,”
the first novella in the Sullivan Vampires series, a beautiful, romantic epic that follows the clan of Sullivan vampires and the women who love them.
 
Advance praise has hailed this hallmark series as “
Twilight
for women who love women” and “a lesbian romance that takes vampires seriously!
 
Two thumbs up!”
 

…So
this
was the staircase from last night, next to the front desk.
 
The Widowmaker.
 
It must be.
 
I’d never seen a steeper set of stairs.
 
From up above, they looked simply like the rungs of a ladder in a barn—so steep and so tall and almost impossible to even think of taking.

It’s not that I don’t like heights—I’m pretty okay with them.
 
But these stairs were something else.
 
I wasn’t taking these steps—I’d have to circle back somehow and find the other spiral staircase down to the first floor

As I turned, I caught the first floor out of the corner of my eye.
 
Because of the cathedral ceilings of that first floor, it seemed much farther away then I’d thought it was.

It was then that something strange happened.
 

The ground seemed to spin under me for a moment, bucking and heaving like I was trying to walk on waves of carpeting, not good firm floor.
 
Or did it really?
 
Was it just a trick of the eye?
 
Either way, I took a step backward as a shadow fell in front of me, but there was no floor beneath that foot stepping backward, then, and I was
tumbling
backwards, shock cold enough to burn me flooding through my body as, impossibly, I began to fall down the stairs.

A hand caught my arm.
 
I hung suspended over the abyss of the air, my back to the emptiness, and in one smooth motion, I was pulled back.
 

Saved.

The hand was cold, and the body I brushed against as I was hauled out of the air felt as if the person had stepped out of a prolonged trip through a walk-in freezer.
 
I looked up at the face of the woman who had saved me, and when I breathed out, I will never forget it:
 
my breath hung suspended in the air between us like a ghost.

She was taller than me by about a head, and I had to lean back to gaze into her eyes.
 
They were violently blue, a blue that opened me up like a key and lock as she looked down at me, her eyes sharp and dark as her jaw worked, her full lips in a downward curve that my own eyes couldn’t help but follow.
 
She wore a ponytail, the cascades of her silken white-blonde hair gathered tightly at the back of her head and flowing over her right shoulder like frozen water falling.
 
She wore a man’s suit, I realized, complete with a navy blue tie smartly pulled snug against her creamy neck.
 
She looked pale and felt so cold as her strong hand gripped my wrist, but it was gentle, too.
 
As if she knew her own strength.

I saw all of this in an instant, my eyes following the lines and curves of her like I’d trace my gaze over an extremely fine painting.
 
And, like an extremely fine painting, she began to make my heart beat faster.
 
That was odd.
 
I was never much attracted to random women, even before I dated Anna, even before Anna…well.
 

But this wasn’t just my heart beating faster, my blood moving quicker through me.
 
This was something else.
 
A weightlessness, like being suspended in the air over the staircase again, the coolness of her palm against my skin a gravity that I seemed to suddenly spin around.
 
When she gazed down into my eyes, she held me there as firmly as if her hands were snug against the small of my back, pressing me to her cool, lean body that wore the suit with such dignity and grace that I couldn’t imagine her in anything else.

I was spellbound.

She said not a word, but her fingers left my wrist, grazing a little of the skin of my bare forearm for a heartbeat before her hand fell to her side.
 
I shivered, holding my hand to my heart, then, as if I’d been bitten.
 
We stood like that for a heartbeat, two, the woman’s eyes never leaving mine as her chin lifted, as her jaw worked again, her full lips parting…

“Are you all right?”
 
I shivered again.
 
Her voice was dark, deep and throaty, as cool as her skin, as gentle as the touch of her fingertips along my arm.
 
But as I gazed up at her, as I tried to calm my breathing, my heart, we blinked, she and I, together.

I knew, then.

I’d heard that voice before.

I’d seen this
face
before.

“Have we…met?” I stammered, eyes narrowed as I gazed up at her in wonder.
 
We couldn’t have.
 
She shook her head and put it to the side as she looked down at me, as if I was a particularly difficult puzzle that needed solving.
 
I would have remembered her, the curve of her jaw and lips, the dazzling blue of her eyes.
 
I could never have forgotten her if I’d only seen her once.
 
It would have been impossible.

I took a gulp of air and took a step back again, unthinking, and her hand was there, then, at my wrist again as she smoothly pulled me forward, toward her.

“The stairs,” she said softly, apologetically.
 
I’d taken a step closer to her this time, and there was hardly any space between us, even as I realized that my hand was at her waist, steadying myself against her.
 
I took a step to the side, quickly, then, my cheeks burning.

“I’m sorry,” I managed, swallowing.
 
“And…thank you…”
 
Her head was still to the side, but this time, her lips twitched as if she was trying to repress a smile.
 

“I’ve been meaning to remodel these steps.
 
Not everyone knows how steep they truly are,” she said, and her lips did turn up into a smile, then, making my heart beat a little faster.
 
I took a great gulp of air as she held out her cool fingers to me, palm up.
 

“I am Kane Sullivan,” she said easily, her tongue smoothing over the syllables as the smile vanished from her face.
 
“You must be Rose Clyde,” she said gently, the thrill of her voice, the deepness of it, the darkness of it, saying my name, the way her lips formed the words…I nodded my head up and down like a puppet, and I placed my hand in hers.
 
Her fingers were
so cold
, as she shook my hand like a delicate thing, letting her palm slide regretfully over mine as she dropped my hand with a fluid grace I had to watch but still couldn’t fully understand.
 

I was acting like an idiot.
 
I’d seen beautiful women before.
 
But Kane wasn’t beautiful.
 
Not in that sense.
 
She was…compelling.
 
Her face, her gaze, her eyes, an impossibility of attraction.
 
I felt, as I watched her, that buildings, trees, people would turn as she walked past them, unseeing things still, somehow, gazing at her.
 

I knew her, then.
 

The painting.
 
The woman in the painting from last night, with the big, black cat, lounging and regal and triumphant and unspeakably bewitching.
 
The naked woman, I realized, as my face began to redden, warming beneath her cool, silent gaze.
 
She was the woman from the painting.
 
But as I realized that, as we silently watched one another, I realized, too, that that would have been impossible.
 
It had been a while since college, it was true, but I could still tell when a painting was a few hundred years old.

The woman in the painting could not possibly have been Kane Sullivan.
 
And yet, it couldn’t possibly have been anyone else.
 

“I’m…I’m sorry,” I spluttered, realizing—again—how much of an idiot I must look to this incredibly attractive creature.
 
Her lips twitched upward again, and her mouth stretched into a true smile this time, the warmth of it making the air around her seem less frozen.
 

“You’re fine.
 
It’s not everyday that someone completely uproots their life and charts a course for places unknown,” she said, turning on her heel and inclining her heard toward me.
 
As she turned, I caught the scent of her.
 
Jasmine, vanilla…spice.
 
An intoxicating, cool scent that was warm at the same time.
 
Unmistakable and deeply remarkable.
 
Just like her.
 
I stared up at her with wide eyes as she gestured gracefully with her arm for us to walk together, like she was a gentleman from the past century.
 
True, she was wearing a sharp man’s suit (that I was trying desperately not to stare at or trace the curves of it with my eyes—and failing), but there was something incredibly old fashioned about her.
 
I kept thinking about that at that first meeting.
 
Like she was from a different era, not the one of smart phones and the Internet and fast food french fries.
 
No.
 
The kind of era that had horse-drawn carriages, corsets and bustles and houses that contained parlors.
 
We began to walk down the corridor together, in the opposite direction I had come, me sneaking surreptitious glances at her, her staring straight ahead.

The spell of the moment was broken, but a new spell was beginning to create itself, weaving around the two of us as we walked along the corridor.
 
As she spoke, I stared half up at her, half down the hall stretching out in front of us.
 
All of my actual attention, though, was on this woman.
 

Every bit of it.
 
She was just like that.
 
So…compelling.
 
She was a gravity that pulled me in, hook, line and sinker.
 
I didn’t know then how much of a gravity she had yet to become to me.

You can get
Eternal Hotel
, the first in the Sullivan Vampires series, available now!

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Acknowledgements

A Knight to Remember
has been with me for a very long time.
 
I wrote the rough draft of the novel many years ago, and then simply held on to it.
 
I write mostly paranormal stories, and
A Knight to Remember,
while being firmly entrenched in this world, was more fantastical than paranormal.
 
I loved writing it so much, but I held onto it.

One night, while having dinner with one of my dearest friends, author P.J. Bryce, P.J. and my wife, Natalie, were talking.
 
“Hey, whatever happened with that knight book you wrote?” asked P.J.

I told her that I’d done nothing with it.
 
She was scandalized by that.
 
“It’s good!” she said.
 
“You should publish it!”

“But it’s so unlike anything else I’ve written,” I told her worriedly.
 
Natalie and P.J. both shook their heads.
 
“Publish it,” they said.
 
And because they thought I should, I did.
 
I trust their opinions deeply, and—without them—this book would still be collecting dust.
 
You two are the most wonderful women I’ve ever been blessed to know.
 
Thank you for encouraging me to put out this story.
 
:)
 
And for the wonderful dinner!