Charon's Crossing (A Paranormal Romantic Suspense Novel) (2 page)

She yawned again and her eyelids drooped. I might as well get up, she thought, very clearly.

And then her lashes fluttered to her cheeks and she tumbled into darkness.

* * *

She is standing on a verdant green plateau, overlooking a crescent of white sand. Beyond, a huge sun floats on the breast of a sapphire sea. There are rocks below. She cannot see them, but she can hear the beat of the surf as it hurls itself against the shore.

The scene shifts, kaleidoscoping around her with dizzying swiftness. The sun has finished bleeding into the sea. It is late and very dark; the only illumination is from a sickle moon that rides high overhead. Kathryn is standing before an arched white trellis. It is overgrown with roses: she cannot see them, in the darkness, but their perfume surrounds her. Ahead, she sees a delicately curved wrought-iron gate. It is closed but she knows instinctively that it leads deeper into the garden. She is barefoot, and the grass is soft and damp to her toes.

She turns in a tight circle and tries to see beyond the narrow perimeter of pale moonlight that surrounds her, but she can't. She feels uneasy, as if she is not alone, as if there is someone else here, someone standing just off in the darkness...

"Kat."

The voice is a whisper, deeper than the night that surrounds her, yet it seems to resonate through her body. She whirls around, her hand to her breast. The wrought-iron gate has opened and a man is coming slowly towards her. She cannot see his face—the moon has fled behind a lacy froth of cloud—but his presence is imposing.

He is tall and broad-shouldered. His hips are narrow, his legs long and muscular. His stride is slow, almost lazy, yet there is something of the predator in it.

Her heart trips crazily, then begins beating wildly in her breast.

She wills herself to take deep, calming breaths.

I am dreaming, Kathryn thinks very clearly. I am not here at all, I am at home, safe in my bed.

"Kat," he says again.

She steps back quickly but there's something behind her. A bench. Her legs feel boneless. Wake up, Kathryn tells herself fiercely, come on, come on, wake up!

He is standing inches from her now. He reaches out, touches his hand lightly to her cheek, sliding his fingers along her skin, and she flinches back.

"Who are you?" she says sharply.

He smiles; she can see the flash of his teeth in the darkness. "No games, Kat," he murmurs. "Not after we've found each other again."

His hand slides along her throat. His fingers curl around the nape of her neck, his thumb settles against her racing pulsebeat. He exerts the lightest of pressure, yet she has no choice but to move forward, closer to him.

"Sweet Jesus," he says, "how I've missed you."

She wants to speak, to tell him she has never seen him before, but she cannot. She is becoming entangled in the misty reaches of the dream. His hand continues its journey, slipping to her shoulder, then down the length of her arm. He catches hold of her wrist, lifts her hand, brings her fingers to his mouth.

"I've been waiting such a long time, Kat."

His arms encircle her and he gathers her close. Kathryn catches her breath at the feel of him against her. He is all heat and hard muscle, and a wild excitement begins to course through her blood.

This is crazy. Crazy! The part of her mind that is dancing on the knife edge of reality, the part that knows she is dreaming, races furiously in an attempt to regain control. She must open her eyes and wake up!

But when he clasps her face between his palms and sweeps his thumbs across her cheekbones, she trembles.

"You are so beautiful," he whispers.

His hands are in her hair, undoing the neat braid that hangs down her back, letting the dark strands cascade to her shoulders like ebony silk. He catches the hair in one hand, wraps it around his fist so that she has no choice but to tilt her head back, exposing the long line of her throat to him.

He bends to her, feathers kisses along her temple, along her jaw.

"Kat," he groans, and finally—finally—his mouth slants down over hers.

Heat, swift and dangerous as summer lightning, arcs through her blood.

His hands go to the row of tiny buttons that adorn her nightgown from throat to breast. Kathryn reaches up to stop him; her hands clasp his wrists but his fingers are swift and nimble and, in truth, she doesn't want to stop him, not really. She wants this to happen, wants the buttons to fall open, exposing her flesh to the warm night air.

And to his mouth.

Oh, his mouth! He kisses his way the length of her throat and she burns everywhere he touches. When, at last, he presses his lips to the high, curved slope of one breast, she cries out.

"Yes," he growls, "yes," and with a soft moan, she loops her arms about his neck and lifts herself to him, rising on tiptoe, pressing her body to his.

She is on fire for him, she wants him with a passion that obliterates everything else. She moans and digs her fingers into the thick, silky hair that covers the nape of his neck. She brings his mouth down to hers. The kiss is deep, passionate, and when it ends, he makes a sound of his own, one that is part male triumph, part elemental desire.

"Tell me that you never stopped thinking of me," he says in a fierce whisper. He lifts her into his arms. "Tell me that you want me now, deep and hard inside you."

She is beyond speech, beyond everything but sensation. The answer he seeks is in the way she clings to him, in the way she moves against him. He bends her back over his arm, kissing her again and again, his tongue thrusting into her mouth, and she feels the flooding warmth of her desire building between her thighs.

Is she dreaming, or is what is happening real? A whisper of fear dances along her skin.

"No," she says, but it's too late. His mouth is on hers, he is drawing her down, down into the softness of the grass, into darkness and desire to the sound of thunder, rumbling far out over the sea...

* * *

"No!"

Kathryn sprang up in her bed, the cry bursting from her throat. Her heart was racing, trying to leap from her
chest.

"No," she said again, but this time the word was only a hoarse whisper.

The dream was already fading, collapsing in on itself like a dying star in the blackness of space, snatching her from the imagined heat of a tropical night and casting her into the frigid gloom of a winter morning and, in the process, turning the swell of thunder back into the persistent growl of her old-fashioned alarm clock.

She silenced the clock with a quick swat, gave a shaky laugh, and fell back against the pillows.

"Wow," she said softly.

For someone whose dreams usually had all the symbolism of a Walt Disney movie, this one had been a winner. An X-rated, adults-only winner.

After a minute she sat up and stretched her arms high over her head. So much for eating
moo goo gai pan
late at night, she thought with a rueful smile. The smile became a grin. Poor Jason. If only he'd tried a little harder, maybe she wouldn't have insisted on going home last night after all.

Kathryn stuffed her feet into her slippers, grabbed her robe from the foot of the bed, and pulled it on. Maybe someday, after she and Jason were old and grey, she'd tell him what had happened.

"Remember the night you proposed to me," she'd say, "and you wanted to make love, but I couldn't keep my mind on anything but the trip I was leaving on the next day?"

Well, no. She wouldn't do that, either. The details of the dream were fading now but one thing was certain.

Jason hadn't starred in it.

She made a face as she headed down the narrow hall to the bathroom. No doubt about it, the sooner she got this trip out of the way, the better. There was a limit as to how much stress you could handle, and she seemed to have reached hers. It was a relief to think she'd have this whole mess settled by this time next month.

The bathroom was cold enough to make her gasp.

"Welcome to Iceberg City," she muttered, dancing her fingers across the undersized radiator tucked beneath the window. As usual, the damned thing was sending up the barest minimum of heat. It always did, unless it was midsummer and then you could almost count on the heating system to go crazy and do its damnedest to cook you right out of your socks.

Well, she thought as she drew back the shower curtain, you won some and you lost some. There were lots of things to love about this apartment. The private little garden in the rear courtyard, for one, where you could sit in the shade of a leafy plane tree on a spring evening, tilt your head and watch the moon rise over the city.

And the apartment's location was wonderful, just a twenty-minute bus ride from work and maybe ten minutes more than that from everything Kathryn loved about New York. The theaters, Lincoln Center, the museums, all the stuff she'd grown up with and couldn't imagine living without.

She made a face as she turned on the hot water. You just had to take the good with the bad, that was all. Like the cramped size of the rooms.

"It's a good thing you're not claustrophobic," her mother had said drily, the first time she'd seen the place.

And like the shower being better suited to polar bears than people. The water was finally reaching tepid. Another couple of minutes and she'd grit her teeth, pull off her robe and nightgown, and go for it.

At least it would be warm, where she was going. Charon's Crossing was in the Caribbean on some island Kathryn had never heard of. Her mother had seen the place once. Or she might not have. She wasn't sure.

"I think I was there years ago, after your father and I first got married," Beverly had told her. "You won't like it much, Kathryn. If I'm right, it was this gorgeous, romantic old white elephant of a house. Not the kind of thing that would appeal to you at all."

Romantic, hell. It was probably a disaster. Only Trevor Russell, who'd prided himself on what he'd called his artist's eye, would have been fool enough to have hung onto it.

The truth, as her mother so often said, was simply that he was blind to reality. Wasn't that why Beverly had finally divorced him?

Kathryn spread a white ribbon of Colgate on her toothbrush. The divorce, and the separation from his wife and daughter, hadn't seemed to bother Trevor very much. Except for an occasional postcard from places she couldn't even find on the map, Kathryn had never seen her father again.

And then, a few months ago, word had come of his death, followed by the news about Charon's Crossing.

Well, in just a few hours, she'd see the place for herself. Right now, it was time to be brave and deal with the shower. Kathryn took off her robe, hung it behind the door. Slippers next, then the braid...

But the braid was already undone. How...?

The dream. Of course. That silly dream. A soft flush rose in her cheeks.

"Audience participation, Kathryn," she whispered.

Well, that was a first. She had never......
his fingers, tunneling through her hair until it falls loose...

Kathryn went very still. Images were surfacing, rising from her subconscious mind as if through layers of dark, still water. A tropical sun, setting on the sea. A garden, lit by moonlight. A man stepping out of the shadows, a man with a voice that whispered of desire and hands that brushed her with flame.

She stared into the mirror. Wisps of steam had risen past the shower curtain. They eddied in the air around her, curled lightly over the silvery surface of the glass so that it seemed as if she were standing in some faraway place of distant enchantment.

Her hand rose, crept to the high, frilled collar of her nightgown and to the row of opened buttons that marched from the hollow of her throat to the rounded curve of her breasts, and she swayed a little.

His hands at the buttons of the gown, opening them one by one, baring her throat to his mouth, baring the swell of her breasts, her head falling back, her lips parting...

* * *

Five stories below, Jason Carr stepped out of a taxi, a bag from Mister Donut in his hand and a clutch of hopeful expectations in his heart.

He tugged at the waistband of his grey sweatpants and ran a hand through his dark hair.

Hell, Jason, are you sure this is really such a great idea?

He'd asked himself the question at least six times in the past half hour. The answer this time was the same as it had been before. Of course it was a good idea. What woman wouldn't be thrilled to have her new fiancé drop in for breakfast?

Jason opened the door and started up the stairs. Besides, he'd resorted to a little spontaneity last night and look where it had gotten him. A grin spread over his face. Engaged, that was where, and by God, he still couldn't believe his luck.