The Last Kiss Goodbye (48 page)

She knew him instantly, as she knew she would always know him in any realm, in any universe, in any dimension, in any time.

“Michael,” she said, and smiled at him as the slight uneasiness Tony’s pain had caused her gave way to pure joy.

He opened his arms to her. She walked into them. They closed around her, hugging her close. She could feel every hard, muscular inch of him. She lifted her face to him, and he kissed her, his lips hot and slow. Sliding her arms around his neck, she kissed him back.

She could feel every thrilling nuance of that kiss.

She never wanted it to end.

They were on the same side of the barrier now, and he was hers, just like she was his. Nothing to separate them any longer.

Ghosts couldn’t stay. But what she hadn’t realized was, she could go. With him.

“I’m dead?” It was both a question and a statement, asked when he stopped kissing her at last.

“Charlie.” His honeyed voice was husky, low. She was in his arms still, with her cheek resting against his wide chest, knowing there was no place else in heaven or hell where she would rather be. When he hesitated, when he said nothing more beyond her name, she tilted her face up so that she could see his eyes. They gleamed down at her, their usual sky blue veiled by moonlight.

A faint tinkling of chimes blew in on the breeze. Charlie turned her head to listen.

Not too far away, in a clearing in the middle of a copse of tall trees, a sprinkle of falling moonbeams turned into a column of solid light.

Her mouth fell open as she looked at it. The light was beautiful, celestial, divine.

She knew what it was. The gateway. The passage.

The light mesmerized her. Drew her. It was everything she could do to tear her eyes away to look up at him, to draw his attention to it. All of a sudden it occurred to her that maybe she could take him with her into it, that maybe its power would hold his weight as well as her own, that maybe there could be an eternity for them together, after all.

“Michael.” Pulling out of his arms, she caught his hand instead, tugging him with her toward it. “There’s the light. Come with me into the light.”

“Charlie.” He resisted. He was too big, she couldn’t budge him against his will. “No.”

“You see it, don’t you?” she asked in sudden consternation, because she remembered then that he’d never been able to see it before.

“I see it.”

“You can walk into it with me. It’s strong enough for both of us. I can feel it. I’m”—
almost
—“sure it will take us both.”

“Maybe.” His tone was grim. “Whether it will or not, babe, you don’t want to go.”

Charlie frowned at him. “What? Yes, I do.”

He shook his head. “No, you don’t. Being dead sucks. You want to stay here. You want your life.”

She answered almost piteously: “No.”

“Yes.” He was inexorable. “They’re over there giving you CPR again. You can still go back.”

“No.” But then she thought of her house, and her work, and her mother, who would grieve. So, it seemed, would Tony, and Buzz and Lena, too. And—others. Her colleagues. Her friends. Then there was Michael. What if he couldn’t walk into the light with her? What if he was torn away from her, and she never saw him again?

Until that moment, she hadn’t really noticed that the breeze had turned into a gentle suction, wafting her toward that poor drowned body in the grass.

She looked up at him, undecided, and he pulled her into his arms and kissed her. Kissed her like he was promising her forever, like he had found eternity in her arms. Clinging, she kissed him back, and was still kissing him when—
swoosh
—he was no longer there.

A moment later, she was lying in the grass coughing and sputtering and spewing out lake water like a fountain.

Michael stood where she had left him.

The feel of her was still in his arms. The taste of her was still on his lips. She was back in her body. He could see her moving over there in the grass. She would be fine, he knew. She would live, and have her life.

He wished with every glimmer of his being that he could say the same.

The light was still there. The white light that she’d been talking about for so long.It had come for her. Not for him.

But he could feel it pulling at him. He walked toward it, curious. It waited for him, beautiful and shimmering. He could feel the hope of it, the promise of it. Looking at it, he was tempted. Just to try.

For a long moment he stood there, resisting the pull, deep in thought. Then he turned his back on the light and walked away.

There was a woman he wasn’t yet ready to leave.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

K
AREN
R
OBARDS
is the
New York Times
and
USA Today
bestselling author of over forty books and one novella. The mother of three boys, she lives in her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky.