Spirit Bound - Christine Feehan [136]
“When I was boy, we were snuggled in our apartment, the fire going and my father stretched out on this couch, his head in my mother’s lap, two babies on his chest. I remember he looked at my mother with such love on his face and he took her hand and said, ‘This is a golden moment, my love.’ At the time I didn’t know what that meant, but it stuck in my head because of the way he looked at her, with so much happiness. Now I know what he meant.” Once again he brought the fistful of her hair to his mouth.
He loved the feel of all that silk. He thought it looked like a shining waterfall, dark and mysterious on a dusky night. When Judith lay on a pillow, with her hair spilling all around her, he’d never seen a more beautiful or seductive sight. He rubbed her hair over his jaw, wanting this moment to last forever. He glanced at her, was immediately caught in the spell of her. Tears swam in her eyes, diamond droplets caught in her eyelashes.
Without conscious thought, he leaned over and kissed her tears away, sipping them from her soft skin. “Don’t ever feel sad for me, Judith. My life brought me to you and that’s enough for me. That’s everything.”
Judith shook her head and finished off her chocolate, too choked up to answer him. Sometimes, when those small memories came back to him, Stefan broke her heart. She wanted to hold him forever. He thought she saved him. She could tell in the way he looked at her, in the things he said to her, but it was the other way around. She had become lost in her need to avenge her brother’s death. In her belief that she didn’t measure up because she couldn’t find a way to make Jean-Claude suffer.
She sighed. The chocolate was definitely doing the trick, making her sleepy. She let herself drift, thinking of the man beside her. He was an anchor in the storms of emotion that washed over her so intensely. Sometimes she couldn’t contain all the force of her passionate nature, so concentrated by her element, but when she was with Stefan, she didn’t need to keep constant vigil. She found she could relax and just feel what she was supposed to feel. She’d felt half alive, desperate to control the growing power within her, yet the moment she’d met Stefan her spirit had recognized him as some sort of protective shield. It made no sense—yet it made perfect sense.
“You make me happy,” she said, half closing her eyes, allowing herself to drift further toward a dreamy place. It was more than that. She’d felt empty and he’d filled her. She’d felt afraid of herself and he gave her confidence. There wasn’t any rhyme or reason to it, but strangely, they fit, two misfits completing one another.
She turned her head to look at him, struggling to keep her eyes open. Her lids felt heavy and her body deliciously exhausted. “I was happy here, and I knew I’d have a decent life. I didn’t know I was empty until you came along. And I didn’t have any idea what real happiness was until I laid eyes on you. Isn’t that crazy?”
He shook his head. “No. I didn’t consider another way of living. Even when I prepared for it, I never really thought I’d disappear into the real world. Men like me live our lives apart and we die that way. No one knows we exist and no one mourns our death, because we’re ghosts. I didn’t consider myself unhappy. My life was just what it was.”
He allowed the soft strands of her hair to slip through his fingers, watching it slide back around her, a cloak of silk framing her face and falling with grace below her waist. “Until I saw you. The world just seemed to hold its breath, waiting for you to notice me.”
Judith felt as if he had given her the world. He didn’t think he knew the right words to say, but nevertheless he found them, at least for her. He made her feel as if she were the only woman in the world.
“Tomorrow your sisters are going to talk to you, angel. You know they’ll come at you from a million different ways.”
She could hear the concern in his voice, the worry that once away from him, she would be persuaded she’d made a terrible mistake. “I worry that