Stakes & Stilettos - Michelle Rowen [90]
I nodded stiffly, still too stunned to even make room for a little bit of positivity. “Okay. If you say so.”
Thierry turned me away from the bed to look at him instead of the dead witch. “Sarah, please be strong. This isn’t the end.”
“Just feels like it, right?”
He took my face between his hands and forced me to look at him. “Sarah, please. Don’t lose hope. Hope is sometimes all we have.”
“Since when have you become such an optimist?”
“Since about ten weeks ago.”
I smiled weakly at him. “I’m tired. I know I’ve only been awake for a few hours today, but I think I want to go to sleep in my own bed tonight. I’ll pull a Scarlett and think about everything tomorrow.”
He nodded. “Perhaps that would be for the best. Let’s leave this place. I’ll contact the authorities when I return to Haven.”
So we left, literally closing the door behind us on any hope of breaking my curse tonight. I went back to George’s place, to my bed that I hadn’t slept in for the week in which I’d stayed with Thierry at his townhome, stayed at the motel in my hometown, or slept on the sofa at Haven, and I pulled the covers over my head and tried to sleep.
Not too surprisingly, I dreamed. Vividly.
I was in Mexico with Thierry. A picture postcard of our trip to Puerto Vallarta shortly after we’d first met when I thought that I might have just achieved my little vampiric happily ever after with my handsome but angsty Prince Charming.
The sun was setting over the ocean, which sparkled like diamonds. The sand felt cool against my hands. I reclined on a lounge chair under the umbrella that had been up during the day. The sky was all shades of pinks, oranges, purples, and golds as the sun slowly slipped beneath the horizon. There was a slight wind that felt warm against my skin and I could smell a mixture of sea salt and that cocoa-butter aroma of suntan lotion.
I took a sip of the drink the waiter had just brought by—a Tequila Sunrise. My favorite and definitely appropriate to the location. The mixture of tequila, orange juice, and grenadine slid satisfyingly down my throat.
I wore the skimpy red bikini that I’d bought specifically for the trip. When I’d first put it on I felt strange and exposed wearing so little compared to the way we had to dress for winter in Toronto, but I’d quickly gotten used to it. A couple of beaches away the women went topless, so my small bit of red material was comparatively modest.
“You’re so beautiful,” Dream-Thierry said. He sat on the accompanying lounge chair. I turned my head and smiled at him. His shoes and socks were off and his black shirt was unbuttoned to the waist.
“You’re not so bad yourself,” I said.
He got up from his chair and knelt beside mine, resting his hand on my bare stomach.
“I’m glad you convinced me to come here,” he said. He pulled off my dark sunglasses and set them down on the little table between the lounge chairs that also held our drinks. “I want to kiss you right now.”
“Well, what’s stopping you?”
His hand drifted down to my hip, over the tied strings at the side that held the bikini bottom in place, and then farther down to my thigh, my knee, my calf, and then back up again all the way to my face.
“When I’m with you, Sarah, you have a tendency to make me forget myself,” he said, and his dark gaze returned to mine.
I frowned. “What does that mean?”
“It means that when I’m with you I feel like a normal man when I am anything but.”
“You’re normal,” I said. “Very normal. Now are you going to kiss me, or what?”
A small smile played across his extremely kissable lips. “I’m not normal,” he said as he moved his face up to mine and brushed his mouth against mine. “And neither are you. Not anymore.”
“Are you talking about the nightwalker thing?”
He leaned back slightly. “That, yes. But much more than that makes you different now. My own mistakes have changed things that should have been left alone. Les jeux sont faits.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that the games are set. The plays have been made. And now we must wait and hope that all is well, for I fear