“You heard Lucan,” she murmured against his mouth, a smile in her voice. “You need to get some rest.”
“So?” he growled, playfully nipping her supple lower lip.
Elise laughed. “So, maybe we should wait to do this until we get home.”
Tegan rolled her onto the bed with him, smoothly pinning her under his awakening body. He looked down into her wide lavender eyes, which held him with so much love it staggered him.
He kissed her slowly, tenderly, sincerely.
“I am home,” he said, his voice rough with emotion as he pressed her down beneath him. “This is the only home I’ll ever need.”
About the Author
With family roots stretching back to the Mayflower, author LARA ADRIAN lives with her husband in coastal New England, surrounded by centuries-old graveyards, hip urban comforts, and the endless inspiration of the broody Atlantic Ocean. To learn more about Lara and her novels, please visit www.LaraAdrian.com.
Read on for a sneak peek of
Midnight Rising
by
LARA ADRIAN
Coming from Dell in spring 2008
Midnight Rising
On Sale spring 2008
Chapter One
The woman looked completely out of place in her pristine white blouse and tailored ivory pants. Long, coffee-dark hair cascaded over her shoulders in thick waves, not a single strand disturbed by the moist haze that hung in the air of the forest. She was wearing tall elegant heels, which hadn’t seemed to keep her from climbing up a wooded path that had the other hikers around her huffing in the humid July heat.
At the crest of the steep incline, she waited in the shade of a bulky, moss-covered rock formation, unblinking as half a dozen tourists passed her by, some of them snapping pictures of the overlook beyond. They didn’t notice her. But then, most people couldn’t see the dead.
Dylan Alexander didn’t want to see her either.
She hadn’t encountered a dead woman since she was twelve years old. That she would see one now, twenty years later and in the middle of the Czech Republic, was more than a little startling. She tried to ignore the apparition, but as Dylan and her three traveling companions made their way up the path, the woman’s dark eyes found her and rooted on her.
You see me.
Dylan pretended not to hear the static-filled whisper that came from the ghost’s unmoving lips. She didn’t want to acknowledge the connection. She’d gone so long without one of these weird encounters that she’d all but forgotten what it was like.
Dylan had never understood her strange ability to see the dead. She’d never been able to trust it or control it. She could stand in the middle of a cemetery and see nothing, then suddenly find herself up close and personal with one of the departed, as she was here in the mountains about an hour outside Prague.
The ghosts were always female. Always youthful-looking and vibrant, like the one who stared at her now with an unmistakable desperation in her exotic, deep brown gaze.
You must hear me.
The statement was tinged with a rich, Hispanic accent, the tone pleading.
“Hey, Dylan. Come here and let me get a picture of you next to this rock.”
The sound of a true, earthly voice jolted Dylan’s attention away from the beautiful dead woman standing in the nearby arch of weathered sandstone. Janet, a friend of Dylan’s mother, Sharon, dug into her backpack and pulled out a camera. The summer tour to Europe was Sharon’s idea; it would have been her last great adventure, but the cancer came back in March and this time the chemotherapy wasn’t making so much as a dent in the disease. Sharon was still in the hospital, and at her insistence, Dylan had taken the trip in her place.
“Gotcha,” Janet said, clicking off a shot of Dylan and the towering pillars of rock in the wooded valley below. “Your mom sure would love this place, honey. Isn’t it breathtaking?”
Dylan nodded. “We’ll e-mail her the pictures tonight when we get back to the hostel.”
She led her group away from the rock, eager to leave the whispering otherworldly presence behind. They walked down a sloping ridge, into a stand of thin-trunked pines growing in tight formation. Russet leaves and conifer needles crushed on the damp path underfoot. It had rained that morning, topped off with a sweltering heat that kept many of the area’s tourists away.
The forest was quiet, peaceful…except for the awareness of ghostly eyes following Dylan’s every step deeper into the woods.
“I’m so glad your boss let you have the time off to come with us,” said one of the women from behind her on the path. “I know how hard you work at the paper, making up all those stories—”
“She doesn’t make them up, Marie,” Janet chided gently. “There’s got to be some truth in Dylan’s articles or they couldn’t print them. Isn’t that right, honey?”