Heather Graham Read Online Free PDF Page B

husky, gentle, yet assured…Always assured. A ghost’s voice…A ghost was holding her hand. It couldn’t be…It was…
    She blinked and turned her head to the left. Yes, it was Brian. Yet not Brian. Not the Brian she had known…This was a different man and very much a man. His voice was gentle, a rustle of velvet, deep, deeper than before. He had always been well built, but now he was somehow larger yet leaner. His shoulders had become very broad; his waist and hips extremely trim. Beneath that vee of his open-necked sport shirt she could see that the hair on his chest had become thick and no longer a yellow gold but rather a honey. His hair was a little long. Men don’t wear their hair quite so long these days, Brian, she wanted to tell him.
    But the biggest difference was his face, his eyes. His features were almost gaunt, very angular. Still strong, but stronger. There was a look of hardness about him, steel and stone. Those lines about his eyes and his mouth. Brian had lips that were full, not so easily compressed; they were giving; they twisted into smiles. And his eyes were the color of the sky, not indigo pools, sharp, heated yet slightly chilling, keen. They had become rays of heat that permeated the soul.
    It was Brian. Yes, it was Brian. But not the Brian she had known, not the Brian she remembered. In her mind he had remained the same. This Brian had changed. She had changed….
    “I suppose I should have called you first or done something. I realize this must be a terrible shock.” He was speaking again, and she was still just staring at him.
    Because you’re a ghost! Don’t you see, Brian, you’re a ghost, and I don’t know you anymore….
    “You said that he was dead!”
    Kim blinked and stared at Jacob, hovering behind Brian’s back. The words were full of reproach. Her son, her son—she had reared him for twelve years—was staring at her as if she had committed murder.
    “He was—” She defended herself stupidly. How had the twins known, simply known, instinctively? Surely only minutes had passed; suddenly she was the stranger, staring at the three who were so alike.
    Brian chuckled, and Kim realized with a resentment she tried to bury with logic that the mere sound of his voice eased the growing tension. “It wasn’t your mother’s fault, Jake. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. Actually”—he winked at his son—“I was dead, legally dead, that is, until a few days ago. Talk about a strange experience; I had to go to court to have myself declared alive.”
    This was impossible; there was a marker in the cemetery. “Brian Drew Trent, Sergeant, USAF, 1950–1972.” A bronze vase above the military plaque. “Beloved Son, Husband, and Father.” His dog tags were upstairs. Some body was in that pine box….
    She couldn’t talk. She saw clearly, yet the world was spinning; she couldn’t think or feel…“How…where…?”
    “Long story,” he murmured, cocking his head slightly, indicating the twins. “I just came in from Arizona. Before that I was in France, before that Thailand, before that Nam.”
    Her mouth must have formed a question because he nodded. Yes, all that time. All that time he had been somewhere in the jungle and then getting back, coming home. But she should have been notified. She had been placing flowers on his grave once a month with his sons while he was in Arizona having himself declared alive without informing her.
    Kim sat up, then lay back down. He was sitting beside her hip, and trying to move placed her almost touching him, eye to eye with him, and she wasn’t ready for that. She could feel the brush of his thigh against her and it seemed to radiate like heated steel.
    He wasn’t even looking at her anymore. His eyes were on his sons, going from one identical face to the other. The pain and loss within the deep blue of his eyes were phenomenal, and she empathized with what he was feeling even as he kept himself in great control. He was studying his