Gabriel David's White Horse (3 page)

At the door they hugged.

“May I pop in tomorrow, Belle?”

“Of course.”

Later that night, as Belle lay in bed she smiled. Happy with herself about how she’d maintained control of the situation with Victor, she rolled onto her side and fell into a deep restful sleep full of dreams and the beautiful stranger from the meadow.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

Mirabelle rolled over and moaned at the unpleasant sound invading what had been a dream-filled sleep. An erotic, dream-filled sleep.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

Whoever was on the other side of the door was a dead person! She reluctantly rolled from bed and grabbed her satin robe from the bed. On the way to the door she shrugged into the cool material.

She played with the series of locks on the front door, but in her sleepy haze, couldn’t get the sequence quite right. “Dammit!” She tried again, this time concentrating. Finally the door cracked and Mirabelle squinted from the oppressive light. Once her eyes adjusted to the intrusion, her eyes found him—the man from her dreams.

His celadon eyes wide on her quickly lasered to thin slits like vest pockets. He was younger than her—thirties, but a rough thirty something like he’d worked out in the sun. With its dark roots and light ends, his thick, shoulder length hair added credibility to her theory. He stood before her in worn, fitted jeans and a worn cotton T-shirt whose softness beckoned for her fingertips. His size filled her porch stoop and she’d wondered if she’d ever seen a man so large.

“Mirabelle.” The syllables of her name dripped lazily from his lips like he’d been searching for her for ages and was now glad to be home.

His was the kind of physique that made her glad she was a woman. The muscle in his arms bulged, as did his thighs under the denim. Forgotten were the death threats she’d made to the person on the other side of the door. Lustful thoughts took their place. “H-hi.” Her voice squeaked. Come on Belle, you can do better than that. She coughed to clear her throat and to hide the pitch break. “Hello.” There that was better. Sultry and low.

“You’re Mirabelle.”

“I’m sorry, do I know you?” And yet she must—he’d haunted her dreams for years, but she thought he was just that…a dream. God, he was sexy. His penetrating olive-green gaze rested heavily on her and she found it difficult to breathe. Belle moved to lean against the jamb and her tits rubbed against the silk of her negligée, letting her know that they had become needy hard points.

“The stables. There was a wild horse.” His voice ignited chills—good chills—along her arms and the back of her neck.

“Name of an angel,” she whispered.

“Pardon?” He tilted his chin at her.

“Gabriel,” she managed.

His jaw dropped, but he recovered quickly. “I thought you were a dream.”

“I thought you were too,” she whispered, unable to keep her unblinking eyes from him. “Please, come in.” She stepped aside allowing him passage.

Inside the small home he found his way to the loveseat. When he sat, his long legs extended all the way to the round coffee table. “Can I get you some tea or coffee?”

“Tea would be great.” Deep and raspy, his was the kind of voice that wound its way around a woman’s hips.

“Iced or hot?”

“Iced.”

“Sugar?” She asked as she walked away from him.

“No thanks.”

In the kitchen she poured tea over ice in two glasses and inconspicuously kept one eye on him. He sat up board straight and as still as a stifling summer day. He wet his lips and pressed them together while his eyes took in her home. Heat bloomed in her chest.

She passed him a glass of tea and he accepted. “Thank you.”

Belle took her glass to the red chair where Victor had sat last night and attempted to seduce her. “What’s on your mind?”

He took a swallow of tea and pressed those damn thick lips together. His head shook ever so slightly as he formulated his thoughts. “I don’t know where to start.”

He raked fingers over his close, well-trimmed beard. She’d like to do that for him. Instead she took a large sip of tea to cool her sizzling brain. “How did you come to knock on my door?”

“Max told me you look enough like Cara to be her twin sister.”

“That’s awfully nice of Max, but highly deceptive and that really provokes more questions than answers.” She smiled and sipped from her glass.

“You’re right. It is deceptive, you look nothing like your daughter.”

She frowned. He was peculiar and possibly a tad rude, though he didn’t seem aware of it.

“You have a widow’s peak,” his index and middle fingers rubbed against the top middle of his forehead. “Your eyes have more gray in them…the color of a heavy, gray fog. Your eyebrows arch higher giving you a naturally sexy come-hither stare.

Yeah, she’d been told she had bedroom eyes. It wasn’t always desirable.

“Your lips find it hard to close around your top teeth and so they peek through. Your lips are the color of apricots, Cara’ are the color of raw tuna. And you have a birthmark on your temple, in your hair. It’s the shape of a bird and there’s a fraction of a scar on your lip. It causes your smile to be a little skewed to the right.”

She just remembered he was an artist. His ability to see everything was unsettling and she pulled her hair to cover the dark mark on the side of her face.

“So you’re here for Cara? I’m afraid—”

“No. I’m here for you.” He leaned forward, placing his glass on the coffee table at his knees. “Ten years. I’ve been chasing you. Vapor. I was convinced you weren’t real—I tried to substitute my work with different models, but the soul and the strokes never coalesced.” He steepled his hands before his face and inhaled. “A few weeks ago I found Cara. At first I thought she was you, but upon closer inspection realized she wasn’t, just a close likeness. A usable likeness.”

“Usable?”

“That day at the stables, you saw the white horse.”

“I did. And so did you.”

“I’d like to get your depiction of that day.”

She moved the cold glass to her other hand. “I was waiting for Cara to finish her riding lesson. While I waited something caught my eye and I followed. The rolling landscape itself is gorgeous—you don’t get so much of that in these parts. But the horse demanded attention. Wild and free, he made me want to follow and capture a little of that spirit. I thought if I could get close enough maybe I could touch him. His hair was as white as a quartz beach and I knew if I could just close my fingers around it, it would feel as soft as velvet.”

He watched her intently and so she continued. “When he ran, his hair harmonized with the rolling movement of his muscles, like waves at sea.” Everything about the scene reminded her of the beach. She chanced a glance at Gabriel. He was no longer looking directly at her. She picked up her tea glass and sipped, hoping to quiet her lips.

“I remember the horse, but I remember the sheer, white gown you wore even more.”

God, his voice could melt the panties right off of a woman. The rainstorm they’d been caught in had rendered the gown she’d worn that day transparent. She watched him from her side vision. He stared at his hands and she imagined he was deep in thought. There was a comfort about him that made her feel like she genuinely knew him. “You’re an artist.”

He sighed and leaned back into the couch. “If I were an artist I would be able to finish painting my exhibit from memory. Instead I have twenty-eight canvases with a white horse and no Mirabelle. After I saw you that day I attempted in vain to find you. When I searched the fields you were gone. I asked everyone, but the only thing I had to go on was the name Mirabelle.”

The way he said her name in his deep, scratchy voice gave her chills. His speech was slow, sensual, and precise. Their first names were the only words they’d shared. She’d made Harmony swear to her that she wouldn’t give any of her information to Gabriel. She’d been conscious of their attraction, but had a child to raise and didn’t need the heartache that would inevitably come from connecting with him. She and Cara had been through that enough with Cara’s father. Belle had sensed his boredom. She’d predicted he’d leave. What she hadn’t predicted was that he’d never return to see his daughter. He owed Belle nothing, they’d never even married. But he owed Cara everything.

She’d enjoyed dreaming about Gabriel. He could be everything she’d ever wanted in a man and since he basically didn’t exist, he’d never disappoint her. What would he do if he knew she dreamed about him no less than once a week?

“I don’t mind providing whatever it is you need to finish the paintings.”

He stared at her without blinking. Normally she would have been uncomfortable, but she wasn’t. Perhaps because she could tell he was sincere. His eyes screamed at her to pull him out of his despair. Something troubled him, but she didn’t think all of his woe stemmed from an unfinished project. Either way, she’d help him. “Gabriel, are you okay?”

His gaze on her broke, “Sorry, I’m just trying to figure out what it all means.”

“What it all means?”

“You’re the last thing I see when I drift off to sleep every night. Until about ten minutes ago, I thought you were a dream. I asked Harmony for your information all those years ago and she’d told me there’d been no one at the stables that day.”

Belle didn’t know what to say. His intensity was thick enough to cut with a knife. “Does it upset you that I’m not a dream?”

“No.” His jaw tensed. “A little.” He ran a hand through his sandy blonde, shoulder-length hair, the oils from his fingers giving it gloss. “I’ve spent ten years with the dream of you. If you had
stayed
in my dreams, I could be absolutely certain that you would never leave.”

She reached across to rest her hand on his arm. “If it helps you to know…I have no immediate plans.” She smiled when he shot her a puzzled look. She stood and next to her he followed suite, standing to his full height, dwarfing her living room. Her stare lingered a little too long at his thickly corded frame. Her eyes traveled up from his nipped-in waist to his shoulders that flared into a V. There existed somewhere between the present and the past a sexual tension. It had been there that day so long ago and it was back full throttle. The air was so thick it choked her. Coughing she said, “I’m going to get dressed.” He nodded but continued to intensely stare, standing firm in his spot in the living room while she padded away.

“Mirabelle?”

She froze at the sound of the deep, raspy song he made with the syllables of her name. The notes curled around her body making her breasts heavy and her sex needy. “Hmm?”

“I don’t guess you still have the white gown you wore from that day in the pasture.”

She did in fact have it hanging in her closet.

The seconds hung in the air. They stood facing one another, the small square ottoman separating them, and they sized each other up. On one end of the continuum it was believed that sex complicated things. However, Mirabelle believed in the adage that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. So if intimacy could complicate, it could also simplify. She turned and took in this king among men. A gladiator, a Viking, a Knight. Name a warrior from history and his rounded, muscular shoulders and biceps fulfilled the description. She longed for him to roughly grab her, throw her over his shoulder, and carry her straight to bed and have his uncivilized way with her. She was lonely and needy and wondered if her mood and her heart would fare any better with this man than it had with Victor.

Given her trade, Mirabelle knew when a man was attracted to a woman. And she knew that Gabriel was just as turned on for her as she was for him. For starters, his eyes dilated when he looked at her. Given the ten years he’d searched for her that could be explained. More telling than his dilated eyes however was his unyielding gaze. He openly perused her body. His eyes traveled to her lips, down her chin and neck to her breasts, and landed on her hips where they cemented and his gasping breath forced his lips apart.

“I do have the gown. Would you like to come to my bedroom? I’ll dig it out.” Shit! She’d gone and done it now.

He abruptly turned and sat on a plush green chair. He grimaced as he pressed fingers into his temples. “I want you, so it’s better if I wait here.”

Disco
. There it was—the moment of truth, the moment of no return. He wanted her, she wanted him. She suspected it had been the same all those years ago. Only difference was, now they had ten years of sexual tension to break through. Her sex clenched at the thought, even though she knew the responsible thing to do—the adult thing to do—would be to turn him away.

Her feet carried her to the chair where he sat. She stood between his legs and reached for his hand. “I want you too. More than that even…I need you between my legs. Come, I’ll wear the gown.”

He didn’t say a word, just stood and followed her down the hallway. When Belle saw the bed, she began to straighten the burgundy-colored sheets. To her surprise, he stood opposite from her and helped. Together, they lifted the cherry blossom comforter and spread it over the smoothed sheets.

“Why don’t you make yourself comfortable and I’ll see if I can find that white gown?”

He nodded and folded his large frame to sit on the edge of the bed. When he started unlacing a boot, her skin tingled. She couldn’t wait to see the body hidden beneath his clothes.

After he’d divested himself of his boots and socks, he stood, cocking his head at her. She watched in slow motion as his large hands grasped the edge of his olive green shirt that was the same shade of green as his eyes. His torso was long and muscular with abs, obliques, pecs—basically the guy’s muscles had muscles—and she wanted to tie him to her bed, grab her lunch, and eat it from his chest.

“Is everything okay?”

“Oh, yes. I was just going to retrieve the dress.” What a ninny she was! And Belle had been around a lot of men, but he was strikingly handsome. The kind of hot that left a women staggering, just as she was now as she searched through her closet for the white gown.

Belle rifled through dozens of dresses before she found the sheer, white gown that she’d worn on that day over ten years ago. She emerged from the closet holding her dress by the hanger. “Here it is. I knew I could find it.” Looking at the dress she frowned. “I hope I can still fit in the damn thing.” She held the dress at arm’s length in front of her. It was going to be a tight fit.