Nature Of Desire: Mirror Of The Soul Read online

  When Josh coaxed Mac out onto the floor with Violet and his own wife, she laughed, really laughed, so that she couldn’t help the reflex to cover her mouth. Tyler drew her hand away as they watched Josh try to teach the big cop the first steps of a sexy Latin dance. Mac was not too enthused about gyrating his hips, even with his tiny Mistress laughing and pushing him from behind.

  She and Tyler gave Natalie the honor of cutting the first piece of cake. They carried on conversations with almost every guest. Finally, in the early hours of the morning, they saw them off in cabs or their cars, depending on their level of inebriation. Marguerite held on to Komal a long moment before letting her into her car. She’d been unable to talk her into staying in a guestroom, but Tyler assured her several of the guests were headed back to Tampa. He quietly arranged for them to keep Komal’s vehicle in their sights until they were sure she’d made it back to the turnoff to her suburb development.

  She watched with quiet delight when Brendan walked Chloe to her car with his hand beneath her elbow. He even held on to it a few moments before leaving her, visibly reluctant to go. Marguerite didn’t bother to hide her laughter this time when Chloe turned and mouthed Oh. My. God. across the driveway. Gen rolled her eyes and ordered her into their vehicle, then blew Marguerite a kiss. “See you back at the shop after the honeymoon!”

  “Tired?” Tyler slid his arms around her waist as she watched them bump across the oyster shells down the driveway.

  “In a way, yes. In another way, I feel like I could dance under the stars forever.”

  “Well, we’ve one more group of guests to deal with. They’re vowed to stay and mooch off our hospitality until the last bottle of champagne has been opened.”

  She chuckled as they strolled back to the party area. As she expected, she found the lone inhabited table was the one with Violet and Mac, Josh and Lauren, Justin and Sarah. Josh stood up and held out a chair for Marguerite while Mac pushed one out for Tyler beside it with his foot. Nearly half asleep, Violet blinked at them in benign pleasure, her body leaned into the curve of Mac’s.

  “Exhausting, isn’t it?” Lauren, who looked like she should be a lifeguard on a Hollywood fluff drama rather than a doctor, crinkled her blue eyes in a smile at Marguerite. Josh’s arm lay across the back of her chair, fingers playing with her bare shoulder. Sarah had her feet in Justin’s lap. He was massaging them, his fingers occasionally drifting up her thighs so that she could slap at him like at a mosquito, making his dark eyes twinkle.

  “Little Madonna.” Tyler reached over, touched Violet’s knee. “What a mother you’re going to be. Watch, Mac. It will be a girl and you’ll have two spoiled brats to care for.”

  “You’re pregnant?! Oh my God, you didn’t tell us!” Sarah jerked up, bringing her feet down so abruptly she managed to thump her heel into Justin’s groin, then smacked her friend smartly in the arm as he winced good-naturedly.

  “Hey, delicate condition here.” Violet fended her off, laughing and shook a finger at Tyler. “You, I’m going to kill. And aren’t you supposed to defend me?” She shot a glance at Mac.

  Mac grinned at her. “Sugar, men never break up fights between women. It’s the closest thing to watching them have sex with each other and we’re always hopeful it will lead to that. Kind of like how it does between men and women on soaps.”

  “Yeah, like that happens,” Lauren said dryly. “I always feel like having sex with Josh when I want to kill him.”

  “You always desire me,” he said, unruffled. “You just pretend to be angry with me to make me work harder for it.”

  “Men. Pigs. The lot of you.” She tugged his hair. Obligingly he tilted his head toward her, giving her an easy smile. Marguerite saw no shadows in his eyes tonight. There was too much love to light their way this evening, no room for nightmares.

  “We’re simple creatures, Mistress, when all’s said and done.”

  “No. No, you’re not.” Marguerite was surprised when the words rose so strongly in her. She thought of what she knew of Josh, his artistic talent and those nightmares, his ability to give comfort with his easy manner. Mac’s protective nature. And the small taste she’d had of Justin…it was obvious to her. And she wouldn’t even begin on the man who sat next to her, his arm around her, holding her into his body, his warmth. His statement of perpetual protection and love on her throat. “You’re so much more than that.” She looked at each of them in turn. “You’re our dreams come true. The dreams we all pretend we don’t have until we meet you and then it all makes sense. From then on we know no matter what happens, it’s going to be okay.”

  She raised the glass of wine Tyler had put before her. “To love. In all its forms. It gives us the ability to fly. To believe we can fly with the angels.” She raised her gaze to Tyler and he met her look with warmth and all she’d just spoken reflecting back at her.

  His attention went around the table, lingering on each woman as she’d done with the men, and then came back to his own.

  “And to the angels themselves,” he added. “Who make it worth taking that leap of faith.”

  “Hear, hear,” Justin said. The glasses raised, catching the soft gleam of the fairy lights. Marguerite closed her eyes, thinking she felt the brush of wings against her hair a moment before Tyler’s lips touched hers, sweeping all need for thought away.

  Epilogue

  “Can we make it happen that quickly?”

  “Angel, we’ve got a whole month left before the carnival. A city can be built in a month.”

  “If you have more money than God.”

  “Well, aren’t you fortunate to be married to me, then?” He grinned, slowed down to kiss her, but she spun away, pulling him onward.

  “No time for your husband anymore?”

  “Not a moment,” she agreed. “He’s kept me out of this part of the garden for two weeks. He told me today was the day I get to see what he and Josh have been doing. Our anniversary was yesterday, after all.”

  “More money than God doesn’t faze an artist,” Tyler grumbled. “I even tried threats of violence. He just waved his hand at me like he was swatting at an annoying fly. He’s already made the damn thing. I didn’t realize he would take half a week to determine how to set the base and arrange the area.”

  “Well, at least you tried. That’s something.” Showing a woman’s proclivity for changing moods, now she stopped, turned full into him and rose onto her toes to wrap her arms around his neck and give him a heated, openmouthed kiss. Her body was soft and giving, making him groan and grip her hips, pull her hard against him.

  “You sure you won’t reconsider Jell-O?”

  “No,” he said decisively. “Sarah will not make enough Jell-O to fill a wading pool. She draws the line there. And I am not opening ten thousand of those little cups.”

  “Chloe will help.”

  He raised both brows. “She’s…”

  “Brendan told me he’s bringing her. Or she’s bringing him. It’s unclear.” Marguerite smiled. “But I suppose one of my employees is about to see a very different side of her boss.”

  “Baby oil.” His eyes gleamed. “It’s much easier to obtain by the gallon and it does lovely things to female skin.”

  “It’s not too bad on males, either,” she returned. “All right, then. We do wrestling contests in the baby oil pool and then the contestants can go to the open shower area. Only there’s a cost. Men have to pay a donation to hold the detachable showerheads and the women can’t leave the shower area until they’ve reached orgasm. And the couple that takes the longest to finish has to pay a bonus donation.”

  “I like that.” He liked it a lot. Enough to want to whisk her away to their private bath area and practice.

  “Oh, no.” She disentangled herself and backed away, chuckling. “My gift. You promised.”

  He would promise her anything, his angel who had learned how to laugh and smile so much more easily this past year, who let him help her keep her lingering nightmares at bay
with his arms safely around her through the night. And in that miraculous reciprocity that love had, she kept his at bay the same way.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” She caught everything, every change in his expression. It made it easy to learn to be open with her, in a way he hadn’t ever trusted himself to be with a woman before.

  “I was thinking how different you’ve become this year. The way you laugh and smile more.” He reached out, touched the curve of her mouth, saw her quell the instinctive urge to cover the gesture, a gesture that had become instinctive of late only when pointed out, like now.

  “Will you stop loving me if I become so different from the person you knew?”

  “It has nothing to do with who you are today, tomorrow or yesterday, angel. It’s about who your soul has always been, always will be.”

  When she took his hand, he saw her holding him in her eyes, in her heart.

  “Will Josh be waiting for us?”

  “No. I wanted to give it to you when we were alone as man and wife.”

  Her expression always became tender, bemused when he referred to her that way, so he did it often. Now he squeezed her as they walked companionably through the trellis, the one under which they’d taken their vows. He’d moved it to the opening of this new part of his garden. It was a transition point for the area, which he knew she would understand, being a student of Japanese tea ceremonies. He’d become somewhat of one himself this past year, as well as an avid apprentice of Japanese gardening.

  Marguerite noted this area was more intimate than her favored Aphrodite area. The vegetation here was all Japanese gardening style. Delicate maples, a rock garden with the tiny bamboo rake, the sand arranged in ripples to look like water. On the side of the clearing was a wisteria arbor, whose meaning she immediately recognized. Tyler had created an outdoor machiai, a waiting room for guests to cleanse and prepare themselves before entering the teahouse. Passing through the arbor, the circular area that followed contained a mat of greenery and soft low ground cover which could become a dew garden with the water mister, concealed as a tiny statue of a rabbit. Guests would stand there to clean their feet before they would turn to the stone basin on a pedestal next to it, a tsukubai, to wash their fingers and mouths, further purifying themselves before their host or hostess led them into the teahouse. A stone bench was here for them to seat themselves to wait for that host or hostess.

  And the teahouse was perfect. Simple, natural materials. No nails, all peg construction. Small, intimate, for the preferred two to four guests.

  “I thought you might finally decide to perform a Japanese ceremony for me. Inside, right now, there’s a tea set with one cup. For us to share as the samurai did, to emphasize the bonds that exist between family. I thought we might go in there in a few minutes, share a cup together, make it official.”

  Family. She and Tyler were a family.

  “I didn’t know Josh was doing construction now.”

  “He isn’t. Robert and I handled this part.” He leaned forward to kiss her, holding his lips against hers in a quiet way as the cicadas buzzed and the breeze whispered through the garden area. Then he pulled back, turned her away from the teahouse, facing her toward an angle of the garden not visible until one stood here.

  “This is what Josh was doing.”

  For a long moment she simply stood, staring at it. Not believing what she was seeing. Fragile dark green ferns clustered at the base of the sculpture that had been placed by a small waterfall crafted of round smooth stones. There was another rock garden here as well. Tyler released her hand, his fingers caressing hers a moment before he let her go. She felt him watching her as she went closer. A small bench was in front of the statue, a simple square wooden piece that could serve as a kneeling bench for prayer, a place to sit while one made designs in the rock garden, or a place for solitary contemplation. She stepped up onto it to bring herself closer to the statue’s face, reach out to it with trembling fingers.

  In the mortal world she’d never known him as an adult, but she knew this was how he would have looked. It was all there, the structure of his face, the intentness of his eyes, even the manner in which he stood. Alert, turning as if he was about to respond to her, a light smile on his lips.

  She stepped down. When she turned to face her husband, the question was in her eyes, but she was unable to speak.

  “I tried to tell you several times,” he said. “But we’d get interrupted, or the timing would be wrong. There seemed no way to say it until I could show you, like this.”

  “H-How could you…”

  “When I drove up that day…” Shadows gathered in his eyes. Because she knew the memory still haunted him, she reached out and he took her hand. Sitting down on the bench, he kissed her fingers. “When I jumped out of the car I looked up, looking for you. And I saw something.”

  Tyler turned his attention to the statue, remembering. “You leaped with Natalie in your arms, your father with you and then… It was like sunlight, only it was raining. Mac remembers it as the sun breaking through the clouds for just a moment, but I saw something else. Wings.” He met her gaze. “A face, a length of leg. When your chute came out, he was all over it, pulling it out, open. He held on to it a moment, probably decelerating you a bit. Then he was gone as if that was all he was allowed to do. If I saw what I thought I saw, I’m sure he would have seen you all the way to the ground if he could have.”

  Marguerite stared at him. Her attention shifted back to the other prominent feature of the statue. She’d thought it had been Tyler’s compliment to her brother’s spirit, but she now recognized it as an attempt to reconstruct a memory. This older version of her brother had a pair of wings coming out of his back, all of it sculpted in bronze, every feather textured and separate. The smooth musculature of his arms and legs was defined well, though his body was clothed in a simple tunic. Marguerite was sure that was due to the fact he was her brother, since Josh’s work rarely displayed clothing for the purpose of modesty. However, he had not hesitated to show in sensual detail what a beautiful mortal man David would have been. Making her heart hurt, wishing he had lived to enjoy the love of a woman, to give some woman the gift of himself.

  “I thought about it a long time, not sure of my own mind on it,” Tyler continued. “Then, the night you went sleepwalking in my house, when you got up on the balcony, I saw him again. He woke me up, saved your life. That time I got just a quick glimpse of his face. He has a hell of an arm. Just about knocked me out of the bed.” Tyler smiled, though his eyes remained serious. “And I haven’t seen him since. I guess he knew his work was done.”

  She nodded mutely, sinking down on his knee. Tyler put an arm around her waist, steadying her with a palm on her hip as they looked at the statue together.

  “All those years in the field, remembering every detail of a person based on just a flash impression, paid off. I described him to Josh. Komal had pictures of your brother, so between that and my recollection he came up with his face, the body type and stance. I hope we did well.”

  “It’s him.” The words came out thickly. Tears began to fall, her expression torn between grief and joy. “Oh, God, Tyler. You…” She shook her head and he pressed his face to her throat, wrapping both arms around her.

  “No, angel, I didn’t want you to cry.”

  “Yes, you did. In a good way. And this is a good way, I promise. You just…you understand so much about me, more every day. And this…if you keep giving me gifts like this, I’ll be the first person whose heart broke out of too much happiness.”

  “I’ll be here to put it back together, angel. Every time. I promise.”

  * * * * *

  Robert slipped into the garden as they strolled back up the path, smiling a little at their absorption in each other, remembering his and Sarah’s days as newlyweds. He turned at a shadow, a rush of wings as if a heron had taken flight close by. Seeing nothing but the delicate pointed leaves of the Japanese maple quivering, he shrugge
d, bent to retrieve his garden tools and went to the statue to clip back some of the weeds trying to poke their heads out among the ferns at the base.

  He discovered a feather there. Large enough to be a heron’s, only herons didn’t have feathers like this. Long and white with gilding on the tips like the touch of gold and silver mixed. Holding it in his hand, Robert felt a warmth sweep through him, a sense of peace, of the type of spiritual tranquility he often felt in his garden. He felt thanks sweep him. For the day, for Sarah. For Mr. and Mrs. Winterman. For the beauty of green things and flowers. For life.

  Leaving his weeding tools for the moment, he went to find Sarah. He wanted to give her the feather, sensing that it was the perfect gift for the woman who’d agreed to be his for the rest of their lives.

  The End

  About the Author

  I’ve always had an aversion to reading, watching or hearing interviews of favorite actors, authors, or musicians because so often you find that the real person does not measure up to the beauty of the art they produce. You find their politics or religion distasteful, or you find they’re shallow and self-absorbed, or a vacuous mophead without a lick of sense. And from then on, though you still may appreciate their craft or art, it has somehow been tarnished. Therefore, whenever I’m asked to provide personal information about myself for readers, a ball of anxiety forms in my stomach as I think, “Okay, the next couple of paragraphs can change forever the way someone views my stories.” Why on earth does a reader want to know about me? It’s the story that’s important.

  So here it is. I’ve been given more blessings in my life than any one person has a right to have. Despite that, I’m a Type A, borderline obsessive-compulsive paranoiac who worries that I will never live up to expectations. I’ve got more phobias than anyone (including myself) has patience to read about. I can’t stand talking on the phone, I dread social commitments, and the idea of living in monastic solitude with my husband, a few animals, books and writing is as close an idea to paradise as I can imagine. I love chocolate, but with that deeply ingrained, irrational female belief that weight equals worth, I manage to keep it down to a minor addiction. I adore good movies. I’m told I work too much. Every day is spent trying to get through the never ending “to do” list to snatch a few minutes to write.