Midnight Shadows Read Free Page B

head.
    All the music that had fled her life returned now, Dagda was back in her head, the music coming in great arpeggios, the music that had always been the center of her life until Douglas. He’d entered her life and then the music fled but she had always clung to the hope that she could someday, somehow have both.
    Douglas mourned the loss of her music as much as she did. These past three days had opened her heart to the most dangerous emotion there was—hope. Hope that the music would come back.
    Allegra opened her eyes unexpectedly and caught Douglas unawares. Caught the tenderness of his look and the worry between his brows.
    Their eyes met. “Hey there,” she whispered.
    He instantly smoothed his face out, to the extent that his scars let him. “Hey there yourself.”
    She let her legs drift slowly to the white sand beneath the rocking turquoise water and walked up to him. “I saw all the ladies ogling you on the beach.”
    He snorted. “Yeah, right.”
    It was a running joke that, for her, had a vein of seriousness running through it. “I did. Including the lady with enough diamonds to sink the Titanic . She sat up and pulled down her sunglasses for a better look. Her necklace nearly blinded me.” The lady in question was dark-haired and very voluptuous. And drowning in bling. Her jewelry covered more of her than her bikinis did.
    “She must have had something in her eye.”
    “Oh, of course she did. You.”
    By this time she was plastered against him, arms around his neck, and oh yes. There he was, fully erect. As he was most nights in bed with her. All dressed up with nowhere to go.
    He was shaking his head, hard mouth slightly uptilted, eyes half closed against the huge golden sun.
    For just a second Allegra was overwhelmed that this man who looked like Neptune without the pitchfork, so huge and strong and capable in every way, was hers. And he was. Every single line of that big body told her that he was completely hers and would remain so to her dying day. When they’d taken their vows, she knew he meant every single word of the ageless ceremonial phrases.
    For richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part.
    So easy to say, so hard to do.
    Lucky, lucky her.
    She’d grown up in the fickle world of music where every single straight male, from the stage hands to the lead singer, thought they were God’s gift to women. Feckless boys, all of them, most of them thin and narrow-shouldered, so hopeless in the real, physical world that unless it involved music, they were like helpless babes. And every single one thought he was a sex god. Except now that she was actually married to a real sex god, she was able to laugh at the memory of the ones who had caught her eye.
    “Come here, sailor.” Allegra tightened her hands around his neck, savoring the feel of the steely muscles there.
    “Giving orders, are we now?” Douglas responded in a pure Irish accent. You’d think he’d been born in county Connemara.
    “Sure and I have a perfect right to, don’t I? Seein’ as how you had me waitin’ for so long, eh?” she answered in kind.
    Douglas laughed and she laughed with him. She loved it when he laughed. It was always as if laughter took him by surprise, as if laughter were this new, unfamiliar territory he had just ventured into.
    “Kiss me,” she whispered and he bent to her and, oh man. That familiar magic. His arms tightened around her back, bringing her close to him, to that acre of strong, hairy male chest, a wall of muscle. When she felt him against her she simply lit up.
    How she remembered what it was like being in Douglas’s arms when she’d been blind. How she’d had no choice but to concentrate on what was beneath her fingertips, against her lips, inside her body. It had been one of the only advantages to being blind—this ability to concentrate entirely on what her body was telling her.
    Like now, when her body was signaling such pleasure. When Douglas held her, the