A Touch of Heaven Page 4

  My mind whirls, racing around like a pony looking for the salt lick of an answer. Even as I wrack my brain, I can’t seem to take my hand away from Patrick’s penis. It’s like a source of life and hope and power, throbbing against my touch.

  “Good grief, are you a priest? Are you on a sabbatical or a holiday or something?”

  It’s the only explanation. He’s a man of the cloth, celibate, yet still human and still a man whose body and emotions work like any other man’s. His hormones and his subconscious still have the drives, even though he’s pledged to a sex-free life.

  “Not a priest. No. But you might say it’s in that general sort of area.” He takes my hand from him, gives it another little kiss then scoots away across the bed. Slipping to his feet, he stands beside it, looking down on me. His expression is one of resignation, as if he has to face telling me a difficult truth.

  “What do you mean in that general sort of area?” I’m shaking. I don’t know what to expect. Is he some higher echelon of priest? Surely he’s not a bishop? I don’t know what the hierarchy is. But somehow I sense it’s more, much more and stranger than that.

  “Well…it’s this.”

  My eyes widen as I watch, the world tilting and sliding…

  With my mouth hanging open and a strange buzzing in my ears, I look not at Patrick’s face, but the air just behind him. The sight takes my breath away, quite literally. I gulp as I finally remember to breathe again.

  There’s what can only be described as a disturbance in reality. It twists and warps and then there’s a snap like a high wind catching a sail, and two great shimmering, fluttering, feathered structures unfurl from his shoulders, perfectly visible and yet at the same time insubstantial and translucent as vapor.

  Everything seems to drop away from beneath me. It doesn’t make sense. There is no sense to it, but Patrick leans forward, grabs my hands in his, the grip as real and tangible as the phenomenon behind him is impossible.

  “Wh-what are th-they?” I stammer, even though the shape is unmistakable. I want to look away, but I know they’ll still be there when I look back again.

  “They’re my wings,” says Patrick. “I’m sorry. I should have told you I was an angel.”

  As I crumple into unconsciousness, I feel him hold me close again.

  Chapter Three

  I open my eyes in the dark. What time is it? Where am I? What the hell has happened?

  With a struggle, bits come back to me in something of a jumble. Staring at the ceiling, I attempt to sort through them, pull them to the surface of my half-asleep brain. Some of them make me smile in the darkness, feeling sensual and slightly wicked. A little debauched.

  As far as I can decipher, I passed out from pleasure again, had an orgasm so stupendous that I blacked out from the intensity of it. Or at least, I think that’s what happened. There’s no other explanation for me being awake one moment and out cold the next.

  Does this always happen with Patrick? Boy, he’s good. Do his women always swoon when he makes them climax?

  Still drifting and not fully with it, I stir and test my limbs in my usual exploration of possible pain. Everything seems fine though, better than fine. I wriggle my hips and wiggle my fingers and there’s barely a twinge.

  Excellent. But it’s still a task to order my thoughts and clear my brain. In fact, the more I reach for it, the fuzzier everything becomes. Something’s sharp enough though, and I smile, gasp, almost reliving the delicious pleasure of Patrick’s mouth against me. My sex flutters as if he’s still down there, making magic with his tongue.

  But still there’s something else bugging me. It’s big and scary, but I just can’t make it resolve. My mind keeps blanking when I grapple for it, almost as it’s automatically trying to save me from myself, and some appalling, astonishing secret or shock.

  Then, still thrashing my brain cells, I freeze. It’s not memory though, just physical realization. My heart starts to pound.

  Beside me, I hear a soft sigh, and to accompany it the sound of a body shifting against the mattress.

  Oh, how wonderful. How wonderful and strange and unexpected.

  I’m not alone.

  Rolling to one side, I pat around and find that far from disappearing and leaving me to wake alone like before, Patrick is still here sleeping next to me. We’re both reposed on the top of the duvet. I’m naked and lovingly swathed in my favorite fleece throw again, and he’s just lying there, fully clothed, on his side with his hands tucked beneath his face like an angelic child.

  Angelic? Oh God…

  It all comes slamming back in with the force of a pneumatic hammer. The memory emerges from the lingering clouds of sleep. Something that just has to be a dream or some kind of mind trick, because it’s too crazy and far too far out there to be real.

  I could swear I saw wings. Yes, wings, for heaven’s sake. Great big, honking wings, attached to Patrick’s shoulders.

  Well, I say attached. That was a bit of a grey area. They seemed to be there, and yet they weren’t there. Beautiful, substantial constructions of immaculate, snowy-white feathers, yet transparent as if projected on a screen.

  Crikey, it’s no wonder I passed out. Who wouldn’t?

  They’re not there now though. Gingerly, I sit up and shake off my throw, and then, shifting my weight as little as possible, I lean over him. No, no wings. The back of his waistcoat is dark silk, smooth and undamaged, covering his strong back and certainly not hiding any supernatural appendages. Just to be sure, I cautiously reach across and touch the satiny cloth. There’s heat from his body, and his muscles are firm and resilient, but there’s nothing at all there that shouldn’t be.

  I frown and my mind capers around a bit. What about hypnotism? Was he using the power of suggestion for some arcane purpose he’s yet to reveal to me? It has to be that. It’s a game, and I just don’t know why he’s playing it yet.

  A little sigh interrupts my examinations, and I freeze. Rocking back again, I look down into Patrick’s eyes, so blue and still lambent despite the darkness. His expression is clear and innocent, but it could be hiding terrible danger.

  “Hello.” He unfolds his hands from beneath his cheek and then unfolds himself up into a sitting position.

  He’s so handsome. So like a man, a gorgeous one, but pretty normal. So not like any man I’ve ever known, or imagined knowing, perhaps not even a man at all. No, please, that’s ridiculous. He is a man. He’s got to be.

  “What I think I saw… I imagined it, didn’t I?” Suddenly it dawns on me I’m as good as naked, and I scrabble for my throw and wrap it tightly around me. I wish I could reach my old velour dressing gown hanging on the hook behind the door. It covers me from neck to toes, and it’s substantial. “Are you some kind of hypnotist? Or something like that?”

  “No, I’m afraid you didn’t imagine it,” says the so-called angel on my bed.

  He’s quiet and unshakably calm, which only makes me almost judder with confusion and frustration. “Oh, come on. You’re not really telling me you’re an angel, are you? You’ve got to be kidding. You are joking, aren’t you?”

  He shakes his head in answer.

  “Well, that’s just great.” I’m still taking this in, and it’s hard. In fact it’s impossible. So many implications I daren’t even think about. If he’s scamming me somehow it’s bad, bad, bad. But if he believes it himself, that’s even worse. If he’s delusional… “How on earth can you be an angel when I’m not even sure I believe in them?”

  I feel cold and sick. Maybe I’m the one going mad, not him. But if he is a dangerous lunatic, then how the hell can I see his hallucination?

  “You don’t have to believe in me for me to exist.” The words are nonsense. They don’t compute. He scans me with those sharp eyes of his, and I can feel him reading my fears and doubts. He makes as if to move forward and embrace me, and I shrink back. How can something as delicious as the pleasure we’ve shared go bad so quickly.

  I must get him
out of here. I could be in deadly peril. My brain instructs me, but my heart and body still respond to his beauty.

  Oh hell, do I still want him? Even after this latest bombshell?

  “Won’t you give me a chance to explain?” The sadness in his voice twists my heart. It sounds so genuine, and yet it could be another trick. If he’s anything like what I fear him to be, he’s as fiendishly clever as he is adorable to look at. Adorable with tragic eyes filled with pain.

  Slowly, more laboriously than I’ve ever seen him move, he climbs off the bed. It’s as if I’ve aged him overnight with my disapproval. I want to surge forward and embrace him and hug away all the pain, but still…still…

  Oh, I just don’t know. I think I need a little space.

  “Very well.” His words are barely audible, but they’re louder than the ones that I only thought. Whatever or whoever he is, his mentalist powers are extraordinary.

  Relief gusts through me like a wind as he walks away towards the open French window. But it’s a cold and wintry blast, despite the balmy summer night. Again, I battle the urge to rush to him and cuddle away his sorrow and our conflict.

  At the threshold he pauses. “May I come to visit you tomorrow? During the day time perhaps, in the garden? So we can talk?”

  So we can talk about what? About his ridiculous claims? How he does what he does? Talk about the infinitesimally slight and frankly terrifying possibility that he might actually be telling the truth.

  “I don’t know. I need to time to think. Some space.” I babble the usual clichés, everything inside me helter-skelter. I do need to be alone so I can attempt to find a calm place.

  “Very well.” Patrick already seems to be in a calm place, but I’m not too sure he likes it. “I’ll wait until you’re ready.” He yanks in a breath, and his exquisite old-young face shifts and changes in a rapid shadow-play of stark, conflicting emotions. “But…well, I might not be here too long now, and I’d like us to come to some kind of agreement and to be friends before I go.”

  “Okay, okay. I’ll see you tomorrow, maybe.”

  He nods and the moonlight glints on his hair. “Goodnight, Miranda.” He starts away across the balcony, and like an idiot I do scoot across to him. But I stay on my side of the divide, in my darkened room.

  Still at sixes and sevens, I say the first stupid thing that comes into my head.

  “Aren’t you going to fly then?”

  He jumps, looks completely taken aback. A flare of hope lights his eyes for a second then dulls again.

  “No, not this time.” With a final nod, he starts away down the stairs.

  While I head for the kitchen, seeking a cup of tea, my body still shakes.

  The next day, I have my time and my space, but I still don’t arrive at any conclusions. I fumble through a morning at the charity shop, making so many mistakes that they send me home early. And a while later, I’m sitting in the kitchen, comfort eating a chocolate éclair and turning over everything I heard and saw and felt and did during my two brief but astounding interludes with a man who may or may not be an angel-or a confidence trickster-when the phone rings.

  “Hello, Miranda, love. How are you doing?”

  My ex’s familiar voice used to make my heart flutter but today that organ feels indifferent to him and disappointed that it’s not another voice. The voice of someone I’m wishing and wishing and wishing would come around and see me, even if he is probably as bad for me as my ex-husband.

  Even so, as Steve and I chat, I start to warm to him, and it’s as if I only remember the good times, not the bad. We skip from one inconsequential topic to another at first, but pretty soon I begin to hear the tension in him, the edge I recognize from the beginning of our end. When I ask if anything’s wrong, it all spills out, a tale of woe.

  His business has failed. His new relationship is rocky. He misses me, or so he says. Part of me almost believes him. But when massive debts are mentioned, I grit my teeth, indentifying the real reason for his call.

  Of course, he couches it in a touching display of regret for what he did to me, and heavy-handed intimations that we should get back together again, but we both know he’s really tapping me for money. And quite a lot of it.

  As we talk, it’s like I’m in a play or following the action in a book. The real me is thinking, what would Patrick do? I don’t know why, but it seems important to know what he thinks and to take the course that he’d approve.

  Why? Why? Why? I’ve only known him two days and he might well be even more self-serving than the man I’m speaking to. Or he might be just the one to set me on the true, right path.

  When Steve gets my unspoken message that I don’t want him back, he comes out and lays his cards on the table. He asks for a loan.

  “I’ll pay you back when I can, you know that, love, don’t you?”

  What I do know, or at least suspect, is that if I give him it I’ll never see it, and probably him, ever again.

  I’m on the spot. I must decide. Apparently, Steve borrowed the money from people that he shouldn’t have, whose methods are unscrupulous.

  After what he did, I should say no. And yet, I still remember a time when he made me happy, and I can’t deny the love that we once had, even if mine was greater.

  I say, “Okay,” and then feel light and dizzy. In my mind, Patrick seems to smile and nod.

  Later, I lie on my mattress beneath my parasol out on the balcony. I feel strangely calm about the money I’m going to give to Steve, even though it’s a sizeable bite out of my assets and I might end up having to find a job again.

  It’s the other beautiful young man who’s making me restless. The one whose very nature I turn and turn over in my mind.

  Thoughts whirling, I begin to regret the two glasses of wine I had with lunch. I don’t normally drink during the day, but these are special circumstances. I’ve never been faced before with such a conundrum.

  Who are you? Who are you? What are you? Who are you? Who are you?

  It beats like a mantra in my brain until I’m hypnotized and feeling drowsy. The afternoon is warm, the scent from the flowers below is sweet and soporific, and the wine was good stuff and packed a punch. Before long I feel myself drifting, and I welcome the haze. At least if I sleep I won’t have to think. Or ponder. Or even just wait.

  In my dream I’m still warm, though the heat is diffuse, not like the sun. I feel as if I’m floating, yet lying down, curled on my side, perhaps on a soft couch, or maybe even suspended in mid air, unbound by gravity or weight. I’m no longer wearing the light day dress I lay down in and my eyes are closed, yet still I seem to see a mellow glow.

  I’m relaxed. I feel free. No doubts and fears and worries assail me. I smile as a presence gathers against my back, molding to the shape of my spine and buttocks.

  Patrick.

  I know it’s him, even though I can’t see him and he doesn’t speak. Warm arms circle around me, sweetly familiar, and I feel completely safe and happy as if the real world and its questions don’t exist. He grips me lightly at breast and crotch, and his mouth is soft as velvet against my ear. Loving his touch, and yes, loving him, I arch against him.

  His lips feel heavenly pressed against my skin, and his hold on me tightens, keeping me close against him. Then we seem to roll and turn and float. There’s a sound like beating and long, deep flapping, and I realize-without surprise, because it’s a dream-that we’re flying. He’s gripping me securely against his body while his great wings bear us aloft.

  The sensation is beautiful, transcendent, and it seems perfectly natural that he should start to caress me intimately. He curves his hand at my breast and cups me, thumb working slowly on my nipple in time to the lazy strokes of our celestial flight. Between my legs, his long finger divides my labia, pressing in through the soft mat of my pubic bush. He squeezes my crotch in the same languid rhythm.

  Curving to fit tighter against him, I place my hands over his, feeling his warm, smooth skin and the way the
fine muscles of his fingers flex and stretch as he strokes me. I tilt my hips to give him better access, and to press my bottom against the hard mass of his erection. He’s naked in flight, and his cock is burning hot, like a rock against my bottom crease.

  As we fly and writhe against each other, he sings to me, his voice liquid, wordless music in my ears. Even my own groans of need and desire are in harmony, matching the rhythm of his arpeggios and the stroke and squeeze of his fingers.

  Helplessly aroused and with the heavy drag of desire winding in my belly, I surge against him, my clitoris tingling beneath his beautiful, accurate fingertip. My legs wave wildly, but he holds me without effort, our bodies turning together in slow rolls, unshackled by forces of nature. He plays with my nipple and rubs his cock along my anal groove, hot and teasing.

  Time doesn’t pass the way it normally would. Breaths take an hour to draw in. The circle of his finger around my clit seems to last a day. When I have an orgasm, the pleasure builds over what seems like a millennium, intensity spiraling and soaring as do we, swooping and rolling as if we were diving through waves of bliss.

  “I love you,” I sob as all goes soft and dark.

  Just as we’re extinguished, Patrick answers, “I love you too.”

  I wake a while later to gilded twilight, the dying sun creating a skyscape that echoes my dream. If that’s what it was.

  My body feels heavy, replete with pleasure. As if I really did swoop and fly with Patrick, turning and barrel-rolling into ecstasy. It’s hard to sit up, as if I’m pinned to the mattress by complete relaxation, but I manage to haul myself up, gritting my teeth at a few little twinges as I straighten.

  We’re supposed to be having a talk. Did I say I’d go over and see him, or did he say he’d come here? I can’t remember. I only know I want to see him. I want to know. I want to hear whatever he has to say. Although after that strange dream, I’m not sure what I believe.