Eternally Yours (The Afterlife Series Book 1) by Gina Ardito

Author:Gina Ardito [Ardito, Gina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Victoria Ardito
Published: 2012-06-26T05:00:00+00:00

♥♥♥♥

A sudden slamming door, followed by a man’s tuneless whistle, broke through Jodie’s despair. Gabe! Drawing herself into a tight coil, she spiraled up toward the stucco medallion carved in the ceiling. Within seconds, she’d transformed to what the human eye would assume was a shaft of white sunlight.

Heavy footsteps thudded down the hall, drawing nearer, until at last Gabe stepped into the makeshift studio. He’d lost weight. The chubby chipmunk cheeks she used to love to pinch now angled sharply toward his chin. His once beautiful gray-green eyes were now bloodshot and rimmed by dark purple shadows. Had she caused that haggard look in him?

Oh, Gabe, I’m so sorry!

Guilt nearly sank her to the floorboards, but she kept spinning, drawing on every atom of fortitude she found whirling inside her.

A cool breeze rippled the air as he passed beneath her hiding place, his gaze focused solely on the painting on the easel. Shooting his weight to one hip, he stared at the image he’d conceived. “Hello, my lovely.”

The endearment—and the memories the term inspired—shattered Jodie, and she fell in graceful beads to the floor, dust motes dancing on a sunbeam. Their first meeting came to her so clearly she may as well have relived every precious second.

She strolled through the Metropolitan Museum of Art, viewing a collection of Native South American Painting and Sculpture. Inside the Gallery of Portraitures, a man sat, sketch book in hand, studying a gouache painting by a Cuban artist of the 1940’s. Curious, she inched closer to the man’s sketch. In gray and red pencil, he’d captured the bold strokes, the foliage, the shadows of dark and light.

“Lovely,” she remarked before her brain stopped her tongue.

The man started, looked up from the drawing, his eyes wide. Hazel eyes with thick brown lashes she couldn’t attain with a whole tube of mascara and a gamut of makeup specialists standing by.

“Yes,” he murmured. “You are.”

Even years later, Jodie would never really know which of them reacted more strongly to his compliment. She coughed and sputtered her way through an embarrassed thank you while he stammered out a bumbled but touching apology. That one clumsy interlude led to coffee in the Met’s Balcony Café, which led to dinner the following night, and so on and so on. And from that first moment together, he had always called her, “my lovely.”

All the way up to the moment of her suicide. Why hadn’t she believed him? Why had she doomed them both with one momentary weakness? Why didn’t she—

“Gabe? Sweetheart?” A woman called from the front room. Seconds later, heels clicked across the oaken floor. “Are you home?”

Jodie scurried to gather her broken pieces, only to see Gabe scrambling to throw a drop cloth over the painting.

“In the studio, Aimee,” he replied.

He turned away from the easel. A bright smile stretched his lips when the woman, a baby dressed in pink riding on her hip, stepped into the room. “How are my two lovelies?”

Jodie, perched on high, felt the slice when Gabe used her endearment on these two strangers.

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