• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

But somewhere around an hour ago, his breathing had changed from the controlled inhaling and exhaling she could barely discern, to the deep, rhythmic soughing of sleep.

Claire listened to the slow sounds of his slumber, while Danika’s words about the rarity of second chances and not wasting precious time on regrets were playing over and over in her mind like a song she couldn’t get out of her head. There was so much she wanted to say to Andreas. Things she needed him to hear.

Not that he would listen. He didn’t seem inclined to let her get close enough to reach him at all. And she needed to be close to him now, if only to feel his strength beside her when everything she thought she knew about her world was crumbling at her feet.

She’d felt a wall come up between them tonight. It seemed to grow taller and less scalable the longer they were at the farmhouse Darkhaven. Claire wasn’t sure what she’d done to upset him, or maybe it was simply the fact that he’d been forced to look after her now that Wilhelm was likely gunning for them both.

For a moment she wished she’d been gifted with Danika’s talent so that Andreas’s mind, and his cryptic emotions, wouldn’t be such a mystery to her right now.

Her own ability could help her there, too. Everyone was more accessible in the dream realm. Not everything said or seen was truth, of course, but the surreal nature of dreams had a way of peeling back inhibitions.

Claire ventured a look over the expanse of the wide bed to the large bulk of Andreas’s body where he slept on the floor. She tucked her arm under her head and curled up on her side, watching him. Wondering where his dreams had taken him. She closed her eyes and thought about him as she let her body relax, willing her mind to calm and prepare for sleep.

She let her talent stretch, tendrils of awareness reaching… searching.

It usually took incredible focus to find the dreamer, but with Andreas, she’d no sooner slipped under the veil of consciousness and slumber than there he was. It had always been like that with him, as if their connection had been there from the instant they first met and had never weakened.

There had been times, long after Andreas was gone from her life, that Claire had been tempted to seek him out, if only in the dream realm. But she’d been too afraid of facing more of his rejection, and too ashamed of herself that, try as she might, she could not find for Wilhelm anything close to the love she had been unable to purge for Andreas.

After all that had happened the past couple of nights, what she felt now for Wilhelm and the blood bond that shackled her to him was a cold and biting mistrust. Contempt, if everything she was learning about him was true.

After all she’d been through with Andreas in these harrowing, intense long hours together, she had to admit to some measure of fear for the lethal individual he was now. But along with that fear had come a rush of emotion that terrified her even more for how strongly she still felt for him.

For how deeply she still wanted him, needed him.

How easily she could see herself falling back in love with him … if she’d ever truly stopped.

As she walked into his dream now, her breath caught to find him under the starlight of a clear evening, seated shirtless and barefoot in the crisp, cool grass of the parkland sanctuary she had designed for his vacant Darkhaven property. All the details were just as she had them on the architect’s model, down to the very last bench and flower bed.

Good lord. He had memorized the entire plan.

“It’s beautiful,” he said, his deep voice a vibration she felt all the way into her bones. “You knew exactly what needed to be here. Somehow, you knew.”

He didn’t turn to face her as she cautiously approached him at the edge of his dream, where the land he was imagining in his sleep hugged the glittering lake beyond. Andreas’s golden skin was luminescent in the moonlight, made all the more striking by the flourish of twisting, twining