The Unquiet - J. D. Robb [164]
“Okay. So how do I get back into the dream on your side of their heaven?”
She looked at him, shook her head, and passed her free hand through her hair in disbelief. “I feel like we’re already there, in the same bizarre dream I’ve been having for weeks. You were right before, about it being a good thing no one’s recording us. We sound completely nuts.”
“What’s your point?” he asked, deadpan . . . and then they both laughed with as much relief as humor.
Taking a deep breath, she jumped in with both feet. “Let’s go with it, then. Completely nuts, I think we should start our dream in the same place, together.”
He looked askance, and her gaze drifted over his shoulder to the head of the bed, where one pillow lay indented, the other not. When her eyes came back to his, he was asking something else.
“Knock it off. First we help Oliver. Focus.”
He made a minor production of it. “We sleep together. Literally. Then what?”
She shrugged. “We let Oliver take over.” She stood and started padding toward the bathroom. “If it works, we get firm with him.” She went through the doorway. “We’re a united front. Okay? We finish this here and now and no more riddles or talking in circles. He tells us what he needs us to do to free him, tells you whatever it is he needs to tell you . . . and you say what you need to say, and then it’s over. All right?”
Finished, she lingered in the doorway and turned out the bathroom light, though the lamp on the bedside table still shed plenty to reveal him lying on his side in her bed, head propped on one hand as he grinned and patted the bed next to him with the other.
Raising one deadly brow in jest and pointing an admonishing index finger at him, she reiterated in a mostly serious fashion, “ All right?”
“ All right. All right.” He chuckled when he leaned back and stretched out his arm to turn out the lamp as she got to the bed. “I don’t want my kid brother lurking around in your head the first time we make love any more than you do, so let’s make this work. I’m getting jumpy.”
“Jumpy, huh.” She got into bed next to him—even though she was lying stiff as a board along the very edge of her side of the bed, she was aware of every breath he took. His long arms and legs took up a lot of room. It was a king-sized bed, and she felt like he was all over it. She could feel his body heat a foot away . . . and was a little jumpy herself.
“Mm, jumpy. Under my skin. All pins and needles like my body’s been asleep for the past ten years. Tingly, you know? Jumpy.” Yes! She got it. She knew. “And whether you’re lying eighteen inches away or not it doesn’t change anything. I feel this way just knowing you’re in the neighborhood . . . in the northern hemisphere . . . on the planet, actually.” The sheets rustled and pitched when he turned toward her. “So don’t you think it’d be easier for Oliver if we were closer together?”
She rolled her head to face him—the shadow of his shoulders and torso loomed like a sloping mountain range. “How much closer?”
“Oh, say, share-a-pillow close.” Those were the words he used but the low, rich rumble of his voice made it sound like in-my-arms, smell-your-hair, kiss-your-neck close.
“ Anything to make it easier on Oliver.” Sportingly, she began to scoot to the center of the bed, and next thing she knew, he had her tucked against his body—her back to his chest—one arm under the pillow supporting her head, the other wrapped tight around her middle. “Ah . . . are you . . . are you really, really, really happy to see me or did you bring a missile to bed?”
“A what?”
“A metal pipe maybe?”
After a bit of thrashing about, he started to laugh. “You’re going to be so disappointed.” A blinding beam of light shone on the far wall when he flipped on the flashlight that he’d retrieved near her ankles. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be. I’m faint with relief.”
They laughed and settled in again; any tension they felt was dispelled and replaced with an intimate sense of sharing a common purpose. They took comfort in the other