Falling Awake (22 page)

“You didn’t scare me. I was concerned, that’s all.” She glanced at the briefcase. “Although I, uh, didn’t realize that you were armed.”

He didn’t say anything, just stood there looking at her with an enigmatic expression.

She reminded herself that he had just responded to a perceived threat with a gun in his hand. There was probably a lot of adrenaline and testosterone still pumping through him. She needed to give him time to get himself under control.

“It’s okay, Ellis.” She made her voice as soothing as possible. “Why don’t I fix you a nice cup of tea?”

He took a step toward her and stopped. “Next time I tell you to get down on the floor and stay there, you do it. Understood?”

She sighed. “You’re really mad, aren’t you?”

“I’m mad, all right. Last night someone you knew well got himself killed, remember?”

“I’m hardly likely to forget it.”

“We aren’t playing games here.”

“I’m perfectly well aware of that.” She felt her own temper start to flare. “You don’t need to lecture me.”

This discussion was turning into a full-blown quarrel, she thought. Why was that happening? Now that the small scare was past, they should both be relaxing, savoring the relief, maybe even joking about the incident.

But there was no amusement in Ellis. She could feel the edgy, battle-ready tension coming off him in dangerous waves of raw power. She wouldn’t have been surprised if there had been a few sparks in the air.

“No,” he said. “I don’t want any tea.”

She folded her arms tightly beneath her breasts. “Maybe a drink?”

“No.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “You think I’m overreacting, don’t you?”

“I think that, under the circumstances, your reaction is entirely reasonable.”

“Lawson says my jumpiness is a side effect of my post-traumatic stress and my obsession with Scargill.” Ellis scrubbed his face with one hand. “Maybe he knows what he’s talking about. Maybe I have gone around the bend and just don’t realize it.”

“I don’t believe that,” she said quietly. “Not for a moment.”

He lowered his hand and stared hard at her. “How can you be sure?”

She unfolded her arms and moved to stand directly in front of him, inches away. “I’ve walked through your dreams for the past year, Ellis Cutler. I would know if you were dangerously obsessed or deluded. I would also know if you were suffering from post-traumatic stress.”

He exhaled slowly. “Yes. I think you of all people would know the truth about me.”

She smiled slightly. “Want that drink now?”

He shook his head, slowly, deliberately. Then he raised one hand and wrapped it lightly around the nape of her neck.

A rush of heat flashed through her, igniting her nerve endings all the way to her fingertips. She knew that her body’s internal temperature-regulating mechanism had just gone on the fritz, because she was suddenly hot and cold all over.

“I dream about you,” Ellis said. He spoke in the harshest of whispers, producing each word as though it were a chunk of ore that he’d been forced to dig from the farthest reaches of a deep, sunless cavern. “I dream about taking you to bed.”

Her mouth went dry.

“You do?” She had to struggle to get the words out.

He searched her eyes. “I’m scaring you, aren’t I? You’re starting to wonder if maybe Lawson is right about me, after all.”

“You’re not scaring me.”

“Didn’t you just hear what I said? I
dream
about you. Some folks would call that a sign of an obsessive personality.”

She touched the side of his face. “Studies show that a significant percentage of dreams involve sexual content, and dreams about engaging in sex with strangers are quite common for both men and women.”

“I don’t dream about having sex with strangers. I dream about having sex with you.” His eyes darkened. “And the dreams are all Level Five, extreme and very, very lucid. Do you have any idea how many cold showers I’ve taken in the past year?”

“Oh.” She did not know what else to say. She was dazed and breathless.

His mouth twisted. “Now you’re scared, aren’t you?”

“No. Honest.”

“You probably should be.”

“You don’t scare me, Ellis Cutler.”

“Maybe not. But I think I’m scaring myself. I should go back to the inn.” He took his hand away from her neck and started to turn toward the briefcase.

She was suddenly very cold.

“Ellis.”

He stopped. The heat in his eyes burned away the chill.

“What is it?”

“I dream about you, too,” she whispered starkly. “Level Five with all the trimmings.”

He was very still. “You never saw me. Never knew what I looked like.”

“In my dreams your face was always in shadow but I knew who you were. There was never any doubt.” She smiled. “I knew enough
about you to recognize you the other day when you walked into the auditorium at Kyler headquarters. Somehow you looked exactly like you were supposed to look.”

He took a step toward her, not touching her but crowding all the air out of the space that separated them.

“I recognized you, too.” Now he touched her, cradling her face in his warm, strong hands. “But I had an advantage.”

“What was that?”

“After I started dreaming about you, I told Belvedere I wanted a photo of you. Gave him some tale about needing it for security reasons. Not that he cared one way or the other.”

She went blank for an instant. Then a memory returned. Delight and wonder rose inside her.

“The gorgeous orchids,” she whispered. “I remember Dr. B. taking a snapshot. He told me it was for his files.” She broke off, her euphoric mood dropping like a stone when she got a sudden, bad flashback to all the failed hairstyles she had tried out in the past year. “I can’t recall what phase I was in that day. What did my hair look like? Did it involve a lot of curls? Please don’t tell me there were curls.”

He smiled slowly. “No curls. Sounds interesting, though.”

“I hope it wasn’t my blond era, either. That was not a success.”

He shook his head. “Your hair looked a lot like it does now. You had it pulled back into a knot at the back of your head.”

“Oh, that’s right, I was between experiments that week.” She put her hand to her hair and winced. “This is my default mode. I call it the Desperately Professional Look.”

“You don’t look desperately professional when you wear your hair like this. You look like a sexy, sultry tango dancer.”

“Really?” No one had ever described her as sexy, let alone as a sultry tango dancer. “I’ve never even taken tango lessons.”

“Neither have I. But something tells me we could learn together.”

“Oh, Ellis.”

He used one hand to tilt her head back, baring her throat. She could have sworn that she could hear the first dramatic, mysterious chords of the bandoneón, the instrument forever associated with the most passionate dance in the world.

When Ellis kissed her shoulder she thought she would burst into flames. She shuddered and wrapped her arms around his neck, pressing herself into him.

His mouth found the delicate place just below her ear. He used his tongue and the edge of his teeth until she could not stop the delicious shivers that pulsed through her.

She drew the inside of her thigh upward alongside his leg, thrilling to the shudder that went through him and the powerful contours of muscle and bone beneath his skin.

By the time his mouth closed over hers, she was shaking with the intensity of the emotions pouring through her. Every nerve ending in her body was alive. The part of her that had been dreaming for so long was fully awake. No matter what happened, no matter where this moment led, she had to discover what awaited her in this bright, new dawn.

“Isabel.”
Ellis tightened his arms around her and crushed her against the length of his body. “I want you so much, I’m hurting tonight. I knew it would be like this.”

She was stunningly aware of his fierce arousal. There was nothing halfhearted or lukewarm about his passion. He had told her his dreams for nearly a year, but unlike the other men she had dated, he did not see her as a sympathetic friend or a big sister tonight. He saw her as a tango dancer, and in his arms she felt like one: daring, alluring, smoldering, gloriously, powerfully feminine.

At least once in a lifetime, everyone deserved the chance to make at least one dream come true.

She kissed him the way she had wanted to kiss him in her private midnight fantasies, deliberately trying to provoke and incite; experimenting, sampling, savoring.

Somehow her shirt had come undone. She didn’t realize he had slipped the buttons until he was peeling the garment off her.

The emerald green fabric fell into a tropical pool at her feet.

Ellis traced the line of her shoulder with the edge of his thumb, as though mesmerized by the curves and angles there. Then he bent his head and kissed her just above her collarbone.

“You have the most beautiful shoulders,” he whispered.

“I took out a gym membership last year,” she said before stopping to think. She blushed furiously. Great. That was a real sexy thing to say, she thought.

“It was worth every cent,” he assured her gravely, and then he kissed her throat.

She wished she had known what was coming. She would have liked to have put on one of the sensual nightgowns she always wore when she dreamed about him. That was the problem with waking life. You couldn’t predict it.

“Maybe Lawson’s right.” Ellis’s voice was low and heavy with desire. “Maybe I am becoming obsessive. All I can think about right now is what it’s going to feel like to be inside you.”

She unfastened the buttons of his shirt and slid her hands under the edges so she could feel the sleek muscles of his chest. “That’s okay, because that’s all I can think about right now, too.”

He removed her bra and cupped her breasts in the palms of his hand. When he brushed his thumb across one nipple she felt everything inside her tighten into a knot.

She managed to fumble his shirt off and then paused when she felt the unnaturally rough texture of the skin at the back of his right shoulder. Scars, she thought. Big ones. She was horrified in spite of the fact that she had known of the injury. He had come so close to death.

“This was where Scargill shot you, isn’t it?” she whispered.

He hesitated. “Not real pretty, I’m afraid. The doctors said they could do some cosmetic surgery after it was healed but I never went back. I don’t want to see the inside of a hospital again if I can avoid it.”

She touched him as gently as possible. “It doesn’t matter how it looks. I just don’t want to hurt you.”

“You won’t.” He raised his head. “But the damn shoulder
doesn’t work as well as it once did. That means I can’t scoop you up in my arms and carry you off to the bedroom. I’d have to throw you over my good shoulder, which seems a little tacky.”

Laughter bubbled up inside her. “Guess what? I can walk.”

“Lucky you,” he muttered into her hair with great feeling. “I can barely stand up.”

But he was obviously in better shape than he thought because he locked her close to his side and drew her down the hall. It took a while to get to their destination because every few steps he stopped and pinned her against the wall long enough to kiss her and remove another item of clothing. By the time they reached the shadows of her bedroom she had somehow managed to shed all of her clothes except for her panties.

She slid beneath the covers and waited for him. Ellis got rid of his own garments with efficient, impatient movements. He turned toward her and then stopped and just stood there, looking at her as if she weren’t quite real. She realized that she was lying in a splash of moonlight.

“You are so lovely,” he said.

She could not speak so she smiled tremulously and raised her arms to welcome him into her bed.

He said something low, husky and hungry-sounding when he lowered himself to her.

And then the world went away. All that mattered was the hot, damp passion of their lovemaking.

Ellis’s kisses singed every part of her from head to toe. When
he found the inside of her thigh she gasped and clutched at him. Burying her fingers in his hair, she twisted beneath him, feeling full and achy and frantic.

Her sexual experience had been limited—nonexistent altogether for the past year. She had told herself that one of the reasons she found it easy to forgo intimacy was because she had never found any genuinely stirring pleasure in the act. Her private fantasy dreams had always been a great deal more satisfying.

But tonight she was swamped with sensations she had never experienced except in her dreams and even in those the feelings had never been so intense.

When she reached down to cup him in her palm, he groaned, rolled to cover her and rested his forehead on hers. She could have sworn he was shaking a little. His back was slick with perspiration.

He reached down between their bodies, found the part of her that was clenched tight and gently pried it open with his fingers. Her hips came up off the bed in response. With his hand he urged her toward the response that her body demanded.

When her release struck she was so overwhelmed and so undone she could not even cry out. She convulsed, sinking her nails into his back.

He was inside her before the shimmering ripples had subsided, sinking deep. The sudden pressure created by the heavy, rigid length of him caused her body to soar along the delicate border between exquisite pleasure and exquisite pain.

“Ellis.”

He stopped at once, halfway inside her. When he raised his head to look down at her she could see his face etched in the moonlight. Highwayman, vampire, dashing rake; he was all of them, all of her midnight men.

“Are you okay?” he asked hoarsely.

“No. Yes.”

She encircled him with her legs, tightening her thighs. He groaned and crushed her down into the bedding.

His climax tore through him.

She heard satisfaction, exultation and astonished pleasure in the husky, elemental, utterly male cry of release.

h
e came out of the bathroom some time later, got back into bed and wrapped her close. He put one hand behind his head and looked up at the ceiling.