The Man of her Dreams: A Paranormal Romance (4 page)

She had to laugh. “If you don’t know what a car is, you’d be completely amazed to see an airplane,” she said, and he furrowed his brow at her. She realized she had to explain a car to him first, before moving on to other things. But how? She waved her hand in the air, trying to conjure up some way to explain the things she knew so well.

“It’s… well, a car is a vehicle. A way to get around. It’s kind of like…well, like a horse-drawn carriage, but without the horse. The thing that makes it go is an engine, inside the car. It goes on roads and takes me places.”

“But how does the engine go?”

“With gasoline.”

Philip raised an eyebrow again. “What’s gasoline?”

She grinned and continued explaining. Philip was an excellent listener, and she found herself spurred on to tell him more and more, as the hours flew by. By the time she had explained gasoline, then airplanes, then even trains and various other ways of traveling without horses, the sky was starting to turn to light. The booms of the destruction were now completely gone, but she was staring at a sky that was quickly losing its stars. One by one they fell, slowly leaving streaks across the sunrise sky.

“I have to go soon,” she said, and Philip stepped forward. His voice was urgent as he looked at her with wide eyes.

“Not yet, please,” he said, and she stared at him as he came toward her. She was still a bit wary, but was now comfortable enough that she let him approach her without the need to bolt as hard and as fast as she could. When he was within arms’ reach, he stopped and stared into her eyes. The intensity of that gaze made her knees feel a little weak and made her breath a little short.

“Before you go…
Alexis, may I kiss you?”

Alexis laughed out loud. The sound burst from her without any conscious thought, a reflex that came from being so shocked by something so ludicrous. The contrast between his chivalrous tone and the absurdity of their situation was just too much to handle. She barely trusted him to stand there in front of her and not bring the fires of hell down upon them. She was now supposed to give him a kiss? What planet was this man from, anyway?

But then she remembered the way he had kissed her in the last dream. He had been more aggressive than Evan, more sure of what he wanted, and she couldn’t help but think about the way that her body had gone all liquid – and how, in that moment, she had wanted him more than anything else in the world.

“You may,” she said. He smiled, and closed the distance between them with one long step. She looked right up into his eyes, only inches from her now, and then her gaze fell to his full lips.

“Wait,” she said. “I would only like to kiss you on the condition of honesty. No hidden agendas, and no tricking. Just a kiss.”

Philip smiled, but said nothing, and just gave her a silent, solemn nod. He reached up and brushed her hair back from her forehead. The touch of his skin against hers sent a small, pleasant shock through her body, a wave of pleasure that reminded her even more strongly of the way he had kissed her until her knees gave out and left her in his arms. Before she could collect herself and say what she meant to say, Philip leaned down and closed the final distance between them, pressing his soft lips firmly against hers.

It was a short kiss, but sometimes those were the sweetest. Alexis pulled away after just a moment, and Philip didn’t chase her. He just waited there, to see what she might do. But the pull of desire was already too strong, and she wound up leaning forward, pressing her lips to his again.
What in the world am I doing?
she wondered, even as her hands came up to his broad shoulders and his own arms went around her waist.

Philip pulled her tight against him. Even though the clothing they both wore, she could feel the strength of his body and the way she melted against him, every curve of her body fitting every hard angle of his. Her hands delved into his hair and she sighed when his kiss deepened, his tongue dueling with hers. A small part of her brain wondered how much of her common sense she had just taken leave of, but the rest of it wondered how much further she was willing to go.

As if he’d read her thoughts, his hands tightened around her in that moment. She gasped as he pulled her body in against him. She suddenly felt how hard he was, the arousal that one simple kiss had triggered in him. It was the purest form of a compliment, and it showed the full sincerity of his desire.

She was about to say something – but before she could, there was a sudden booming sound in the distance. Alexis shut her eyes, hoping it would pass, but almost immediately there was another, louder sound. The wind began to blow, and when she opened her eyes and pulled away from Philip, the ground was undulating like an earthquake was rattling it from deep inside. The dream was collapsing – and fast.

Alexis began to panic, and looked at Philip with wild eyes. He grabbed her arm, jarring her back to her sense.

“Wake up,” he yelled at her over the din. “Close your eyes and wake up!”

She paused a moment longer, hesitating, scared and on the verge of falling through the abyss. “Wake up!” Philip yelled again. Nodding, she shut her eyes, not knowing what to say to him.

“I will find you again!” he called to her – and then, the world went quiet and black.

C
hapter 4: To Hell and Back

Alexis gasped as her eyes flew open, and she sat straight up in bed. Her heart was pounding, and her chest ached when she drew in a breath. She could almost taste the sulfur and feel the burn of the superheated air as it had swept past her in the dream-world. Pulling herself from that dream had felt almost impossible – it had simply felt too real this time. She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and touched the cool floor with her feet. She stood up, her eyes searching every corner of the room. She felt oddly as though she had to protect herself – but from what, she wasn’t entirely sure. The Devil? The dreams? Philip himself?

She snapped on the bedside lamp and light instantly flooded the room, chasing away the shadows that had seemed to cling to the walls, lurking along the floor and in the corners. Alexis put a hand to her chest, against her racing heart, and closed her eyes again. “Calm down,” she whispered to herself. “Calm down, you’re home, you’re safe, you’re fine.”

But Philip wasn’t safe – not safe at all.

The
sudden realization made her eyes snap open again. She could get out of the dream, but it had become his reality after so many centuries in the dream-world. When she went away, what did he do? Where did he go? Obviously he wasn’t conjured up by her – he was there, all the time. Did he have a place to hide? Would he have to face the Devil again, now that she was gone and her dream-world had collapsed along with her departure? What a strange thing she was feeling… was this pity? Curiosity?

…Love?

So many questions, but not nearly enough answers. Alexis looked back at the clock: it was five minutes before she had to get up for work. It was the first time in a long while that she’d actually woken up before her alarm. She reached over and turned it off before it had a chance to sound.

In the bathroom, she stared at her face in the mirror. Her lips looked… fuller, somehow. And bright red? What was this? She could have sworn that they looked as though they’d been wildly kissed. She touched them with her fingertips, feeling the power of the dream that was still unraveling inside her head, the memory of it fading little by little as she woke up more fully to greet the day.

But the memory of Philip himself remained sharp and clear in her head. It was as though her dream was just a vehicle that brought him to her, and that he was so real he stood out in sharp relief from all the other things in her head.

But he wasn’t truly “real” – was he?

Alexis grabbed her temples. Her head was swimming, and suddenly she was gripped by a wave of terror. She was having trouble differentiating the dream world from waking life, as if she couldn’t tell what was real. It was a disturbing, disorienting feeling. The two worlds were intersecting in so many new and confusing ways. Right now all she wanted to do was dive back into the dream and find Philip, so she could enjoy his company without distraction.

But he was in the dream-world, and she was here on the other side, and there was no way he could join her. No matter how she felt about him – and she really wasn’t at all sure how she felt, just now – it didn’t even matter, because they existed in completely different worlds. She didn’t see how they could ever bridge that gap.

Still, despite all the craziness and the sheer impossibility of it, she couldn’t get the man out of her head. The power of their connection had felt stronger than anything else she’d experienced. She felt he knew her, completely, beyond a shadow of a doubt. When she pictured him in her mind’s eye, she felt strangely at peace. Even amid the swirling chaos of her dreams, she knew he’d always be there for her.

“No,” Alexis said out loud at the thought. She stared at herself in the mirror for another long moment. “No,” she said again, shaking her head and looking into her own eyes. “You will absolutely not fall in love with a man in your dreams. That’s just not possible. It’s not sane. It’s not… it’s just not happening. No.”

But as she climbed into the shower and the finer details of the dream fell away, one thing remained: she remembered everything about Philip, and she wanted to see him again. The more she learned about him, the more she wanted to learn. She loved that he seemed both strong and vulnerable at the same time; she loved the way he’d grabbed her, so naturally, and so kind. She found herself wondering more and more about the reasons he was locked in that unique hell, and what he’d be like if he ever broke free of it.

The questions about Philip were so strong that she thought of little else during the morning. She drove to work in a fog, said hello to her coworkers without really noticing them, and sat down at her desk with her mind somewhere else entirely. She looked down at the paperwork waiting for her attention, but she couldn’t focus at all. This was the second day she’d been distracted, and today it was even worse than before. The words on the page seemed to elude her, almost as though it was written in a foreign language. She sighed heavily.

How important could this paperwork
possibly
be, when her inner world had been turned upside-down so completely?

By the time noon rolled around, she was starting to think she must be crazy. She’d accomplished almost nothing, having spent the morning in a dull kind of trance, staring off into space. She shut down her computer and pushed her chair away from her desk. She would go to lunch, she decided, and then she would call her boss and say that something came up – an emergency, quite urgent, and that she needed the afternoon off. She wasn’t normally the type to duck out of work like this, but then again, she wasn’t the type to develop strong feelings for a man she could only see when she was asleep.

The mere thought of it made her laugh out loud. She cackled, and the looks her coworkers gave her made her feel even crazier. She gave a cheery wave and headed out the door, acting as though she had just seen something funny on her computer, and there wasn’t anything in the world wrong with her.

But when she got to her car, she let out a long sigh of relief.

“I’m going crazy,” she said to the windshield. “That’s what this is. The whole situation is crazy. The dreams are crazy. I’m crazy.”

But it’s real
, a little voice in her head whispered, and she knew somehow that it was true. It was impossible to feel this way about something – about someone – who wasn’t real.

Alexis sat in the car and stared at the dashboard. She remembered describing cars to Philip, then airplanes, then so many other things that she took for granted. She turned on the air conditioning and realized that she hadn’t told him about A/C. How could she have forgotten that? She looked out at the asphalt around her car and realized that he probably didn’t know about parking lots filled with asphalt or concrete, either. There were so many things that he didn’t know, and would never know, if he never found a woman who truly loved him.

Alexis shook off the idea of love. The more she thought about Philip, the more that unwanted thought came up. That was the last thing she needed. It was true that she’d been increasingly lonely these days, and that she longed for a man to call her own. But it was insane to fall in love with someone who was only in her dreams. She needed a man who could actually share her life with her, not someone who could very easily be characterized as a figment of her imagination.

“Today is nothing but crazy,” she said to herself, even as she looked at the little clock on her dashboard. It was now only six hours or so until she could go to sleep and find him again…

At that thought, Alexis decided it was time to confide in someone. And she had a very good idea of who she might be able to talk to – someone who wouldn’t call the loony bin as soon as she opened her mouth.

“If you think you’re going crazy,” she muttered to herself, “then you’ve got to try something crazy to fight it.”

She turned onto Main Street and drove a few miles, then slowed down, looking at the storefronts. There was a place she had seen before, one she had been curious about, but never curious enough to go in. But today, she definitely had good reason to visit. She didn’t see it at first, and briefly panicked, thinking it might have gone out of business – but then she saw it, tucked away between two larger buildings, a small neon OPEN sign beckoning her inside despite its dark interior and drawn shutters. She’d found it.

She let out a squeal of victory and pulled neatly into the empty parking space right in front. She stepped out of the car and up at the sign:

Madame Valentine: Psychic Readings and Fortune-Telling. Your Inner Secrets Revealed. Specialist in the Supernatural Arts.

Alexis had
never
done anything like this before, but today it was exactly what she needed. She’d seen Madame Valentine’s commercials on TV from time to time – everyone had. But she’d never gone in, not even just for kicks like so many of her friends had. Going to a psychic was one of those things you did on spring break or something, on a lark. Not something you took seriously. It was just for fun, something that everyone knew was fake.

Right?

The truth was, Alexis had been tempted once or twice, mostly because she wanted to hear someone tell her it would be okay. Fake or not, it would be nice to have someone who claimed to see the future smile at her and say, with all certainty, that her life would turn out all right: that she would find love, and success, and all the other things that would make her happy, until she died at a ripe old age, having lived a life that was full and complete.

But what always stopped Alexis was that little nagging worry that the psychic would say there would be hardship and troubles, and the crystal ball wouldn’t show something good. Even if she didn’t believe that the psychic could see anything, it couldn’t be a good omen to have someone predicting doom and misfortune in your future. So the truth was that the whole idea of a psychic held more power over Alexis than she would have liked to admit.

Sometimes, not knowing was the better option.

But today, she had to know. She simply
had
to.

The psychic storefront was actually a house, an older home that had seen larger buildings grow up around it in recent years. It was set back a bit from the street, and that gave it an even deeper air of mystery and darkness, as though it really didn’t belong here among the more modern buildings. Next to the door, a small sign asked you to take your shoes off when you entered. Alexis stared at the sign as she walked up the old cracked sidewalk and approached the door.

Should she knock? She raised her hand to do so and then stopped, thinking. The other buildings around here were businesses, and she would walk right into those, so should she do the same here? She stood uncertainly for a moment, then simply tried the doorknob. It was unlocked.

As she stepped into the front room, her heart began to pound. It looked like any ordinary house that had been turned into a business, with a small desk to one side and comfortable chairs and couches all around. It looked like any waiting area, only perhaps more comfortable and homey, but that wasn’t what made her pulse race. It was the fact that she was about to take the plunge and tell someone else about Philip that set her heart to pounding.

“Welcome, come in, come in!” The voice was feminine yet strong, calling to her from a room to the right. The beads over the door chimed and shimmied as a woman stuck her head out through them. She must have been at least sixty, with sparkling eyes and a smile so radiant that Alexis couldn’t help but smile back.

The woman smiled at her for a moment, then said, “You’re troubled. I can see it in you.”

All the conventional, cynical wisdom about psychics reared up, and Alexis bit her lip so that she wouldn’t utter what she was thinking:
Gee, you think?

“Come on back, child,” said the woman, and then she was gone in a flurry of beads.

Alexis closed the door behind her. She took two steps before she remembered that she should remove her shoes. Leaving her heels by the door, she moved on bare feet toward the place where the woman had vanished. She looked into the room, expecting to see candles lit everywhere and perhaps a crystal ball, but there was only the woman, sitting on a comfortable couch. She patted the spot next to her. “Do come in!”

Alexis walked through the beads. They made a charming tinkling sound behind her as she stepped into the room. The floor here was carpeted, and she dug her toes into the plush fabric for a moment before approaching the couch. The woman simply waited for her, entirely serene and patient.