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But the room is empty, Dakota’s dress a shadowy creature on the floor.
The scent of our sex still fills the air, musky, and welcome.
I turn to find Dakota sitting up in bed, gazing at me, her eyes terrified orbs in the semidarkness.
“Why do you have your gun?”
“You screamed,” I murmur, sensing in her voice that she’s still half-asleep.
Waking and sleeping in violent jolts takes some practice.
“Oh,” she says, still eyeing me like I’m somebody else. “I just need—just leave me alone for a minute.”
She hurries into the ensuite, slamming the door behind her. Sparky scratches at the door so I walk across the room and scoop him up. He whines and looks anxiously toward the ensuite door, as though telling me that my woman needs me, needs us.
“I know, boy,” I murmur. “I think maybe she had a nightmare.”
Leave me alone for a minute.
The phrase replays in my mind as I return to the bed and sit down with a heavy sigh. I let Sparky go around the room, sniffing like a madman, before he finally settles at the door to the ensuite, sat there like a good little soldier awaiting his instructions.
Leave me alone, that definitely sounds like her nightmare was about me or at least that something in her nightmare reminded her of me.
I sit and wait, a skill I’ve honed over the years.
I’m often stunned by the way people will fidget as they wait, their hands clawing for their phones, for a magazine they have no interest in, for anything other than being in the company of their own thoughts.
I breathe slowly and tell myself that no matter what Dakota says when she emerges I’ll be there for her.
She’s carrying my child now.
I can’t be sure of that … except that I feel sure, the same certainty that touched me when I laid eyes on her. I’m done questioning the feelings of fate and closeness and destiny, no matter much the labels might make me feel foolish.
Finally, the door cracks open and she walks out in a silk bathrobe, walking with small steps over to the bed and sitting close to me. But not next to me, as though she wants to keep some distance between us.
“Bad dream?” I ask.
She laughs drily.
“Yeah, that might be an understatement,” she murmurs. “It was …”
I lift my hand to reach over, but then remember the way she stared at me from the bed, the wide-eyed horror in her eyes. I let my hand drop. She sees me and shuffles closer, tentatively taking my hand. I grab onto her firmly and savor the feeling of this closeness, the way I’ll always savor it, even after we’ve held hands ten thousand times.
“It was just crazy,” she goes on. “I was in this house—I think. It’s hard to remember all the details now. You know what dreams are like. But I was in this house and the men who killed my family were in there. My mom and dad, they were already dead, and then I was running out of the house and into the forest and one of the men caught me and …”
“And you turned and he had my face,” I say. “Because I’m a killer, just like the men who killed your parents.”
She frowns. “I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to, Popstar.”
“I can’t help what I dream, Damian,” she says.
She snatches her hand from mine and walks across the room, standing at the window so that the moonlight shining through the diaphanous curtains frames her in silhouette.
“I know,” I say calmly. “But that’s what scared you when you woke up. You saw me holding the gun and for a second you thought I was going to hurt you. Which I’d never fucking do. Which I’d die before doing.”
“I know that,” she says, spinning back to me, fists clenched. “But maybe this craziness is finally hitting me, okay? Maybe being kidnapped and cutting somebody’s face with a letter opener and nearly being raped and then being saved and then being attacked and now this—now losing my virginity to you, to the man of my dreams, to a killer, to a handsome wonderful protector, to a big confusing lump of a man, maybe, maybe …”
She chokes on her sob, as if she didn’t expect it, and then coughs past it and starts to cry shakily. I rise to my feet and walk over to her, steeling myself for the possibility that she’ll turn away from my embrace.
But I have to try.
Thankfully she clutches onto me, burying her face in my bare chest.
“It’s just so much,” she gasps through the tears.
“Maybe I’ve been taking it too fast—”
Whack.
She brings her hand down on my chest with surprising strength for somebody who doesn’t lift weights. But then again, maybe I’m doing her a disservice by forgetting how strong she is.
