Page 65 of More Than Puppy Love

Costello

He’s in the garden again. Paradise. The warm night air caresses his bare skin while a cool breeze teases him. He’s searching for her like he always does, acutely aware that this time it’s real, it’s not the dream he’s had a thousand times since reaching his twenties.

Impossible.

He feels the soft grass under his feet as he pads silently down a path through lush vegetation, the tangy green smell of crushed leaves rising around him with each step. He smells jasmine too—her scent—sweet and clean but undeniably sexy. It stirs him until he groans.

He must find her. Find her and make her his own. Though she’s always belonged to him, as he belongs to her.

In his dreams, she’s searching for him as ardently as he pursues her jasmine and sea salt smell. He waits to hear his name among the sound of crickets chirping and night birds singing. Will she call him this time, now that she’s real, now that this is happening? Does she still love him, as she claimed to when they first kissed as young teenagers?

Impossible. She’s only a dream.

And then he hears it—her soft voice saying his name. The breeze picks up and he can smell her skin.Real this time, he thinks.Finally real, finally mine.

He steps out from under the rhododendrons and she stands naked like him. Her back is to him, her body silhouetted in the moonlight—the cello-shaped curves so familiar. She turns and reaches out when she sees him. In a moment they are in each other’s arms and he’s kissing her. His erection pushes against her belly and she presses back, stands on her tiptoes slowly so that her skin glides against his shaft. He moans into her mouth, tasting her sweetness, his senses lost in her presence. His hands slide down until he’s cupping her bottom. He lifts her and she wraps her legs tightly around his waist. He slips effortlessly inside her as she sighs.

His paradise. His home. So real, at last.

She whispers how much she loves him, how she’s missed him all this time and he wants to tell her he’s dreamed of her so many times but the tight warmth surrounding him takes away his breath until he’s pushing deeper. So close to ecstasy, he begins to say her name…

…and realizes when he can’t remember it, that this is yet another dream. Another fantasy. Unreal.

The garden fades even as he tries to grip her tighter. The moonlight becomes morning light seeping around his curtains. The hum of crickets is an oscillating fan, her sea salt and jasmine smell his own sweat soaking into the bedsheets mingling with a potted jasmine on the windowsill. Before the dream fades completely, he pulls his head back to look at her face, to remember her. The lost look in her eyes tears at his heart.

Costello woke with a pillow pressed hard against his cock and a curse on his lips. This wasn’t the first time and it wouldn’t be the last. He growled and punched the pillow, which made his dog, Anubis, jump and look around as if someone were about to attack.

“Sorry, boy.” Costello patted his head and then headed for the shower to do something about his hard-on. He turned the cold tap on full blast and rested his forehead against the cool white tiles.This time felt so real.

As long as he could remember, he’d dreamed of her in the garden. When he was a child so was she and they played in the shade of a citrus grove, climbing the trees, making up stories and games where he was a prince defending her against fierce monsters. And the fiercest, most frightening one came from a fountain in the center of the garden. It slithered from the impossibly deep water and crept through the garden, a dark shadow always watching them. Watching her and waiting for its chance to steal her away. Watching him in the hopes of dragging him under the water forever.

They grew up together in his dreams. As he became aware of girls, so she became more beautiful, more alluring. And she returned his interest. Long before he kissed a real girl in high school, they’d kissed under a full moon at the edge of the garden where a low wall protected the grounds at the edge of a cliff falling away into the Pacific.

The garden was real enough. He remembered visiting it as a kid with his mom. He couldn’t have been more than three or four. But every time he’d ask his mother about the visits, she claimed she had no idea what he was talking about. And every time, he saw the shadow of a lie in her eyes.

But he had no waking memories of the girl who came to life so vividly in his dreams, who aged as he did.

Costello wasn’t given to fantasy in his waking hours, despite his nickname, Psychic. He’d earned the moniker because of his uncanny ability to know when he and his men were about to be attacked, and from where the bullets would come, or the explosion that would have taken them all out. He was the first person to tell you he didn’t believe in the paranormal, or psychic abilities, or any other woo-woo New Age bullshit. He just had a near-photographic memory and incredible powers of perception. That’s all. There was nothing psychic about seeing movement from the corner of his eye or remembering a face he’d seen in the market, one that shouldn’t have been there ten miles away near the base.

He never told anyone about his dreams because he couldn’t explain how real they were. How realshewas. Her touch, her smell, the sound of her voice. Always consistent, detailed, down to the same mole on her shoulder dream after dream. His teammates would laugh, probably tell him that’s why he couldn’t stay in a relationship beyond a week. And that joke was too close to the truth. The second he dreamed of her and happened to awaken beside a different woman, he couldn’t get out of there fast enough, feeling like he’d just betrayed his dream girl.

Showered and dressed, Costello fed Anubis and watered the numerous plants throughout his condo’s rooms and lanai. His buddies didn’t know why he kept so many and he wasn’t about to let them know that either. Running late, he loaded Anubis into the SUV and chugged a protein shake on his way to work, trying not to let the dream seep into his thoughts. He was meeting a new client first thing and didn’t need to be fuzzy-brained and distracted, let alone pop a boner in the middle of things.

Costello dropped Anubis off with Kyle, a little sad that his teammate was only back temporarily before moving permanently to Colorado to open a new branch of Watchdog Security, but also happy that the Pup had found his own dream girl.

He headed into the meeting room where Lachlan already waited with the new client. A primadonna from what Costello had heard, a spoiled socialite from a high-class family, some sort of installation artist.

“Sorry I’m late…” he started to say, when his gaze fixed on cello-shaped curves as his nostrils filled with the unmistakable perfume of sea salt and jasmine.

“Glad you could join us,” Lachlan said with his usual sarcasm. “I’d like you to meet the woman you’ll be guarding, Ms. Jordan Summers.”

She turned from the window where she watched Kyle putting the dogs through their paces. It was her. The same eyes, the same lips, and he imagined she had the same mole on her shoulder.

The smile on her face froze as wonder crept into her eyes.

She looked like she recognized him. But of course she would—he’d dreamed of her for years.

Impossible.

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