“Why did you have to be such a cold bastard?” she found herself wondering, repeating the phrase that she’d heard so many people use to describe him over the years.
“I don’t know,” Thomas said, pulling her tightly against his chest as he leaned down and kissed her forehead.
“We could have been happy together,” Aileen mumbled sleepily against his chest as she felt herself drift off as everything slowly went black and-
“It was just a dream,”Ashlyn kept telling herself, somewhat frantically, as she stumbled into the bathroom only to find herself thinking about the moment the knife slid into her side and-
“It was just a dream,” Ashlyn whispered hoarsely as she struggled to unbutton the shirt that she’d helped herself to from Shayne’s bag only to have her fingers refuse to cooperate and settled for grabbing hold of the back of her shirt and frantically pulled it off, desperate to prove that it wasn’t real.
Once she managed to get the shirt off, Ashlyn dropped it on the floor and looked for blood only there was nothing there. She could still feel the musket ball tearing through her chest, leaving agonizing pain in its wake, but no matter how many times she ran her fingers over her skin, she couldn’t find anything.
She just...
She couldn’t breathe, Ashlyn realized as she grabbed hold of the edge of the bathroom counter when her legs threatened to give out. God, there had been so much pain, she thought, closing her eyes as the first sob broke free, and once it started, she couldn’t stop crying.
It felt like her heart was breaking.
She’d never felt anything like this before.
It was too much, Ashlyn thought, struggling as the heartache currently tearing her apart threatened to swallow her whole. God, it had to stop, she thought as her legs finally gave out and dropped her to the floor. She didn’t fight it, couldn’t fight it, andall she wanted to do was to go to Shayne and crawl into his arms, but she couldn’t move.
She couldn’t stop thinking about the moment when she realized that she would never see either one of them again. It didn’t matter that it was just a dream and that Thomas was just a figment of her imagination, it felt real, and she couldn’t take it.
Christ, she never thought that it was possible to love someone this much or that anything could hurt this much, but she could still feel just how much it hurt knowing that she was about to lose both of them.
God, it hurt so much.
She wanted it to stop.
Needed it to stop.
She-
“Come here, lass,” Shayne said as she found herself pulled into his arms. She moved to push him away only to find herself fisting her hands in his shirt so that she could bury her face against his neck as the sobs continued to rack her body.
“Shhh, it’s okay, lass,” Shayne said soothingly as he held her, but it wasn’t okay and every time she tried to tell him that, she just ended up crying harder, so she stopped trying and just let him hold her.
He held her while she sobbed, while she struggled to deal with the pain of having her heart broken twice, leaving her unable to do anything more than cry. He held her long past the time when the tears stopped coming and the pain slowly faded away, leaving her feeling safe in his arms.
“Do ye want ta talk about it?” Shayne asked sometime later as he continued rubbing her back.
“It was just a bad dream,” Ashlyn said, knowing that she would never survive another dream like tonight.
“That was some dream,” Shayne said softly, kissing the top of her head as he adjusted her in his arms before he carefully stood up and carried her back into the bedroom.
“It felt so real,” Ashlyn mumbled as he lay her down on the bed before he joined her and pulled her back into his arms.
“What happened, lass?” Shayne asked as he wrapped his arm around her.
“I died twice tonight,” she said hollowly, barely aware that he’d stopped breathing. “The second dream was the most heartbreaking. Aileen told Thomas that she loved him and he just let her go.”
“And the second dream?” Shayne asked after a slight hesitation.
“You left me to go save your brother from the king,” Ashlyn said as she glanced back at him and-
“Yer Lasarín.”
CHAPTER 24
