Page 7 of Bound

That was before the dream became a nightmare.

With the lights and the noise, the shouts and the blasts. And then—

Oz?

It was Demos all right, yelling something about Christmas. And juice.

Things were muddled after that. Jayd disappeared. He heard her voice, but that was it. He was lost. No. Worse. He was lost and lachrymose. And shit, did his head hurt. But that pain wasn’t as awful as the anguish. It was overwhelming…

Until the next bizarre cameo in his head.

Asha was there.

What the hell?

The girl didn’t look anything like he remembered. She was no longer lying in the Afghanistan cave in which they’d been imprisoned. Her big brown eyes were happy, not fading from the wound she’d gouged into her own chest.

He reached for her but couldn’t seem to get near. That didn’t seem to upset her, so he chilled out too. Suddenly, they were above ground in Bamiyan, and they were going over the plan for how he’d smuggle her out of the shithole. She was thanking him for the hundredth time, and he was telling her to save it until they got to the other side.

She replied with words that made no sense.

But Brickham… I am on the other side.

He shook his head, baffled by what she meant.

I am here and I am happy, all right? And you do not have to worry about me anymore.

But he did exactly that. Still consumed by confusion, he lunged for her again. She’d already disappeared. The chaos and noise were back again. And the pain. Holy fuck, the pain.

Bourget. He was on the tarmac at—

But he wasn’t.

He was in a plane, but then not. He was on a stretcher, but then not. There was on a tarmac at some point, but Paris was no longer on the horizon. There were palm trees and flowers and an ocean…

What the hell?

What the hell?

What the—

“Hell?”

He jolted as if someone had dunked him in ice water. He jerked his eyes open, only to slam them shut just as fast.

“Shit!”

Light. Once more, way too much of it. But it was accompanied by a breeze that smelled like a trip to Fantasy Island. Palm trees and freesia, ocean salt and cloves. Damn. If Asha had really been walking him up to heaven, the place smelled better than he’d anticipated.

It looked different too. A lot different.

After several heavy blinks, attempting to moisten the three-ton potato chips doing service as his eyelids, he was able to focus on his surroundings.

Not a tarmac.

He was in a bedroom. A damn fancy one. Not the-sheik-on-steroids kind of fancy. More like old money meeting new but not needing to broadcast that fact. None of it matched the medical monitoring equipment to which he was tethered in several places. But he didn’t linger long on the anomaly. There was still a hell of a lot to figure out here. Or so he’d try.

He was resting against a dozen downy pillows in a bed that could easily accommodate a Hummer. Maybe two. The thing’s four posts were wrapped in flowy white fabric that matched the drapes in front of the massive windows, waving gently with the crisp wind off the water. To his left, a wide stone archway led to a stone balcony with bougainvillea-wrapped columns. Beyond the balustrades was an endless ocean, looking like blue satin encrusted with a million diamonds. As if on cue, a pod of dolphins cavorted by.