Lake of Dreams Read online

  Go. That was all she had to do, simply pack and go. Instead she let him lead her back to the kitchen, where their cups sat with coffee still gently steaming. She was disconcerted to realize how little time had passed since she had fled the table.

  “How did you know where to find me?” she asked abruptly, taking a fortifying sip of coffee. “How long have you known about me?”

  He gave her a considering look, as if gauging her willingness to accept his answers, and settled into the chair across from her. “To answer your second question first, I’ve known about you for most of my life. I’ve always had strange, very detailed dreams, of different lives and different times, so I accepted all of this long before I was old enough to think it was impossible.” He gave a harsh laugh as he too sought fortitude in caffeine. “Knowing about you, waiting for you, ruined me for other women. I won’t lie and say I’ve been as chaste as a monk, but I’ve never had even a teenage crush.” He looked up at her, and his gaze was stark. “How could a giggling teen girl compete?” he whispered. “When I had the other memories, when I knew what it was to be a man, and make love to you?”

  She hadn’t had those memories until recently, but still she had gone through life romantically unscathed, the deepest part of her unable to respond to the men who had been interested in her. From the first, though, she hadn’t been able to maintain any buffer against Richard. Both mentally and physically, she was painfully aware of him. He had grown up with this awareness, and it couldn’t have been easy. It was difficult to picture, but at one time he had been a child, and in effect he had been robbed of a normal childhood and adolescence, of a normal life.

  “As to how I found you,” he continued, “the dreams led me here. The details I saw helped me narrow down the location. The dreams were getting stronger, and I knew you couldn’t be far away. As soon as I saw this place, I knew this was it. So I rented the neighboring house, and waited.”

  “Where is your home?” she asked curiously.

  He gave her an odd little smile. “I’ve lived in North Carolina for some time now.”

  She had the definite feeling that he wasn’t telling her the entire truth. She sat back and studied him, considering her next question before voicing it. “What do you do for a living?”

  He laughed, and there was tone at once rueful and joyous in the sound, as if he’d expected her to pin him down. “God, some things never change. I’m in the military, what else?”

  Of course. He was a warrior born, in whatever lifetime. Snippets of information, gleaned from news broadcasts, slipped into place. With her inborn knowledge of him directing her, she hazarded a guess. “Fort Bragg?”

  He nodded.

  Special Forces, then. She wouldn’t have known where they were based, if it hadn’t been for all the news coverage during the Gulf War. A sudden terror seized her. Had he been in that conflict? What if he had been killed, and she had never known about him—

  Then she wouldn’t now have to fear for her own life.

  Somehow that didn’t mitigate the fear she felt for him. She had always been afraid for him. He lived with danger, and shrugged at it, but she had never been able to do that.

  “How did you get leave?”

  “I had a lot of time due. I don’t have to go back for another month, unless something unexpected happens.” But there was a strained expression deep in his eyes, a resignation that she couldn’t quite read.

  He reached across the table and took her hand. His long, callused fingers wrapped around her slimmer, smaller ones, folding them in warmth. “What about you? Where do you live, what do you do?”

  The safest thing would be not to tell him, but she doubted there was any point in it. After all, he had her name, and he probably had her license plate number. If he wanted to, he would be able to find her. “I live in White Plains. I grew up there; all of my family lives there.” She found herself rattling on, suddenly anxious to fill him in on the details of her life. “My parents are still alive, and I have two brothers, one older and one younger. Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

  He shook his head, smiling at her. “I have a couple of aunts and uncles, and some cousins scattered around the country, but no one close.”

  He had always been a loner, allowing no one to get close to him—except for her. In that respect, he had been as helpless as she.

  “I paint houses,” she said, still driven by the compulsion to fill all the gaps in their knowledge of each other. “The actual houses, not pictures of them. And I do murals.” She felt herself tense, wanting him to approve, rather than express the incredulity some people did.

  His fingers tightened on hers, then relaxed. “That makes sense. You’ve always loved making our surroundings as beautiful and comfortable as possible, whether it was a fur on the floor of the tent or wildflowers in a metal cup.”

  Until he spoke, she’d had no memory of those things, but suddenly she saw the pelts she had used to make their pallet on the tent floor, and the way the wildflowers, which she had arranged in a metal cup, had nodded their heads in the rush of cold air every time the flap was opened.

  “Do you remember everything?” she whispered.

  “Every detail? No. I can’t remember every detail that’s happened in this life, either; no one does. But the important things, yes.”

  “How many times have we . . .” Her voice trailed off as she was struck once again by the impossibility of it.

  “Made love?” he suggested, though he knew darn well that wasn’t what she had been about to say. Still, his eyes took on a heated, sleepy expression. “Times without number. I’ve never been able to get enough of you.”

  Her body jolted with responding desire. Sternly she controlled it. It would mean her life if she gave in to the aching need to become involved with him again. “Lived,” she corrected.

  She sensed his reluctance to tell her, but he had sworn he would answer all her questions, and his word was his bond. “Twelve,” he said, tightening his hand on hers again. “This is our twelfth time.”

  She nearly jumped out of her chair. Twelve! The number echoed in her head. She had remembered only half of those times, and those memories were partial. Overwhelmed, she tried to pull away from him. She couldn’t keep her sanity under such an overload.

  Somehow she found herself drawn around the table, and settled on his lap. She accepted the familiarity of the position, knowing that he had held her this way many times. His thighs were hard under her bottom, his chest a solid bulwark to shield her, his arms supporting bands of living steel. It didn’t make sense that she should feel so safe and protected in the embrace of a man who was so much of a danger to her, but the contact with his body was infinitely comforting.

  He was saying something reassuring, but Thea couldn’t concentrate on the words. She tilted her head back against his shoulder, dizzy with the tumult of warring emotions. He looked down at her and caught his breath, falling silent as his gaze settled on her mouth.

  She knew she should turn away, but she didn’t, couldn’t. Instead her arm slipped up around his neck, holding tightly to him as he bent his head and covered her mouth with his.

  THE TASTE OF him was like coming home, their mouths fitting together without any awkwardness or uncertainty. A growl of hunger rumbled in his throat, and his entire body tensed as he took her mouth with his tongue. With the ease of long familiarity he thrust his hand under her T-shirt and closed it over her breast, working his fingers beneath the lace of the bra cup so his hand was on her bare skin, her nipple beading against his palm. Thea shuddered under his touch, a paroxysm of mingled desire and relief, as if she had been holding herself tightly against the pain of his absence and could only now relax. There had never been another man for her, she thought dimly as she sank under the pleasure of his kiss, and never would be. Though they seemed to be caught in a hellish death-dance, she could no more stop loving him than