“Incantevole,” I breathed out, “doesn’t even come close to what you areto me.”
Seizing my hand, she placed my finger in her mouth, sucking as she moved even harder, even faster.
She bit me hard enough to make the air escape through my teeth, and I pulsed up, making her scream my name and beg me to do it again.
Outside of the water, she was beginning to dry, but her body glistened with a sheen of moisture, sliding with mine so easily that we moved with slippery ease. Her hair was starting to rise with the humid air, fluffing around her head in a wild halo.
“Your eyes.” She rose up and came down, stealing the breath from my lungs. “Don’t ever stop looking at me that way. I don’t move by my own will. You move me.”
“Scarlett—” I stopped her by putting my hands on her hips, forcing her out of the moment and into reality. She was slowly coming back to her mind, but not fully surfacing. “You are my life.”
“You’ll keep me safe,” she said with a ring of finality that rivaled words written in the stars.
30
Scarlett
Dreams kept me up at night—when I slept.
Lack of sleep, along with an energetic toddler who was skipping her naps and refusing to use her stroller, plus being pregnant, made me feel as though I constantly moved through a thickly fogged dream.
On the bright side, at least it wasn’t a nightmare.
The reoccurring one, the one I’d admitted to Brando, had me worried.
The first night he hadn’t asked for specifics (perhaps he thought they would disappear after that), but after the dream caused me to wake up drenched in sweat and clinging to him, he gave me his usualtell me.
The dream always started as that—just a dream—and then progressed into a nightmare as the characters and storyline revealed themselves.
During pregnancy, perhaps from the surge in hormones, I craved sex more often. If I couldn’t control the amount of sleep my body needed, or the hunger I seemed to be experiencing on another level, neither could I deny myself the pleasures of my husband’s more than willing body.
Somehow that craving seeped into my dream.
Brando would caress my naked body with a crimson rose, the petals as soft as wings, his caresses even softer. I’d beg and moan—sometimes my hands would be tied, sometimes my feet—which was unusual.
He never needed to subdue me with physical props to make me utterly his. Like the world’s most infamous illusionist, he had cast invisible ties around my heart and soul to keep mine tethered to his.
Irrevocably.
As time moves in dreams, I’d be on the verge of getting all my heart desired—so close to climax that I could feel the high recede into such a low that I’d almost start to cry.
It was the feeling of desolate denial.
My husband was there and then gone. I was left all alone.
Out of the sudden darkness I found myself in, a shadow would dislodge, faceless, nameless, but I knew who he was. Somewhere in the deepest recesses of my mind, I knew him, though I couldn’t speak his name or describe his details. He just…was.
The feeling of sexual desire washed out of me in a hard rush—an all too abrupt shift from complete safety into the hands of the unknown.
Brando’s name was on my tongue, and I’d cry for him, but he never came.
The dream ended.
I’d wake up abruptly, crying, hot tears rushing down my face. My palms would be close to bleeding from the bite of my own nails.
The dream itself never truly frightened me, it was the fact that I knew the unknown man in the dream, but I couldn’t place him.
The traitor was hiding from me.
