“I’ve been looking for you.” His hand snakes around my waist, pulling me up to stand.
“I want to be cleansed. I want to forget,” I tell him.
He runs his hand up the side of my body, his fingers gliding along the underside of my arm as he pulls it outwards and then holds on to my hand.
“Step into the water,” he commands.
The hypnotic quality of his voice renders me docile as I dutifully do as he says, a shiver trickling through my insides. The bottom of my dress floats around my feet, the material hungrily soaking up the water as if it’s been starved.
There’s no sound of him entering the pool behind me, yet I know he’s there, his hand still holding mine. The water is cold, but all I feel is heat working its way up my legs as I wade into the middle.
“This pool is made up of tears, angel,” he tells me, the water circling my ankles. “It’s all the tears you’ve cried—every single one.”
The moonlight glistens off the tears, my movements sending slow ripples across the surface, the patter of the fountain getting louder as we move nearer.
Without a word, he beckons me to stop, and when I do, droplets spray against my shins. Releasing a clasp at the base of my neck, he pushes the dress from my shoulders, and it falls into the water, gathering like a billowing cloud before I step out of it and watch it float away.
He slides his fingers up my arms, and the heat from his hands joins the warmth swirling inside me. There’s a moment when I think I should be telling him to stop, but I don’t have the will to do it. Something is at work here, and I don’t know what trickery it is, what magic lies at the heart of these midnight escapades or within this wonderous mansion with its haunting songs, but I’m lost to it all, giving myself freely to whatever this man has in store—because I want it.
I want this.
I crave this.
So, when he tells me to sit, I obey, lowering my naked body slowly into my fallen tears.
His body acts like a chair as I lean my back against his chest, using his thighs like armrests. His hand curls around mythroat, pulling my head back so all I can see is the blackness of the night sky with a thousand twinkling stars winking from above.
The rhythmic rushing of the fountain floods my ears as the water hits my inner thighs, the pressure of it massaging my muscles. He inches me closer, my legs spread and my eyes straining on the nightscape.
It’s when the water hits between my legs that I cry out. He tightens his hold around my throat, and his other hand holds me under the gushing fountain, the water assaulting my most intimate area.
“This is beautiful.” His words sink into me, pleasure building at the onslaught of the water. “Watching you spread out like this, holding you, tasting your tears.” His tongue licks at the droplets that have landed on my face.
It’s unrelenting, the power of the stream, the pummelling against my clit, the overwhelming pleasure it produces, and all because this man decides it will be so.
And I revel in it, pushing my hips into the torrent, letting it drum against my skin and stoke the heat that is raging within me.
“Let yourself go, angel,” he whispers, his fingers squeezing my throat until I’m not sure which stars I’m seeing, the ones above or the ones inside my head. “Come for me.”
And it hits, like a tornado that’s been building, a tsunami that’s been escalating. I break against the sheer pressure that’s intensified between my legs.
“Valdemar!”
Breathing hard, my eyes strain against the darkness of my room, my body shivering, the fire wild between my legs. Rubbing my hand against my throat, I swallow hard, trying to get my breath back.
A dream.
Just a dream. Like all the others.
But it had felt so real.
Like all the others.
My emotions are playing tricks on me. Ten years of snowballed grief has resulted in night-time hallucinations, reminding me of the trauma I’ve lived through. Growing up with no mother, knowing that mine and Ed’s birth was the cause of her death, is not something you live lightly with.
Spending your days talking to your dead mother is also not the norm. Then losing my brother the way I did—no wonder I’m having nightmares.
But they don’t feel like nightmares. Not while I’m having them. Not now that I’m awake.
