“Again,” he said, half-carrying her into the small space remaining. “You can do it.Wecan. Tell me how to help!”
She exhaled, eyes closing, her grip on him easing. The walls came to a shuddering halt inches shy of crushing them.
He forced himself to look at her, not the walls that could so easily slam shut. “Are you trying to go to the forest between your house and mine?”
“Yes. The clearing. Just—close your eyes and picture it in your mind.”
“Right.” He tried to remember the spot as it had looked on his last trip through. An impression of branches reaching overhead, growing into each other. Damp earth, decomposing wood. Light breaking through the bower in a dozen places.
Or before that. Night. Exhaustion. The weapon in his arms, a twining, thorny branch of multiflora rose catching at his pants, giving him an idea of where to hide his misbegotten creation.
The remembered relief of getting it well-hidden swept over him. And then he smelled it—soil and wood and sharp, cold air.
The walls were gone. Bare trees towered over them, the sky above as dark as the witching hour, and they stood in the clearing of moss and fallen leaves, safe.
Beatrix broke into deep, heaving sobs.
“It’s all right,” he murmured into her ear. “It’s over.”
She made a sound halfway between a sob and a bitter laugh. “It’snotover. It will never be over. First my mother. Then Dad. And finally … finally …”
And that was when he realized what they’d just come through had been no nightmare. It was a panic attack.
And finally Lydia.
“Beatrix, I?—”
“Make me forget,” she said, a demand as fierce as a threat, and kissed him.
It wasn’t hard to comply. The nerve endings that had so recently zinged with fear leapt back to attention. He worked on the buttons of her void-black dress as fast as he could manage until finally he could take it no longer and ripped the awful thing open, pulling it off her as if he could cast away her quite reasonable fear with it.
As she pressed against him, nothing between them but her shift and his clothes, he had a dizzying sense of déjà vu. This was how their very first twined dream had ended—in the forest, doing and wearing exactly this.
She worked her shift off, letting it pool at their feet—calling back to another dream. He groaned, lightheaded from the melding of past and present lust, and pressed her to the ground, cushioning her on the ruined dress.
The other time he’d been in this clearing rushed back at him. Beatrix’s dream—from the early stages of the Vows, when he would experience hers or she his. She had danced with Garrett here. They’d kissed.
She might truly have no feelings for Garrett now—of her own accord, uninfluenced by her Vows—but between the two of them, Garrett and him, she had freely chosen only one. And he was not that man.
“Tell me you want me.” The words tumbled from his mouth before he could stop them. Of course she did. Her Vow to him made sure of that out of some twisted idea that harm would come to him if she didn’t.
“I want you every second of every day,” she said.
It wasn’t untrue. But it wasn’t real.
His eyes burned with impending, mortifying tears. He tipped his head up to force them back, trying to hold on to the fact that the state of his heart should not be his primary concern right now, and felt snow, wet and shockingly cold, on his cheeks. It was swirling down through the trees at a fast clip.
She laid her palm on his chest, the heat going straight through his shirt. He forced himself to look at her, into those dark eyes that saw straight through him.
“I want your good opinion.” Her words were barely audible. “I want your counsel, your company, your touch—I want you, Peter, mind and body and soul.”
“You have them,” he whispered over the lump in his throat.
He let her finish unbuttoning his shirt and then he shucked off his clothes and knelt over her, shivering. He supposed they should have the power to switch off the snow, but there was something welcome about the way it numbed him.
Beatrix lay on the black dress, her riotous hair dusted an unearthly white that wasn’t far off its true, concealed color. Under the enchanted brown, it was magic-induced silver like his—because he had tempted her to cast spells on the sly. Because he’d set this roiling mess in motion.
Something urgent bumped at the edges of his memory, something he was supposed to ask her.
