Dream Bound (34 page)

Smiling, Mac tossed back the last of his drink, took one final look at the array, and headed inside. Dink was right. He was too damned stubborn to fail. At this point, it wasn’t even a possibility.

But he was sure gonna feel a hell of a lot better once this rescue was over.

Turn the page for a sizzling preview of Kate Douglas’s next novel in her brand-new erotic romance series ...

DREAM UNCHAINED

An Aphrodisia trade paperback on sale November 2012!

1

I
t wasn’t until a tangerine slice of sunlight flashed above the sharp edge of the plateau that Mac Dugan realized he’d spent the whole damned night on the deck outside his bedroom.

Sitting in a hard, wooden Adirondack chair, freezing his ass off while the woman he loved and his best friend were curled up together in the big bed in the room behind him.

He imagined the two of them—snuggled warm and cozy in a tangle of twisted bedding—and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the visual. Dink, all long, well-formed male with a sexy mat of dark blond hair across his chest, washboard abs, and a strong, sharply masculine face darkened with morning stubble.

And Zianne? Fluffy little gray squirrel.

Last time he looked, she’d had her tail curled around the top of Dink’s head and one tiny paw resting on his ear.

It wasn’t supposed to end like this.

He took a deep breath, pushed back his fear and the sharp burn of frustrated tears, and focused on what they’d shared last night. Mac, Zianne, and Dink, together as they’d been so long ago. Zianne had held on to her human shape long enough for them to make love—the three of them connecting in a way they’d not been able to do since her abrupt disappearance so many years ago.

Twenty fucking years. Twenty years wondering if she still lived. Worrying whether or not all of his creative energies, every spare penny he’d been able to raise, and the combined technological advances of the entire research and development team at Beyond Global Ventures would be enough to rescue Zianne and the few surviving members of her species from slavery.

Twenty years, sixty million dollars, and a lifetime of focusing on an impossible rescue would all come down to the next thirty-six hours or so. Fewer than two days for Zianne to live or die, for her people to survive. Or not.

They were so damned close to success, even as the entire project balanced on a razor’s edge of failure.

Shit.
He hadn’t allowed himself to consider failure. How could he, and still work toward such an impossible goal? What fool would even attempt the rescue of a small group of slaves imprisoned aboard a spaceship—held by another alien race preparing to plunder the earth of all its natural resources?

It sounded ridiculous no matter how he phrased it, so he did what he always tried to do when the fears surfaced. Mac pushed the negative thoughts out of his head. Refused to consider failure. Reminded himself it was not an option.

Call it denial, call it what you will, but it was the only way he’d survived the past two decades. Focus on the desired outcome. Ignore the rest. Plan for everything that can possibly go wrong, and then put those plans aside and go with the one that assured success.

Failure is not an option.

Clichéd, but still the only acceptable outcome.

Mac sucked in a deep breath, centered himself, and locked away his fear. He consciously refocused his energy, squinting at the growing brilliance of the sun as it slanted across the huge array of satellite dishes. He gazed at them a moment, taking comfort in the fact that they worked perfectly, that they had indeed allowed his small team of young men and women to make contact with Zianne’s people.

Then he shifted his attention and glanced across the quiet yard at the square cinder-block building they’d labeled the dream shack—the center of operations for his team, the place where his telepaths focused their amazing sexual energy on the Nyrians now in orbit behind the moon. It was barely six, which meant Finnegan O’Toole had a couple more hours to his shift.

Now there was a guy who’d proved first impressions weren’t always correct. Finn had come across as a class-A jerk—brilliant but still a jerk. Then he’d shown more character than Mac or any of the others had suspected when he’d volunteered to go aboard the Gar star cruiser to help with the rescue.

A brave and foolish request by a man who was no one’s fool.

What kind of man would willingly step into danger like that?

Me?

Yeah, Mac’d knew he’d do it in a heartbeat, except he was needed here. This was, after all, his quest, for want of a better word. The culmination of his twenty-year mission to find Zianne, to save her people, to destroy the Gar—alien creatures with a record of plundering untold worlds.

It sounded like a grade-B movie when he spelled it all out, except it was real. Terrifying, beyond belief, yet all too real.

Who in the hell, in their right mind, would think he had a prayer of success? Of course, no one had ever accused him of being in his right mind. Even Mac’s strongest supporters figured he had more than a few screws loose.

In all fairness to himself, what genius didn’t march to a different drummer? It was probably a very good thing that the world didn’t know the truth—Mac Dugan didn’t follow a drummer.

Hell, no. He’d been following the directions of a beautiful alien who drew her physical form from his sexual fantasies. A woman who wouldn’t even exist as other than pure energy without the drunken visual of a twenty-six-year-old postgrad student back in the early days of the computer age.

Only a handful of people knew the truth—that his whole career had been based on a four-month relationship with an inhuman creature he’d fallen in lust and then in love with. The same creature now trapped in the body of a little gray squirrel.

Shit. What a fucked-up mess. What chance in hell ...

“Mac? I thought you came back to bed. How long have you been out here? Good lord man, it’s fucking freezing out here.”

Mac leaned his head against the back of his chair and stared upside down at the man shivering behind him. “G’morning to you, too, Dink. Couldn’t sleep. Didn’t want to disturb you guys.” He straightened up and waved at the chair beside him. “Have a seat. You don’t by any chance have coffee, do you?”

“You’re kidding, right? Me? Make coffee?”

“One can only hope.” He chuckled. A famous investigative reporter, Dink had never been known for his culinary skills. “I was afraid of that, but yeah, I know. I lost contact with my toes a few hours ago.” A thick down comforter settled over him, still warm from Dink’s body heat.

“Okay. This works.” Mac drew his feet up under the blanket and tucked all that soft warmth around him. “Damn, that feels good. I think it’s even better than coffee.”

A moment later, Dink flopped down in the chair beside Mac’s, wrapped head to foot in another blanket. “I heard some rattling and clanking downstairs,” he said. “Sounds like your cook’s putting some fresh coffee on. I’ll get us some in a few minutes.”

Mac grunted in assent. He turned and glanced toward the sliding glass door, but Dink had closed it and the glare of the growing sunlight reflected off the glass.

He couldn’t see Zianne. “Is ... ?”

“She’s asleep. Still a squirrel. I left her wrapped in your jacket.”

“Thanks.” He sighed.

“You okay?”

Mac rolled his head to the right and stared at Dink. “You’re kidding, right?”

Dink grunted.

Hell, no, I’m not all right.
“We’ll know in approximately two more days, I guess.”

Dink grunted again.

Two more days and Mac would know if all his efforts might actually pay off. And if they didn’t?

He sucked in a deep breath. Exhaled. “Cameron was scheduled to meet the last two Nyrians during his shift last night, which means that by now all of them should have access to functioning human bodies. The first group will be coming to Earth tonight—once they have their soulstones—as soon as it turns dark.”

“So what happens today?”

Mac glanced at Dink. There was none of the investigative reporter about him this morning. No, he just sounded like a very concerned friend. Right now, Mac figured he needed the friend more than the reporter. “Today a couple of the stronger Nyrians are going to show Finn and Morgan how to disincorporate and move through space.”

“Holy shit.” Whispered softly, more a prayer than a curse.

Mac shrugged. “That’s the only way to get them on the ship. Breaking down to molecular particles and traveling with a host Nyrian through space. Sounds good in theory.”

“I can’t believe you actually got volunteers.”

“Morgan Black and Finn O’Toole. Both good guys, physically strong, very sharp. The Gar shouldn’t be expecting an attack, but they’re always well armed. According to Nattoch, the Nyrian elder who’s sort of their leader, the Gar carry weapons that can disrupt the Nyrians’ energy field. Doesn’t kill them, but can effectively immobilize them. It shouldn’t affect humans, though. Once Finn and Morgan arrive on board the ship, they’ll have to rematerialize and disarm the guards so the Nyrians can retrieve their soulstones.”

And, Nyria help them, Zianne’s soulstone as well. She was dying. Would die within the next few hours without an infusion of power from one of her fellow Nyrians, but even their generous gifts of power couldn’t hold her here forever.

Not without her soulstone.

Mac sighed. So much could go wrong. So damned much.

Dink reached across the narrow gap that separated them, took hold of Mac’s hand, and squeezed it tightly. “This is the one thing I hate most about being a reporter. Learning the plans, knowing the danger, and realizing there’s not a fucking thing I can do to alter the outcome.”

Mac squeezed back. “You’re here, Dink. That matters more than you realize.” He gazed into his friend’s silvery eyes, but there was too much emotion, too much to even consider right now.

Mac glanced away as the sun broke free of the horizon in a blinding blaze of orange and pink against a cerulean sky. It was easier to blame the tears in his eyes on the brilliant flash of sunlight shimmering off row after row of white satellite dishes, marching west across the array with inexorable certainty.

The sun would continue to rise, the days would pass, the world would go on.

But life? Not such a sure thing. Not anymore. This might be the last day for Zianne, but if things went wrong with their plan for rescuing her people, it could be the end of more than the few remaining Nyrians.

If they couldn’t stop the Gar, if the Nyrians were somehow compelled to continue powering their huge star cruiser, it could very well mark the end of everything, at least as far as Earth was concerned.

Zianne and Mac’s love wasn’t even a blip on the radar, not compared to the ultimate risks they faced.

It wasn’t like humans had been such great stewards, but they hadn’t totally fucked things up yet. If the Gar had their way, once they moved on to other worlds, they’d leave nothing but a smoldering chunk of rock where civilizations had once risen and fallen. Where humans had grown and evolved.

Where Mac had met an impossible, improbable woman, where he’d fallen in love and followed a dream.

A dream that had all the signs of transforming into a nightmare.

He didn’t want to think about it. No, he had to believe in success. As Dink kept reminding him, it was the only acceptable outcome, and he said it again, whispering the words to himself as he sat there on the deck, his hand tightly clasped in Dink’s.

Failure is not an option.

Cameron Paisley’s hand shook so badly he couldn’t get the damned paintbrush into the jar of paint thinner. This had never happened before. Not to this extent, this total loss of self while painting.

His fantastical landscapes of imaginary worlds had always come to him through dreams, but he’d generally been wide-awake while he painted them. The amount of money they brought in certainly kept his eyes wide open, but this canvas was something else altogether.

It was haunting. Beautiful. Terrifying. Even more frightening? He couldn’t remember painting a single stroke. It was a world he’d never seen, and yet he knew exactly what it was. Where it was. And he knew, without a doubt, that it no longer existed as it once had. As he’d painted it.

He finally managed to drag his gaze away from the mass of dark and fearsome images, focused his attention on the jar of thinner, and jammed his brush into the solvent.

His attention was drawn back to the painting. Critics had asked over the years if his work was more than his imagination. He’d always said his paintings were the product of dreams.

This was no dream. This hadn’t come to him during his shift in the dream shack. No, this had taken him over like a bad drug trip, had caught him up for ... He glanced at the clock on the wall. Two hours?

Stunned, he stared once again at the canvas. He worked quickly, but this painting was filled with such detail that it should have taken him much, much longer.

It hurt to look. To realize what he saw in the bold strokes.

Forcibly turning his back on the art, Cam grabbed a rag and wiped his hands clean. Somehow he had to clear his head; he needed to make sense of this.

Tossing the rag aside, he quickly slipped out of his clothes and left them in a pile on the floor in front of the easel. Naked and shivering in the morning chill, he walked quickly through the bedroom to the bathroom.

He caught a brief glance of himself in the mirror. As always, he quickly averted his eyes and turned on the tap in the shower. So stupid, the way he always reacted to his own image.

Someday he’d probably wish he still looked like an overgrown teenager, but for now, it would be nice to look his age. It was hard enough getting the established art world to take a thirty-year-old man seriously. A guy who looked about seventeen got absolutely no respect.

Did it really matter? Shit, no. If Mac’s project failed, there wouldn’t be a fucking art world to worry about.