Dream Lover (3 page)

Muscles she had forgotten about were put to work in service of Lucien’s appetite for her flesh; she felt herself thoroughly put through her paces, the ghost cock plowing back and forth, sparking old nerve endings back into hectic life. She almost thought it was more than she could take, her lungs compressed and ribs bruising beneath the onslaught. But it was worth it for the slow build and starburst of release, the act of giving herself to him, body and soul, while his pace increased to a furious rate, and the bedsprings squealed. There was a moment of almost complete stillness and then an epic rush and downward crush.

Freya felt her body lifted and swung around the room, flying to the ceiling, spinning back down to the bed. This often happened in her dreams, and for a moment she was disappointed, thinking that she had taken a step back, fallen into dreamland proper, away from her love and the incredible climax they had shared.

But when her eyes opened, she gasped and raised her weary body to an abrupt sitting position. He was there. Large as life and twice as handsome, lounging on her bed, those fathomless eyes bright and directed at her.

“I spent,” he said wonderingly, as if resuming a conversation recently broken off. Freya could do nothing but ogle. This was
him
. He was real…unless she was dreaming.

“Pinch me,” she murmured.

“I can do better than that,” he said with a curl of the lip, reaching out and cupping a breast, stroking the nipple with a practiced thumb. “Now doesn’t that beat a nasty old pinch?”

“Lucien…?”

“Freya.” He bent forward, touched her lips with his. “I owe you rather a debt of gratitude. I really never thought I’d have a stroke of luck like this.”

“If this is madness, I like it.”

He laughed and the sound was far from ghostly, bouncing off the flocked wallpaper and the pier glass, filling her head with enough joy to rout the fear completely.

“Everything good in life leads to madness. I think you understand that, Freya. I think that’s why you’ve come here and freed me from my bondage.”

“Bondage?” Freya had a fleeting, rather titillating, vision of Lucien’s fine eyes bound in black satin while his wrists struggled against silken cords.

“I was a foolish boy. I experimented with forces I should have left well alone. I participated in rituals and made bargains. I lost the bargains.”

“Who won them?” whispered Freya, chilled by his graveness.

“Can’t you guess? His Satanic Majesty requested the honor of my assistance, beyond the grave. I’ve been doing his dirty work for nearly a hundred years. But now I’m free! That tiny, almost hopeless subclause I managed to hide in the contract—well, you met it.”

“How on earth…?”

“I was bound to perform the little beast’s ordinances until the day a living human came for me, in a spirit of earnest love. Earnest love always crushes the devil. He rather hates it. You can imagine. So I’ve been hanging around here on the off chance most nights for the last hundred years. The first eighty years were dreadfully dull. Nobody slept in here but my great nephews and nieces and their guests. I thought it would be rather wrong to try and seduce them. But when it was bought up by that hotel group, ah, then I began to entertain a vestige of hope.”

Freya, awed by the depth of Lucien’s sufferings over the course of the century, felt powerless to contribute more than prosaic expressions of sympathy to the conversation.

“Whatever you did in life, you certainly paid for it,” she ventured.

“Yes, I did. Every farthing and more. But now you have come. Literally indeed.” He paused to chuckle at his schoolboy witticism, noting Freya’s blush and kissing the tip of her nose. “Magnificently, I should say. And love shall be my savior.”

“How?” It felt mean to be practical at this hearts-and-flowers juncture, but Freya needed some answers.

“How?” Lucien wrinkled that fine aristocratic nose. “Well, I’m here, aren’t I?”

“But what does the future hold? Are you, to all intents and purposes, human again? Or are you some kind of spirit?”

“Did I feel like a spirit to you?”

“Ah. No. I must admit. I’ve never been with a human who got, um, to the core of things quite so well though.”

“That’s just technique. I always had that.” Lucien mockyawned. “Doesn’t make me some kind of poltergeist pervert.”

“So you’re alive again? You can live a normal life?”

Lucien sighed and lay back on the bed, his hands cradled behind his head.

“Normal? I don’t know what you mean. And neither do you.”

“Good point. You can do all the things that humans can do then?”

“I can kiss you.” He tilted his head toward her, biting one lascivious lip in almost irresistible invitation. “I can touch you. Let me show you how I do that.”

“No!” The massive rebellion staged by Freya’s body against her head was quashed for a moment longer. “I have to know,
Lucien. Is this a real…resurrection? In every sense?”

“It’s a love resurrection.” Lucien sighed again. “All right. I’ll be honest—for once in my life. Or my death. Whichever. There are a few strings attached.”

Bondage again
, thought Freya lightheadedly.
No. Stop thinking about sex.

“Obviously I can’t come back to full life. That’s impossible. There’d be resurrected corpses all over the place if it weren’t. It’d be like one of those zombie apocalypse films.”

“You watch zombie apocalypse films?”

“Don’t ask. All the horror movies find their way downstairs eventually. So I’m not completely human. I can’t, for example, impregnate you.”

“Thank God for that.”

“Hmm, thanking God doesn’t go down so well where I’ve been. All the same. I don’t have the corporeal functions that you might expect. I can’t eat. I can’t drink. But I can fuck. Oh yes, I can. As much and as hard as I like. But only with you.”

“So you can’t cheat on me? Why haven’t I considered dating ghosts before?”

Lucien rolled his eyes in concession to her jaded heart. “In life, I found it difficult to comprehend the desire for monogamy. It has taken a century of suffering to open my eyes to the value of fidelity and constancy. I see it in you, and I admire you for it. Love you for it. I would not blame you if you left me to my fate but…”

“What would your fate be? If I left you to it?”

Lucien smiled sadly and took her hand. “Back down to the pit I belong in, Freya. For eternity this time. But thank you for giving me this night.”

“Lucien! You seem very sure that I will reject you. You know that I love you. Do you still have no understanding of love?”

“I understand that sometimes there are too many tensions around love to allow it to survive.”

“What tensions?”

“I, well, if I am to stay in this form, I have to, ahem, take you.”

“Yes,” said Freya slowly, not seeing a problem with this proposition.

“Rather often. Nightly, in fact.”

“I can…do that.” Freya shook her head, blushing. “If, you know, it’s strictly necessary. It’s not such a huge sacrifice.”

“No, but sleeping here every night might be. Financially, if nothing else. You see, I’m tied to this house. This house and its grounds. I can never leave.”

“Oh.”

Freya put a knuckle in her mouth, chewing it consideringly.

“Never?”

“Never.”

“It’s rather expensive,” she said, her face pale and eyes pleading for understanding. “I was going to leave at the end of the month.”

“So there we have it. Practicalities. Tensions that outweigh love.”

“No. No. There must be a way. Lucien, I can’t leave you. There must be something I can do.”

“You should leave me. I’m not even the man you fell in love with. I’m not Lucien Mountfitchet, The Devil’s Amanuensis, as they used to call me. Not anymore. I’m, well, you could say, I’m his good twin.”

“I don’t care about that! I loved you despite your horrible behavior, not because of it. I knew there was a part of you that was redeemable. That’s the draw of the bad boy, Lucien, surely you know that? The idea that I might be the one to redeem you.”

“And you are. Freya, you must not throw your life away on me. I forbid it. Better to have loved and lost and all that.”

“Not for me,” she said stubbornly. “Losing you could never be any kind of good for me. You are my life.”

“Rather codependent, darling,” murmured Lucien, but he had drawn her to him and his lips were in her hair, his hands caressing her heaving shoulders. “But I tend to feel the same way.”

 

Freya set off the fire alarms, making sure every guest and member of staff was out on the lawn, befuddled with broken sleep, before dropping the lit match on to the petrol-soaked carpet of Room Six.

“I know this isn’t ideal,” she whispered from the balcony, looking down to the stable block where Lucien had been instructed to meet her. “And I’m sorry. But it had to be done.” And then the flames, already blackening the curtains behind her, began to fan out onto the stone balcony and she leapt down into the hedge below.

 

Three months later, Freya and Lucien lay in fresh hay in the nowdeserted stable block, rosy-cheeked as rustic lovers, dreamy and spent after a bout of country matters.

“So you’ve signed the deeds? The place is really yours?”

“Yes.” Freya grinned. “If only you could have come to the auction. The auctioneer said some dreadfully rude things about you in his introduction. Called you ‘notorious.’”

“And so I am.”

“So you
were
.” Freya tweaked his elegant nose.

“You’re such a clever girl. I still can’t believe you sweet-talked all those academics and bigwigs into fronting up the money to buy it. The Mountfitchet Foundation indeed. And it’s still going to be a hotel?”

“A new kind of hotel. A museum with rooms and a restaurant. The consortium is very excited about the whole concept. They think it’ll take off and the Mountfitchet will be the first of many. A Wordsworth in the Lakes, a Shakespeare in Stratford, a Byron in, I dunno, wherever Byron came from.”

“I never imagined myself in such exalted company.” Lucien brushed straw from Freya’s forehead. “But you’re the only company for me now. And that’s the way I like it.”

They kissed with happy passion, finding the stables no less congenial than Room Six had been. Lucien, naked but for his billowing white shirt, gathered Freya close, allowing her to feel the renewed hardness of the Mountfitchet member against her thigh.

“Another love resurrection?” she enquired cheekily.

“The best kind,” he growled, flipping her onto her back and covering her in his shadow. “Before I put my mind to atoning for all those misdeeds of the past, I want to have my wicked way once more.”

In the shadow of the burnt-out wreck of Hatton Stacey, Lucien and Freya joined libidinous forces, living a dream instead of dreaming it, using that dream to refashion their worlds.

 

 

 

 

 

 

S
ea foam lathered the jagged rocks along the shore, each lap sounding like a soapy caress; a sensual sound that fired my imagination to think about things I hadn’t since…well, in a very long time.

Frustrated with the elusive memory, I turned my face into the wind and enjoyed the way it whipped at my hair and the nightgown I’d thrown on over my underwear before making the trek down to the beach. The way the light played at the edge of the horizon had been too much temptation for me to stay inside the cabin hugging the side of the cliff.

The air was cool with an underlying note of humid heat, cloying enough to make the silk stick to my skin, but I didn’t care. No one was there to see my nightgown mold my body. I hadn’t wanted to dress since I rose from bed that morning—one of the perks of being a writer. I’d worked without a break all day, but now I needed to clear the cobwebs before I headed back into my story.

I strode beside the water, jumping back to avoid the tidal fingers that seeped between the rocks lining the shore to rush across the sand. I headed to the small pool the ebbing tide left every day to see the treasures the sea deposited for me to admire.

Or so I liked to think. Not that I ever took them home with me. I hadn’t the courage to wet my fingers in the brine. It was an old phobia of mine—I wasn’t sure where it started.

Tall, sharp-edged boulders framed the opening where the water rushed into the pool. I lay on my stomach on a flat rock above the pool, peering into the water. I edged closer and closer, tempted to trail my fingers in the silky salt water. An orange starfish, bits of broken shell, a long thin strand of seaweed were all that filled the pool. Still, I stared, wishing I were braver.

“Do you always whimper when you stare at starfish?”

I jerked back, my gaze flying to a man, his hands braced between the two sentinel rocks and his body completely nude. “You startled me,” I blurted, scrambling to my knees. Then I narrowed my eyes. “What are doing here? This beach is private. And why the hell are you naked?”

“Don’t you have you any pity for a man washed up on your shore?”

I didn’t believe him. His skin hadn’t been torn or bruised by the force of water crashing against the rocks. But how had he come here? And why hadn’t he worn a swimsuit?

I didn’t want to know, no matter how handsome he was. And gods, he was handsome. His hair was nearly black and the wet strands grazed the tops of wide shoulders. His eyes were a startling blue, like a calm sea, but staring into them was anything but calming.

The longer the moment stretched, the harder I tried not to
notice the dark hair matted to his chest or the hollows that outlined the muscles stretched over his abdomen.