Stolen by Shadows: A Paranormal Reverse Harem Romance (Into the Labyrinth Book 1)

by Evelyn Avery

  Wiping my hands on the tiny white apron wrapped around my waist, I bent to pick up my baby from its highchair at the table and cooed nonsense in its ear. My lips pressed against one sweetly-scented cheek. Nothing compared to the smell of a freshly bathed and swaddled baby, like warm milk and spun sugar.

  With this perfect home and my even more perfect family, I had to be the luckiest woman on earth. My heels clicked on the linoleum floor as my red plaid skirt spun around me while I moved around the kitchen. My hair was done up in neatly pinned curls, and I didn’t need to check a mirror to know that my makeup was perfect, not even a smudge in my pink lipstick.

  I would be the picture of perfection when my husband walked through the door just in time for dinner like a good housewife should be.

  The front door opened and slammed shut. I twirled around to greet my beloved husband, a wide smile on my face.

  Vaughn grinned back at me as he always did, happiness suffusing his features as he laid eyes on his family after a long day at the office. “How is my favorite girl?”

  “Waiting for you.” I leaned forward to accept his quick kiss and watched as he nuzzled the baby before turning away and loosening his tie. “Dinner will be on the table in five minutes.”

  He winked. “You’re a saint.”

  Like always, he dressed in a crisply tailored suit that made him look like an extra out of Mad Men and carried a shiny briefcase that I polished every night so it wouldn’t scratch. It made me so proud to look at him. He worked so hard every day so that I could stay home and take care of our beautiful home and child. I’d always loved seeing him in a suit, ever since our wedding day when we kissed under an arch of roses while our family and closest friends clapped and wept.

  This life was like a dream come true.

  All of this was like a dream.

  I suddenly felt dizzy. Setting the baby down in the high chair, I leaned against the counter so I wouldn’t pass out. For a moment, everything around me seemed hazy as blood rushed to my head. I stared down at the chunk of steaming beef on the counter, surrounded by a bed of potatoes and carrots soaking in its meaty juices. A wave of disgust washed over me as I imagined the farting beast it had come from. Cows were the most disgusting creatures on earth, and greenhouse gases from industrial farming were punching holes in the ozone layer.

  Did I even eat pot roast?

  “Are you alright?” Vaughn asked from me, a concerned smile on his lips when I turned to look at him. “It’s like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “I’m fine. I just felt strange for a minute.”

  But that feeling of strangeness hadn’t gone away.

  He watched me with concern for a moment before turning to the cabinet. “I’ll grab the plates so we can set the table.”

  “Are we dreaming?”

  I only realized that I had spoken the words aloud when he answered.

  “I’ve always thought of our lives as a dream.” Vaughn gave me a confused smile and leaned over the roast, inhaling deeply. “Dinner smells wonderful. Shall we eat?”

  Even as I returned his smile, a strange sensation niggled at the corners of my mind, an awareness that something wasn’t quite right. But what could it be? I looked down at myself, gaze focusing on the checkered pattern of the dress I wore. As I stared, it seemed to lengthen and shift in color to an off-white while the fabric gleamed like silk. Then I blinked, and the image was gone, replaced with the cotton fabric I remembered pushing through a Singer sewing machine as I’d made it.

  But even that didn’t make sense. It wasn’t 1958, nobody made their own clothes anymore, myself included. I couldn’t so much as sew the button back on a costume without hurting myself.

  Why was I thinking about costumes? Halloween was months away.

  Then I looked at the kitchen, really looked at it. Even the most old-fashioned people would have torn out those turquoise blue cabinets and replaced them with something else. The refrigerator was the kind with a locking handle that no self-respecting person would allow a child near in this day and age because of how many times kids had accidentally trapped themselves inside.

  This wasn’t my kitchen, it might as well have been a set from Leave it to Beaver.

  Something was very wrong.

  Through the open archway, I could see into the living room with its floor covered in shag carpeting. A line of framed photographs sat on a mantle above the small fireplace. There were baby pictures, families in studio poses with their hands on each other’s shoulders, and even a wedding photo in the center, the bride dressed in a long white gown that seemed achingly familiar. But in all of them, the faces were blurred and overexposed, so it was impossible to know who the people were.

  This was all so definitely wrong.

  I rushed to the door and ripped it open. The gorgeous view from my kitchen window was nowhere to be seen. Outside, the sky was dark and foreboding while strange fog blanketed everything, so thick that it obscured my view of anything else.

  Vaughn came up behind me as I slammed the door shut. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  I wasn’t married, and I didn’t have a child. Maybe those things were still possible for me, but I had always assumed they weren’t.

  Even in my dreams.

  “This isn’t real.”

  His smile was gone, replaced with real concern. “You seem distraught. Is it your time of the month?”

  As if the real Vaughn would ever ask me that question. Perhaps he was simply another part of the illusion. “Think about it. You look like Dick Van Dyke. We have to be dreaming.”

  A strange expression twisted his features as Vaughn took a step back. His mind was fighting this strange reality, but my words weren’t quite enough. “I think I should call the doctor. You’re scaring me.”

  “Do you even know the name of that baby in there? Or if it’s a girl or a boy?” I practically shouted the questions, even as I reminded myself that yelling at him wouldn’t solve anything. “Because I don’t. Think about it. Nothing about what is happening right now makes any sense. You walked in carrying that briefcase that I bet will be empty if we open it. Tell me what you even do for a living.”

  His mouth opened and then closed again as his brow furrowed. “I’m not sure.”

  “You don’t know because this isn’t real. Why don’t those pictures over there have any faces in them? Why does this place feel like a 1950s fever dream?” I stepped away from the door and closer to him, gripping his hands. His skin was warm and solid underneath mine, too real for him to simply be an illusion. But I couldn’t say the same about everything else around us. “Please just wake up.”

  But he shook his head. “I’m calling the doctor. You’re clearly hysterical—”

  I slapped him across the face, hard enough to make my palm sting. “Vaughn Elliot Latimer. You were raised by California hippies. Even if your wife stayed home while you worked, you wouldn’t expect her to wear pearls and heels all day while she vacuumed. Quit this antifeminist bullshit and wake up!”

  He jerked back from the slap. The sight of his fifties housewife with her hands balled up into fists as a bruise bloomed on his cheek was disconcerting enough to finally penetrate the fog. His gaze passed over me, from the dress clearly made from a Simplicity pattern to my hair done up with enough hair spray to choke out a lesser man.

  And then his eyes widened.

  “Izzy.” Vaughn gripped my face with his hands and stared into my eyes as if finally seeing me. He looked around us with a wild expression on his face. “How are you here?”

  “We’re in a dream, convincing enough to make us believe that it’s real” My head ached as I forced myself to pick through what was real and what wasn’t. “It was the fog. If you breathe it in, then it traps you in your dreams. If you don’t force yourself to wake, then you’ll be trapped inside of it forever with your body left undying but impossible to rouse in the real world.”

  His eyes narrowed, and I finally saw the much more familiar Vaughn shining
through his eyes, not the dream-addled version. “We need to get the fuck out of here.”

  Relief rushed through me with enough force to weaken my knees, and I gripped his arms to keep myself upright. “Tell me what you remember.”

  “Hanging out at the bar, reading lines from your play. Everyone was insisting because you’d been keeping it so under wraps. And then I passed out, and when I woke up, there was this weird man there. He threatened me and showed me you . . .” Vaughn swallowed hard as his gaze bored into mine with an intensity I’d never seen from him before. “He showed me you with these other guys, and other things that I’m not even sure were real like he was taunting me.”

  “The Erlking can’t touch us here, at least.” The thought of what he might have seen embarrassed me, but I forced myself to push that aside. “He’s the one responsible for all of this. He brought us here, trapped us, tricked us. I have to reach his castle to defeat him, or we’ll never get home.”

  “He locked me in a room with all these glass orbs in it. I could see you in them, sometimes, and other things.” Vaughn took a harsh breath as if remembering what he’d seen. But the look on his face made me hesitant to ask for any details. “Maybe I fell asleep.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You said this was a dream,” he mused, looking around us. “Whose dream is it?”

  “There isn’t anyone else here, so it has to be yours or mine.” It wasn’t difficult to imagine the more idiotic parts of my mind coming up with something like this. When you’ve never had a real family, your idea of what one looks like gets a little warped. “Maybe both.”

  “If this were my dream . . .” Vaughn trailed off as he looked down at me, a curious expression on his face.

  Even as his head bent to block out the light, I didn’t expect him to kiss me. His lips touched mine tentatively at first as if he wasn’t sure whether or not I would pull away. When I didn’t, his lips pressed more firmly against mine, and his arm wrapped around my waist, so my body fell against him. Without him to hold me up, my weakened knees wouldn’t have been able to support me anymore.

  I kissed him back as my arms clung together around his neck. Why had we never done this before, acknowledged what we both knew had always simmered under the surface between us? Fear had held me back. Fear of rejection or even worse, the pitying look he would have given me if I revealed my schoolgirl crush. But what was his excuse?

  Because there was nothing close to pity in the way he kissed, demanding and consuming like he wanted to possess every part of me. His tongue teased at the corners of my lips until they parted.

  My heart stuttered to a stop and then restarted in my chest as he tasted my mouth with gentle flicks of his tongue. Strong hands glided up my back and pressed me closer to him as our bodies fit together like matching puzzle pieces.

  This wasn’t a fairy tale where a kiss awakened the princess from her dreams. If anything, his kiss felt like being led more deeply under the spell. A deep yearning compelled me to respond to him, to tangle my fingers into his dark hair and deepen our kiss, even as I knew our time was running out.

  Finally, I forced myself to pull away, even as every cell of my body screamed in protest. “Wow, okay.”

  He gave me a sheepish smile. “I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time.”

  “Me too,” I admitted, blushing. Even though I’d known him for years, it almost felt like we were strangers. I’d never felt as awkward around him as I did in this moment, even as I could barely tear my gaze away from his full lips.

  But the conversation we had to have could wait. It had to wait. As much as I wanted to throw myself back into his arms, the real world got further out of reach with each passing moment. There was no telling how much time had passed while we were trapped in this shared dream. “We have to find a way out of here.”

  His hand wrapped around my wrist stopped me short as he pulled me slightly back. “What would happen if we didn’t?”

  “What? Didn’t go back?” I asked incredulously, shocked when he only answered with a shrug. “You can’t be serious.”

  “You said that we were in a dream, and we only have to wake up if we want to. Our bodies would remain forever undying in the real world.” Vaughn drew me closer again, his breath warm against my cheek as he pressed his face against mine. “That means we can stay here and be safe as long as we never wake up.”

  I didn’t have any idea how to respond to that. The suggestion was ludicrous, but the thought of abandoning a literal dream wasn’t exactly easy. “Vaughn . . .”

  “You have no idea what it’s like. The Erlking has me locked in a room with no food or water, watching a dozen images of you in danger with no way to help you. I don’t know if I can go back.” He squeezed my hands hard enough to bruise, the expression on his face stricken. As fake as the dream was, he clearly recognized that we couldn’t be tortured or starved here. Our bodies could endure everything imaginable, but our minds would be safe here. “I can’t face him again.”

  “You don’t have to. I’m so close to reaching you, and you don’t even know it. The last things I saw before I fell asleep were the spires of the Erlking’s castle. We can escape the Underground and go back to the real world. And then we can make this dream a reality.” I pulled against his hold on my wrists until he released me, and then I raised my hands to cup his face. His skin was so hot it felt fevered, and stubble brushed my fingers. But I knew we weren’t truly together, not in the way that mattered. A bubbling laugh escaped me, and I knew it was born more of hysteria than amusement. “I’ll even wear the fifties housewife dress if you’re into it. But this is a dream. It isn’t real. I need it to be real.”

  But the stubbornness and tenacity that made him a steadying force in my life hadn’t left him here. His eyes narrowed on my face with an intensity that would have frightened me if I didn’t know him so well. “It’s as real as we make it.”

  This time, he kissed me in a way that lacked even an iota of hesitation. I let him swallow my gasping protests because I didn’t have any strength left to fight this. Even though I knew the consequences were dire, all I wanted to do was wrap my body around his and never let go.

  So I did.

  Vaughn lifted me easily with his hands under my thighs while my legs wrapped around his hips. The one nice thing about these stupid flared dresses was that they allowed for easy access. He carried me without breaking our kiss, somehow managing not to knock into the walls or trip over any furniture.

  We only went a few yards before he fell with me onto a bed that definitely had not been in the living room a few minutes ago. I broke our kiss with a gasp and looked around to see that we were no longer in the hallway, but inside a tastefully decorated bedroom lacking both windows and a door.

  I didn’t have to go searching to know that the baby was gone, along with all the pictures on the mantle, because we no longer needed to convince ourselves this was really happening. We both knew now that it was a dream, which meant that the rules of reality no longer applied.

  The dream was whatever we wanted it to be.

  We stripped each other’s clothes off with frantic hands until both of us were completely nude. But Vaughn froze above me as the last bit of fabric covering my body was stripped away, his gaze drinking me in. His nostrils flared as he deeply inhaled and then bent his head to capture a peaked nipple in his mouth, sucking hard.

  With a groan, my hands rose to tangle in his hair as I pulled his head further down and arched my back into his mouth. The movement was in vain; not even a millimeter of space separated him from my flesh. His hand rose to my other nipple and pinched it between his fingers. Stars burst across my vision with an answering heat between my thighs.

  He released my nipple with a wet pop then traced his mouth up the curve of my breast and over my chest, stopping to nip my collar bone. He kissed the side of my neck, swirling his tongue on the skin, before breathing out in a soft sigh.

  Fingers teased at my opening, dipping inside
to feel how slick my passage was. He shouldn’t have bothered, I’d been ready for him from the moment he walked through the door. The tip of his thumb stroked over my clit, rubbing in a gentle circle, and I let out a low groan.

  “I’ve been waiting for this too long to be gentle,” he murmured against my overheated flesh. “We’ll do slow and sweet next time.”

  “Okay.” The words next time tickled pleasantly down my spine, just as he lifted my ass on the shelf of his hand and drove into me.

  Even in a dream, my body was barely ready for him. It had been years since I was with anyone, and despite my readiness, my passage clenched around him.

  “God, you’re so tight.” His mouth captured mine in another bruising kiss as he slowly withdrew, waiting for the frantic pull of my hands at his shoulders before he would move again. “Maybe I can manage to go slow, after all.”

  Slow might be one thing, but there was nothing gentle about the grinding movement of his hips. My nails dug into his shoulders as he slowly eased out of me, forcing me to beg in gibberish phrases before he drove into me again, bottoming out in one thrust that sent spasms of painful pleasure through my womb.

  “You’re torturing me,” I whined, trying to twist under him to tempt him into going faster or at least get a little more friction until he stilled me with strong hands on my hips. “I can’t take it.”

  “Yes, you can.” Vaughn gently bit my lower lip, a smile in his voice. “And I think I could go on like this forever. Just. Like. This.” He punctuated each word with a driving movement of his hips until I thought I might actually pass out. Amusement twinkled in his eyes as he captured my mouth in another searing kiss. “Remind me how long a dream can last.”

  “Forever,” I breathed in a harsh gasp of air. My arms wrapped tightened around his neck, and it felt like I was hanging on for dear life. But my port in the storm also happened to be the source of this delicious torment. “It’s me you have to worry about not lasting.”