“No, I—” She broke off, startled out of her knee-jerk denial. “Yes,” she uttered in reversal, “you are in danger. I had to tell you.”
“Why? What do you know?” he demanded suddenly, stepping closer to the image of her, his fists clenching with anxiety.
To his surprise, she suddenly reached out to touch him, her left hand wrapping around the back of his neck, the other settling on his left pectoral muscle as she drew up flush to his body. It was shockingly intimate, a lover’s embrace, as if she were going to pull him into a kiss. When he reacted, his hands passed right through her image. How was she able to touch him, yet he couldn’t touch her in return? It was disconcerting, and he suddenly felt as though he could no longer easily defend himself.
However, she was gentle and otherwise benign as she settled against him. He could even feel her body warmth, the brush of the fabric of her clothes. Strange to feel her weight, yet it wasn’t there. He had a sense of the figure hidden beneath the loose folds of the burnoose. He felt her ample breasts against his chest. A taut, flat belly touched his, and strong thighs slid long and lean over his own as they braced close to him. Bronse was astonished by the prickles of attentiveness that made themselves known up and down his body. He was already on edge, and he was aware from a militaristic perspective, but this was something far more intimate. He recognized it as a strictly male response, though he was baffled by his own uncontrolled reaction. Long stretches between planetside leaves or not, he did not usually react this casually to women. He made calculated, conscious choices in such matters. It was a lifelong habit that he had considered wise and logical for dozens of reasons.
Hell, she was hardly even a woman! Not a real one in any event. But she was still a threat, provided this wasn’t a hallucination. Great Being, he hoped he wouldn’t wake up in Medbay with heatstroke and a hard-on for an imaginary goddess.
The goddess, meanwhile, was looking directly into his eyes, her height placing her extremely close—just a minor head tilt away from eye level. He felt the grip of her hands tightening on his neck and chest, then her fingers turning chill as she seemed to disconnect from herself. A faraway but troubled expression passed over her.
“Do not let them leave you,” she whispered, her breath warm and sweet as it flowed over his face. “They will die without you,” she said urgently. Her eyes flickered behind their lids, her lashes fluttering as if she were in REM sleep and watching a dream. “And you will die without them. You must stay together.”
“It’s you. You’re the reason I can’t shake this feeling of danger.” Bronse could hear the rush of his own breathing in his head, and suddenly his hands were closing around her back. He wasn’t even aware that he was actually touching her now. “You keep coming to warn me.”
“Yes,” she said in a low voice, her tongue sliding anxiously between her lips to moisten them, the action drawing his swift attention as more powerful prickles of sexual awareness sparked through him. His body stirred against her, apparently with a mind of its own, intent on making its interests known. Yet something about all of this was terribly familiar. It was as if this impulsive arousal were a habit, a very enjoyable one.
“How do you know?” he heard himself asking her, his voice gruff, as her soft, sensual perfume—an aroma of gently exotic flowers and the undercurrent of erotic Ayalya spice—drifted in an assault on his senses. He knew that her closeness to his body wasn’t meant to be a come-on, that it wasn’t her intention to stir him. The grasp she had on him served another purpose, though he was confused as to what it was. He was the one making something sexual out of her attempt to warn him, to protect him. Bronse wasn’t used to anyone outside of his team wanting to protect him. The feeling was disquieting.
Ravenna tilted her head to the side, her eyes opening and refocusing on him at last. As she came to herself again, she studied him carefully.
“I always know. I am never wrong. I do not know how it is we meet like this; I do not know what draws me to you night after night, Bronse, but I know you are in danger and I know that very soon you and I will meet in the flesh.”
“We will?” An exciting thought, to say the least. All of Bronse’s concerns about security and safety had fled. He was pretty much convinced that this was all a dream anyway.
“No!” she cried in despair.
Bronse woke up with a ragged gasp, sitting upright on the gravity mat in his shock. His heart was pounding hard enough to burst out of his chest. As he realized that it had indeed been a dream, he shuddered with the terribly real feeling that it had left behind. He could still feel the sweet weight of her body against his—a silhouette burned into the entire length of him. He was tense with foreboding and hard with arousal, the confusion of the two incongruous feelings twisting his gut and his brain into knots. Danger and desire clashed with mystification as he leapt to his feet, instantly feeling better once he was standing.
He had fallen asleep on the mat. He’d had a dream. That was all it was. Just a very strange dream. He had woken up the moment he had realized he was caught up in a fantasy. So why did it still feel so real? Shouldn’t that feeling of realness shake off the longer he was awake?
It would, he realized. He just needed a few minutes.
Meanwhile, he also needed a cold shower and a visit to Medbay.
Ravenna woke with a stuttered gasp, sitting up on her pallet as she tore violently out of her sleep.
Curse him! He did it every single time! Him and his logical mind, disassembling and dissecting everything into neat, explainable categories; the minute he told himself he was dreaming, the dream ended. It was one of the conditions of such connections carried out in a dreamworld. That fragile state was always conditional to a being’s belief system. While imagination could take a being to wild places, it would stop as soon as acceptance stopped.
Rave threw off her covers and swept to her feet. She reached to touch the thin gown she had worn to bed; she was still caught enough between sleeping and waking to need to check to see if she were wearing the nightgown she had donned at bedtime, or the wine burnoose she had worn earlier in the day. Thankfully she had a sense of modesty when she decided to visit the dreams of this strange man. He had gazed at her with more than enough obvious hunger while she was fully dressed. She could imagine his reaction if she’d shown up in the transparent Yojni silk with only its trimmings of Delran thread and Jimsu lace.
Actually, she could very easily imagine it, she admitted as she pressed cool hands to her heated cheeks. There had been no way to mistake the reactions of his body as she had leaned against him. And why was this the first detail jumping out at her, especially when there was so much danger and so little time left?
Yet she could not shake away the feeling. She moved to the small window of her chambers, ignoring the bars impeding her view so she could look up at the night sky. He was somewhere out there, this powerful man with his hard voice and even harder body. Rave shivered as she remembered the feel of all that corded sinew against her body. Gods above, but he had been so magnificently made. Did men truly come with such strength packed into their bodies? Or was he an exception, with his layers of twisting muscle? She had seen broad-shouldered men, but none so well shaped, nor so obviously powerful on sight alone. Bronse’s chest had been a map of pure might; his skin heated and moist beneath her hands as she made the contact she had needed to read him. The power of his bulging biceps had been proved as his hands had found and gripped her back, the pure energy of his vigor radiating from his fingers. There was no mistaking the thick potency in his muscular thighs.
Ravenna’s cheeks grew still hotter as she avoided descriptives of other thick and potent parts of his body.
She forced herself to concentrate on other things, reaching to pluck the silk of her gown away from her suddenly damp skin. She was telling him a bold truth when she had said they would be meeting soon, and it would not do for her to react in this wild manner when they did. Especially considering the danger to both of their li
ves she had predicted. She needed to focus on how she could possibly be of help to him.
She did not have the answer to that, though, aside from her obvious abilities, at least. It was all too vague. Would it be before or after the day looming in threat? Would this man rescue her from the awful fate of servitude that was being forced upon her, or would it be even more dangerous than that, the danger coming later, and in treacherous, foreign territory? Perhaps so. This she could not see. Damn her clarity anyway. Her clairvoyance was stubbornly capricious, picking and choosing what it would reveal. Bronse had asked her to elaborate, and she was not trying to be enigmatic when she couldn’t do so. She was just as frustrated as he was. But at least she was sure now that he had gotten her warnings. She had been afraid that he would not remember the messages she had sent into his dreams. His reactions to her tonight, however, told her that he had remembered the messages, if not the messenger herself, in his waking world.
Oh, how she wondered about that world. She always met him in his immediate territory. It seemed so different, so beautiful and cold sometimes. He lived strangely, she knew. Their surroundings changed constantly in their shared dreams. One night she would sense metallic, hulking surroundings that clanged and echoed with the restless movements of others she could not see. The next night Bronse would be huddled under scraggly brush with black sand all around him. In all this time—a lunar month, as far as she could remember—he had never had a woman beside him. There had been men, however. She had never seen them, but she had sensed his awareness of their proximity. She might have thought it his preference if not for the way he reacted to her in his dreams. That and the fact that she had come to understand that he was a soldier of some kind. A leader, actually. She had sensed that. He did not look like the warriors she was familiar with. Then again, she suspected that he came from a world that was very different from hers.
This brought her focus back to the stars. The brightest ones were planets. At certain times of the year, more or fewer of them were visible in the night sky. She had heard rumors that other beings lived on some of those planets. She had even heard stories that ships on her own home-world left for those places constantly, that in the Citified States, such things were commonplace. These were tales told by fanciful bards and merchants who were looking to tweak some coin out of a naïve person’s purse, she suspected. Still, how else would one explain a man like Bronse? She was no simple wilderness girl whose head could be turned by a charlatan’s stories. She had a logical mind to go with her psionic one, and together they told her that there may be a great deal of truth in these matters.
If this were true, though, what would an off-world soldier have to do with her? How could their paths possibly cross? Even she knew how enormous Ebbany was. One man meeting up with one woman in the entire universe? It seemed impossible. And yet her heart had fluttered with excitement when she had remembered something from one of her geography lessons. Ebbany comprised mostly deserts, each different and unique. But the largest was the most unique of all.
Because of its black sand.
Did that mean Bronse had already been to Ebbany? She remembered the black sand so clearly. He had held his hands over it to warm them as the heat of the day escaped into the frigid cold of the desert night. He had talked to her so wearily, clearly tired from his disturbed nights of dreaming with her, yet still sharing innocuous facts about the desert animals at night. It had been a short lesson because he had woken up quickly. She had almost forgotten about it herself. It seemed, however, that tonight’s dream had been different. It had been more like a culmination, a solidifying of the past visitations, bringing them into the forefront of memory so they were no longer vague and irresolvable.
All of this meant that time was drawing to an end.
Ravenna shivered as she cast her eyes down from the heavens and looked at the village, at her jailers, whom she had once treated with respect and honor. A deference they had more than reciprocated. The level of their betrayal burned within her like a fury. She was biding her time, though, before she let them feel it. They all would.
There was not much time, but there was enough. If Bronse came in time, she would wish to help him in every way she could imagine, so that they would meet as they were destined to and would both survive that meeting.
But if he came too late …?
She would already have been sacrificed for the “good of her people,” which would make any chance of saving her almost, if not completely, impossible.
Lieutenant Commander Morse groaned as a high-pitched tone penetrated his sleep. He knew the tone and he knew it inevitably meant that he was not going to get his full eight hours of rack time. Not that he wouldn’t survive. He had hundreds of times before. But the First Actives were on downtime, and that meant sleep, beer, and women, and hopefully lots of all three at that. If Bronse had reactivated them without telling him again, he was going to shoot him in the head first and ask questions much, much later.
Lasher gave in and reached to touch the communications pad with a light brush of a finger.
“Morse here.”
“Sorry to bother you, Lieutenant, but I have a little problem and I think I’m going to need your … umm … special skills to assist me on the matter.”
Masin hesitated for a beat, suddenly coming awake and processing a shipload of information at once.
“Trick?” he asked with surprise.
“Aye, sir.”
“Chief, why the hell are you calling me at this hour? And don’t tell me it’s official when I know your ass is strapped to a bed in Medbay.”
“No, sir. Actually, I’d like to keep it really unofficial … if you grasp my meaning.”
Lasher sat up suddenly. Trick was never this vague. Not unless he had a damn good reason to be. He was practically speaking in code. A very obvious code, Lasher realized as he smacked himself in his thick head for not being quicker on the uptake the first time Trick had greeted him.
“On my way,” he said shortly, punching the button to cut off the communication.
He leapt out of bed and began to jerk on his black uniform pants. His eyes dropped to his knife and gun in anticipation of dressing them on next.
Lasher had to enter a special code in order to access Medbay after hours. Luckily his rank allowed him access to that code. He was cautious as he entered the bay, not having a clue as to what he would find. The medics’ station was abandoned; apparently the night medics were making rounds or doing whatever it was they did. Feeling grateful rather than suspicious, Lasher walked freely back through the halls of the huge bay to Trick’s room, the location of which he already knew by heart. He passed a second medics’ station and gave a smart salute to the man behind the desk, who automatically jumped up in haste and saluted back. Lasher chuckled to himself. Privilege number one in ETF was always the awe/respect factor that made it rare for the crew members’ movements and actions to be questioned.
He pushed into Trick’s room. He immediately stepped back to lock the door when he saw Bronse sitting on the chair near the chief’s bed with a grim expression on his face, dressed in full uniform and just as armed as Lasher was.
“Have a seat,” Bronse commanded politely, indicating a chair on the opposite side of Trick’s bed.
Lasher did so without question or hesitation. As he drew himself into the chair, he noted the CompuVid on the table resting across Trick’s lap. Apparently the chief had grown bored, and someone had plugged him into the Universal Database to amuse him or shut him up. Possibly both. There was nothing less tolerable than a high-adrenaline soldier stuck with bed rest.
“Comfy?” Bronse’s sardonic tone was not lost on Lasher.
“As a babe,” Masin said with a cheeky grin.
“Well, then, Trick, how about telling the lieutenant commander here a bedtime story?”
Trick grinned and saluted the commander enthusiastically, although his hand quickly recoiled to his flank as the sharp movement tugged at his healing wound. His f
irst words came out a little strangled with pain.
“I was getting bored, you know. Almost a week down here by myself and all. So I found ways to entertain myself—”
“Let’s skip the ‘chasing nurses’ part of the story, soldier.”
“Well …” Trick grinned, clearly unrepentant. “The medic in charge got tired of me bugging everyone, so he jacked me into the Universal Database. So I’m flying all over the U.D. and I thought it would be funny to … uh … visit some places I’d never seen before.”
“Translated—I take it—to mean that you hacked into restricted-access sectors?” Lasher queried.
“Which I am totally cleared to do, by the way,” Trick argued.
“Under orders, supervision, or reasonable suspicion,” Lasher retorted dryly, glancing at Bronse’s impassive expression. Was the commander looking to discipline the junior officer?
“Yeah, well.” Trick brushed all that aside with the careless flip of a hand. “So I thought it would make a good joke to hack into the IM database. I mean, all I was going to do was maybe issue you guys some false orders about delivering my favorite foods and an attractive woman.”
Lasher glanced at Bronse, who was still playing at being impassive, but Masin could see the brief glow of humor in his eyes. Clearly something serious had happened; otherwise, the commander would have enjoyed the clever joke. They were always pulling stunts like this during downtime. Actually, it was something of a one-upmanship contest, although mostly among the junior officers.
“To issue orders, however, our young chief had to hack into the command codes in the IM database,” said Bronse. “His codes of choice were those of Admiral JuJuren.”
Lasher whistled low and with obvious amazement.
“Only you would pick the codes of the hardest ass in the entire IM fleet, Chief,” said Lasher. “JuJuren is the one surefire way to get your rank busted down to that of a ground slug if you get caught.” Lasher paused only a beat. “Tell me you did not get caught.”
Seduce Me in Dreams Page 4
