Secret Legacy (21 page)

She gasped. The full force of the emotions he was grappling with consumed them. His need to belong.
His need for her. The compulsion to lose himself to the homecoming her mind had become to him.

Her cheek nuzzled against his hand, the softness of her skin branding him, the same as it had the night he’d first found her at the center. Then she froze.

“What if I can’t make the right choice,” she asked, “once the ocean has control and I’m lost in the nightmare?”

“You were born to dream.” He listened to the voices of the woods shifting around them. In them, he heard what she couldn’t yet—the power and possibility of the life she was meant to live. A life he wanted to share. “You’ve already chosen, Sarah. You’re here with me, instead of still running. You’ll dream again tomorrow with the Brotherhood’s support, and you won’t be lost. I won’t let you be. Then if you have to run again, whenever the night and the memories become too real, I’ll be right here running with you. Trust that. Trust your team. Trust yourself. And no matter what happens, you won’t fail. You never have to be alone with your darkness again.”

“That’s . . .” Her shy smile was a surprise. “Is that the recruitment speech you Watchers give everybody?”

Richard trailed the backs of his fingers down her cheek. His thumb rubbed across the tantalizing curve of her lips. Then his mouth brushed the same spot. She gasped into his kiss.

Heat.

Desire.

Silky promise flooded them. The winter night caressed their skin with fire. She accepted his need, sending back a flood of her own along with the magic that
happened every time their minds brushed. He swept her body closer, where he’d wanted her since he held her in their vision. Where he’d always want her.

An insatiable craving flared to life, for more of her, all of her, everything inside her that he hadn’t yet touched. For the reality of Sarah holding him, needing what they could become together. It was all new to him, this touching and wanting and believing beyond his duty. Sarah was teaching him to feel again while she learned the same for herself. She was teaching Richard how to dream.

“This is where the worst nightmare of my life happened.” He closed his eyes against the feel of her mouth and her thoughts claiming him. “It’s where I wanted to help your nightmares end.”

“I . . .” Her gaze was alive with need. It was haunted with doubt. “I don’t know how to stop seeing the monster in my nightmare.”

“The wolf?”

“No.” She shook her head. “The monster he wants me to become.”

“For a long time, I saw my father’s hatred and my mother’s weakness every time I looked in the mirror.”

And as his penance, Richard had shut down so he could survive and guide and protect and preserve, taking nothing for himself. Then he’d found Sarah. And even lost to him in a coma, she’d instantly become a future he wanted to fight for.

“The only person keeping the monster you fear alive is you,” he said. “You don’t have to endure this alone. Others want more for you, Sarah. Accept that you’re a
Watcher. Survive the battle you have to fight for your legacy. Believe that you’re mine. That I’m yours. Give the life you’ve made me want with you a chance.”

Memories swirled around them. His memories still. Hers, too. All of them shared, released, as the haunting rustle of a raven’s wings rode the wind and the clouds and the shadows, freeing them of the demons they’d both clung to.

“The Temple Legacy either lives or dies in my dreams tomorrow.” Sarah’s tiny, searching kiss at the curve of Richard’s neck stole his heart all over again.

“Then so do I.” He took her mouth with his, needing to consume her, body and soul.

“I . . .” The moonlight in her eyes shone like forever, winking closer for just a moment before it was swallowed by quicksilver tears. “I don’t know how to believe in this. The good things in my life . . . All I’ve ever done is destroy them.”

Richard had asked her to believe once before. Then he’d used his duty and his mission to build a wall between them, because he hadn’t believed enough himself to fight for what they’d found.

He rested his forehead against Sarah’s and found himself praying. Gods and spirituality were unknown to him, but he was praying to every deity that had ever been worshipped for another chance to protect the magical place within this woman that still dreamed.

“I failed you,” he said, “when I didn’t stop Tad Ruebens from manipulating your mind. But Dream Weaver is his darkness, not yours. You’re everything good and loyal and honorable and beautiful that I’ve been afraid to want. I’d die before I’d let anything happen to you
again. Just like you’d die before you’d hurt the people you love anymore, no matter what your nightmare’s programming wants. We’ll find a way through this together. Tell me you can believe that. Tell me we have a chance.”

Sarah clung to Richard’s honesty and his strength while he asked for her future. Her mind swirled with his gypsy’s story and his warrior’s logic and the emotional honesty he was finally giving her.

There was no reason to believe he wouldn’t hurt her again. But safe or not, she could feel herself falling. Sinking. His memories from his family’s tragedy surged around them and rustled through the ravine like thousands of tiny wings fighting to escape the night’s darkness, as fearlessly as Richard had survived his own legacy’s meltdown.

She nestled deeper into his embrace, exactly where she’d always wanted to belong. She yearned to be as fearless as that sixteen-year-old boy who’d found a way to survive the unthinkable—as fearless as she appeared right now, reflected back from Richard’s gaze. She wanted to become whatever she had to, to keep him in her life, in her mind. More than ever, she wanted to conquer the nightmares that threatened this new beginning he made her want to believe she could have.

Richard had been her raven. A villain from her past. But the man before her now was so much more. He’d
never left her, despite the duty and oath that had been all he’d known since he was a child. He hadn’t abandoned her to her psychotic rantings when she was impossibly damaged. He’d accepted his own role in the unfair price she’d been forced to pay, for the sake of other legacies and the innocents his Dream Weaver mission had spared.

He’d guided her and trained her and waited for her to heal enough to see the bigger war being waged around her. A war he believed she could be valuable in, as long as she kept fighting. Kept believing. Kept trusting.

Sending her consciousness deeper into his, she wrapped her mind in the truth that he’d been waiting for her tonight. Not just for duty, but for himself. She was something he needed. Something he’d always needed. He’d run with her because she filled a hidden place in him that was just as broken as her darkest fears. The dream of them she could feel inside him had been there, within his mind, from the start.

“What are we doing?” she whispered.

“I think we both might be starting to live.” Richard kissed her softly. “tonight, it feels like I’m truly alive for the first time.”

“Why?” She couldn’t stop herself from inching closer, needing more.

“Because you’re not hiding from me here, in this moment.” His hands cupped her face. “And you won’t be hiding from your team tomorrow, when you’ll still be scared and needing to run. And I’ll be there, Sarah, feeling you reach for your future instead of the past. It’ll be better than anything I’ve felt in my life—even this.”

“Richard . . .” She was shaking her head, the taste of
him at once devastating and utterly perfect. “This is crazy.”

His groan took her need deeper. She wanted to lose herself in each caress of his mouth.

“If I’ve learned one thing since finding you.” He smiled. “It’s that sanity is highly overrated. Come with me, Sarah. No more control. No more fear. Not here. Fall apart with me. Trust me to be there to bring you back.”

The night’s velvet softness cooled her feverish skin as her clothes slid away beneath his skilled hands. Sarah longed to feel his body completely open to hers, just as his mind now was. When they were skin to skin, she arched into the feel of him. Layers of muscle and strength attested to his Watcher training. But it was the gentleness in his touch, the longing in his mind, that sucked her deeper into their madness.

“Yes,” she gasped as his hands and mouth found her breasts.

Her fingers did their own exploring. His breath hissed. His body responded, growing even harder.

“Yes.” He drew her to the ground. “Stay with me forever, Sarah.”

He rolled until she straddled him. His erection pressed against her damp center, demanding without forcing, throbbing but under the same control he exerted over the rest of his life.

“You’re perfect here,” he said, “with my moon and shadows and memories. I’ve always wanted you right here.”

She could feel the strain that holding back was costing him. She could feel all of him, while he cherished her body and kept things slow, easy, because he thought
that was what she needed. She kissed and nipped down his chest, using her teeth. She raked her nails against the rough patch of hair trailing down his abs to his belly.

“I could devour you.” His fingers clenched in her hair.

She looked up from where her tongue was dabbling with his navel.

“Who’s devouring who, Colonel Metting?”

She had a moment to appreciate his answering growl. Then the world shifted. He pinned her under him and slid his hands beneath her bottom, pulling her into the thrust of his body.

Her cry filled the night.

He clutched her close, covering her, shielding her, wrapping her in warmth and safety and the feeling of . . . home.

“Are you all right?” He held himself motionless inside her. “I—”

“Don’t stop,” she begged. Her whole life. She’d waited for this moment her entire life. Feeling complete. Feeling whole, every part of her exactly what it should be. “Please, Richard . . .”

He dropped his head to her neck, and he began to move. She strained and arched at the incredible sensations filling them, both their experiences combining within their link, sharing, building, driving them closer to a perfection she’d never dreamed possible. His kisses found her breasts again. He rocked in and out of her body, each stroke a bolt of sizzling ecstasy.

“Say it.” His voice was strained. Barely recognizable.

“What?”

“My name, from your first dreams with me. Tell me
you know this is me. Not a Watcher. Not your raven. Give me your dreams again, Sarah.”

“Rick,” she gasped, surrendering herself to trusting him with her secrets and her heart and her future. “Rick . . .”

Richard stood across the dream lab from Sarah. The strain of their third hour of mission prep was taking its toll on her. Still reeling from the power of what had happened between them, needing her back in his arms, her future back under his protection, he had no choice but to give up even more control over what was about to happen.

Even though she was still leery of the mission, Sarah was working with the team. Trying to, anyway. Jeff, the Watcher lead for the dream mission, wasn’t pulling his punches. He couldn’t afford to, not if they were going to have any hope of securing her legacy from the center.

“They’re just colors,” Sarah said. “I’m telling you, the voices are controlling the dream.”

“They’re not
just
anything.” Jeff sat directly in front of her, straddling a chair he’d turned backward, his injured leg stretched out to the side. His arms were folded over the chair’s back. He already wore the scrubs everyone would use for the mission. “Any more than it’s been just voices crying in your mind since you were a kid. If you had mentioned that detail to someone the moment
you started hearing what you thought were Trinity’s cries, we might not be in this mess. Something is plugging into your memories and using them to project new realities that threaten everyone around you.”

Madeline stiffened beside her sister. She and Jarred sat next to Sarah, at the center of the circle of Watchers filling the lab. Madeline’s fingers clenched around Sarah’s arm. Jarred squeezed his fiancée’s shoulder, completing a circle of support, while Richard kept his distance.

But Sarah was in his mind still. In his heart. She’d touched his soul so deeply, he’d never be able to let her go. The others couldn’t know the new depths of their connection. Not yet. But it was there for Sarah, for both of them. Their link would get her through this meeting and the nightmare, and into the future she and her legacy deserved.

She took a steadying breath, absorbing Richard’s unspoken conviction that she could handle Jeff and his barrage of questions.

“Why don’t you save us all time,” she said to Jeff, “and just tell me what you want the colors in my dreams to mean? Then we can move on to discussing the only thing that really matters—saving a little girl whose mind the center’s trying to destroy, the same way they did mine.”

Silent screams battered the mental control Richard was helping her maintain. He heard them continuously now, the same as Sarah. He’d been hearing them more strongly, more frequently, since walking with her, her mind fully open to him, back to the bunker.