Three Worlds 01 - Seduce Me In Dreams (5 page)

“Who
are
you?” she asked.

Bronse was surprised by her question, his hands settling on his hips as he regarded her.

He wondered how she could see him. He wasn‟t on a hologram pad, nor would he even know how to dial out a connection to this stranger.

“I think I asked you first,” he said in his sharpest military tone.

She lifted a single brow, the delicate arch rising in an expression of amusement and surprise. It was the humor that threw him. Mainly because he was used to receiving respect and even intimidation in reaction to his military attitude. He‟d perfected it during a short stint as an ETF training officer.

“My name is Ravenna. Somehow I know that your name is Bronse, though I do not know how. Now we have exchanged names, but it is unsatisfying, is it not? There is nothing to be learned from a name.”

It was a good observation. He had learned more about her while she had stood silently before him. Although the unusual name could come in handy later when he got his hands on the Universal Database.

“Why did you come to me?” she asked.

Again, she had beaten him to the punch. He was bemused to the point of smiling slightly as he ran a hand through his wet hair, sending sweat bouncing off the ends.

“I didn‟t come to you. I think it was the other way around.”

Now it was her turn to look bewildered. She recovered fast though.

“Who are you really,” she demanded, narrowing her eyes. “Why do you taunt me like this?”

The question gave Bronse pause. There was the contempt of history in that strange remark. It was as if she was accusing him of …

Bronse straightened suddenly, flashes of memory swimming through him. “I‟ve seen you before,” he uttered in surprise.

“I cannot sleep because of you,” she accused softly.

Dread chilled its way down Bronse‟s spine as he understood that the situation was mutual. “You,” he said in quiet shock. “You‟re the one who keeps warning me about danger.”

“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 lives 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.