Falling Awake(81)
Author: Jayne Ann Krentz

“I feel the same way I did after we found Gavin Hardy’s body. Exhausted but very, very wired.”

“You’re not the only one.”

“The excitement doesn’t seem to have affected Dave and Vincent. I think they were asleep before I turned out the hall lights.”

“They’re young,” Ellis growled. “At their age, they can sleep under any circumstances. Give ’em a few years. That’ll change.”

She smiled against his shoulder. “You’re not that much older than they are.”

“Sometimes it feels like centuries.” He stroked her, his hand gliding down her side to her hip. “I have, however, discovered one thing that makes me feel about twenty-three again.” He nibbled on her ear. “Hell, even better than I ever did at twenty-three.”

“Really?” She curled her fingers in the crisp, curling hair on his chest. “What’s that?”

“You.” He tightened his hold on her. “In fact, you make me feel a lot of things I had forgotten I could feel. Things I wasn’t sure I wanted to feel. I love you, Tango Dancer.”

“Ellis.”

Joy, as radiant and sparkling as the rarest of jewels, shimmered through her. It drove out the cold residue left behind by the violent events of the evening. She reached up to catch his hard face between her palms. “I fell in love with you months ago, soon after I started analyzing your dream reports. Couldn’t you tell?”

“I hoped all that advice you tacked onto your reports meant that you felt something. Why do you think I moved out to California?”

“You moved out to the West Coast because of me?”

He smiled wryly. “I had a long-term plan to get to know you, see if you felt the same way about me that I felt about you. I wanted to find out if I could be part of your life.”

She was delighted. “You planned to court me?”

He cleared his throat. “I never thought of my plan as a courtship. Not exactly.”

“Of course not,” she said, dismissing that clarification with an airy wave. “You were probably thinking in terms of an affair, right?”

“It did cross my mind,” he admitted.

“You told yourself that you would have an affair with me because anything more than that involved serious risk,” she said gently. “You’ve spent a lot of time and effort avoiding that kind of risk because you learned long ago what it’s like to experience a great loss. Anyone who went through the kind of trauma that you went through when you were twelve is bound to be very, very careful.”

He looked at her for a long moment. “When you love, you take risks.”

“Yes,” she said simply. “But we both know how to do that, don’t we?”

“Yes.” He seemed vaguely amazed by that simple observation. He closed his hand more snugly around her waist. “As I said, I had a plan. But I got distracted.”

“Your shoulder.” She traced the wound with her fingertips. “I know you went through a lot of pain—”

“The shoulder was the least of my problems,” he said. Moonlight glinted on his cheekbones, casting the rest of his face into deep shadow. “The real issue was Lawson and his growing conviction that I had developed a bizarre fixation with finding a dead man. I was starting to wonder if he was right. Maybe I had gone off the deep end. Then you got fired and took off for Roxanna Beach and everything started to change.”

She smiled and arched beneath his hand, loving the scent of him. “I was waiting for you, you know.”

“Just like I’ve been waiting for you all my life.”

He moved on top of her and kissed her until she stopped shivering from the aftermath of violence and trembled with passion instead.

afterward, she felt Ellis relax as if his climax had turned off a switch somewhere inside him. She was glad the heated lovemaking had proved to be the tonic he needed to allow him to sleep. Unfortunately it did not have the same effect on her.

She closed her eyes, willing herself to sink into oblivion.

Nothing happened.

She opened her eyes.

“Mmmph?” Ellis tightened his arms around her to stop her wriggling. “What’s wrong?”

“I can’t sleep. I know he’s out there. I can feel him breathing.”

“Who? Scargill? Dave? Forget ’em. They’re fine.”

“No, not them. Better let me up. He’s not going to go away. I can’t stand the thought of him just sitting there and he knows it.”

Reluctantly, Ellis released her. She pushed the covers aside, got to her feet, went to the door and opened it.

Sphinx was on the other side. He rose, stalked past her into the room, heaved himself up onto the bed, settled at Ellis’s feet and went to sleep.

Isabel got back into bed.

“Everything okay now?” Ellis asked.

She smiled into the darkness, loving the feel of his arm wrapped around her and the heat of his body enveloping hers.

“Like a dream come true,” she said.

41

i found Maureen Sage, aka Amelia Netley’s personal dream log in her car last night.” Ellis lounged on one of the stools in front of the kitchen counter, one hand curled around a mug of freshly brewed green tea. “Got a chance to read some of it this morning. Turns out she was a Level Five herself, but she kept it a secret because she thought it would give her an edge.”

“That was the doc, all right,” Vincent muttered. “She was always looking for an angle.”

Ellis nodded. “Amelia-Maureen was fascinated with what she saw as the potential power of extreme dreaming. She was obsessed with her plan to get control of Lawson’s government-funded dream research program. She went to work for him and saw her opportunity when he was at a bad point in his relationship with Beth. She dazzled him for a while with her expertise in psychopharmaceuticals, and seduced him. But in the end he canceled her experiments with CZ-149 and then he canceled their affair.”

The kitchen was crowded this morning. Isabel listened to the debriefing with only a small part of her attention. Mostly she was focused on the task of fixing scrambled eggs, toast and soy sausages for three large human males and one big feline of the same gender.

It had seemed so easy at the start, she reflected, cracking the last of a full dozen eggs into a bowl. I’ll just whip up some breakfast. You all just drink your orange juice and tea while I get this on the table. No problem. Be ready in fifteen minutes. Hah.