An Unexpected Pleasure (The Mad Morelands #4)(88)

Megan moved closer, drawn to the man, floating down from the heights to stand on the rock floor. It was cool beneath her feet, and she realized in that instant that her feet were bare. She glanced down at herself. She was wearing one of her nightgowns, a simple, straight, white cotton shift with a rounded neck and one frivolous row of ruffles across the bosom. The air was chilly on her skin, but it did not bother her.

She walked closer, and the woman on the other side of the table lifted her head and looked straight into Megan’s face. She smiled slowly, with satisfaction, then turned and walked out of the cave into the darkness beyond, leaving Megan alone with the man on the rock slab.

Megan went to his side and looked down at him. The heavy incense filled her nostrils, the smoke stinging her eyes. He moved restlessly on the stone, coughing again. His face was flushed, and she could hear the rasp of his breath in his lungs. She touched his forehead, and his skin was searing with heat. He was dying. She knew it as certainly as she knew that she loved him.

“You can’t die!” she exclaimed, her voice cracking with emotion.

His eyes flew open at her words, and he stared at her. His eyes were dark in the dim torchlight, and he seemed to gaze deep inside her.

“You cannot die,” she repeated. “I won’t allow it. I am waiting for you.”

She slipped her hand in his. His palm opened to her, revealing the clear crystal that the woman had laid there. Megan curled her hand around his, the crystal trapped between them, and squeezed, holding onto him fiercely.

“Live!” she whispered. “You are mine.”

The crystal between them flared with heat, sending it shooting up Megan’s arm and into her body. She trembled with the intensity, her gaze locked with that of the man before her. For an instant they were melded together; her veins, her nerves, her flesh connected to him, humming with the same piercing vibration.

Then the moment was gone, and she went limp. She had to grab the edge of the stone table to remain standing. She looked at the man. He gazed back at her for one long moment, then placed the crystal in her palm.

Megan closed her hand around it tightly, not caring that its edges bit into her flesh. She laid her other hand upon his forehead. It was noticeably cooler, and she smiled. He would live now, she thought.

Reaching up, she took the chain she always wore out from beneath her nightgown. She slipped it off over her head and kissed the medal, warm from lying against her skin. Then she put the medallion and its chain into his palm, replacing the crystal, and curved his fingers around it. She lifted his fist to her mouth and brushed her lips against his knuckles.

“Remember me.”

“Always.” His word was a mere breath on the air, but she heard it.

He smiled.

Theo.





CHAPTER 17




MEGAN SHOT BOLT UPRIGHT in her bed. She stared into the darkness, her heart racing. The man in her dream had been Theo.

She had had the dream before. She remembered it now, with that eerie sense of reliving a moment.

She had dreamed it when she was sixteen, a few weeks after Dennis had left on his expedition. It had been erased by time—and, she thought now, by a certain reluctance to recall it. It had been too piercing, too vivid, too at odds with the world she knew, to be retained.

But now she remembered. Remembered each word, each movement. A shiver ran through her.

Megan slipped out of her bed and hurried to her dresser. Lighting a candle, she opened the top drawer of the dresser and pulled out her little box of treasures.

She set the box on the dresser and lifted the lid, reaching in to take out the chunk of glass that she had kept as a lucky charm for so many years. Ten years, she thought now, remembering how she had found it lying underneath her bed one day when she was cleaning.

It seemed strange, thinking about it now, that she had never questioned how it had come to be there. She had simply pocketed it, keeping it, she thought, because it was intriguing.

Megan held the thing up to the light. Though the candle cast only a dim glow, it lit the silver lines inside the glass. Not glass, she told herself. She realized that now. It was a crystal. She gazed into its depths, scarcely believing the thoughts that were whizzing around in her head—incoherent, unbelievable ideas that she could not dismiss.

Her fingers closed around the crystal, and, picking up the candlestick, she turned and left her room. She hurried down the hallway, hand held up to shield the flickering flame of the candle, heedless of the fact that her feet were bare upon the runner of carpet or that she had not even thrown on a dressing gown over her night robe.

She did not pause at Theo’s door, but turned the knob and rushed in, calling out his name in a low, urgent voice.

He sat up, coming awake with a start. “Megan!”

Theo shoved aside the covers and leaped out of bed, realizing a moment too late that he was wearing nothing beneath the sheets. Megan gasped, blushing red to the roots of her hair, at the sight of his lean, muscled body. Yet she could not look away, could not close her eyes, fascinated by the smooth musculature of his hardened body, the dark hair that sprinkled his chest and tapered down to the flat plane of his stomach and abdomen…and lower…. Heat curled through her own abdomen and pulsed along her veins.

Muttering an oath, Theo grabbed the sheet and yanked it from the bed, quickly wrapping it around his waist and tucking the ends in to secure it. Thus covered, he came forward.