Perhaps it did.
So she wrapped around him, her body pulsing like a heart, and took him as he took her.
Eyes open and locked.
When he dropped his forehead to hers, when he found the ability to draw breath back into his body again, he gathered her up. Her body felt so lax, he wondered she didn’t just pour like rainwater through his hands before he got them both in bed.
There he drew her against him, stroked her back.
“Enough finesse for you?”
“Any more, I’d be in a coma.”
He felt the cat leap back onto the bed, take his place.
All’s well then, he thought, as she fell asleep in his arms.
* * *
The dream didn’t surprise her. She’d expected it. But even in the dream she willed herself to handle it, not to let it weaken her.
Maybe she hadn’t expected to find herself in that room in Dallas with the red light blinking, the air so goddamn cold. But it didn’t hold the terror for her it once had. She wasn’t a child now, and Richard Troy was dead.
She’d killed him, after all.
She stood there, in the room of so many nightmares, dressed in black, her weapon in place, and waited for Mina Cabot to speak.
Mina stood in her school uniform, her hair bright and shiny and smooth, her eyes bold and alive.
“You think you understand me? You came from this. I didn’t. I had family who loved me. You didn’t. I had friends and a nice room of my own. You didn’t have anything. What do you know about me?”
“I know they took all of that from you. I know what that’s like.”
“You didn’t have anything to take.”
“Tell me something I don’t know. Something I don’t know I know.”
“They wouldn’t have taken you and dolled you all up. You weren’t pretty.”
Eve glanced over as Mina pointed, saw the pale, skinny child she’d been. The dirty hair, the hopeless eyes.
“Guess not.”
“He’d’ve sold you on the cheap. All broken and used up.”
“He’s the one who broke me and used me up. They didn’t break you, did they? Not until the end.”
“I had brains, and something to get back to. You didn’t save me.”
It hurt, even in the dream, it hurt. “You’ve got me there.”
“She’s not going to save me, either.” Dorian stood beside Mina now, her hair groomed into perfect curls. She wore the same school uniform.
That was wrong, Eve thought. She hadn’t gone to private school.
“She doesn’t even know if I’m dead or alive. What does she care?”
“I’m here because I care.”
“Bullshit!” Rage, Eve recognized it as it slapped out at her. “You’re here because they pay you. Like they paid the cops to drag me back to that shithole so my mother could collect her stipend.”
“I put your mother in jail.”
“A lot of good that does me now. You can just fuck off. I can take care of myself.”
Were teenage girls really that bitchy? Eve wondered. Or did she just see them that way?
“You want to be pissed at me? Fine, but I’m what you’ve got. You think I don’t understand you? She does. And she’s me.”
She looked at the child she’d been, cradling her broken arm while blood dripped from her hands.
“It’s going to get better,” Eve told her. “You’ll be okay.”
“Bullshit!” Dorian shrieked it this time. “You’re lying to her. How’s it better to get tossed to strangers who don’t give a shit? If they’d known what she did, they’d have tossed her in a hole. Killer! Killer! Killer! At least I never killed anybody. I didn’t do that!”
Mina stood, the blood turning her shirt red around the spear through her chest.
“This really sucks, and you didn’t stop it. You didn’t stop any of it. So…”
“Just fuck off,” the girls said together.
She woke with sunlight trickling into the bedroom and a fully dressed Roarke sitting behind her.
“There now, just a dream.”
“I know, I know. I’m okay. Damn it.” She sat up, laid her head on his shoulder when he put his arms around her. “It wasn’t that bad. Well, bad, but not … I don’t know.”
She eased back, pressed a hand to her head.
“Headache. Not a question, I can see it.”
“It’ll be all right.”
He rose, went to the AC for coffee. And bringing it to her, took out a blocker. “Take it, or no coffee.”