“Take it easy. You’re all right.” The words were spoken by a hard male voice that sounded too deep to be coming from one of her high school classmates
But she couldn’t take it easy. She was frightened, and she lashed out, striking the man who held her. When she landed a blow to his face, he grunted, and pinned her arms down so she couldn’t hit him again.
As she struggled against him, she realized that she wasn’t lying on a cold tile floor as she’d thought. She was on a bed, and the man who had spoken was lying across her, holding her down, with a terrifying restrained power that sent panic zinging through her.
She redoubled her efforts to get away, and he circled her wrists with his hands, keeping her in place. She knew from the way he held her that this man could hurt her, yet she also knew that he was trying to be gentle.
“Olivia, don’t. You’re all right. You were having a bad dream.”
Finally the familiar voice registered.
Her eyes blinked open and she found herself staring up at Max, illuminated by a shaft of light coming through the bedroom door.
“Max?”
“Yeah.”
She felt heat rise in her face and was glad of the darkness. “I hit you. I’m sorry.”
“You were having a bad dream,” he repeated.
“Yes,” she murmured, dragging herself back to present reality. She wasn’t in the middle of some wildly panicked scene. She was in her own bed, and Max Lyon was lying there with her. And as she looked up at him, she saw that he was naked. Or maybe he was wearing shorts, she couldn’t be sure.
Embarrassed by her out-of-control behavior, she stammered, “You… you told me to work on the case while I was sleeping, and… and I think I did that.”
“Okay. Yeah.”
She heard his automatic reassurance but knew he couldn’t understand what she was talking about. He hadn’t been there with her in the dream. He’d only come in when she’d been trying to free herself from the nightmare.
When he started to pull away, she involuntarily gripped his arm, needing the physical connection on some deep, primal level. Like the sky would come down around her if he left her now. She couldn’t tell him that. All she could say was, “I don’t want to be alone.”
“Okay.”
Before she could stop herself, she moved over to make room for him, and as he settled down beside her on the bed, she saw that he was wearing a pair of boxer shorts.
He lay on his back, and she lay beside him, her shoulder touching his. As her emotions settled, she decided that she probably shouldn’t have invited him to stay in her bed. Somehow doing that in the house where she’d grown up felt very wrong, but she wasn’t going to send him away because she hadn’t lied to him. The dream was too vivid for her to cope with it alone.
She wasn’t sure what he was feeling when she heard him drag in a breath and let it out.
“Can you tell me what was so upsetting?” he said.
Although she was the one who had stopped him from leaving, the idea of talking about the dream brought a breathless wave of cold to her body, as though she’d been pulled into an arctic lake and dragged below the surface by a sea monster. He probably felt her shiver. And when she remained silent, he prompted, “You said you were working on who might have killed Angela?”
Yeah, that was the crux of the problem. “Yes,” she answered in a low voice.
“And that’s what triggered the dream?”
“I think so.”
When she went silent again, he shifted toward her, his hand stroking her arm. “Can you tell me about it?”
She swallowed hard. “Okay. I was back at a party in my senior year of high school. With a lot of the same people who were at the meeting tonight… And some who weren’t…” Her voice trailed off. “Well, I guess it was yesterday.”
“Some who weren’t?” he asked.
“Well, like Angela.”
He waited for her to say more.
“I can’t be sure if it was exactly the way it really happened back then.”
“Why not?”
She swallowed hard. “Because in the dream, you were there.”
He laughed. “I guess that means it was a total fantasy trip, since I didn’t run in your circles.”
“We did meet once,” she said.
She felt his hand go still. When he spoke, his voice had thickened. “You remember that?”
“Of course.”
“But you never mentioned it.”
When she didn’t respond, he asked, “What do you remember, exactly?”
“Angela and I were in a pizza parlor. Some guys we didn’t know were harassing us, and you came up and stopped them. Then you left, and I never got a chance to thank you.”