Neptune's Lair (sensual paranormal romance) (The Protectors) (4 page)

Chapter Two

“
Your name
…” her dream lover whispered. His beautiful blue world dissolved like chalk on a sidewalk. “
I need your name
.”

“Dallas. I’m Dallas.”

A faint beep, beep, beep tugged at her awareness. She could barely breathe. Exhaustion weighed heavy on her chest. It took all her strength to draw a steady breath. Lord, she’d had sex dreams before but nothing had ever come close to what had invaded her dreams last night.

She drew another breath, this one not quite as even as the first, and tried to stretch. Everything ached, especially her inner thigh muscles—exactly as expected after a night of vigorous lovemaking. It wasn’t a bad ache. Her muscles felt stretched and relaxed and, well, sated.

He had stretched her and done things to her that were beyond her wildest imagination. First with his tongue and fingers, and then with his tireless cock. Simply thinking about it made her body grow tight, eager for more.

Which was nonsense. It had only been a dream. A pleasant, wet, highly erotic dream sparked by a stranger’s stolen kiss. Perhaps Janice was right. If this sexual explosion was any indication, perhaps Dallas’s love life had become too regimented.

She shuddered to imagine what would have happened if she hadn’t been in a hurry when she’d bumped into that sinfully sexy man in the alleyway. Would she have lived out those obviously repressed fantasies for real?
With a stranger
?

Lord, she hoped not.

Though amazing, mind-blowing and violently erotic, it had simply been a dream. One, that had made her whole body feel as if the encounter had been more real than anything she’d ever experienced before.

What the hell was up with that insistent beep, beep, beep? She couldn’t imagine anything more annoying on a Saturday morning. It wasn’t as if she had any appointments this morning. She’d planned on sleeping late. So why was that cursed alarm clock blaring in her ear?

Her muscles screamed their protests as she swatted her arm out, trying to find the snooze button. Her fingers hit plenty of tubes and wires, but no buttons.

“Come on, I just want to sleep,” she grumbled.

“You’re awake!” Janice cried.

“You set the alarm clock?” Of all the under-handed, sneaky things to do to a person.

Dallas opened one eye, which wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Even her eyelids felt heavy and sore.

Janice started sniffling. “They told me you were going to…to…” She was sniffling again.

Dallas opened her other eye and blinked several times to clear her foggy vision. What she saw made her want to shut them and return to her sensual dream world.

Janice never cried.
Not ever
. But there they were, big salty tears running down Janice’s pink cheeks.

“What’s going on?” By that time she had gathered enough wits about her to figure out she was in a hospital bed and hooked up to enough wires to make an electrical panel proud. But why? “What’s wrong with me?”

Janice shook her head and cried some more. “Don’t you remember anything?”

Dallas remembered quite a lot. But overactive dream life wasn’t something she felt comfortable talking about, not even to Janice. Besides, her dream encounter would never explain why she was waking up at the hospital.

“We were heading out?” Janice prompted. She wiped her eyes with one of those ultra thin tissues hospitals provide. “To meet Tony and Cayce?”

Dallas shook her head. Her memories from last night, except for the vivid wet dream, were foggy.

“We made it to the hallway outside your apartment when you got this blank look on your face,” Janice was saying. “I asked you if you were okay, but you wouldn’t answer me. You pushed my hand away when I tried to touch you. And then—” she sniffed “—then, you collapsed.”

“Collapsed,” Dallas repeated as if saying it out loud could make it feel real. But it didn’t.

“No,” she said, shaking her head again. She didn’t collapse. She’d soared. She clearly remembered soaring.

However, the insistent beep, beep, beep of the heart monitor was telling a vastly different story.

“What’s wrong with me?” Dallas asked again.

Tears flooded Janice’s eyes. “I don’t know. The doctors don’t know.”

It had been a fantasy. A sex dream. Not something that would threaten her life or land her in the hospital.

“You’ve not had any measurable brain activity all night, Dallas. You were in a coma and they said you were going to die.”

“
Die?
No.” The room spun and Dallas fell back against her pillow. No, she couldn’t believe it. This couldn’t be happening.

She had sensed her brooding stranger with those singeing kisses was dangerous. But the danger would be to her heart. Not to her life.

And dammit, it
had
simply been a dream. Sparked by a near-death experience? She found that difficult to believe. All she knew was that, despite the danger, her body was aching to be with him again. And soon.

* * * * *

“Hey!” someone shouted in Brendan’s ear.

What the hell?

Before he could push whoever was shouting at him away, he found himself trapped within a pair of powerful arms. He sucked in a breath and ended up with a lungful of water.

What the hell? Coughing and spitting up water while struggling against his attacker, he tried to piece together what the hell was happening to him.

He caught the scent of lavender. His candles. He only used them to help send himself out into the universe—a form of astral projection where his spirit actually left his body.

Returning was always a bitch. His head felt packed with cotton. And he couldn’t get his mind to work fast enough to figure out why someone would be trying to drown him like an unwanted puppy.

“What the hell are you trying to do, Brendan? Kill yourself?”

Dammit, what was Horace doing here? There was no mistaking the demanding voice as belonging to the owner of one of Chicago’s hottest nightclubs. Horace was the only man Brendan had ever trusted enough to call a friend. Although, he couldn’t say he was feeling too friendly toward him right now. Horace pounded on Brendan’s back until Brendan coughed up all the water he’d inadvertently sucked into his lungs.

“I was searching for her.” His voice felt like razors against the back of his throat. At least his face was now above the water. His lungs burned from inhaling too much of it. He coughed again.

“Did you think she was hiding at the bottom of your tub?” Horace with his great strength helped Brendan push up onto his knees and then one foot at a time, get his legs under him.

“You know what I was doing.”

Horace grimaced. “Stone’s not going to like this.”

Brendan drew a deep breath that burned all the way to the bottom of his lungs. “Then we don’t tell him.”

“What won’t you tell me?” Stone asked from the bathroom’s doorway. He sounded furious.

Ignoring his aching body, Brendan climbed out of the tub and grabbed a towel to wrap around his waist. “It’s nothing.”

“I found him sunk to the bottom of that damned tub,” Horace said.
Traitor
. “By the look of these lumps of wax that used to be candles, it appears he’s been there all night. Damn near drowning himself.”

“I wasn’t drowning myself.”

Brendan grabbed a second towel and used it to dry off his hair. There was a chill in his apartment that seemed to be seeping into his bones. He padded into the other room with his focus on the coffee maker in the kitchen.

Stone followed. “What were you doing?”

“Tracking our target.”

“And?”

The lid to his coffee tin wouldn’t budge. Brendan shook the damned thing and then banged it against the kitchen’s onyx countertop until Stone took it from him.

“And?” he asked again as he held Brendan’s coffee beans hostage.

“Her name is Dallas.”

Stone nodded. “Sit down.” He opened the tin and started to make a pot of coffee. “You look like hell, by the way.”

“He was on the bottom of the tub. Under the water,” Horace said as he came into the room. He’d been in the bedroom. He tossed a robe in Brendan’s direction.

“
The darkness
has already found her,” Brendan told both men. “And she has some strong barriers of her own.”

“So you went deeper?” Stone asked.

Brendan nodded.

“That’s all well and good,” Horace said. “I may not be able to pop in and out of people’s heads like Brendan, but I understand enough about it to know that finding a woman’s name shouldn’t take all night.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “What else were you doing, Brendan?”

“There were...complications.” There was no way in hell he was going to tell either Stone or Horace that he’d brought Dallas to his secret world, seduced her, and had spent several mind-blowing hours between her legs.

“Okay.” Stone curiously didn’t press him for details. That wasn’t like him, but Brendan wasn’t one to knock a good thing. Stone put a mug of coffee on the table in front of Brendan. “Get some rest before going after her. I’ll expect you to bring her to the café this evening?”

“If all goes well, I should.”

“Call me if you run into any more…um…complications,” Stone said on his way out.

Brendan waited until he heard his front door close before laying into Horace for calling in Stone.

“What was I going to do, let you die?” Horace asked, not sounding the least bit sorry. He sat down at the kitchen table across from Brendan. “At least you won’t have to do that again. The next time you meet her it will be in the flesh, right?”

Brendan sipped his coffee. “I don’t know how to find her.”

“
What
? You spent the night with her and you didn’t…” Horace closed his eyes and groaned. “I take it she’s attractive.”

An understatement. But the amazing way her body had glistened as she writhed with pleasure under him wasn’t something Brendan wanted to talk about.

When Horace spoke again, it was in a harsh whisper. “We’re talking about your life. If Stone finds out, he’ll be forced to haul your ass in front of the council. And you know the council isn’t civilized like a human court of law.”

Brendan knew. Hell, he knew that what he had done—ripping a soul out of a body—carried the death penalty. Somehow it hadn’t mattered. He wanted Dallas. He craved her sensual energy like he craved food.

It was irrational and wrong. Still, it didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to give her up.

“She’s mine,” he said in a warning growl. Nothing was going to keep him away from her.

“I wonder what your poor target is thinking this morning. I wonder if she is as certain about everything as you are,” Horace snarled back.

* * * * *

Dallas felt drawn to him. She knew it was crazy. She didn’t even know how to find him. Not his name. Not an inkling of an address. And he’d accosted her in an alleyway. What did she want with him other than to point him out to the police?

His body. That’s what.

His sumptuous body.

Oh, and his expressive brown eyes that reminded her of creamy, dark chocolate.

“What are you doing?” Janice pushed Dallas back into the hospital bed.

It took some effort to bat Janice’s not-so-helpful arms away. “I’m trying to get dressed.”

She unhooked the IV, the heart monitor, and a bunch of other wires that didn’t make any sense to her. A series of alarms blared. It sounded as if she was trying to break into a bank, not crawl out of a hospital bed.

“I’m fine.” She hoped. “Just stiff.”
And horny.

She needed to find her dream man in the flesh. Flesh with flesh. That should cure the throbbing ache between her legs.

“You’re not fine.” Janice started fighting her again. “Hell, your lips are blue.”

“I’m fine.” Dallas pushed back. In this condition, she wasn’t much of a match for her petite friend. And thanks to the heart monitor alarms, Janice was getting backup.

A team of nurses rushed into the room. One was pushing a crash cart, and another had a tray piled with what looked more like medieval torture implements than medical equipment. They hovered around her like vultures, swooping down whenever there was an opening. Pinching. Prodding. The conversation hovered around scary topics like brain tumors, lesions and seizures. All this was happening while Janice went on and on about Dallas trying to leave the hospital. She sounded like a tattling child.

“I thought you were my friend,” Dallas whispered.

“I am,” she shot back.

A few minutes later a doctor ambled into the room. His gaze met Dallas’s as he surveyed the chaos surrounding her. He returned her pleading look with a wry smile.

A murmured request had the nurses and orderlies backing away and clearing a path for him. Like a royal visitor, he approached the bed.

“I want to go home.”

Dr. Halverson—Dallas read on the nametag he wore—hummed a response. He took her wrist in his hand and pressed his fingers to her pulse. Feeling as horny as she was, she held her breath, afraid she might pounce on him, a doctor. A young, athletic, blond doctor with crystal clear blue eyes.

Nothing. Despite her throbbing arousal and her tingling breasts, she felt no desire to let this man—also a stranger—touch her in an intimate way.

She released her breath, grateful to know that her trip into vivid sexual fantasies hadn’t turned her into a stark-raving nymphomaniac.

“Pulse is normal,” he said.

His voice sounded like velvet. But Dallas didn’t care. Yesterday, she would have. Yesterday, she would have been blushing and stammering all sorts of nonsense. And making a complete fool of herself.

This morning, she didn’t care. Dr. Halverson wasn’t
him
. She needed to get to
him
.

She pushed the doctor’s hand away as he tried to press it to her forehead.

“I have to go.” She felt an odd power surge in her voice.

Dr. Halverson looked faintly stunned. He opened and closed his mouth and then took a step back.

“I’d like to run some tests,” he said after a long moment. “Find out what happened to you.”

“I have to go,” she repeated, feeling her power expand.

Despite Janice’s howled protests, Dr. Halverson gave a nod. “There’s some paperwork you’ll need to fill out. I’ll go get it.”

He quickly returned with an AMA discharge form. Dallas’s throbbing, sex-hungry body didn’t care that she was leaving the hospital AMA—against medical advice. She wasn’t even the slightest bit worried that there might be something seriously wrong with her. In fact, by the time she stumbled out of that hospital and into the chilly morning air, she only had one thought on her mind.

She had to go find him.

Now.