Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
SELENE
The dark figure stood at the far edge of the clearing with his back to me. His face was turned toward something in the distance, but I recognized his silhouette. He held that same sense of someone waiting.
I knew that outline.
I had seen it in my dreams that morning, in the gray before dawn. In the place where my sleeping mind had been building this scene for years.
He turned, and the breath left my body.
The man faced me now as if he’d been expecting me, fully visible in the moonlight, but my sense of him was more like recognition at a cellular level.
In every dream, he’d turned just before I could see him. Just before my mind could complete the image. Not this time.
Now I knew his face.
And he looked exactly like the man from the pub.
I stood completely still while my thoughts scrambled to catch up. The breadth of his shoulders, and the angle of his stance. The stillness he carried, as if the air around him had stopped moving.
That image had been burned into my memory, and now he stood in front of me, fully alive.
My mind immediately leapt to the most obvious explanation for why he was there. He must have followed us.
Except there’d been no other cars in the lot. Nor had we seen anyone on the path. And even if he had come later—
He couldn’t have gotten here first.
The moonlight. The waterfall behind him, silver and impossibly quiet. The way the mist crept in slow tendrils across the ground.
All of it exactly as I’d dreamed it, down to details I hadn’t known I’d memorized.
And him. Standing in the center of it.
None of it made sense.
His cool, contained expression was the same as it had been in the pub, revealing nothing. Attraction flooded me, only to have the memory of his refusal come back in a furious wave, followed by a rush of heat to my cheeks.
Except that man wasn’t this person.
I blinked several times, struggling to maintain the line between reality and whatever this was.
He watched me as if he already understood something I didn’t, and the stillness of him made it worse.
Was he really here? Was I?
“You were at the pub,” I finally said. It was the only solid thing I had. “Did you follow me?”
His expression didn’t change. “I believe I was here first.”
I expelled a slow breath as I continued to assess him, wishing he’d given me something I could actually use. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
He arched his brow as if my question somehow entertained him. “Neither are you.”
My dream had never progressed this far before, and I wished there was something I could do to wake myself up. Or at least confirm I wasn’t in a dream. Because if I wasn’t, this was utterly unreal.
I ignored the persistent thread of attraction drawing me to him and cast my gaze around the clearing again, mentally noting details and checking again that everything appeared as it always had before.
I remained wary of any movement as I lifted my gaze to the sky.
The moon was in the exact position it always was, peeking just above the tree line. “This looks like my dream.”
“You’ve dreamed of this place?”
I jerked my gaze back to him, questioning the surprise in his voice. “I have. Though you’ve always been nothing more than a shadow figure.”
He studied me with intense eyes, but said nothing further.
I cocked my head, pondering. A real person would be more animated, wouldn’t he?
I gathered my courage and inched toward him, aware that decreasing the space between us sent my pulse racing. But I supposed that didn’t matter if he wasn’t real.
When I was only a few feet away, I stopped to study him more closely.
He remained focused on me and rooted in place.
I drew my gaze over his torso, noted the strength of his jaw, a scar next to his brow, and found myself mesmerized by his dark eyes, which now held silver flecks. That was definitely different.
I’d thought he was the same man from the pub, but maybe not. Could it be that I’d superimposed that man’s face onto my shadowy figure?
I slowly closed the remaining distance between us and pressed my hand flat against his arm.
He was solid. And warmer than the air surrounding us.
I pulled my hand back and jerked my gaze upward to his.
He remained motionless, watching me with an expression I couldn’t read.
Gods, this was eerie.
I glanced at where I’d entered the mystical clearing, certain my friends would have arrived by now. Though if I was in slumber, they wouldn’t.
I looked back at him, unease threading through the pull I couldn’t ignore, and I asked what I’d yearned to know for so long. “Do you have a message for me?”
He tilted his head ever so slightly. “A message?”
I held his gaze, ignoring the powerful current running between us that tightened my insides. “You’ve been in my dreams for years. There must be a reason.”
Silence stretched endlessly between us, long enough that I thought he wouldn’t answer. When he finally did, his voice was low and careful. “You don’t know what you are.”
His words settled somewhere deeper than I liked.
I didn’t know what I was? A strange flicker of resistance rose immediately. Of course I did.
And yet—
Standing there, in a place I shouldn’t have been, in front of a man I had only ever seen in dreams…the certainty slipped. “Does anyone?” I murmured, more to myself than to him.
He didn’t respond.
The silence stretched again, my instincts telling me to leave, to find a way to break the dream. Or at least find something sensible to say.
Instead, I remained before him. “My friends and I went hiking after leaving a pub, looking for a place like this.”
I frowned, realizing that if this was a dream, I didn’t remember the return hike. Or getting back to the car. “Maeve told us about an old Irish story about a moonlight man who supposedly haunts a clearing in the forest. She called it a thin place, and we wanted to see if we could find him.”
Something quick and controlled flickered in his gaze, but I caught it. Or I dreamed I did.
I wasn’t sure what else to say, but at least I’d gotten a reaction from him, so I continued recounting my evening.
“She said he would enchant any woman who entered the clearing and steal her heart, showing her love like she’d never known.
But the women tragically couldn’t stay with him, and it ruined them for anyone else. ”
His expression didn’t change, but something in the air did. He held my gaze and spoke softly. “And if it were true? What if you found yourself charmed by such a man and yet knew it wouldn’t last?”
I hadn’t expected him to engage, and his directness caught me off guard. Was this exchange the true reason for my dream? Was my mind telling me something was missing in my life, even though I wholeheartedly disagreed with the notion?
I shrugged. “It wouldn’t break my heart if that’s what you’re asking. I’d enjoy it, but I wouldn’t lose myself to it.”
His gaze drifted over my face as if he was studying each feature. He lifted his hand and slowly drew a finger down my cheek in a way that felt far too real. “What if you couldn’t help yourself?”
I could barely draw a breath. No man had ever affected me this way before, and I was certain one never would.
It must be a dream.
It was the only explanation that made sense.
So I chose not to question it further.