Chapter 7
The dream started the way dreams usually do, without warning or permission. One moment I was asleep with Gabriella warm against my chest, her breathing steady, the house quiet around us, and the next I was somewhere else entirely, somewhere golden and green and utterly, ruinously real.
We were in the meadow. The same one where we’d worked all afternoon, where she’d thrown water at my chest and I’d chased her and caught her and pinned her in the grass.
But in the dream, the light was warmer. The kind of light that makes everything look like it’s been dipped in honey, and the grass beneath us was soft and cool against my back, and Gabriella was on top of me, not pinning my wrists this time but moving, her hips grinding against mine, making my body go liquid beneath her.
In the dream, her nightgown was gone, the way details vanish in dreams, and what replaced it was skin, her skin, pale and warm and catching the golden light like she’d been poured from it.
Her breasts were small and perfect, tipped with pink nipples that darkened when I touched her, and when I put my mouth on one she arched into it with a sound that didn’t belong in dreams, that belonged in the real world, in dark rooms, in places where people could hear you if you weren’t careful.
Her hands were in my hair, pulling, and she was saying my name, Gabriel, Gabriel, her voice breaking on the syllables, and I was hard against her, so hard it hurt, the fabric of my sleep pants the only thing between us and not enough, never enough.
She rocked against me, her body slick where we pressed together, and the friction was maddening, her hips moving with a confidence the real Gabriella kept hidden behind ledgers and quick smiles.
Then her hand was there, sliding between us, pushing the waistband of my pants down, and the cool air hit me and then her hand wrapped around me and my whole body went tight, a groan tearing from my throat that should have woken the entire farm.
Her grip was firm, knowing, her thumb circling the head of my cock, and when she sank down onto me, taking me inside her with a slow roll of her hips that made her eyes flutter closed and her mouth fall open, the sensation was so real, so physical, so overwhelmingly present that my back arched off the grass and my hands found her hips and I was saying her name, Gabriella, God, Gabriella, over and over like it was the only word I knew.
She moved. Above me, around me, her body taking me deeper with each downward stroke, her thighs trembling against mine, her breasts bouncing, her dark blonde hair falling across her face in damp strands.
Her back was bare, and I ran my hands up her spine, feeling each vertebra beneath my palms, and she shuddered and pressed herself harder against me and whispered something I couldn’t hear over the blood roaring in my ears.
The pleasure built. Fast, too fast, the kind of buildup that happens in dreams where your body has already decided the outcome and is just taking you along for the ride.
My hips jerked up to meet hers, driving deeper, and she cried out, a sharp, broken sound that went straight through my chest and settled somewhere lower, and her inner muscles clenched around me, tight, perfect, and I was coming, hard, my release pulsing into her while she rode me through it, her body clenching around mine, her fingers digging into my shoulders hard enough to leave marks.
The intensity of it woke me, all at once, like falling through ice.
One moment I was in the meadow with Gabriella’s body wrapped around mine and her voice in my ears, and the next I was in my bedroom, the darkness thick and close, and the warm weight against my chest was real, and my cock was throbbing and wet and my sleep pants were soaked through, and Gabriella was still asleep, her face pressed into the hollow of my collarbone, one hand curled against my chest, her breathing deep and even.
I lay perfectly still. My heart was hammering so hard I could feel it in my throat.
The wetness cooling against my stomach was mortifying, the kind of adolescent humiliation I hadn’t experienced since I was sixteen and waking up to similar situations with considerably less complicated feelings attached.
I was twenty-six. I had commanded units in battle.
I had stood before the queen and received commendations without blinking.
And here I was, come in my pants like a teenager because I’d dreamed about fucking her.
God, I needed to move. Carefully, I eased my weight off the mattress. Gabriella murmured in her sleep but didn’t wake, her body settling instinctively against the empty space I left.
My sleep pants were a write-off. I peeled them off as quietly as cloth would allow, balled them up, and tucked them under the bed where they would wait for tomorrow’s laundry and my eternal shame.
I found a clean pair in the dresser, pulled them on, and stood there in the dark for a moment, breathing, waiting for my pulse to settle.
Gabriella hadn’t moved. She lay curled on her side, the quilt pulled to her chin, her face peaceful in a way I hadn’t seen it since I’d come home.
Whatever nightmare had driven her to my bed, it had been chased away by something deeper, and the sight of her sleeping so soundly, so trustingly, in my bed, reminded me that I would have stood between her and every cruel thing in the world if that was what it took to keep that peace on her face.
I climbed back into bed. Slowly, gently, I gathered her against me, one arm beneath her pillow, the other around her waist, and pulled her close.
She sighed in her sleep, her body molding against mine with the ease of something that had found its place and intended to keep it, and I pressed my lips to the top of her head and held her and tried very hard not to think about the meadow or the grass or the way her body had felt around mine in a dream that had no business being that vivid.
Her eyes opened. I felt it before I saw it, the slight change in her breathing, the way her body went from sleep relaxed to waking attentive in the span of a heartbeat. She lifted her head from my chest and blinked up at me, her eyes finding mine in the near dark.
“You moved,” she said, her voice thick with sleep. “What happened?”
“I woke up,” I said. “From a dream.”
She frowned, concern etching itself across her features. “A bad one?”
“No.” I brushed a strand of hair from her forehead, my thumb lingering against her temple. “The best kind.”
The concern melted, replaced by a slow, warm understanding that started at the corners of her mouth and spread upward until her eyes were crinkling with it.
She didn’t ask what the dream had been about.
She didn’t need to. The way she looked at me, the slight flush climbing her neck, the way her body pressed a fraction closer against mine, told me she’d already guessed, or hoped, or both.
“Good,” she said softly, and settled back against my chest, her hand finding mine beneath the quilt and squeezing briefly, before her breathing deepened again and sleep took her back.
I lay awake longer than I should have, holding her, feeling the rise and fall of her ribs against my side, and wondered, with the clarity that only comes at three in the morning, what the hell I was doing and whether I had any intention of stopping.
* * *
Morning came the way it always did on the farm, with light and birds and the creak of old floorboards as someone moved through the house downstairs.
I woke to it gradually, the way you wake when your body has decided it’s had enough sleep but your mind is still negotiating the terms of consciousness.
Gabriella was still against me, one arm thrown across my chest, her face buried in the pillow beside my shoulder, her breathing deep and even.
She hadn’t moved all night. Or if she had, I’d been too deeply asleep to notice.
I lay there for a while, watching the light strengthen through the window, turning the dust motes gold, and tried to calculate the exact degree of awkwardness that would accompany Gabriella waking up in my bed after the conversation we’d had and the dream I’d had and the fact that I was currently holding her with considerably more tenderness than I ever had before.
Better to let her sleep. She needed it more than I did, and the dark circles under her eyes had been there long enough to qualify as permanent residents.
I eased my weight with the care of a man disarming a trap, easing my arm from beneath her pillow, and she murmured something unintelligible and rolled onto her back, one hand finding the empty space where I’d been and settling there like it was keeping the spot warm.
I dressed quietly. Trousers, shirt, boots by the door.
The house was making its morning sounds around me, water running somewhere, the distant clatter of pans, Angelina already at work because Angelina was always already at work, the woman’s internal clock apparently calibrated to something several time zones ahead of normal human waking hours.
I was pulling my shirt over my head when the door opened, and Angelina stepped into the room with a wicker laundry basket balanced on her hip, her wings half folded behind her, her eyes doing their morning survey of the bedroom she presumably expected to find empty.
They found Gabriella instead. Her daughter, asleep in my bed, the quilt pulled to her chin, her dark blonde hair spread across my pillow in a tangle that looked both peaceful and, from Angelina’s perspective, extremely informative.
Angelina stopped. The basket settled against her hip. Her eyes moved from Gabriella to me, standing shirtless by the dresser with my arms still caught in the fabric, to Gabriella again, and something passed across her face that I couldn’t quite read.
“She came to me last night,” I said quietly. “Another nightmare. About the playground.”