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  “What are we doing?” she whispered.

  “I think we both might be starting to live.” Richard kissed her softly. “tonight, it feels like I’m truly alive for the first time.”

  “Why?” She couldn’t stop herself from inching closer, needing more.

  “Because you’re not hiding from me here, in this moment.” His hands cupped her face. “And you won’t be hiding from your team tomorrow, when you’ll still be scared and needing to run. And I’ll be there, Sarah, feeling you reach for your future instead of the past. It’ll be better than anything I’ve felt in my life—even this.”

  “Richard . . .” She was shaking her head, the taste of him at once devastating and utterly perfect. “This is crazy.”

  His groan took her need deeper. She wanted to lose herself in each caress of his mouth.

  “If I’ve learned one thing since finding you.” He smiled. “It’s that sanity is highly overrated. Come with me, Sarah. No more control. No more fear. Not here. Fall apart with me. Trust me to be there to bring you back.”

  The night’s velvet softness cooled her feverish skin as her clothes slid away beneath his skilled hands. Sarah longed to feel his body completely open to hers, just as his mind now was. When they were skin to skin, she arched into the feel of him. Layers of muscle and strength attested to his Watcher training. But it was the gentleness in his touch, the longing in his mind, that sucked her deeper into their madness.

  “Yes,” she gasped as his hands and mouth found her breasts.

  Her fingers did their own exploring. His breath hissed. His body responded, growing even harder.

  “Yes.” He drew her to the ground. “Stay with me forever, Sarah.”

  He rolled until she straddled him. His erection pressed against her damp center, demanding without forcing, throbbing but under the same control he exerted over the rest of his life.

  “You’re perfect here,” he said, “with my moon and shadows and memories. I’ve always wanted you right here.”

  She could feel the strain that holding back was costing him. She could feel all of him, while he cherished her body and kept things slow, easy, because he thought that was what she needed. She kissed and nipped down his chest, using her teeth. She raked her nails against the rough patch of hair trailing down his abs to his belly.

  “I could devour you.” His fingers clenched in her hair.

  She looked up from where her tongue was dabbling with his navel.

  “Who’s devouring who, Colonel Metting?”

  She had a moment to appreciate his answering growl. Then the world shifted. He pinned her under him and slid his hands beneath her bottom, pulling her into the thrust of his body.

  Her cry filled the night.

  He clutched her close, covering her, shielding her, wrapping her in warmth and safety and the feeling of . . . home.

  “Are you all right?” He held himself motionless inside her. “I—”

  “Don’t stop,” she begged. Her whole life. She’d waited for this moment her entire life. Feeling complete. Feeling whole, every part of her exactly what it should be. “Please, Richard . . .”

  He dropped his head to her neck, and he began to move. She strained and arched at the incredible sensations filling them, both their experiences combining within their link, sharing, building, driving them closer to a perfection she’d never dreamed possible. His kisses found her breasts again. He rocked in and out of her body, each stroke a bolt of sizzling ecstasy.

  “Say it.” His voice was strained. Barely recognizable.

  “What?”

  “My name, from your first dreams with me. Tell me you know this is me. Not a Watcher. Not your raven. Give me your dreams again, Sarah.”

  “Rick,” she gasped, surrendering herself to trusting him with her secrets and her heart and her future. “Rick . . .”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Richard stood across the dream lab from Sarah. The strain of their third hour of mission prep was taking its toll on her. Still reeling from the power of what had happened between them, needing her back in his arms, her future back under his protection, he had no choice but to give up even more control over what was about to happen.

  Even though she was still leery of the mission, Sarah was working with the team. Trying to, anyway. Jeff, the Watcher lead for the dream mission, wasn’t pulling his punches. He couldn’t afford to, not if they were going to have any hope of securing her legacy from the center.

  “They’re just colors,” Sarah said. “I’m telling you, the voices are controlling the dream.”

  “They’re not just anything.” Jeff sat directly in front of her, straddling a chair he’d turned backward, his injured leg stretched out to the side. His arms were folded over the chair’s back. He already wore the scrubs everyone would use for the mission. “Any more than it’s been just voices crying in your mind since you were a kid. If you had mentioned that detail to someone the moment you started hearing what you thought were Trinity’s cries, we might not be in this mess. Something is plugging into your memories and using them to project new realities that threaten everyone around you.”

  Madeline stiffened beside her sister. She and Jarred sat next to Sarah, at the center of the circle of Watchers filling the lab. Madeline’s fingers clenched around Sarah’s arm. Jarred squeezed his fiancée’s shoulder, completing a circle of support, while Richard kept his distance.

  But Sarah was in his mind still. In his heart. She’d touched his soul so deeply, he’d never be able to let her go. The others couldn’t know the new depths of their connection. Not yet. But it was there for Sarah, for both of them. Their link would get her through this meeting and the nightmare, and into the future she and her legacy deserved.

  She took a steadying breath, absorbing Richard’s unspoken conviction that she could handle Jeff and his barrage of questions.

  “Why don’t you save us all time,” she said to Jeff, “and just tell me what you want the colors in my dreams to mean? Then we can move on to discussing the only thing that really matters—saving a little girl whose mind the center’s trying to destroy, the same way they did mine.”

  Silent screams battered the mental control Richard was helping her maintain. He heard them continuously now, the same as Sarah. He’d been hearing them more strongly, more frequently, since walking with her, her mind fully open to him, back to the bunker.

  “There is no meaning to any of this without your input.” Jeff’s tone was clipped, his energy toxic, while he baited her. “You convinced the council you were ready to become an active part of this mission instead of another misfiring variable we have to work around. I suggest you convince yourself you’re ready, Ms. Temple. Because these men are about to put their lives on the line to protect your stubborn ass.”

  “I am ready.” Sarah’s nightmare screamed. She glared at Jeff. “I’m ready to save Trinity, not to be dissected like some lab experiment.”

  “Warriors prepare to prepare,” Jeff said. “You’re being treated like a warrior here, not a specimen. Secrets within a team get people killed. We need your memories, even the ones you don’t want to go back to, so the team can build a shared understanding of what each piece of your dream might become once we project together. You need them to help you understand the symbols that will lead you to Trinity.”

  “You want me to tell you that my mind works rationally.” Sarah glanced to Richard, miserable. “You—”

  “I want you to tell me the truth you’re still running from,” Jeff pushed. “Stop protecting yourself from us, like we don’t already know what you’re capable of. These men are veterans in the fluid work of telepathic missions. We’ve been trained in Dream Weaver techniques, and we know your history with Ruebens. But no one’s as intimately familiar with your mind as you are. We need to know everything you can remember from every dream you’ve ever had. You’re a Watcher now. All hell’s about to break loose in your mind. Which means the men on your team are quite possibly dead, if yo
u don’t stop pouting and get to work.”

  “Pouting?” Sarah’s nails bit into her skin, drops of blood trickling from the tiny cuts she was making on her hand.

  Richard sent his consciousness deeper into hers, discovering cloud images battling her panic, rather than the rage he’d expected. Sarah was fighting for control. She was resisting the impulse to lay into Jeff. She was reaching for the new chance she still couldn’t quite believe was waiting for them beyond her nightmare.

  He added his own energy to the relaxation routine he’d taught her—his confidence that she could do this. She stared at him only for an instant before her focus returned to the others. But everything they’d shared, everything that connected them, had filled that one endless moment.

  “Tell them why the colors are so hard for you to talk about,” he projected to her. “Trust them to understand. Trust yourself to handle remembering.”

  Sarah looked down at the damage she’d done to her hand.

  Her troubled past shifted closer.

  “The colors aren’t a threat,” she said to the team, wincing as she let her mind drift back. “They’ve always been there to guide me, not hurt me. For most of my life they were the only things I was sure I belonged to. They were the only things that never went away.”

  Jeff’s powerful body relaxed with her first genuine contribution to the discussion.

  “We expect your dream relationship to existing themes and symbols to shift as today’s projection plays out,” he said. “That’s how the center got to you at the house. New variations will no doubt arise in the ocean’s shifting matrix. Even with our help stabilizing the matrix and Colonel Metting anchoring the team’s link to you from this lab, you could easily lose your identity to the dream. The center knows which buttons to push. Once they feel your psychic energy searching for Trinity’s, they’ll come after you in unexpected ways. They’ll use something you’ve grown to trust. Something you’ve told yourself is harmless. Safe. Nonthreatening.”

  “So . . .” Sarah reached for her sister’s hand. “Nothing’s safe now.”

  “Color’s been your safe place your whole life?” Jeff asked.

  “They . . .” The past’s hold on her escalated. “They’ve surrounded the people and voices in my visions. All my life, they’ve told me who’s who. Whether there’s acceptance or danger. They’re why no matter how much everyone was concerned, the ocean dream always felt safe to me before this last nightmare.”

  “Because in the lab we kept you where the water was shallow,” Madeline said. “There was nothing in the shallows but the bright colors that you’ve always loved. Amethyst. Turquoise. Sapphire. The colors you scribbled all over your wall when you were a little girl.”

  “My wall?” Sarah asked, the lab suddenly spinning in a dizzying whirl. Her bedroom wall . . . The wall her angry, little-girl image had been staring at in the Lenox daydream. “But . . . there were no colors on it in my vision at the house . . .”

  Richard’s mind filled with the flash of the vivid hues Madeline described, illuminating the decaying, empty bedroom they’d found in the Temples’ crumbling old house. He was seeing a little girl with dark auburn hair sitting on a pink bedspread, staring at a wall consumed by swirls of color and emotion, instead of the black-and-white images Sarah had described from the vision. He was feeling the little girl’s fear of what she’d painted, what it meant. Her compulsion to cover every flat surface of the room with the same mania. She needed to drown in the colors, breathe them, until the voices she didn’t understand stopped hurting.

  He absorbed the memory from long ago, shielding it from everyone but Sarah and Madeline, encouraging the twins to dig deeper. Their minds flowed with his until the truth finally bubbled to the surface.

  “Oh, my God. I’d forgotten. The colors on my bedroom walls protected me from the madness.” There was shame in Sarah’s whisper, but relief, too, as a piece of the past her mind had run from fell back into place. “That’s why the daydream seemed so familiar. That’s the memory the projection connected with. Mom got so mad when I kept painting the walls, that summer I was six, no matter how many times she covered up the mess I made. It felt like those colors were saving me. They helped me believe that some day all of this would end and it would stop hurting, and I’d stop being something people were afraid of.”

  The room grew still as the team identified with the loneliness, the isolation, of Sarah’s story. None of the Watchers were normal. None of them had been accepted. None of their secrets had been truly safe until they’d found the Brotherhood.

  Madeline tilted her head to the side. “Colors were guiding you in the ocean dream, too,” she said. “They comforted you at first. They helped you swim deeper, taking you toward Trinity’s voice. Then the colors you were following disappeared into the darkness.”

  “Actually, some of them were still there.” Jeff had a laptop balanced on his knee. Each Watcher held a similar compact unit, the devices wirelessly connected to Richard’s dream database. Jeff called up a report. “You saw at least one color near the door you said barred you from Trinity’s location. Reds. A spectrum of reds. They were—”

  “Ugly,” the twins said in unison.

  “Angry,” Sarah added. “Like they were warning me.”

  “Or they were repelling you.” Jeff typed their comments into the computer. “You said you couldn’t break through. Did the colors stop you? Or did you just give up because reality didn’t turn out as lovely as you’d dreamed it would be in your little-girl fantasies?”

  His sarcasm sent a flash of energy sizzling from Sarah. Richard directed it away from Jeff, toward himself. Jeff caught the pain Richard couldn’t fully mask. His gaze jerked back to Sarah’s. He tried to swallow. The motion caught halfway down his throat. He coughed, not taking a full breath until Sarah glanced an apology toward Richard.

  “I don’t expect anything to turn out the way I dreamed it anymore.” Self-loathing filled her. Fear of the madness that drove her to strike out.

  “You’ve been dreaming of colors and cries for help since you were a child?” Richard asked, buying Jeff time to catch his breath.

  “Yes,” Madeline answered for her sister.

  “Since you were kids?”

  “Since my mother told me to stop remembering my dreams,” Sarah said. “Because they weren’t real, and I’d only make things harder for everyone if I didn’t stop talking nonsense all the time.”

  “Good.” Jeff cleared his throat. He turned his chair around, favoring his injured leg, and sat back for the first time since the meeting began.

  “Good?” Sarah swiped at the moisture collecting in the corners of her eyes. “I’ve been a freak my entire life, and it’s getting worse now, whether I’m dreaming or not. And that’s good?”

  “It is, as long as your team knows about it.” Jeff’s smile offered acceptance, if Sarah would let herself take it. “As long as you trust us while you work through it, instead of fighting and failing alone. And clearly, you’re capable of doing that, since I’m still breathing after being an unbearable ass. And you’re still in control enough to answer questions after you stopped short of strangling me. I’d call that damn encouraging mission prep.”

  “You . . .” Sarah sputtered. “You were baiting me? You were pushing me, to see if I could be trusted with your team’s lives?”

  “No,” Richard corrected, “to see if you could trust them with yours. And I assure you, you can.”

  Jeff had opened the meeting, explaining their three-pronged plan: he’d have Watchers scouting the matrix for whatever could be gleaned of the center’s logistics and Trinity’s location, streaming their findings back from the dream to Richard’s lab; the team would protect the Temples while the twins’ minds searched for the little girl, the Watchers added power feeding the matrix and preventing Sarah and Madeline from being absorbed into whatever the center was still doing with Dream Weaver; and the twins would once and for all prove their commitment to work fully, op
enly, with the Brotherhood.

  “You have to accept that we’ll have your back,” Jeff said, “whatever you do in the dream. Whatever’s happened in the past.”

  Sarah’s gaze swept the room.

  Richard, too, cataloged every man’s reaction to Jeff’s challenge. Someone from the Brotherhood was leaking information to the center. Likely a Watcher chosen for this team.

  Jeff could be sending a traitor into Sarah’s mind equipped with the information he needed to hand the center a final victory. Richard listened to his instincts and tried to feel which of his brothers couldn’t be trusted. But he sensed nothing out of the ordinary from any consciousness in the lab.

  Jeff inched his chair closer to Sarah’s. “What aren’t you telling us?” he asked.

  “The people I care about most in the world are going back into the nightmare with me,” Sarah said. “Do you really think I’d keep something from you that could protect them?”

  She sounded sincere enough, but Richard could feel her holding back.

  “You can do this,” his mind promised her.

  “I could lose you if I don’t stay in control,” she projected back. “Or Trinity or Maddie. You could all die, just like my parents.”

  “We’re not going anywhere. No one here is going to let that happen.”

  “Equip your team to counter whatever the dream will do,” Jeff said. “Trust us, even with what you think are the weakest parts of your legacy. You have my promise as a warrior, your team will be there for you when you need us.”

  “You mean we have your personal assurance?” Jarred asked. “Imagine our relief, since a little over a day ago you were seconds away from shooting Sarah dead. Why should she trust you now?”

  “Because every consciousness that follows her into tonight’s nightmare will be trapped in that altered state if she can’t disengage. We’ll all find ourselves at the mercy of her Dream Weaver programming if she doesn’t maintain control. We all want the same thing—successful mission execution and extraction of everyone from the nightmare, particularly Sarah.”