Aurora screamed, and the sound cut through the air. Everything around her—the light from the streetlamps, the walls of the buildings trapping her in the alley—disappeared, melting away. She screamed again, her heart pounding in her chest, her blood roaring in her ears, and all at once she wasn’t in Miami; she was sitting up in a darkened room, something tangled around her legs and arms, keeping her from running away from the fearsome sight of the loan shark.
Aurora squirmed and struggled for a moment longer, trying to get away from the phantom that had ripped her out of her dream—and that was when reality flashed back in
to her mind. She wasn’t in Miami. She was hundreds of miles away, on a yacht, in the Caribbean.
Aurora closed her eyes and breathed in slowly, details of her evening beginning to filter through her mind. She remembered meeting Khaleel, getting onto the yacht, being discovered as a stowaway, swimming to the beach. She opened her eyes again and looked around, briefly afraid that her adventure had been a dream and that her real life remained unchanged from what it had been that morning. But when she reached over to the bedside table and turned on the lamp, the sights of her opulent room soothed her eyes.
“Jesus Christ,” Aurora murmured, scrubbing at her face with her hands. The sweat that had formed on her body cooled and she shivered in the slight chill of the room. “Okay. Note to self: do not eat lobster before bed. Apparently it gives you almost-sex dreams and nightmares.”
Aurora disentangled her legs from the sheets and blankets and stepped across the room, stopping short of the bathroom. A small cabinet next to the doorway opened to reveal bottles of water. Aurora took one and cracked the seal on the top, swallowing down long gulps. She shook her head, remembering the details of the dream with a mixture of dread, arousal and fear. “Never again,” she told herself firmly, finishing the bottle of water in a few more gulps.
As the adrenaline of her nightmare began to ebb out of her system, Aurora’s fatigue set in once more, and she threw the bottle into the wastebasket before padding back to the bed. She climbed onto it and sank down amid the blankets, shaking her head as she recovered from the intensity of her dream.
She slithered down between the sheets and reached over to the bedside table once more, extinguishing the light. Aurora felt more than a little embarrassed at the possibility that someone might have heard her screaming, might wonder what it was the strange newcomer had been doing in her sleep to make her scream like that.
“Think about something pleasant,” she told herself out loud, turning onto her side in the darkness. The parts of the dream with Khaleel had been pleasant, at least; but there was something about the romantic—almost erotic—intensity of that part of the dream that made Aurora’s cheeks burn. She knew better than to think that Khaleel would want anything to do with her once they were back on the mainland; he was too wealthy, too important, to ever trouble himself with a girl who was on the run from a loan shark.
Aurora pushed aside the thought of having anything further to do with Khaleel when they returned to Florida. She would get through however long they were on the trip, then she and Khaleel would part ways, and that would be that. She certainly wasn’t going to kiss him, or try anything with someone whose life was so different from her own. It would only set her up for disappointment. I just wish the dream had been in reverse, Aurora thought wryly as fatigue began to settle in once more and her mind began to wander into the cozy warmth that came before she dropped off to sleep.
NINE
Hours later, Aurora woke up again; not because of another nightmare but because of the light coming in through the French doors leading out onto the balcony. She groaned and rolled onto her back, staring at the ceiling, not wanting to get up just yet. She could feel the yacht moving underneath and around her, hear the ocean on the other side of the wall.
She scrubbed at her face, trying to decide what to do with herself. Khaleel had told her to make herself at home; but it wasn’t as though his yacht were a cruise ship, and there were activities going on at all hours.
She looked around the room as she sat up, looking for a source of entertainment. “So peaceful out at sea,” she murmured to herself, realizing that there really wasn’t very much for her to do in her quarters.
She called down for breakfast, and went once more with what Khaleel had set as the menu; Aurora thought she could do worse than eat like a Sheikh. She changed into a pair of pants and a blouse that she found in the dresser; she had no panties to change into, but Aurora told herself it was the same premise as laundry day.
The food arrived, and Aurora took the tray out onto her balcony, already tired of the four walls of her room. Khaleel’s selections were similar to the ones she'd delivered to him the previous day: she had a bowl of porridge, spicy and sweet, fresh fruit, yogurt with honey and nuts, and a small carafe of coffee with cream and sugar on the side.
As she ate, Aurora contemplated her situation. She didn’t resent being confined to the yacht as much as she had initially; on the contrary, she recognized that, for the moment at least, it was probably the safest place for her.
The dream she’d had of Khaleel, before it had turned into a nightmare, tugged at her mind, and she tried to decide what she would do if and when she got back to the mainland. Her job at the café was obviously a bust; she couldn’t go back to it, and she didn’t think she could safely get a job anywhere in Miami or Dade County without Jon eventually finding her. At that, anywhere in the state he’d probably find a way to track me down, she thought bleakly.
Having finished her breakfast, Aurora set her tray outside of her cabin door and sat down on the plush couch her quarters boasted, looking through the window to the sea outside.
“I could go back to medical school, I guess,” she said, frowning at the thought. She had left med school for good reasons, after realizing in the middle of a pathology class that the only reason she’d even gone was because her parents had expected it of her. They had wanted her to follow