I mean who in the real world actually had satin sheets? I’d once had a satin pillowcase in my early teens because Seventeen magazine said it was a great way for curly-haired girls to fight off frizz. Grandmere had made one for me, and damned if my head didn’t slip off it almost every night.
Satin sheets were the bedroom version of a Slip ’n Slide.
Except in my dreams.
And those usually also featured a naked man, so I wasn’t going to complain too much.
“The sheets are a bit clichéd, don’t you think?”
Holden wrapped his arms around me from behind and tugged me close. He nestled his cheek in my hair and whispered in my ear, “I’m sorry, whose dream is this again?”
In reality this wasn’t a normal dream, and that was the only reason I was so hyperaware of it being part of my imagination. In other dreams it was hard to sort out what was what because everything felt so real. This, too, felt so real it was hard not to convince myself I was awake. But I wasn’t. Because of the bond I’d formed with Holden when I was his ward, the sneaky bugger could worm his way into my dreams if he so desired.
“Don’t forget, you have all the power now,” he reminded me, as if reading my mind. Maybe he could? He was capable of sneaking into my subconscious. Who’s to say what he could glean from me while he was there.
“You’re trying to tell me I brought you here?”
He licked the shell of my ear, and my whole body tightened. “I’m just saying I couldn’t be here if you didn’t want me here.”
I snorted, but I didn’t push him away. He trailed kisses down from my ear to the crook of my shoulder, and I closed my eyes so I could focus on the sensation of it, his lips as soft and firm as I knew them to be in real life. When I felt the graze of fangs over my skin, I opened my eyes again.
“What are you—?”
“Shhh,” he soothed, traversing a hand over my belly and lower…lower.
A shuddering sigh escaped me. I wished it hadn’t, because he took it as an invitation. He slipped one finger inside of me in the same instant he bit down, teeth breaking skin and…
Nice day for a white wedding.
Billy Idol sure seemed to think so as his voice growled and snarled from the cell phone on my nightstand.
“Ugh, can you…?” I stopped short of asking Desmond to turn it off when I remembered he wasn’t here anymore. I was alone.
The weight of that knowledge sat heavy on my chest like a bloated hippopotamus.
Desmond was gone.
I groped around on the nightstand until my hand found the smooth, cool, credit-card-sized phone, and I hit the speak button, bringing it to my ear with a cheerful, “What?”
“Hello to you too,” Mercedes replied, not skipping a beat. If anyone was used to being on the receiving end of my upbeat just-woke-up self, it was Cedes. “I suspected you might still be in bed, seeing as…well…days aren’t your thing.” There was a long pause. I didn’t fill it, so she carried on. “The current time is seven forty-five, and I am sitting outside your apartment with Owen, because you are expected at Columbia at eight o’clock sharp.”
I held the phone back and looked at the date. April 28th.
I don’t know how I was the only fucking person in the world who needed to be reminded about my own wedding. But here I was, still in bed two hours before I was supposed to walk down the aisle. I was dreaming about another man and waking up sad because yet another wasn’t beside me in bed.
“I’ll be out in five minutes,” I promised her.
“Don’t fancy yourself up too much, there are people for that.” This was said in a voice eerily similar to Kellen’s, and I couldn’t help but laugh. She wasn’t wrong though, Kimberly was bound to have dozens of the best hair and makeup artists waiting to paint me, pluck me and groom me into the best version of myself.
A version I didn’t feel I deserved to be right then.
I mumbled a “See you soon” and hung up.
Fifteen minutes later I was sitting alongside Kellen, Brigit and Mercedes in short-backed chairs while a team of beauty experts went to town on us. They cooed over Bri’s perfectly straight blonde hair so much I was convinced they wanted to do a scalp transplant and put her hair on my head to save themselves the trouble of making order out of the messy ponytail I’d worn to the hotel.
Eugenia had come along with Kellen and was sitting on a small loveseat looking as uncomfortable as humanly possible. I guess when you take a girl who has lived in the swamps of Louisiana for half her life and throw her into a city like New York, there was bound to be a fair bit of culture shock.
“Eugenia?” I said.