She’d responded to him like a woman on a date and that alone had felt miraculous, besides being sexy as hell. She’d experienced a sudden powerful attraction to him the moment she laid eyes on him.
After she’d gone home, the solitary and very lonely nature of her existence had hit her hard.
So it was, in a moment of terrible weakness, she’d entered her fae-based dreamglide for the first time but with only one intention: To find Brannick.
She’d found him all right. All she’d done was picture him and whoosh, she was there, hovering her dreamglide above him while he lay asleep in bed.
She’d done a very bad thing when she’d penetrated his dreams and essentially hijacked him into her dreamglide without his permission. This boundary was considered sacred by both Revel Territory and Tribunal law.
Within the dreamglide, she’d kept him in a half-sleep state while she climbed into his bed and began seducing him. By the time she’d brought him to a dreamglide level of consciousness, he was fully aroused and she was on top of him.
She’d meant to explain the situation, especially to let him know he could send her packing if he wanted to. But he’d been shockingly ready to be with her and had taken her on a ride that to this day caused shivers and chills to chase all over her body.
The man knew his way around a woman.
Now she was here, uncertain what to tell real-time Brannick about everything they’d been doing for the past five months.
She tilted her water bottle back and let more of the liquid flow down her throat.
As she watched Brannick, she’d thought more than once that he would have made an exceptional subject. She’d been a photographer before the alter transformation and couldn’t help but see Brannick as through a lens. And it wasn’t just the perfection of his face and body, but something more, something Brannick exuded through the sheer strength of his personality. He was like staring at a massive and very beautiful wall of granite.
He wore his dark brown hair combed straight back and had the most beautiful green eyes, though they had a pinched look most of the time. She understood why, since she’d come to know him so well over the past few months. The man spent his nights trying to right the wrongs of his past. Guilt drove him relentlessly.
She’d screwed up, though, calling him ‘Brann’. No wonder his conscious mind had started filling in the blanks.
It was a weird conundrum to face the man she’d been having sex with for the past several months and unable to tell him that’s what they’d been doing. Or how it was done. Or even that he’d forbidden her not to say a word. Very bizarre.
But there was another reason why she didn’t want Brann to consciously know the truth. She knew, with every cell of her body, that the moment she fessed up, he’d never come near her again. Brannick had demons that kept him locked up tight as a drum. He’d gone berserk when he became an alter vampire and lost his family to the alter serum.
She’d heard about his mania and how he’d become a one-man death squad, attacking anyone in the drug trade. He’d kept it up until the cartels had sent assassins to take out his parents and abduct his sister, Tracy. Only then had he stopped his vigilante killing spree.
Juliet had heard many versions of his sister’s fate, but the one consistent element was that Brannick had been forced to watch while dark coven witches used her as a human sacrifice.
Juliet couldn’t imagine how Brannick had survived both the loss of his wife and children, then the guilt because of the deaths of his remaining family.
She cut the man a lot of slack because of it.
She sighed. She really, really didn’t want her time with Brannick to end. She wanted him in her dreamgliding bed until she was lying in the Tribunal’s overburdened morgue, an inch away from cremation.
She released a heavy sigh.
“Feeling guilty?”
She’d been staring at the cement of the garage floor, lost in thought. Brannick now stood in front her having finished stacking the boxes.
Looking up at him, she shook her head. “I don’t know what you mean.” She’d play dumb as long as she could.
“You’re dreamgliding me, aren’t you?”
He didn’t look nearly as upset as he had earlier, but she still wasn’t going to tell him anything. “What got you all upset before?”
He planted his fists on his hips, his biceps flexing. His lips turned down. “So you’re going to play it this way, dumb as shit?”
She sighed. “I’m under a strong obligation to keep my mouth shut.”
His green eyes narrowed a little more. “I don’t get it. Who has you under an obligation?”
“You do.”