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Dreamer
Kate Austin

www.spice-books.co.uk

Chapter 1

The dream comes, as it has for as long as she cares to remember, rolling over her like a tsunami. It comes despite everything she’s tried to stop it. Meditation, medication, fornication.

Nothing works.

Since the night he came into her life, the night he changed everything and then disappeared, the dream has haunted her.

Her body weeps for him, damp and hot with the aftermath of the dream. She never comes in the dream, but her body aches for release, her nipples pebbling with desire for his lips.

She wakes each time on the edge, her back arched, her arms reaching, screaming for it, for him, for the orgasm she’s done without for almost three years.

Waking up hurts.

She’s tried sex—well, of course she has. She’s tried deep-down dirty sex, sex with strangers, sex with friends, sex with toys, sex with almost anyone or anything. But like the dream, she gets so far and no further.

She can hang on the edge for what seems like forever, her body dripping and reaching for more. Please, please, more, she hears herself sobbing, feeling more than a little like Oliver Twist and wishing—even with all the hell she’ll have to go through to get to it—for his happy ending.

On the edge, her legs shake, her teeth score her lips until they bleed. She looks down at her body, at her rose-red painfully hard nipples, her blush-pink skin, her legs sprawled as far open as she can get them, and more often than not, a head she doesn’t recognize between them.

No matter how talented the tongue—and she’s become an connoisseur since him—she can’t come.

Now she understands the agony represented by the term “blue balls”—three fucking years’ worth of it.

“No medical reason for it,” more than a dozen doctors have told her. GPs, gynecologists, psychiatrists—they do the tests, they hem and haw, and then they say, “Sorry, nothing we can do.”

Except, of course, for the psychiatrists, who would love more than anything to put her through the therapy wringer until she bleeds her childhood, her extremely active and sometimes dangerous sex life, her dreams and desires.

But Miri will not submit herself to that invasion. She’s full to the brim with self-knowledge.

Yes, her childhood was shit—wasn’t everyone’s? Yes, it made her the woman she is today. No surprise there.

Yes, she’s had a varied, mostly entertaining, occasionally frightening sex life for almost thirty years. And she wouldn’t trade it for anything. There were a few encounters—if she had it to do over—she might decide not to indulge in again. She might tamp down her darker side just a little bit, but having lived through them, she is more than content to keep the memories.

As for dreams and desires? Only one of each.

Not enough, she tells herself, for a psychiatrist to enjoy though she’s fooling herself. They’d love them.

The dream and the desire to get off the fucking edge, to fall—as she used to on a more-than-regular basis—deep into the full body pleasure of orgasm.

God, she misses it with the intensity of an addict. She’s jonesing for it, for the way her entire body heats up as she climbs toward the peak, the way she can never stop herself—if he, whoever he is, hasn’t already taken care of it—from reaching for her straining nipples with dampened fingertips.

She loves the first touch of her fingers on them: a gentle stroking of the aerole, though that gentleness never lasts long. She rolls her lengthening nipples in her fingers, then pinches, softly at first, one and then the other—a sharp squeeze—hard enough to sting, to send a quiver of heat right through her.

The slide of tongue in her mouth, on her belly, her thighs. She’s open for it, for him, wet and hot and fragrant. She’s panting, but forces herself to take deep breaths when she can—the scent of her own arousal, the strongest aphrodisiac she knows.

She’s shaking, writhing with an ecstasy that’s almost pain. So close, so ready. She needs him inside her, needs that final thrust, but she’s almost there. Miri knows if she reaches down with a saliva-moistened fingertip, she can push herself over. But she doesn’t do it. She waits for him, for that added sensation of fullness.

She remembers so clearly the rush of blood to her clitoris, the buzzing at her pulse points as her heart beats harder, the anticipation of the delicious soreness she’ll feel in a few hours, a reminder of her body’s disregard for posture when in this place.

She sighs as she remembers the sweet arch of her back, the strain as she tries to prolong the moment.

Because before him, before the dream, she wanted the edge, craved the thrill of it—knowing the longer she held out, the better the orgasms would be, the longer they’d last—until the pleasure overwhelmed it.

Now all she craves is the fall.

Chapter 2

The dream begins as it always does—in her favourite bar, the place where she feels safe, her home away from home, where the waiters and the owners are her friends, where they watch over her.

She never brings a date to Lily’s, never takes anyone home from here. Don and Sam and Lily steer men on the make away from her, making it clear before she has to that she’s one of theirs, that she’s not interested. They steer over people—men and women—who might interest her, who want what she wants. A nice evening out, interesting conversation, nothing more.

It might be the only rule she has about sex—this place is her place, the one place she doesn’t use to troll for men.

Not that it isn’t a good place for that purpose. It’s in the middle of midtown, haunt of single men and women, full of construction sites and office buildings—and Miri likes variety—but she’s never been tempted enough to break the rule.

Not until the night he shows up.

He’s not much of anything, really. Not tall, not handsome, not charming. She doesn’t give him more than a quick glance, but then he sits down next to her and he smells like sex. Like amazing, sweaty, three-day weekend and maybe calling-in-sick-on-Tuesday sex.

Even now she can’t figure out what the smell is. It’s not aftershave which she, purely on principle, despises. It’s not the sweet smell of the urban male: minty toothpaste and expensive, spicy deodorant. Not that tangy smell of the construction guy: sweat and beer and the faint remnants of Irish Spring from his morning shower.

It’s an aroma, a flavor, a combination all of his own, and Miri, though she still tries to define it, never gets any closer than that first impression. He smells of sex.

When she turns, against her will, to look at him, she sees the fine details she missed when he entered the bar. That not much of anything Miri first thought quickly turns into a desperate mental grab for her never in Lily’s rule.

He has thick dark lashes guarding amber eyes. Miri reads enough romances to know just how much of a cliché those amber eyes are, but he has them. She’s not imagining them. His skin, though she guesses his age somewhere between forty and fifty, is so fine-grained it appears to have been airbrushed.

He has her favorite kind of lips: a slightly pouting lower lip—perfect for nibbling—and a beautifully shaped upper lip—perfect for tracing with her tongue. They have her licking her own in response.

His body is broad across the shoulders, trim at the waist, his worn jeans tight over his thighs and molding his perfect ass. And yes, she noticed that as he walked across the room.

His ears are small and tucked tight into his head, completely exposed by his buzz cut. Difficult, she thinks at the time, to tell what color his hair might be. She’ll have to wait—no longer even trying to stop herself from breaking the rule—until she has him naked to find that out.

It has to be tonight.

Because she’s never felt this way before, never been this hot and impatient without a touch or a word. She can’t even be sure he’ll be interested.

Until he turns to her, his knees—no mistake there-meeting hers between the stools. They’re warm, the heat transferring even through the denim. And his hands, when he carefully lays them on her bare knees, are as hot as she feels.

“Another drink?” he asks, his eyes asking more of her than those two words could possibly imply.

“Uh,” she says, feeling like an idiot for having to look down at the bar to see what she’s drinking. “A scotch.” She looks at Lily behind the bar. “She knows what I drink.”

He follows her gaze and nods at Lily, holding up two fingers. “Scotch is good. Gets a nice buzz on. But only one more, okay?”

She doesn’t pretend not to know what he’s saying. They’re far beyond that. The scotch is a lubricant, just the way the heat of his hands is, the way the feel of the rough denim on her skin is.

She smiles to herself. Lubricant may be the last thing she needs; she’s dripping with need, her panties moist with it. She watches his nostrils flare and knows he’s caught the scent of her arousal.

“Jack,” he says, lifting one of his hands from her knee.

She places hers in it and the arousal intensifies. She suspects that the combination of desire, impatience and astonishment on his face are reflected on hers.