Dream Lover Read online

  “I accept,” she murmured to the bronze bust of his handsome head that stood on a plinth on the right side of the breakfast room fireplace. She stroked his cold, smooth cheek. “I am your lover.”

  She showered before bed that night, taut with anticipation, ignoring the emptiness of her belly after another unsuccessful attempt to eat. No progress had been made on the book, and she had abandoned the day, in her giddiness, to a tour of the surrounding countryside where Lucien had spent his adolescent summer holidays tumbling wenches in haystacks and trying to call up demons. It was as if he sat beside her in the passenger seat, pointing out local landmarks and explaining to her their personal significance. The warm breath of summer air was him, at her elbow, kissing her neck.

  Will you come tonight? She smoothed scented lather everywhere, every curve of neck and hollow of back, paying special attention to the neat mat of curls between her legs and the hidden crease under her breasts. He liked a girl to be clean for him so that he could make his sullying mark on her. Freya knew this from his writings, though she also knew that he was not fastidious about the natural effusions of male and female bodies. He had had erotica published in Holland under a pseudonym. She knew what he liked, which was a blessed relief. Having to second-guess the tastes of more corporeal lovers had been an exhausting waste of time and partly why Freya had withdrawn herself from the mating game. With Lucien, you simply knew that he liked everything and would try anything new: so much easier.

  She stepped out of the shower room, wrapped in towels, and smiled at her neatly folded nightdress on the pillow. No need for that tonight, she decided, placing it in a drawer. She sat on the bedside, brushing out her long dark hair, much more carefully than was her wont. Looking at herself in the mirror, she felt a sudden jolt of melancholy, recalling some words of her mother’s. You’re lonely, Freya. You should stop obsessing over dead men and get yourself a nice live one. It’s not healthy to lock yourself away the way you do. Real men can be nice, you know!

  Humph. What did she know? She was constantly picking up pieces from failed relationships with men who would never be Freya’s late father. Her talk of nice real men would be more convincing if she had one of her own to use as an example.

  Freya slammed the brush down on the dresser and gasped at a shimmer from the mirror, almost as if it was saying, “Careful there!”

  “Sorry,” she said reflexively, then she laughed at herself, watching her hand fly to her mouth’s reflection in the glass. “I’m not going mad, am I?” she appealed to her image. She laughed again, less confidently, before taking the hair dryer from the wall and switching it on, letting its dry roar blot out the cacophony of opposing thoughts in her head.

  Lying on the bed, legs out straight, palms upward in supplication, like the painting of Ophelia drowning, she waited for him. She worried that her too-easy surrender had bored him and he would not return. She worried that she would not be able to slip into that intermediate state between wakefulness and dreaming tonight. She worried that it was all a trick of her overwrought mind.

  She worried that she had lost her overwrought mind.

  And then her eyelids were sliding and the curtain billowed and she was pinned down by the invisible force again, calling the serpentine sibilance into her ears, letting it pour into her head and fill her body.

  The sound streamed toward her, a flow of movement that she could follow, crossing from the curtains to the bed, where it loomed over her for long minutes as if waiting for a sign, perhaps an indication of consent.

  Come to me, Lucien.

  The mattress buckled; there was heaviness on either side of her hips, a strong grip that slowly pinioned her until those upraised palms were pushed back down, lying leaden above her head, leaving her exquisitely vulnerable to ravishment.

  Her eyes, stupefied with lustful adoration, looked for forms in the darkness above her, but she could make out no lines to contain the physical force holding her in thrall. Her lover, invisible and yet so unmistakably present, could not or would not show himself to her.

  Now he bore down, the hissing was close, the heat on her face, the weight of him. Oh, his skin! That slick, porous warmth against her rib cage, that nudge of what had to be a knee between her thighs—and there was a crinkle of hair wedged between his flat hard chest and her breasts, tickling and abrading her delicate skin. She wanted to raise her leg, to rub it joyfully against his, but of course she could not move except according to his will, so she had to content herself with sketching the mental image of him according to what she felt on her body.

  Tall—he stood “six foot three in stocking feet,” if she recalled her readings—broad of shoulder and narrow of hip, with a tumble of luxuriant hair, the attributes of her nocturnal visitor certainly seemed to tally with the few pictures of Lucien she had seen. If she had had control of her vocal cords, she would have laughed with recognition of the long, proud nose that suddenly butted hers, but the laughter would soon have been stilled by the urgent pressure of full, curved lips, muffling her soundless cries in a violent kiss.

  She could not writhe, could not squirm, could not clasp him against her and bury her face in his neck. She could do nothing but accept the disembodied embrace and hope that her enthusiastic compliance would be interpreted correctly.

  If only you would speak.

  But the plea was not acknowledged. Something flexible and wet pushed its way into Freya’s mouth, leaving her lips to expand helplessly in accommodation of it. It sent pulses of wild excitement hammering across her body, up to the fingertips, down to the toes. Between her legs, she was wet and ready, and then a hard length nudged against an inner thigh.

  Take me.

  She gasped at a hard pinch of her nipple, then there was sucking, greedy and lascivious, at her neck. A lick of wet warmth shocked both nipples into yet tighter uprightness once they were exposed to the cold air, and then there was gentle rocking on top of her captive belly and pelvis, a spreading of her lower lips, a deft stroking of her clitoris—oh, how she longed to arch her back!—until she quivered inside, a raw mess of desire and emotion.

  I want you in me. Lucien! Stop teasing me.

  He had heard that thought all right—or was it simply serendipitous that he chose that moment to launch his first stroke, lodging his substantial cock firmly inside Freya in one swift swoop? As she lay impaled on Lucien’s experienced shaft, Freya concentrated on the sensation, narrowing down the focus of her mind until all that existed of her was her sex, filled and stretched by this weighty invader, finally taken in the way she had always wanted.

  Muscles she had forgotten about were put to work in service of Lucien’s appetite for her flesh; she felt herself thoroughly put through her paces, the ghost cock plowing back and forth, sparking old nerve endings back into hectic life. She almost thought it was more than she could take, her lungs compressed and ribs bruising beneath the onslaught. But it was worth it for the slow build and starburst of release, the act of giving herself to him, body and soul, while his pace increased to a furious rate, and the bedsprings squealed. There was a moment of almost complete stillness and then an epic rush and downward crush.

  Come for me, Lucien, yes, that’s it, just as I came for you.

  Freya felt her body lifted and swung around the room, flying to the ceiling, spinning back down to the bed. This often happened in her dreams, and for a moment she was disappointed, thinking that she had taken a step back, fallen into dreamland proper, away from her love and the incredible climax they had shared.

  But when her eyes opened, she gasped and raised her weary body to an abrupt sitting position. He was there. Large as life and twice as handsome, lounging on her bed, those fathomless eyes bright and directed at her.

  “I spent,” he said wonderingly, as if resuming a conversation recently broken off. Freya could do nothing but ogle. This was him. He was real…unless she was dreaming.

  “Pinch me,” she murmured.

  “I can do better than that,” he s
aid with a curl of the lip, reaching out and cupping a breast, stroking the nipple with a practiced thumb. “Now doesn’t that beat a nasty old pinch?”

  “Lucien…?”

  “Freya.” He bent forward, touched her lips with his. “I owe you rather a debt of gratitude. I really never thought I’d have a stroke of luck like this.”

  “If this is madness, I like it.”

  He laughed and the sound was far from ghostly, bouncing off the flocked wallpaper and the pier glass, filling her head with enough joy to rout the fear completely.

  “Everything good in life leads to madness. I think you understand that, Freya. I think that’s why you’ve come here and freed me from my bondage.”

  “Bondage?” Freya had a fleeting, rather titillating, vision of Lucien’s fine eyes bound in black satin while his wrists struggled against silken cords.

  “I was a foolish boy. I experimented with forces I should have left well alone. I participated in rituals and made bargains. I lost the bargains.”

  “Who won them?” whispered Freya, chilled by his graveness.

  “Can’t you guess? His Satanic Majesty requested the honor of my assistance, beyond the grave. I’ve been doing his dirty work for nearly a hundred years. But now I’m free! That tiny, almost hopeless subclause I managed to hide in the contract—well, you met it.”

  “How on earth…?”

  “I was bound to perform the little beast’s ordinances until the day a living human came for me, in a spirit of earnest love. Earnest love always crushes the devil. He rather hates it. You can imagine. So I’ve been hanging around here on the off chance most nights for the last hundred years. The first eighty years were dreadfully dull. Nobody slept in here but my great nephews and nieces and their guests. I thought it would be rather wrong to try and seduce them. But when it was bought up by that hotel group, ah, then I began to entertain a vestige of hope.”

  Freya, awed by the depth of Lucien’s sufferings over the course of the century, felt powerless to contribute more than prosaic expressions of sympathy to the conversation.

  “Whatever you did in life, you certainly paid for it,” she ventured.

  “Yes, I did. Every farthing and more. But now you have come. Literally indeed.” He paused to chuckle at his schoolboy witticism, noting Freya’s blush and kissing the tip of her nose. “Magnificently, I should say. And love shall be my savior.”

  “How?” It felt mean to be practical at this hearts-and-flowers juncture, but Freya needed some answers.

  “How?” Lucien wrinkled that fine aristocratic nose. “Well, I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “But what does the future hold? Are you, to all intents and purposes, human again? Or are you some kind of spirit?”

  “Did I feel like a spirit to you?”

  “Ah. No. I must admit. I’ve never been with a human who got, um, to the core of things quite so well though.”

  “That’s just technique. I always had that.” Lucien mockyawned. “Doesn’t make me some kind of poltergeist pervert.”

  “So you’re alive again? You can live a normal life?”

  Lucien sighed and lay back on the bed, his hands cradled behind his head.

  “Normal? I don’t know what you mean. And neither do you.”

  “Good point. You can do all the things that humans can do then?”

  “I can kiss you.” He tilted his head toward her, biting one lascivious lip in almost irresistible invitation. “I can touch you. Let me show you how I do that.”

  “No!” The massive rebellion staged by Freya’s body against her head was quashed for a moment longer. “I have to know, Lucien. Is this a real…resurrection? In every sense?”

  “It’s a love resurrection.” Lucien sighed again. “All right. I’ll be honest—for once in my life. Or my death. Whichever. There are a few strings attached.”

  Bondage again, thought Freya lightheadedly. No. Stop thinking about sex.

  “Obviously I can’t come back to full life. That’s impossible. There’d be resurrected corpses all over the place if it weren’t. It’d be like one of those zombie apocalypse films.”

  “You watch zombie apocalypse films?”

  “Don’t ask. All the horror movies find their way downstairs eventually. So I’m not completely human. I can’t, for example, impregnate you.”

  “Thank God for that.”

  “Hmm, thanking God doesn’t go down so well where I’ve been. All the same. I don’t have the corporeal functions that you might expect. I can’t eat. I can’t drink. But I can fuck. Oh yes, I can. As much and as hard as I like. But only with you.”

  “So you can’t cheat on me? Why haven’t I considered dating ghosts before?”

  Lucien rolled his eyes in concession to her jaded heart. “In life, I found it difficult to comprehend the desire for monogamy. It has taken a century of suffering to open my eyes to the value of fidelity and constancy. I see it in you, and I admire you for it. Love you for it. I would not blame you if you left me to my fate but…”

  “What would your fate be? If I left you to it?”

  Lucien smiled sadly and took her hand. “Back down to the pit I belong in, Freya. For eternity this time. But thank you for giving me this night.”

  “Lucien! You seem very sure that I will reject you. You know that I love you. Do you still have no understanding of love?”

  “I understand that sometimes there are too many tensions around love to allow it to survive.”

  “What tensions?”

  “I, well, if I am to stay in this form, I have to, ahem, take you.”

  “Yes,” said Freya slowly, not seeing a problem with this proposition.

  “Rather often. Nightly, in fact.”

  “I can…do that.” Freya shook her head, blushing. “If, you know, it’s strictly necessary. It’s not such a huge sacrifice.”

  “No, but sleeping here every night might be. Financially, if nothing else. You see, I’m tied to this house. This house and its grounds. I can never leave.”

  “Oh.”

  Freya put a knuckle in her mouth, chewing it consideringly.

  “Never?”

  “Never.”

  “It’s rather expensive,” she said, her face pale and eyes pleading for understanding. “I was going to leave at the end of the month.”

  “So there we have it. Practicalities. Tensions that outweigh love.”

  “No. No. There must be a way. Lucien, I can’t leave you. There must be something I can do.”

  “You should leave me. I’m not even the man you fell in love with. I’m not Lucien Mountfitchet, The Devil’s Amanuensis, as they used to call me. Not anymore. I’m, well, you could say, I’m his good twin.”

  “I don’t care about that! I loved you despite your horrible behavior, not because of it. I knew there was a part of you that was redeemable. That’s the draw of the bad boy, Lucien, surely you know that? The idea that I might be the one to redeem you.”

  “And you are. Freya, you must not throw your life away on me. I forbid it. Better to have loved and lost and all that.”

  “Not for me,” she said stubbornly. “Losing you could never be any kind of good for me. You are my life.”

  “Rather codependent, darling,” murmured Lucien, but he had drawn her to him and his lips were in her hair, his hands caressing her heaving shoulders. “But I tend to feel the same way.”

  Freya set off the fire alarms, making sure every guest and member of staff was out on the lawn, befuddled with broken sleep, before dropping the lit match on to the petrol-soaked carpet of Room Six.

  “I know this isn’t ideal,” she whispered from the balcony, looking down to the stable block where Lucien had been instructed to meet her. “And I’m sorry. But it had to be done.” And then the flames, already blackening the curtains behind her, began to fan out onto the stone balcony and she leapt down into the hedge below.

  Three months later, Freya and Lucien lay in fresh hay in the nowdeserted stable block, rosy-che
eked as rustic lovers, dreamy and spent after a bout of country matters.

  “So you’ve signed the deeds? The place is really yours?”

  “Yes.” Freya grinned. “If only you could have come to the auction. The auctioneer said some dreadfully rude things about you in his introduction. Called you ‘notorious.’”

  “And so I am.”

  “So you were.” Freya tweaked his elegant nose.

  “You’re such a clever girl. I still can’t believe you sweet-talked all those academics and bigwigs into fronting up the money to buy it. The Mountfitchet Foundation indeed. And it’s still going to be a hotel?”

  “A new kind of hotel. A museum with rooms and a restaurant. The consortium is very excited about the whole concept. They think it’ll take off and the Mountfitchet will be the first of many. A Wordsworth in the Lakes, a Shakespeare in Stratford, a Byron in, I dunno, wherever Byron came from.”

  “I never imagined myself in such exalted company.” Lucien brushed straw from Freya’s forehead. “But you’re the only company for me now. And that’s the way I like it.”

  They kissed with happy passion, finding the stables no less congenial than Room Six had been. Lucien, naked but for his billowing white shirt, gathered Freya close, allowing her to feel the renewed hardness of the Mountfitchet member against her thigh.

  “Another love resurrection?” she enquired cheekily.

  “The best kind,” he growled, flipping her onto her back and covering her in his shadow. “Before I put my mind to atoning for all those misdeeds of the past, I want to have my wicked way once more.”

  In the shadow of the burnt-out wreck of Hatton Stacey, Lucien and Freya joined libidinous forces, living a dream instead of dreaming it, using that dream to refashion their worlds.