Yearnings: A Paranormal Romance Box Set by Amber Scott, Carolyn McCray Page A

in bed, and utterly alone. Another dream. Sweat dripped down her forehead and neck. She sat up. Swallowing hurt. Her body felt leaden, as though she’d run a marathon. “Just a dream,” she said into the dark.
    He was only a dream. Still, she found herself scanning her room, listening past the drumming in her veins, for signs of him, signs it had been real.
    Regret swelled up her throat. Even in a dream, couldn’t she bring herself to interact with him? To stand up for herself? Anger pushed her regret aside. She tore back the covers and strode to the kitchen. She got a glass of water, looked at the clock. Four? “Crap.” How would she get to sleep now?
    Her body was keyed up. Her mind, too.
    Was Jen home yet?
    Probably not. She didn’t see her purse or phone sitting in the usual spot by the fridge.
    She set the empty glass in the sink and decided to journal. Maybe if she wrote the dream out, she could decipher some sort of meaning from it. Every time she dreamt of him, she awoke feeling like she’d missed some very important clue, like he was counting on her for something.
    Sitting in her room, the bedside lamp spotlighting the blank page, she scribbled down every last sensation. She couldn’t open her eyes. Or wouldn’t? Yet, she’d seen him, in a way. She’d envisioned him, hovering over her, afloat in the air over her lying form. She’d envisioned his supple mouth as he kissed her. She’d imagined his wings.
    Why wings? Had her mind chosen him as some sort of savior? She didn’t need a doctorate to know growing up fatherless had a certain impact on her. And if so, then why did it feel like he was asking her to save him and not the reverse? Unless that was the meaning and her mind was still fighting to work out her mother’s suicide. Was she trying to save her mother?
    She wrote the question on the page: Why wings? What am I trying to save/be saved from? Dr. Meyers’ final request today resurfaced. What could she possibly bring? Weren’t all of her previous pieces painted over with Elijah scenes? Him, bare and arched like an angel of destruction, against a clouded moon. Hunched like a gargoyle upon the lip of a skyscraper, a bony mountain’s cliff. Waiting, contemplating.
    Paint something else for the doctor?
    Again, she looked at her writing, remembering her mother's feverish scribbling in her many books. Nancy Graves would spend hours rushing the words onto paper, sheaves littering the floor, her hand unable to keep up with her racing thoughts. As a child, Sadie had a sense of awe over her mother's rapture. Adolescence brought forth skepticism and soon, Sadie doubted the magic she'd once been certain the nonsensical God talk held.
    As her mom worsened, the writing had grown more broken. Word salad, they called it. Pain punctured Sadie's heart at the memory. Did her own writing make any sense? Would her words be a tapestry of unraveling meaning?
    Her head thudded against the headboard. Fatigue ached in her muscles. She resisted a stretch and a yawn, fearing sleep, and dreams. The pit of her stomach lay knotted despite the hour she'd written through.
    Partly, she was angry with herself.
    Here she was, dreaming of this magnificent, seraphic specimen of man. More than dreaming, feeling him, as Elijah utterly seduced her senses, begged her for the simplest of favors. She should have opened her eyes. More. She should have opened her eyes, let him take her into his arms and died into the bliss he offered. The place where the impossible lived, alive, thriving...possible.
    It was like she knew his kiss. She'd tasted his mouth, felt his arms cocooning her, sweeping her up into the heavens and stars. Other nights, not tonight. Had today’s disaster unnerved her so badly? Was she so fragile that one incident could destroy a perfectly good fantasy?
    Her pulse quickened. She itched to paint the dream.
    What the hell had she been so scared of and why couldn’t she shake it now?
    If there were ever a real chance to