Charon's Crossing

Heat, swift and dangerous as summer lightning, arcs through her blood.

His hands go to the row of tiny buttons that adorn her nightgown from throat to breast. Kathryn reaches up to stop him; her hands clasp his wrists but his fingers are swift and nimble and, in truth, she doesn't want to stop him, not really. She wants this to happen, wants the buttons to fall open, exposing her flesh to the warm night air.

And to his mouth.

Oh, his mouth! He kisses his way the length of her throat and she burns everywhere he touches. When, at last, he presses his lips to the high, curved slope of one breast, she cries out.

"Yes," he growls, "yes," and with a soft moan, she loops her arms about his neck and lifts herself to him, rising on tiptoe, pressing her body to his.

She is on fire for him, she wants him with a passion that obliterates everything else. She moans and digs her fingers into the thick, silky hair that covers the nape of his neck. She brings his mouth down to hers. The kiss is deep, passionate, and when it ends, he makes a sound of his own, one that is part male triumph, part elemental desire.

"Tell me that you never stopped thinking of me," he says in a fierce whisper. He lifts her into his arms. "Tell me that you want me now, deep and hard inside you."

She is beyond speech, beyond everything but sensation. The answer he seeks is in the way she clings to him, in the way she moves against him. He bends her back over his arm, kissing her again and again, his tongue thrusting into her mouth, and she feels the flooding warmth of her desire building between her thighs.

Is she dreaming, or is what is happening real? A whisper of fear dances along her skin.

"No," she says, but it's too late. His mouth is on hers, he is drawing her down, down into the softness of the grass, into darkness and desire to the sound of thunder, rumbling far out over the sea...

* * *

"No!"

Kathryn sprang up in her bed, the cry bursting from her throat. Her heart was racing, trying to leap from her chest.

"No," she said again, but this time the word was only a hoarse whisper.

The dream was already fading, collapsing in on itself like a dying star in the blackness of space, snatching her from the imagined heat of a tropical night and casting her into the frigid gloom of a winter morning and, in the process, turning the swell of thunder back into the persistent growl of her old-fashioned alarm clock.

She silenced the clock with a quick swat, gave a shaky laugh, and fell back against the pillows.

"Wow," she said softly.

For someone whose dreams usually had all the symbolism of a Walt Disney movie, this one had been a winner. An X-rated, adults-only winner.

After a minute she sat up and stretched her arms high over her head. So much for eating moo goo gai pan late at night, she thought with a rueful smile. The smile became a grin. Poor Jason. If only he'd tried a little harder, maybe she wouldn't have insisted on going home last night after all.

Kathryn stuffed her feet into her slippers, grabbed her robe from the foot of the bed, and pulled it on. Maybe someday, after she and Jason were old and grey, she'd tell him what had happened.

"Remember the night you proposed to me," she'd say, "and you wanted to make love, but I couldn't keep my mind on anything but the trip I was leaving on the next day?"

Well, no. She wouldn't do that, either. The details of the dream were fading now but one thing was certain.

Jason hadn't starred in it.

She made a face as she headed down the narrow hall to the bathroom. No doubt about it, the sooner she got this trip out of the way, the better. There was a limit as to how much stress you could handle, and she seemed to have reached hers. It was a relief to think she'd have this whole mess settled by this time next month.

The bathroom was cold enough to make her gasp.

"Welcome to Iceberg City," she muttered, dancing her fingers across the undersized radiator tucked beneath the window. As usual, the damned thing was sending up the barest minimum of heat. It always did, unless it was midsummer and then you could almost count on the heating system to go crazy and do its damnedest to cook you right out of your socks.

Well, she thought as she drew back the shower curtain, you won some and you lost some. There were lots of things to love about this apartment. The private little garden in the rear courtyard, for one, where you could sit in the shade of a leafy plane tree on a spring evening, tilt your head and watch the moon rise over the city.

And the apartment's location was wonderful, just a twenty-minute bus ride from work and maybe ten minutes more than that from everything Kathryn loved about New York. The theaters, Lincoln Center, the museums, all the stuff she'd grown up with and couldn't imagine living without.

She made a face as she turned on the hot water. You just had to take the good with the bad, that was all. Like the cramped size of the rooms.

"It's a good thing you're not claustrophobic," her mother had said drily, the first time she'd seen the place.