Rare and Precious Things (The Blackstone Affair 4)

The dreams fucked with my head.

I was fucked up because of them.

I was also sleeping in the same bed as my pregnant wife. This is the part I dreaded more than anything. The moment when I had to lie there suspended, too panicked to look over at her and see if she was peacefully asleep…or unpeacefully awake. Had she caught me this time? Or had I slipped through the net again?

I dared to look. Turning my eyes toward her without moving my head very much, afraid to cause any movement—which was absurd because people moved around in their sleep all the time—in hopes that she didn’t see, didn’t hear…didn’t know.

Asleep on her side facing away from me.

Blessed Jesus, thank you!

My girl slept less soundly now that she was pregnant, and I dearly wished I couldn’t say the same. Trying to rationalize the reasons for my nightmares, attempting to figure out why they’d been triggered so suddenly after being buried for years, wasn’t impossible to work out.

Brynne was the reason. Finding her, falling in love with her, had initiated every possessive instinct inside of me. She had switched me on, and that was it. I’d been driven to have her, yes, but it was Brynne loving me back, putting me in a position of being worried over for the first time, it was her offering comfort to me that made her so different.

Before Brynne, I could just bury the bad and horrible, detaching myself from what had happened to me, and not allowing myself to feel. I was disconnected, aloof, emotionless. Not now.

Now when I had a flashback, the sequences of events were e

ven more deranged than usual. In my head, the past and present melded together in a confused clusterfuck that rattled around in my subconscious, but wasn’t anywhere close to direct reality. Shit that had happened, mixed up with what could have happened, but hadn’t. And then there was the cocksucking future… That bastard would be the death of me, I was certain.

There’s a shit-ton of crap to worry about in the future.

Falling in love with a person changes everything. You learn this, after the fact of course, because you quickly realize you didn’t really ever have anything to worry about before you had someone to lose. Once you do have them?

Newsflash, motherfucker. You can lose them. And in more ways than one, too. You have a lot of fuckin’ things to worry about. Like whether or not you’ll be able to breathe through another day if some deranged lunatic takes the only person on earth you can’t live without.

Brynne was that person for me. I needed her in order to live now.

And thankfully she was sleeping right now, undisturbed by my subconscious ravings and safe in the bed with me.

I breathed in deeply and told myself I could do this. I was getting better at separating the past from the fear of the unknown down the road in the future.

So I focused on her comforting scent and slid over to spoon up against her body, getting my face right next to her hair on the pillow, where I could breathe in the intoxicating smell of floral and citrus that belonged uniquely to her.

I rested my hand over her belly which had grown more since our honeymoon, but still didn’t look very big to me—just a curved mound where she used to be very flat. Eighteen weeks along and we now had a sweet potato according to the TheBump.com, which was bookmarked in “favourites” on all my devices. I liked knowing what to expect.

Brynne didn’t want to know the sex of our baby. And we didn’t know yet anyway because it was still too early to tell, but she amazed me with her ability to wait for something that most people would beg to find out, if the information was available. She said she wanted to be surprised. I had to respect that. Plus, if I did know, I would undoubtedly fuck up and ruin the surprise anyway, and then I’d be in massive trouble. Better if both of us were in the dark about whether we had a Thomas or a Laurel coming.

Either one would be perfect.

I started drifting off again, very loose and soothingly peaceful with her softness against me, when she grew restless. Her breathing picked up and her body tensed. She touched her belly and found my hand already there.

“Ethan?”

The sound of her voice was agitated, almost frightened, in an oddly muffled pitch that told me she was sound asleep and dreaming.

“Shh… Right here beside you, baby.” I gently rubbed the swell in slow circles over her nightgown, and nuzzled at the back of her neck through her hair until she quieted from whatever dream had disturbed her.

I closed my eyes, finally ready for my own sleep, when she spoke out again, this time, as clear as a bell…

“Always here for you, Ethan.”

My eyes snapped open.

Her revelation floored me, not because of what she’d said, but the fact that even in sleep, even in her dreams where the consciousness is blurred, my girl was right there loving me—showing her care and concern for me all the time.

We were that deeply connected.