The Return of Black Douglas Read Free Page B

already turned her head away and tuned Elisabeth out. Staring out the window lost in her own thoughts, she asked herself, just what do you want?
    My very own Mr. Darcy.
    Wishing for Mr. Darcy. She could write a book about it. She had been looking, wishing, and waiting for a man who lived between the pages of a book. Was it too much to ask for a darkly handsome man—heroic, upstanding and moral, with a heart filled to overflowing with love—to come to her rescue and sweep her off her feet and into his arms?
    Where was he, this man of deep feeling, inner struggle, and fiery pride? How beautiful it would be to have a man who did not want to win her love by mastering or overpowering her, but by becoming her ideal; the man of her dreams, a man reformed by love and desire.
    How she yearned for a man of strength and quiet reserve, a man of brooding countenance, who would play the hero. If she could only be the woman who unlocked that tortured soul and released the hidden passions that smoldered within! She knew it was hopeless. To find Mr. Darcy, she would have to go back in time.
    She dozed off, but she did not sleep long. Awakened, she said, “You won’t believe the dream I had.”
    “With all the strange stuff that’s been happening to us, I’m almost afraid to ask.”
    “Eggs,” Isobella said. “I dreamed about eggs. I was standing under a big tree holding a bonnet full of eggs when two men on horseback rode by, dressed in the garb of knights.”
    “Well, if you’re going to dream about eggs…” Elisabeth started laughing. “I hope they were hard boiled.”
    ***
    Back at the hotel, Isobella did a computer search for interpreting dreams about eggs. “Listen to this. Dreaming about eggs is symbolic of fertility and that something new and fragile is about to happen. It can also mean entrapment.”
    From her bed, Elisabeth said sleepily, “It was just a dream. Good night, Izzy.”
    Isobella slept fitfully, tossing and turning until the bedding was twisted and tangled and her gown around her waist. She turned on the bed light, removed two Benadryl from a bottle and downed them with a gulp of bottled water. The Benadryl would ease the stuffiness in her head and make her sleepy—both welcome.
    She dreamed of floating weightlessly through the mist and over the roar of the ocean, while strange shapes and colors produced weirdly distorted visions, a bizarre mixture of real and imaginary characters, places, and events. She heard waves crash, breathed the tang of salty air, and felt herself floating low over a vast body of water and into the darkness of a place she feared she would never leave.
    Her soul was caught in the sweep of powerful forces, and she existed in a vague way above the earth, weightlessly adrift in an imaginary sphere of being. Her mind filled with pleasant thoughts, and fantasies crowded into her memory—beguiling shapes, beckoning shadows, whispered words, and hands that knew just how and where to caress. She breathed deeply, puzzled by the scent of wax candles that filled her nostrils, and when she stretched, she touched warm skin.
    She wasn’t alone.
    He was there, warm and alive, for she felt the honed smoothness of his flesh. Her eyes popped open. She was in a medieval castle. The trappings of a warrior lay scattered about the room. A candle burned down on a table by the bed and further over, in an enormous fireplace, a fire smoldered from its bed of glowing coals.
    She thought him a mythological being with a face and body created by the gods, lying there, with his head propped up with one hand, watching her. The confident, drowsy, hungry look from his dangerous, mesmerizing eyes of vivid blue held her trapped.
    He was dark, frighteningly and desirably bare to the waist, and, more than likely, bare beneath the bedding that covered him. His skin looked hard and smooth, beautifully sculpted with muscle. She tugged the bedcovering upward, for he gazed at her like he was starving and she was the only