Touched by Lightning [Dreams of You] (Romantic Suspense) Read Free Page A

keep having. I’m inside her soul, and suddenly I plunge into water. I fight to stay afloat but eventually I tire out. When I can’t hold my breath any longer, I feel the cold water rush into my lungs.” Even now, he could feel the panic constricting his chest. “Then I wake up.”
    Stella looked haunted. “The water I see…that’s her death.”
    Adrian snapped out of the memory, taking in a deep breath of air. He looked at the photograph again. Would she drown because of him, or could he save her? If BlueFire existed, then he would find her.
     
    The roar of flames engulfed Nikki Madsen, making her gasp as oxygen burned away. It’s only a nightmare , her conscious intoned through the horror. Wake up, Nikki. Control the dream.
    She jerked awake, inhaling the clean air around her. Despite three years’ distance, she still kept reliving the horror over and over again. Now the images came roughly once a month, the ripping heat of the orange fireball as it ravaged her, the feel of the dirt as she dropped into a bed of petunias and rolled out the flames. The sound of her cries filled her ears as she screamed for her mother, saw her engulfed in flames. The worst part was not being able to breathe; even in her dream the choking sensation panicked her.
    Nikki snapped on a switch and grabbed her teddy bear to cuddle in the pool of light that encompassed her bed. Trying to push away the memories, she pulled out the leather-bound journal that had indirectly saved her life that day. If she hadn’t forgotten it, hadn’t stepped out of the car before it exploded, she, too, would have been killed.
    The webbed scar tissue on the back of her hand looked faint now, but the memories would never fade. Her fingers caressed the blue leather of her journal, covered with tiny cracks. Scarred, too, but from age.
    Nikki had always been a vivid dreamer. At thirteen, she’d decided to learn more about the dream world and what it meant. That’s when her dream journal came into existence, where she recorded the strangest of her dreams in order to decipher them. A few years ago she had mastered lucid dreaming, the ability to control her dreams.
    The journal had been the subject of one of her last conversations with her mother, Blossom. More like an argument, really. Now it seemed silly to have argued over the journal and what it represented, but neither of them could have known how their lives would be ripped apart only days later.
    Blossom had been sitting on the edge of Nikki’s bed when she returned from one of her photography forays. Her mother hardly ever came in her room, but there she sat, holding Nikki’s journal. Nikki felt violated and defensive as she set her camera on the dresser.
    Blossom stood, set the journal on the bed and took Nikki’s hands in her smooth ones. “You are a beautiful young lady—”
    “I’m not beautiful. I’m okay.”
    Blossom’s eyebrow, arched dramatically with a brown pencil, quivered. “Nikki, hear me out. I have been patiently waiting for my daughter to bloom. You’re twenty-three and look at you. You’re dressed like a homeless person. What would my friends say if they saw you like this? ‘Doesn’t Blossom buy her daughter clothes? Hasn’t Blossom given her an education and the opportunity to meet wealthy, ambitious young men?’ Have I failed you in some way?”
    Nikki picked up the journal and shook it. “What were you doing with this?”
    For a moment Blossom had the dignity to look embarrassed. “I was straightening up in here. I happened to see that and was curious.”
    “Why don’t you just admit you were snooping?”
    Her mother looked away for a moment. “If I was, it was for your own good. I worry about you, darling.”
    Nikki glanced down at her drab clothes. “Because I don’t dress as nice as you do? I can’t walk around taking photographs dressed in silk and linen. I have to blend in. Besides, it’s impractical.” She could never tell her mother where she’d been