monster he recognized—leading Jeanette off to her death.
Then, as his dreaming self watched in confusion, Jeanette was transformed. Her sophisticated French upsweep had become straight, shoulder-length and blond. Her large brown eyes changed to blue, her small rosebud mouth widened into full, sensual lips and her complexion paled.
He was dreaming about another woman. He was certain he’d never met her, yet she returned again and again to haunt his sleep. At first, the dreams had all been nightmares of her death. Lately, though, things had taken a very different turn.
He’d be holding Jeanette in his arms, kissing her, making sweet love to her with all the tender emotions he had felt so long ago. And then, suddenly, it was the other woman he was holding, and all the passion he’d learned to keep tightly in check was unleashed. Their clothing vanished, and they were skin-to-skin close, chest to breasts, legs tangling together amid silky-soft sheets. His mouth devoured hers as he caressed her breast with one hand and, with the other, searched to find the slick heat between her legs. She lay back on the bed and held out her arms, and he came down on top of her…then awoke, blood pounding, breathing ragged, body covered with sweat.
He squeezed his eyes shut, struggling to banish the heated scene from his mind. He didn’t want to dream. Not of the few sweetly tender moments of love he’d shared with Jeanette, nor of her death or the fiend who had caused it. And certainly not of wildly erotic lovemaking with a woman who, if she even existed, he’d never met and could never hope to have.
Finally, when his body dictated that sleep was his only option, Nick wearily undressed and lay down on his bed. His last conscious thought was to hope that the dreams would leave him be.
“DAMIEN WANTS to speak to you.” The message was delivered with a verbal smirk that set Emma Birmingham’s teeth on edge.
Without glancing over her shoulder, she finished tucking in the sheet at the side of her narrow bed, one of eight in the crowded room where she’d been sleeping for the past couple of weeks. Shoulders tensed, she turned inquiringly toward Henry Briggs, the man who had shattered the relative tranquility of her morning—if anyone could be tranquil after so many nights of the same highly erotic but still unnerving dream she’d been having.
“Don’t keep him waiting,” Briggs added in a silky voice that carried more than a hint of warning.
Emma kept her own tone calm. “I’ll be right there. Just let me comb my hair and put on a little lipstick.”
“The Master will like you well enough without the primping.”
She started to offer a stinging retort, then clamped her mouth closed. Briggs was one of the men in Caldwell’s inner circle, and it was dangerous to anger him.
Quickly, before she could get herself into trouble, she grabbed her brown suede purse from the nightstand and slipped into the adjoining communal bathroom. Thankfully, her roommates had already gone to breakfast, so she had the bathroom to herself.
The face that peered back at her from the mirror was taut with anxiety, and Emma struggled to coax a dreamy look into her blue eyes. She’d seen that look often enough among the women, her sister, Margaret, included, who drifted like Stepford wives around the Refuge.
Her own mind was still functioning independently, but the place was getting to her in insidious ways. Not a night went by now that she wasn’t waking from the same shockingly vivid dream. At first, she’d had only nightmares, most of them about her own death—at the hands of Damien Caldwell.
In the past week, though, a new dream had replaced the nightmares. A dream about a darkly handsome man she had never met, yet he knew her, mind, body and soul, as no one else ever had. Her dream lover came to her out of a misty darkness, taking her into his arms, kissing and caressing her and soothing away all her fears—until he vanished, leaving her hot and frustrated.
She dragged in a breath and let it out slowly and evenly, reminding herself why she was staying in this scary little community.
A month ago she’d gotten a letter from her twin sister burbling about how she’d come to the Refuge for a self-actualization seminar and decided to stay. Emma knew it shouldn’t have surprised her. Their own mother had been a dud at raising a family, and Margaret was always searching for a sense of stability, of security, of home. Joanie Patterson had been married four times and had lived with more than a dozen guys. Luckily for her, only one of the marriages had resulted in offspring—twins—so she’d only had two daughters to neglect while she focused on the series of men in her life.
With the uncanny intuitive bond identical twins often shared, Margaret and she had taken turns mothering each other, with Margaret far more likely than Emma to get the laundry done or a hot dinner on the table when Mom failed to show.
The lack of actual parenting had made Emma independent, self-reliant, freewheeling. She’d been in and out of so many brief relationships that Margaret had warned her she’d end up like their mother if she wasn’t careful. The warning had brought her up short, and she’d been cautious—and unsatisfied—ever since.
She and her twin might look alike, but their personalities were very different. In fact, their home life had had just the opposite effect on her sister. Margaret was always solicitous and caring, but introverted and a bit insecure. While Emma had pursued her dream of becoming an artist who created beautiful pieces of silver jewelry, her sister had worked summers and afternoons in the quiet of a health food store and, later, as an accountant. And she had never stopped looking—unsuccessfully—for a father figure in the men she dated.
So at first Emma had been delighted to find out that Margaret was attending a self-actualization seminar in Maryland. It sounded as if her twin was branching out, and her latest enthusiasm wasn’t simply another inappropriate older man.
Yet something about her sister’s letter, saying she was staying indefinitely at the Refuge, had triggered Emma’s “twin intuition.” She had sensed that not all was well with her sister, so she had looked up Damien Caldwell on the Internet.
What she’d learned about him had made her stomach clench, starting with the title he’d made up for himself—the Master. She wanted to know where he had come from and how he’d become so successful so quickly, but there was no information about him prior to two years ago, when he’d bought the Refuge after the millionaire who owned it had died.
Since then, it appeared that Caldwell had run the estate—really, more like an entire enterprise—as a cult or a commune, using his self-help seminars as a lure to rope in converts. Apparently if the people who attended the seminars were susceptible to his…his what? Charisma? Mind control? then he would invite them to stay on.
Unfortunately, Margaret had turned out to be one of them. No surprise, really, given that the Master exuded “paternal” authority.
Worried about her sister, Emma had signed up for Caldwell’s weekend-long seminar. She’d hoped that, face-to-face, Margaret would respond to her, as she always had. But their former connection seemed to be lost, replaced by her twin’s devotion to Caldwell.
Worried sick and unable to abandon her sister, Emma had managed to come across as “worshipful” enough to be asked to stay at the Refuge—at least on a trial basis.
But this was the second time in the past few days that the Master had asked to see her alone. Why?
Did he know that in the middle of the day, when everyone was busy, she’d been sneaking around the mansion, looking through his private
