Page 2

A nna Malone shot out of bed with all the grace of a startled scarlet-bootied baboon, complete with a wild mane and absolutely zero sense of what the hell had just happened.

No, that wasn’t entirely true. She still had a sense of some things. That man, for starters.

That man . . .

A surging heat pricked her skin, which was a dozen kinds of unnecessary, really, given how often she sweated through her sheets after a visit from him. Any woman, or man for that matter, would have to be dead for a solid century, at minimum, not to appreciate the finest specimen of brawn and beauty ever breathing. And for some reason, which she honestly saw no pressing reason to uncover, her stressed-out brain continued to give her the gift of his imaginary company each night.

Anna itched the back of her dewy neck, frustrated that she still had to sleep with the heat on this close to spring, and tried to shake out why this particular dream felt a little . . . off. He was there, like usual, but good lawdy, that was where the thread of commonality ended. There was nothing usual about what had just happened, and that was saying a boat load given how often her REM sleep cycle served up the same images every night on repeat. She’d never been much into the psychological study of dreams, but she’d read enough Stephen King to know that reruns weren’t normal.

Once her heart rate fell back into generally life-sustaining levels, she pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed. Oh, who the hell was she kidding? Did she even know what normal was anymore? The past few months had been such a tumultuous ride of unexpected marvels, painful disappointments, far too many you-should-be-happys, and a buttload of doubt that it was no wonder she needed to fantasize about some bearded hottie just to make it through the night sans the depression that perpetually trailed behind her during the day.

Then, like frickin’ clockwork, her mother’s old words came flaring up, as they were wont to do whenever Anna was at peak exhaustion or stress, which, these days, thanks to her present condition, was all the damn time.

You should be grateful, Anna.

“Nope. Not doing this right now.” She grabbed the pillow next to her, still warm from sleep, and tried to smother out the ever-loving aggravation that always heated her skin further whenever her psychosomatic system was inclined to leap to her aid. “Ugh, just . . . no,” she mumbled into the pillow, wincing as the polyester scratched her cheek, before promptly falling back and burying herself beneath the covers again. “Too early for this.” Against her better judgment, Anna cracked an eye open. Yup, huge mistake. Numbers that had no business dangling an AM after their digits glared back at her in a muted red that, while somehow soothing during daylight hours, were far too forward and abrasive before the sun was up.

Wait, was the sun even up?

Anna peeled back the comforter just enough so she could see around her nightstand, because no way was she moving more of her body than she needed to again, and groaned. Damn . While no cheerful golden rays crept through the slats of her bedroom’s Venetian blinds just yet, a pale color was beginning to lighten the sky, suggesting that said sun would be up within the hour.

Lovely. No way she would be falling back to sleep.

Enacting the only form of protest still available for the time being, Anna twisted her body so her face was squarely pressed into the pillow. “Should I be grateful for sleep deprivation, too?” she asked into the cushion.

When proper breathing became more of a requirement, she shifted her head away from the pillow, yanked the sweaty strands of hair out of her mouth, and, begrudgingly resigned to her totally unfair fate, swung the covers off and got to her feet.

The sigh that left her lips was the only thing she could bring herself to acknowledge true gratitude for.

“Oh, sweet, sweet equilibrium. How I’ve missed thee.” The first three months of her pregnancy had dealt her the most horrific case of vertigo, which had resulted in more than a few unsightly gashes and scuffs now pockmarking her once passably clean walls. But now that she’d crept into the sixteen-week mark and was solidly into her second trimester, Anna was finally starting to get comfortable in her body again. Well, as comfortable as one could get with a genetically similar parasite setting up shop in the same rent-controlled apartment her vital organs had enjoyed roommate-free for the past thirty-four years.

Despite her early-morning ire, an inevitable smile teased her face at the thought of her tiny homespun hanger-on. Anna’s fingers immediately unclenched and drifted over the roundest part of her belly, which had begun to take that unmistakable pregnancy shape. “Little squatter. When all this is over, you better be the cutest thing on the planet. For both our sakes. That’s all I’m saying.”

Unfortunately, despite her vertigo being blessedly behind her, no amount of comfort in her pre-dawn shuffle toward the bathroom would ever shake the jitters of what she’d just woken up from or who.

Without bothering to turn on the Big Light, as she thought of it, she did her business by the soft glow of her Christmas Mickey Mouse night-light. The ancient thing was still perched in the bathroom after she’d neglected to put it away with the rest of the holiday decorations because when one woke up every two hours to pee and was also inconveniently blind as a bat without their glasses, one was not picky about where her meager five watts of light came from.

After shivering through a hand-washing cycle that was far too short to convince the water heater to get its ass in gear, Anna dried her hands, lifted her tired gaze to the mirror, and immediately wished she hadn’t.

In the sepia-toned haze of her small bathroom, the shadows somehow pulled her attention to her eyes, but recast as they were in the reddish-brown glow of the night-light, all she could see, even without her glasses, wasn’t the soft green of her glance but a starkly two-toned gaze. One hazel eye, one brown. Both belonged to a mystery man she still hadn’t figured out how she’d conjured up. Though, bonus points to her pregnancy brain for giving her dream fella a decent set of muscles to go along with the mystery.

Yay for small wins.

Those early months when she’d somehow manifested him in her dreams were, in her best estimation, nothing short of a trauma response. She’d just peed on the stick that morning and, after doing her level best not to act like an emotional wreck with the handful of telehealth nutrition clients she’d had scheduled that day, had finally given her body an outlet for the flurry of crazy wreaking havoc on her brain. With her higher reasoning held hostage, she’d quickly run to the grocery store on her lunch break, used the last of her and her boyfriend Travis’s grocery budget for the month to splurge on two steaks and all the trimmings, and settled in to thoroughly blow his mind with the news once he got home.

Instead, what she’d gotten had been a shocking panicked play of man-baby emotional insecurity that she didn’t have the tools to deal with and never saw coming.

She and Travis had been together for six years and met when she was twenty-eight and he was twenty-four. The age gap hadn’t seemed so big at the time, and she’d grown to love him regardless. His entrepreneurial spirit, the way he lit up a room and could pull a crowd of gatherers into his orbit as easily as a city street performer, all of it was as intoxicating as it was incendiary. And when he’d trained his charm on her and spoke of his dreams to open up a life coaching business—sorry, personal empowerment business—large enough to rival that of Tony Robbins’s empire, she’d only been too happy to support him, even if it meant upping her own client workload to help fund his mastermind retreats and private coaching sessions with mentors. Dreams, he’d argued, rarely came with upfront investors, and yes, he’d say, coaches did need coaching themselves.

That was when her mother—whose experience with men was limited to a revolving door of Daves during Anna’s childhood and adolescence after Anna’s father, the first Dave, left when she was three—had sat her down and laid some impossibly hard truths on the table.

“Anna, you’re not getting any younger. Travis is taking great initiative and a lot of risk to start his own company, and how wonderful is it that he’s promised you a high-level role in his business once it gets off the ground and becomes the success you and I both know he’s capable of? He’s giving you a future, Anna. For both of you, for your family, for whatever dreams you desire to pursue. You should be grateful, honey. Not everyone takes their partners with them when they finally find a road they can cruise down without all those bumps and potholes.”

It was a testament to Anna’s warped upbringing that, despite her mild success as a registered dietician, she still let her mother’s words carve out such a sizable chunk of real estate in her mind.

What could she say? Childhood trauma was the gift that kept on giving. Even after two rounds of therapy, that trauma still had fucking claws.

In the end, the promise of a real family with Travis had been too enticing of a dream to let go, regardless of her career aspirations. But despite being together for six years and Anna being only one year shy of what her OB/GYN referred to as advanced maternal age , it hadn’t made a difference. Her gratitude had been thrown back at her when, after she’d finally shared with him that they were pregnant, every lit feature on his usually exuberant and joyful face had plummeted as fast as their savings.

For some reason, the decibels of his shouting had been more alarming than the words. Things like “Can’t be saddled with a kid right now” and “How could you let this happen? I’m still in my twenties. I thought you were on the pill” and “Can’t record my new podcast with a baby crying in the background” had become the soundtrack of her new hellish life.

A life that had ultimately ended when Travis realized California was where he needed to be. The operative word being he , with Anna’s sole consolation prize consisting of their small New Hampshire mountain cabin that he’d claimed wasn’t so much of a house as an insect trap. No surprise he’d had zero problems signing that over to her. Or ghosting the debt she’d taken on over their years together so they could start their lives and help his career grow while growing a family of their own.

The triggering memory raked nails along her skin, and she couldn’t hold back the shudder, even while refusing to look away from the mirror.

The night Travis left was the first night she’d dreamed of her mystery man, and it had simultaneously been the most enticing and frustrating experience of her life. She didn’t know his name, didn’t know what part of her psyche had dreamed him up. Hell, she didn’t even know what he looked or sounded like. Not really. Whatever dreamy world she’d conjured up never quite carved out a clear enough picture. Within the white fog of her mind, the outline of his presence was the best she could grasp. Literal heads taller than her, he always stood as though he were bracing for something. Around him, the mist would float and fall along his form, stopping to rest where his body began, peppering the stark outline of sturdy shoulders, arms, and a chest that looked as solidly formed as the White Mountains around her.

But it was always just the essence of him, the impression of his size and strength, never more. Occasionally, if she’d stayed up too late scrolling on her phone and struggled to fall asleep, the vision of him almost seemed to reflect that. His hair, which fell to his shoulders in tousled waves of ruddy auburn and was usually the only feature she could ever make out along with his beard and eyes, would be more mussed and unkempt. Almost . . . manic. Like his bicolored stare whenever he’d capture hers.

Anna smiled at the secret memory as she finger combed a tangle out of her hair. Why were those moments always the most comforting? That if she’d had a shitty night’s sleep, her imaginary hero did as well?

Then she squeezed her eyes shut and held tight until little floating stars danced across the backs of her eyelids. When she finally popped those babies open, all she was met with was her ragged pale complexion that was only slightly sweatier than the one she’d gone to bed with. And just like that, the ghost of his gaze fled the scene almost as quickly as she’d summoned it.

To make room for other memories, ones that were new to the nightly lineup but were also the very things that sent her scrambling from sleep moments ago.

He had been naked. Very naked. Naked with a body she doubted even her pregnancy brain could have filled out properly. Not only that but he was naked and speaking. As in, saying real live words directly from his mouth to her ears. Words she would never consciously put in her dream. Words he expected her to respond to.

“Gah!”

Anna swiped a hand in front of the mirror, padded back to her room, and snatched her glasses off her nightstand, intending to do something so incredibly productive that it would kick all that free-thinking nonsense right out of her noggin. Squinting at the time again, she took a deep breath, threw her shoulders back, and put her hands on her regrettably larger hips. She had a few hours before her first telehealth client, and she wasn’t about to spend it analyzing why her heart wouldn’t calm the heck down after replaying the dulcet timbre of his voice, or how he knew she lived in New Hampshire, or what the hell she’d done to deserve a veritable Greek god kneeling naked before her feet and spouting words of ownership.

I’m yours.

Oh, she’d caught that little diddy, all right. Caught it and became so sick with it that the very notion of another man, even one she’d made up, holding any kind of possessive sway over her—and, by extension, her baby—was enough to catapult her out of the few hours of rest her traitorous body had finally let her have.

Anna stormed over to her dresser, not even bothering with the light, and searched around by feel for her workout clothes. If Captain Dream Muffin was going to start getting real, then so was she.

Nothing like an extra-long session of prenatal yoga, followed by a double dose of guided meditation and a cup of decaf French vanilla coffee to get her mind back in the game.

Yoga. Coffee. Clients. Throw some food at the problem. More clients. More food. Rest. Repeat. That was the routine she needed.

Nowhere did she have room for the haunting eyes she couldn’t stop imagining. Eyes that somehow made her chest feel lighter in the same way that her motion detection lights would as they’d fire up and illuminate her steps when she’d take out the garbage before she’d even realized she needed the light.

Eyes that seemed to follow her everywhere she went.