Page 199 of Mates for the Raskarrans #1-6

Maldek follows me to the tent, gesturing to himself and then to the trees as he did on our very first night of travel back to Gregar’s.

Taking watch. I nod, glad in a way that he won’t be here to listen to me tossing and turning, eagerness keeping me from the dreams I so desperately want to fall into.

At least I won’t have to worry about disturbing him, keeping him from his rest.

“Sam hurt?” he asks me, pointing to my feet.

I shake my head, but he gives me his canteen of berry water anyway. I drink it down without hesitation, and he arches a brow at me. I mime falling asleep and he laughs, patting my shoulder.

“Goodnight, Sam.”

“Goodnight, Maldek.”

He taps his fist to his heart at me before he leaves.

I change into my bedclothes, then dive for my furs, burrowing around in them until I find a spot that’s warm and comfortable.

To my surprise, my eyes grow heavy almost immediately, and without having to really work for it at all, I’m asleep and back in the dreamspace, my mate stalking towards me with a delicious gleam in his eyes.

“Hello, little nightmare,” he says.

The nickname is growing on me, but it also reminds me what I need to talk to him about.

“About that,” I say, pressing my hand over his mouth before he can kiss me. “I’m not a nightmare. I’m not a dream, either. I know it seems impossible to you, but I’m real. I’m really out here in the forest.”

As if my words have poured cold water on his desire, he scowls and looks aside.

“Why must you talk of realness when I could be between your thighs?”

Need shivers through me, and part of me wants to forget about everything else, just skip straight to the part where his tongue is on me, in me. But I shove that side of me down, taking a deep breath.

“We have to talk about it, because I don’t know where you are.

In relation to me. We didn’t connect when I was back in Gregar’s village, and I know there’s like a limit on distance with this.

I’m walking back there now - I could walk out of range tomorrow.

I need you to know that I’m real, and I need to know that you’ll come for me.

When the rains are done and you’ve had a successful hunt, I want the next thing on your list to be coming to find me. ”

I sidle closer to him, unable to resist running my hands across his broad, firm chest.

“I hate to think that you’ll just forget all about me the moment I’m not in your dreams.”

“How could I forget the sweet sounds you make when my mouth is on you?” His voice is low, urgent, and my body flares in response to his word, my pussy clenching. “How could I forget the delicious scent of you, the taste?”

His fingers run up the inside of my thigh, but I catch his hand before it gets to where I want it to go, where I need it to go.

“Think how much more delicious I’ll be in real life.”

The scowl comes back, a hint of his fangs revealed where his lip curls, but he composes himself after a moment.

“Last night you were my best dream. Must you return to being my nightmare?”

He threads his voice with heat, his breath tickling over my skin. And damn, it’s hard not to give in to the seduction. If he tells me to lie back on the bed so he can take me, it’s going to be impossible to say no.

I need to take control of the situation, and quickly.

“I had an idea,” I say. “A way to prove to you that I am real.”

It came to yesterday - something Ellie said about her mating with Anghar.

How she was pretty convinced she was losing the plot, but the little things made her doubt.

The details of the tent and in the things Anghar said.

She didn’t think she had the ability to have invented him.

He was beyond the scope of her imagination.

If I can move the dream, change the location of it, then I can show him Mercenia’s world. If the forests of this planet are alien and strange to me, then the grey high-rises and streets of my bottom tier district will be utterly alien to Dazzik. There’s no way he could believe he imagined it.

“My world, the place I’ve come from, it’s nothing like this place.” I turn away from him, walking towards the bed, running my hands over the soft furs atop it. “There were no soft things, no colourful things. Everything was grey and hard and terrible.”

I close my eyes, picture it as clearly as I can.

Four walls surrounding a tiny space - filled by the bed and small desk alone.

On one wall, a door that slides open into a bathroom, the toilet and shower so close that when you sat on the one, your feet were sticking into the other, getting dripped on by the shower head that always leaked, leaving grimy stains on the floor beneath it.

It doesn’t take much to summon the memory - I spent the last five years living in that single room, laying my shaved head down on the lumpy pillow each night, my hands stinging from all the little nicks and cuts where I caught my skin on knives or graters or peelers.

Beneath my fingers, the furs shift to coarse blankets, the material more scratchy and uncomfortable than I remember.

It’s hard to believe I could ever have slept under such a blanket after the luxury of the soft furs the raskarrans have given us.

But then, even when I was travelling back from the beach, sunburnt and hungry, I never fell into bed quite as exhausted as I used to night after night when I lived on the bottom tier.

I open my eyes, turning to face Dazzik. He’s looking at the room around us, glaring at it as if his distaste could make it disappear.

“Welcome to my home,” I say.