Fantasy Lover

She still had her father's pajamas in her parents' bedroom where she kept all their possessions enshrined. Given the breadth of Julian's shoulders, she was sure the tops would never fit, but the bottoms had drawstrings and even if they didn't fit in length, they would at least stay up.

'Wait here,' she told him. 'I'll be right back.'

After she darted out the door, Julian walked over to the large windows and pulled back the white lace curtains. He watched strange boxlike things that must be automobiles move past her house, making strange droning noises that ebbed and flowed like a tide. Lights lit up the street and other buildings all over, much like torches had once done in his own homeland.

How strange this world was. So oddly similar to his and yet so very different.

He tried to associate the sights with all the words he'd heard over the decades, words he didn't understand. Words like TV and lightbulb.

And for the first time since his childhood, he was afraid. He didn't like the changes he saw, the swiftness with which they had come to this world.

What would it be like the next time he was summoned?

How much more different could things become?

Or even more terrifying, what if he was never summoned again?

He swallowed at the thought. What would it be like to be trapped for eternity? Alone and alert. To feel the oppressive darkness closing in on him, squelching the breath from his lungs as it lacerated his body with pain.

To never again walk as a man? Never to speak or to touch?

These people had things now that were called computers. He'd heard the shop owner talk about them with a lot of customers. And one of those customers had said that they would one day, probably soon, completely replace books.

What would happen to him then?

Dressed in her pink dorm shirt, Grace paused in her parents' bedroom by the crystal dish on the dresser where she'd placed her mother's wedding rings the day after the funeral. She could see the faint sparkle of the half-carat marquis diamond.

Her throat constricting with pain, she fought against the tears that welled in her eyes.

Barely twenty-four at the time, she'd been arrogant enough to think she was grown, and capable of standing strong against anything life hurled at her. She had thought herself invincible. And in one split second, her life had come crumbling down around her.

Their deaths had robbed her of everything she'd ever had. Her security, her faith, her sense of justice, but most of all, she had lost their devoted love and emotional support.

In spite of her youthful vanity, she hadn't been prepared to be cast completely adrift without any family whatsoever.

And even though five years had passed, she still mourned them. Deeply. The old saying that it was better to have known love and lost it was a big fat crock. There was nothing worse than having someone to love and care for you, then losing them to a needless accident.

Unable to face their deaths, she'd sealed this room off the day after their funeral, and left everything in it just as it was.

Opening the drawer where her father had kept his pajamas, Grace swallowed. No one had touched these since the afternoon her mother had folded them, and they had brought the clothes up here and put them away.

Even now, she could remember her mother's laughter. The way her mother joked about her father's conservative taste in flannel PJs.

Worse, she remembered their love for each other.

What she wouldn't give to find a perfect partner like her parents had done. They'd been married twenty-five years before they died and they were every bit as in love then as they'd been the day they met.

She couldn't remember a time in her life when her mother hadn't been smiling, her father gently teasing. Everywhere they went, they held hands like teenagers and stole quick kisses when they thought no one was looking.

But she had seen.

She remembered.

She'd wanted that kind of love, too. But for some reason, she'd never found a man who made her breathless. One who made her heart pound and her senses reel.

A man she couldn't live without.

'Oh, Mama,' she breathed, wishing her parents hadn't died that night.

Wishing for…

She didn't know. She just wanted something in her life that made her look forward to the future. Something that made her happy the way her father had always made her mother so happy.

Biting her lip, Grace balled her father's dark blue and white plaid pajama pants in her arms and ran from the room.

'Here,' she said, tossing them to Julian before she left him and ran to the bathroom in the middle of the hallway. She didn't want him to see her tears. She would never again show her vulnerability to a man.

Julian exchanged the cloth around his hips for the pants, then followed after Grace. She'd rushed to the next door down the hall and slammed it shut.

'Grace,' he said, gently nudging the door open.

He froze as he saw her weeping. She stood in a lavatory of some sort with two built-in sinks, and a white counter in front of her while she held a cloth to her mouth in an effort to muffle her wracking sobs.

In spite of his severe upbringing and aeons of control, a wave of pity washed over him. She cried as if her heart had been broken.

It made him uncomfortable. Uncertain.

Clenching his teeth, Julian forced his strange feelings away. One thing he'd learned early in his childhood, it didn't do any good to learn about people. To care for them. Every time he had made that mistake, he'd paid dearly for it.

Besides, his time here was short-way too short.

The less he entangled himself with her emotions and life, the easier it would be to tolerate his next confinement.

It was then that her earlier words hit him square in the chest. She'd pegged him perfectly. He was nothing more than a tomcat who took his pleasure and left.

Julian clenched the cold doorknob at the thought. He wasn't an animal. He had feelings, too.

At least he used to.

Before he could reconsider his actions, he stepped into the room and drew her into a hug. Her arms encircled his waist and she held on to him like a lifeline as she buried her face into his bare chest and wept. Her entire body shook against his.

Something strange inside him unfurled. A deep longing for something he couldn't name.

Never in his life had he comforted a weeping woman. He'd had sex more times than he could count, but never once had he just held a woman like this. Not even after sex. Once he wore out his partner, he would get up and clean himself off, then go find something to occupy himself with until he was called again.

Even before the curse, he'd never shown anyone tenderness. Not even his wife.

As a soldier, he'd been trained from his first memory to be fierce, cold. Harsh.

'Return with your shield, or upon it.' That was what his stepmother had told him as she grabbed him by his hair and slung him out of her home to begin training for war at the tender age of seven.

His father had been even worse. A legendary Spartan commander, his father had tolerated no weakness. No emotion. The man had doled out Julian's childhood at the end of a braided leather whip, teaching him to hide his pain. To let no one see him suffer.

To this day Julian could feel the bite of the whip against his bare back, hear the sound it made as it cut through the air toward his skin. See the mocking sneer of contempt on his father's face.

'I'm sorry,' Grace whispered against his shoulder, dragging his thoughts back to the present.