She shook her head again, her face coming back into focus, her dark hair spread across the pillow, her nudity and blood now covered in the virginal white of a cotton nightgown. “I wanted to sleep with you, James. You were the notorious Boucher and I wanted your head on a pike in the town square. I wanted to tell the men of the army that a woman had bested the best.”
“But I didn’t fall for anything and you were killed. What did the men of your army think about you then?”
This time it was her eyes that squeezed shut against the truth but when she opened them, it wasn’t Marie who lay in the bed, it was another woman. Another woman with a lithe and supple body, her flame-red hair almost alive, her wide green eyes betraying a malicious tint. Another woman set on discovering his secrets and then turning them against him.
“What about me, James?” she purred. “Will you kill me if the time comes and then call it self-defence?”
“Leave Daniella out of it.”
She smiled then. The blanket dropped as she sat up, revealing the ripped and ruined gown from earlier, her full breasts on display, the dusky nipples peaked and begging. “I want you, James.”
He stepped towards her to pull the blanket up but she reached out and pulled him down into a kiss, the honeyed warmth of her mouth like heaven after the acrid stench of smoke.
When she groaned and tightened her grip in his hair to an almost painful pull, he rolled onto his back and pushed her away.
The laugh that followed was not Daniella’s. Another change in the shifting moonlight and Marie was back. “You do not like the redhead? You prefer your victims brunette?”
“Daniella would never stab me in the back the way you tried to.” His voice was stark in the empty room, his breath harsh between the forced words.
His lie troubled him. Would Daniella stab him in the back? Could she?
The only certainty was that this dream would end the way the dream always did. With Marie lying lifeless alongside him in the bed they had shared for three weeks, blood bubbling from the edge of her red lips and pumping from the hole in her chest.
“How do you know the pirate speaks the truth and isn’t using you? How do you know she isn’t proving herself to her father by delivering the man who crippled him?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Marie. Daniella isn’t like that.”
“Isn’t like what?”
He turned on the bed and faced Daniella once again. Marie could not keep doing this to him. It had gone on for far too long. “You have to leave now, Marie.”
“Oh?” The taunting laugh came again. “What if I don’t want to leave?”
The sharpened tip of a dagger pressed to his Adam’s apple and he swallowed despite knowing the movement would nick his skin. “You should have killed me back then, Marie.”
“Yes, I should have.”
He gripped her wrist hard enough to bruise.
She cried out and dropped the dagger but then came at him again, this time with a sword.
James knew the sword couldn’t hurt him in the confined space with no force behind it…and wielded by a ghost. He threw his body on hers, straddled her perfect hips, heard her cries of denial, of love, that he was mad. He’d heard it before. He’d believed it before. He’d nearly died for it once.
“You need to leave me alone, Marie,” he shouted, his hands around her neck, her face turning red against the crisp white pillow as she struggled to breathe. Her face changed again then, from Henri, to the unnamed soldiers and civilians, then back to Daniella. He shook her, and her nails raked his arms, his cheeks, his hands where they squeezed.
“You’re dead, you need to stay dead!” he roared.
And then she did something she had never done in the dream. She clasped her hands together above her head and brought them down hard to connect with his nose.
Blinding pain, threatening blackness and the sudden buck of her hips saw him on the floor beside the bed. As he lay there on the hard timbers and looked up at Marie wearing Daniella’s face, in her hand the small dagger, he wondered if this dream would end differently. He wondered if the woman he had killed had finally found a way to take his life in return.
*
“What the hell?” Daniella didn’t know whether to slice him to ribbons with the dagger or hit him again. Her hands throbbed and she rubbed them against her thighs.
When James had begun to talk in his sleep, she’d listened. He argued with someone called Marie. It hadn’t taken long for him to start thrashing in the bed so she had got out of it and stood staring at him. When finally he calmed, she hopped back beneath the blankets to try to get some sleep. Then he’d rolled over on top of her and tried to strangle her.
Had he still been sleeping when he attempted to wring the life from her? She rather doubted he just woke up and decided he didn’t need her after all. She rubbed the front of her neck, her throat feeling as though she had swallowed rusted steel.
“I’ll kill you for that, Marie.” He held two fingers to the bridge of his nose as blood dripped over his lips and onto his shirt.
Daniella’s grip around the handle of the dagger tightened. She inched backwards to the door but he came at her again.
“James, it’s me, Daniella. Wake up!”
One hand slammed into the timber next to her ear, the other wrapped around her throat again. “That’s what you want me to believe, but you’re a vindictive bitch, Marie. You need to move on.”
Daniella shoved with all the force she could muster but he was immovable. If she had been slightly worried
