Читать книгу The Baby Gift - Day Leclaire - Страница 7

Ten days before Christmas…

SHE came to him again, all silk and sweetness and heady feminine perfume. Everything about her was soft—from her hip-length cornsilk hair, to her gentle, eager touch, to her soothing words. And her mouth… Her warm, hungry, giving mouth was softest of all.

She flowed over him, rousing emotions he thought had been gutted long ago. He was helpless to resist. Hell, resistance was the furthest thing from his mind. He wanted her. Needed her.

Took her.

Alessandro awoke with a jolt.

Tossing back his covers, he escaped the rumpled bed and crossed to stare out at a star-studded winter sky. Why did that dream continue to haunt him? It was so nebulous, so lacking in form or substance. And yet, it filled him with an odd restlessness. There was something he’d forgotten to do. Something urgent.

But he couldn’t remember what.

He reached for the chain and ring that encircled his neck, cursing when he didn’t find it. He’d lost it almost two years ago, and normally, he remembered that. But on the odd occasion—frustrating occasions when his emotions got the better of him—he reverted to a habit that had been established in boyhood, when the chain had first been placed around his neck by his grieving father.

It was because of his dream, he acknowledged, a dream that had been haunting him with increasing regularity for the past nine months. The woman in it was, without question, his ex-wife, though for some reason Rhonda’s hair was longer and silkier than the flaming red corkscrew curls that had rioted around her face during their eighteen months together. And while he wanted his ex with a painful desperation while asleep, when he woke he couldn’t find the tiniest ember of passion lingering from the disaster of their marriage and subsequent divorce.

Pain, sure. Anger, definitely. Regrets, plenty. But there wasn’t a shred of love or desire. He leaned his arm against the casing of the bay window, his hand folding into a fist. So why the dreams? And what the hell was he supposed to do? What had he forgotten?

“Come on, Salvatore. Think.”

The melancholy hoot of a great horned owl escaped from the California woods surrounding the family’s mountain cabin, the sound a painful echo of his own loneliness. He hated this time of year. Or perhaps he just hated the memories it roused. Drawing back from the window, he glared at the dream-tossed bed, his frustration mounting.

What the hell had he forgotten?