Page 45 of His Winter Wonderland

She should want her body to be the only body he lusted after. Rhen could understand the concerns and needs of his darkness. He also understood the fears of his mate. He balled his hands into fist. And closed his eyes. He wouldn’t bite her. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t. She was his happy place.

Rhen closed his eyes and took a deep breath, then another, and another. He kept breathing deeply until he felt the darkness retreating. He didn’t want to rejoice too soon. He wanted to wait until he knew for sure that it was once again dormant. Rhen could hear Winter moving around. He could still smell her blood.

That heavenly scent surrounded him, engulfing, taking command of all his senses. Everything in him screamed for him to go to her. But at least the darkness wasn’t pushing him to do it. It wasn’t pushing him to sink his fangs into her neck. It wasn’t pushing him to mark her. It wasn’t confusing his desire for her to his desire to kill.

He tensed when he sensed Winter nearing him. “Give me a second,” he told her.

“How are you able to do it?”

“Give me a second, Winter.”

“Okay. I’ve bandaged the wound.”

He’d already picked up on the scent. No bandage could mask it now. She didn’t come any closer. Good, cause, he was barely holding it together. But, he was holding it together. That was major progress. He leaned his head against the door.

He knew this was a test. A test for her to see if he could control the bloodlust. If he left now, he would’ve have failed the test. He needed to do something to further distract him from her scent. Talking would help. And there was something Rhen had longed to get off his chest for years.

“Talk to me,” he told her.

“Okay. Uh, about what?”

“I want to talk about the dreams we used to have.”

She went quiet. He didn’t know if he’d ever be allowed into her cabin again. Before he left, they needed to talk about this.

“Do we have to talk about that?”

“I think it’s time.” For a long time, she didn’t reply.

Then finally she whispered, “Okay. Talk. Tell me how you became the protector and the monster of my dreams.”

Chapter Fifteen

Rhen

Head pressed against the door, Rhen told his side of the story.

“I don’t know how you were pulled into my nightmares,” Rhen told her. “I only know I was cursed to sleep at a certain time every night after I first arrived here. That curse seemed to break after we met in person. At first, I thought you’d found a way to break it. I asked Silvia. She said you had no idea why the dreams stopped.”

Behind him, Winter said, “So you’re the reason Silvia kept asking me about how the dreams ended back then.”

Rhen nodded. “I don’t know if it was our meeting or my horrible actions that night that broke it. Before then, no matter what I did or how many witches I cornered to prepare a spell for me, I always fell asleep each night and woke up on a dream plane. And you were always there. At first, I couldn’t see your face. I couldn’t even tell you were a woman. To me, you were a shapeless shadow figure.”

“For me, you were a monster I couldn’t see. I could only hear your growls and hear you running after me.”

“In my mind, you were the bastard who had me cursed to this plane.”

“So, in your dreams, when you saw me, you saw your enemy from your home realm.”

Rhen nodded again. “Every night, I fought to destroy that bastard, thinking if I could destroy him, I could break the curse. That never happened. I destroyed the shadow night after night, and still, I was haunted by nightmares. One part of the dream that always confused me was the scent of my victim’s blood.”

“Why did that part of the dream confuse you?”

“Mainly because after I smelled the shadow’s blood, my feelings for it began to change. The blood called to me. It made me yearn for that person. And that angered the hell out of me and the darkness inside of me. Though I know people who have partners of the same sex, hell, a few of my brethren are mated to members of the same sex, I’ve never been interested in another male. I was furious that my nightmare was forcing me to lust and crave the blood of someone I wasn’t attracted to, someone I didn’t want, someone I wanted dead. Then one day, I was talking to my right-hand man, Rome, about the dreams. And he said something that blew my mind. He said what if the dream shadow isn’t the person that cursed me there. What if it’s someone I’m meant to find. Someone like my mate. I had never considered that possibility. That night, when I went to sleep, I had a different attitude. That night, instead of letting the darkness do whatever it wanted, I tried to stop it. I tried to see if I could find out who the shadow was. The first part of the dream proceeded the same. I couldn’t stop my darkness from killing who I thought was my enemy.”

“But in the second part, things changed,” Winter said.

“That’s right. In the second part, I was determined to tame my darkness. You probably don’t know what it’s like to fight with your own self. To fight with your own dark thoughts and actions.”