Page 37 of Mesmerized

“The other night. When we were looking through the books, you fell asleep, and I sat here at my desk, reading, and I drifted off, also. I dreamed. When I woke up, I—it seemed to me that you had been dreaming, too.”

Olivia felt heat flooding up her throat and into her cheeks. “Yes.”

“I dreamed about the woman whom we had seen earlier. The vision.”

“You did?” Olivia was startled from her embarrassment.

“Yes. I dreamed about her and a man, someone dressed as a knight. She called him Sir John, and he called her Alys. They were in some place with barrels all over—”

Olivia went cold to the bone. “What?” She took a step closer to him. “You saw them in a storage house?”

He nodded. “Yes. In a castle. In the courtyard, I mean. Then they went down through a trapdoor into a cellar.”

Olivia’s stomach went hot, and her feet and hands were like blocks of ice. She swayed a little, and Stephen leaped forward to take her by the arms and guide her into a chair.

“Here. Sit down. You look as if you’re about to faint.” He pushed her head down, squatting beside her.

“I think I was.” Olivia looked at her hands; they were trembling. She would not have been surprised if she had been trembling all over. “I dreamed the same dream.”

“Sweet Christ!” There was a long silence. Stephen stood back up. “I thought—my first thought was that you had known what I had been dreaming.”

“That is what I thought, too.” Olivia stared at him. “But it was impossible.”

“That is what I kept telling myself all day yesterday. I wanted to talk to you about it, but I could not find you. Did they talk about her husband? Did he ask her about a bruise on her cheek?”

“Yes! He asked her if Sir Raymond had done it to her!”

“Sir Raymond. That is what I heard him say, too.” Stephen pushed his hands back into his hair, his expression a little wild. “And then they—”

“Yes,” Olivia replied in a strangled voice, blushing to the roots of her hairline as she remembered the couple’s embrace and the way the participants had changed into herself and Stephen.

She saw embarrassment in his face, too, but she saw more—a flame that lit his gray eyes and set up an answering heat inside her. Olivia’s mouth went suddenly dry, and she didn’t know where to look. Just sitting here, she could feel again the passion that had flooded through her; she could taste his kiss...his skin.

Olivia wrapped her arms around herself and stepped away. “It’s impossible. How could we dream the same dream?”

“Yet we did.”

“Madame Valenskaya could not have done this,” she said positively. “No one could. How could anyone make us see exactly the same people do the same things in a dream?”

“If an expert mesmerist gave one the suggestion in a trance, said that one would dream about this scene...”

“But to arrange us dreaming it at the same time! I cannot believe anyone is that skillful, let alone Madame Valenskaya. She has no subtlety about her, no dexterity. Why, I have heard her accent slip more than once.”

“Perhaps it isn’t Madame Valenskaya. Maybe Babington is the mesmerist and Madame Valenskaya is just his tool.”

Olivia frowned, unconvinced. “Whoever it is, how could he implant a suggestion that you and I would see the same thing?”

“Well, perhaps we didn’t see exactly the same people.”

“A man with light brown hair, tall and well muscled? His eyes green, with a scar along this cheek, low.” She grazed her left cheek with a fingernail.

“I’m not sure how he looked. I felt as if—as if I were he. I saw the bailey, the castle, the woman, everything, through his eyes.”

Olivia remembered how toward the end of the dream she had somehow become the woman. Her voice trembled as she said, “This is absurd.”

“It surpasses all logic that I know,” Stephen admitted.

“I have never seen, never heard of, any mesmerist this skilled. I don’t know of any trick that comes remotely close to this.”