by Cameron Dane
“I don't understand.”
“The gut sensation, the invisible string”—Colin made his hands into fists and held them against his stomach—“the feeling that went through me the night I saw the red door and swam to your house in my first dream.” He looked into Marek's eyes, without a hint of hiding. “I felt the power that took me over and brought me in contact with you. The one that kept bringing me back every night.”
“What?” Marek shook his head. No fucking way. “No. That's not possible.”
Colin grabbed Marek by the forearms with a digging, tight hold. “Do you swear you've never had any kind of dream about me in the past two years?”
“I haven't. I promise.” Disturbed, Marek untangled himself from Colin's hands and buried his fingers into his overlong hair. The earnestness in Colin's eyes held Marek in its hold, though, compelling him to respond. “Shit. I don't even fall asleep for long enough to have dreams most nights, if you want the truth.”
“Okay, then maybe it really is about your house.” Colin shuffled through the sand and stood at the foot of the path, his arms crossed against his chest. He looked up at Marek's home, studying it like a specimen…or a person. “Maybe it's haunted. Are you aware of its history?”
“I've never seen any ghosts or heard any noises I can't explain. Other than that, I don't know anything about it except that I moved into it two years ago.”
Colin nodded. “Right when I started having the dreams.” Shifting, he put his attention on Marek. “See? That's the part that keeps making me think you must have something to do with them.” Colin smiled like a guilty kid caught doing something forbidden. “That and all the sex with the man who owns it, of course.”
Noting every hard, sinewy line that made up Colin's body, Marek nearly groaned just thinking about the man's dreams. “I think I'd remember having sex with you.”
The tips of Colin's ears burned with red, and he turned away, back to the house. “Thank you,” he murmured. “I think. Anyway, I did some research yesterday—”
Marek swung Colin to face him as a very different kind of fire burned a line straight through him. “You investigated me?” A band squeezed at his chest, reigniting suspicion. Maybe he really is here for money. “You had no goddamned right.”
Colin reared and grabbed his stomach, making Marek feel as if he had kicked the man. “I didn't do a background check on you, Marek; I investigated the history of this house. I would never violate your privacy by researching you. Although, just so you don't think I'm deliberately misleading you—because you seem hell-bent on not trusting me—I am a partner in a private investigation firm. If I wanted to find out about you, it wouldn't be that hard to do it.” Righteous indignation fueled his gaze. “I won't though. It's not my style.”
“Why should I trust you?” Defensiveness laced Marek's voice. “I haven't had any contact with you since I was a teenager, and it's not like we were tight back then anyway. I don't know you anymore.”
Stepping in, Colin opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He pursed his lips, swore under his breath, and eventually looked at Marek with a softer gaze. “You're right; you don't. I apologize. I get that you have reason to be suspicious of my sudden appearance and strange claims.” Colin linked his hands behind his neck and started to pace, pausing to glance at Marek each time he passed in front of him. “I know this is weird for you. It's weird for me too. I feel like I know you, and so I talk to you and treat you in a manner that probably feels too familiar for your comfort. All I can say is that I'm not doing it to keep you off balance.” He finally stopped and offered a small smile. “I do it because I feel safe and comfortable with you, whether it's actually smart of me or not.”
“Do we talk in your dreams?” Marek asked, curiosity winning out over his hundred misgivings. “Like have sit-down, all-out conversations, to where you think you know personal stuff about me?”
“Not exactly. Look, can we go relax on the beach and have this conversation in a way that feels less…I don't know…like we're adversaries?” Colin's gaze drifted to the water and held there with a stare Marek could only describe as longing. “I don't want to be that with you.”
Watching Colin stirred something long gone rusty in Marek, something simple and pure, something that made him want to see another man smile. Colin smile. Because of Marek.
“Sure,” Marek finally answered and prayed he wasn't helping this man lead him right into a trap. “Let's go sit down. I'd like to hear what you have to say.”
“Great,” Colin said. His entire face lit up, sucker punching Marek with pure, gut attraction. Colin started walking toward the dock and their towels; Marek kept up the fast pace beside him. “I'm hoping you'll have some insight or even just a theory or two. I walk around with this awareness of you and this house living inside me every day, but I've only told one person—my best friend Jordan—and I didn't even tell her the depth of them. I'm not an idiot.” Colin kneeled down, grabbed his towel, and walked backward toward the beach, slowing his pace while Marek hustled a dozen more feet down the planks to grab his. “I know how crazy I sound,” he said, as soon as Marek caught back up, “and I knew people would tell me the same if they knew.”
Sympathy tugged at Marek, even though he still wasn't sure he believed Colin. “Afraid they would lock you away?”
Colin shook his head and looked down, busying himself with laying his towel flat in the sand. “Not so much that. I just didn't want anyone to convince me I wasn't really experiencing them the way I knew I was,” he murmured. “I was afraid if I did the dreams would stop. I didn't want them to stop.” Colin lifted his stare off the ground, and the vulnerability visible on his face, in his eyes, stole Marek's breath away. “I didn't want you, or this place, to go away.”
Oh Jesus. Marek's limbs trembled, making him grateful to sit down. Maybe Colin is certifiable, but every word he's speaking is the truth. I can see it. I can feel it. Oh fuck.
“Tell me.” Marek's voice held a rough whisper it its grip. “Tell me what I say. Tell me why you care.”
“It's not what you say.” Colin sat down, facing Marek, and drew his knees up to his chest. “You don't talk much, but neither do I, really. Fact is, I never even saw your actual face in my dreams; it's more a sense of a being than categorizing eyes, hair, or body parts and trying to identify them. I knew it was you when I showed up here the other day because I felt you, for a lack of a better way to explain it. Any time he—you—were nearby, your emotions—sadness, despair—overwhelmed me, and all I wanted to do was take that away, even for a little while.”
Colin sifted sand through his fingers, letting it flow in a thin line back to the beach, like an hourglass. “From the beginning”—his voice dropped some—“sex ignited you, and when we were together in that way, passion, desire, and lust seemed to drown out the other stuff, and then you seemed okay. I would wake up, and it would be morning. I'd go through my day and then when it was time to sleep again, the cycle started over, always in the same place of loss.” Brushing off his hands, he shrugged. “That's it, basically. I didn't know it was you, as in Marek Donovan, the guy I knew in Henderson, ever, until the other day, here, when you got close enough, and I saw your eyes and cheekbones. I remembered those features about you from when we were teenagers and recognized you right away. It totally threw me that you and the man in my dreams were the same person. I feel you even though I don't have any idea of your life since my family left Henderson.”
Marek remembered Colin and his family had left town after Colin recovered from the beating. “I moved away too, not long after you did,” Marek shared. “I had an uncle in Pittsburgh who owned a scrap metal business. I started out working for him at the bottom of the chain. By the time he wanted to retire, I convinced him to let me take over the company and run it for him. I expanded, made him a lot more money, and when he died, he left it to me.” Then I lost Payton, and everything went to shit. Clearing his throat, Marek looked out to the ocean, staring at nothing. “I sol
d it a little over two years ago and moved here.”
Colin reached out and rubbed Marek's leg. “I'm sorry for your loss.”
He didn't know the half of it. “Thank you.”
“Your uncle isn't why you're living on this island though.” Colin trapped Marek's gaze in the steady hold of his.
There was no question in Colin's voice. Only certainly of his claim. Goose bumps popped up on Marek's legs, and a frisson of fear trickled down his back. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that's not why you're grieving in my dreams. Your pain goes deeper than losing an uncle, Marek. You've lost a piece of your soul.” A flickering of knowledge passed over Colin's eyes, and then he said, “Tell me about Payton.”
Rage shot Marek off the ground in a flash, and he had his hand around Colin's neck, hauling him to his feet in the next. “What the fuck kind of game are you playing, you lying piece of shit? Coming in here saying you don't know anything about my life.” He got right in Colin's face, and his voice dipped dangerously savage and low. “Who the hell told you about Payton? Tell me.” Marek's entire body shook, and he swore he could do serious damage. “Now.”
Under the clamp of Marek's hand, Colin never blinked. “You did.”
Marek let go and staggered backward. Covering his mouth, he crumpled to his knees.
Chapter Seven
Oh God, I feel like I stabbed him in the heart.
Colin took a tentative step forward and dropped to his knees, reaching out to the other man. “Marek?” He touched his hand to Marek's forearm, and the temperature chilled his fingers. Shit. “Are you okay?”
“No. Huh-uh.” Marek batted Colin's hand away and shook his head. “I never would have told you about Payton. Not even in your dreams.” His pure blue eyes looked as big and frightening as a vast, endless wide-open ocean. “You said we didn't talk like that.”
The guy looked ravaged, and it tore Colin apart.
“Damn my mouth. I'm sorry. I didn't mean it that way.” Colin curled his hands against his thighs so that he didn't touch. “On your greenhouse door; you have Payton's Place carved into the wood, and there's a heart next to it. I told you I did research on this house, so I know the name of the man who built it for his wife, and I know her name too. Neither was Payton, and they never had children. Only one other couple has owned the place, the people before you, who let it fall apart, and neither of their names was Payton either. That leaves Payton as someone important to you.”
Marek nodded, and a yes formed on his lips with no voice behind it to give it sound.
He looks so fucking alone he makes my heart hurt, worse than in any of my dreams. Colin knew it was because this was real. A real man in real pain with no speculation or uncertainty attached to repeated dreams anymore.
Colin spread his knees to encase where Marek kneeled and, unable to help himself, cupped his cheek. Facial hair scratched at Colin's palm, but he brushed his thumb over smooth skin covering a sharp cheekbone. The man flinched, but didn't pull away.
“You didn't want me in the greenhouse earlier.” Colin pressed, compelled. “I could tell. Payton is why. Isn't he?”
Marek stared out at the ocean, unblinking, clearly a thousand miles away. He suddenly shook his head, his eyes cleared, and he scrambled back away from Colin, rushing to his feet. “No, huh-uh. You don't get Payton. I don't want to talk about him.” Marek walked backward to his house and took the stairs, all the while pointing at Colin's speedboat. “I want you to leave. Now.” He opened his front door.
“Wait!” Colin jumped up and chased after Marek, bounding up the steps to the porch. “Please don't disappear. We don't have to talk about personal stuff; I shouldn't have pushed.” Colin's mind raced, searching for something to grab Marek's interest. I don't know him that well yet to pick a topic! Right then, a breeze caught the door, making it squeak and swing back, all the way open. Of course. “Let me stay and tell you what I found out about your house. If you still want me to go after that, I will.”
Marek didn't say anything; he didn't even offer Colin a glance, but he did leave the door open as he turned and walked inside.
Colin followed to the back of the house into the kitchen, watching as the man went to the fridge and pulled out the tomatoes and cucumbers he had washed earlier. After setting them on the center island, he opened a cabinet and pulled down two thick white plates, set them next to the vegetables, and then withdrew a large knife from a drawer.
Looking up from his task, Marek used the knife and pointed to the rectangular table across the room. “Make yourself useful and set the table. Utensils are second drawer from the left. Glasses you can see through the cabinets, and drinks are in the fridge.” Marek put an unwavering stare on Colin that laid out a hard warning. “You can talk about the house while you're doing it.”
Colin got the message loud and clear. The brief conversation about Payton had never happened.
Glancing at Marek and finding him already slicing tomatoes, Colin grabbed forks and knives, as well as a few paper napkins off a pile on the counter. “The house was built a little over a hundred years ago by an Australian man who owned a number of sugarcane plantations in both Australia and Fiji. He found himself an American wife, who was apparently vacationing in Australia. I don't know how common that would have been in the early nineteen hundreds, but that's the story people tell.” Colin took another quick look at Marek as he palmed two bottles of beer from the fridge and held them up. At Marek's nod, Colin took them to the table and arranged everything in two place settings.
“Anyway,” Colin went on, “she—her name was Beatrice and his was Stewart—came with him to Fiji once to visit his plantation and fell completely in love with the islands. The story is this was the house of a childhood fantasy of hers, and he built it for her from the ground up. His touch was the blue tiles, because he wanted some feeling of a design you might find near the water against the colonial facade. Stewart also fancied himself the start of a legacy and created his own coat of arms, which is what is in the stained glass window above the door.”
“I figured that was what it was.” Marek went to the fridge and returned to the butcher block with a clear-wrapped white ball. “It made me think some British person with a title might have lived here.”
Not quite so dead inside that his own curiosities weren't roused about his home. Colin took heart and sat down, sharing while he watched Marek put together two plates of food. “No royalty under your roof, I'm afraid. It was an upstart Australian and his Yankee wife. Word is they were very much in love and were very kind and generous with the local people. It was just them; they never had any kids. Stewart would leave every so often to tend to his business in Australia, and Beatrice would wait for him to return. Less than fifteen years into their marriage, Stewart went away on another trip, and he never returned. There is a record of his ship leaving Australia, but a storm popped up off the coast not long after, and the theory is he was lost at sea. Well, to the Pacific, to be technically correct.”
“How horrible.” Marek slid a plate in front of Colin and sat down opposite him. “But probably not uncommon back then.” He pointed at Colin's plate of sliced tomatoes and diced cucumbers garnished with shreds of parsley, drizzled with olive oil and topped with thin slices of mozzarella cheese. A huge hunk of hearty bread sat perched on the plate's edge. “I know it's early for lunch, but go ahead and dig in.”
“Thanks. I didn't really eat breakfast earlier.” Colin cut into a tomato, gathered some cucumber and cheese onto his fork, and took a huge mouthful. The cool, fresh vegetables burst with perfection on his tongue, and the rich chaser of cheese melted in his mouth. “Damn, man, that's good stuff.” He tore off a hunk of bread and ran it through some of the olive oil, relishing the pure flavors. “Maybe I should have searched for wine rather than beer.”
Shaking his head, Marek took a long drag off his bottle. “Nothing better than a cold beer on a hot day.”
Colin lifted his bottle in salute. “True enou
gh.” He suddenly put his drink down and made to rise. “Do you mind drinking out of the bottle? I don't ever pour my beer into a glass, so I didn't think to get one for you.”
Marek gestured to the chair with his hand. “Sit down. It's fine. So”—he gathered more food on his fork—“you said someone else owned the house too?”
“Mmnn…” Colin paused and finished chewing what he had in his mouth. “Sorry about that. I'm not finished telling you about the first owners. Everyone on Stewart's ship was declared dead to the storm, but Beatrice never believed it. She ran her husband's businesses for a while, but eventually sold them. She lived off the money for the rest of her life, and she never left Fiji. She stayed here, in this house, feeling certain in her heart one day Stewart would return, and she wanted to be where he could find her.” Colin raised a brow as he gathered another helping of tomato. “He never did come back. Probably did die in that storm. Beatrice passed in this house, in nineteen sixty-nine.”
A quick flicker darkened the blue in Marek's eyes, shifting them to midnight. “She lived a long time without him.”
“Yeah, she did. It gave the house a beautiful, if sad, legacy.”
Questions about Payton and Marek's obvious loss of his partner sat thick in Colin's throat, nearly choking him. The man had to have died; Marek's response to his name and the carving on the door spoke of a connection that would not have been severed any other way. Uncertainty wiggled inside Colin, looking for a place to take root. In his dreams, Colin only wanted to take that man's—Marek's—pain away and give him someone to cling to in the dark. In reality, sitting across from someone who had so clearly loved another man, Colin worried that even if his dreams were correct, and he was supposed to be here, would his role be playing second fiddle to a ghost? Curiosity, jealousy, and insecurity mingled inside Colin, churning his stomach. If only Marek would tell him something about Payton; if Colin could come at this new friendship from a place of knowledge, he knew he would be able to at least accept Payton, if not exactly embrace him.