Dawn scooted closer to her friend. “I’m so sorry to hear about your dad. But no, you shouldn’t give up. I haven’t known you very long, but I do know how devoted you are to finding this treasure. And although I will admit I don’t totally understand it, I sure do wish I had something in my life I was so passionate about. You don’t want to give up, not really, do you?”
“No, I guess not. But I feel sort of foolish dragging you up here with me. Actually, I’ve only confided in a couple of other friends about my fascination with the gold mine, and they never showed any interest in coming up here to search with me. In fact, I’ve never come up here with anyone other than my family until now.”
Chloe glanced over at her with a quizzical frown on her pretty face. “I’m not even sure why I felt I could tell you about my family’s obsession with this place, or why I felt strongly enough about it to bring you up here with me. Maybe it had something to do with your interest in history. I just don’t know.”
“Well, now I feel really honored to be here.” Dawn grinned. “And sincerely bummed I wasn’t able to bring you better luck.”
Chloe shrugged and smiled back before crawling out from under the overhanging ledge. She stood up, stretching her arms high up over her head. “So, I guess we won’t go back rich bitches, just poor underpaid, but totally hot school teachers.”
Dawn giggled as she dragged her stiff body out from under the rock ledge and copied Chloe with a full body stretch. Today she really did feel like she had been rode hard and put away wet. She would never leave home without her vibrator again.
She noticed she had a vague feeling of nausea again this morning. What was up with that? Maybe it was just because the altitude was so different from what she was accustomed to. She took a deep breath and looked around. The unforgiving desert floor, spooky peaks and towers of the Superstition Mountains were so drastically different from the lush wooded mountains in Colorado, but this part of Arizona was still a ruggedly beautiful area in a completely different way. She reminded herself this mountain range and its hidden secrets were a part of her new home now.
Luckily she met someone like Chloe who wanted to be her friend, confide in her and take her places she would never find on her own. But she hoped Chloe would understand and still be her friend, if she didn’t want to come back up here on this frightening mountain range anytime soon.
****
Home Sweet Home.
Dawn’s little apartment on the north end of Apache Junction, and in the hub of a rapidly growing urban area, never felt so welcoming as it did when Chloe dropped her off earlier today from their weekend excursion on the Superstitions.
Curled up on the couch, she settled in for a relaxing evening before the hectic Monday she knew was ahead of her the next day.
She reached for the TV switcher, but put it back down on the coffee table without hitting the power button. It was barely six o’clock in the evening, yet she couldn’t keep her eyes open. She had to be at school early in the morning to get ready for a field trip to the Arizona State Capital Museum in Phoenix, which meant an extra-long day with part of it spent on a hot school bus with twenty-four moody twelve-year-olds.
A smile touched her lips. In spite of how difficult it could be to teach pre-teens, sharing her love of history with her students was something she never got tired of doing. It was extremely rare for her not to look forward to being at school every day.
After not sleeping at all the previous night, and very little sleep the night before, added to the queasiness she felt all day, Dawn was prepared to give in to her weariness and head to bed.
Please no kinky weird dreams tonight, okay? She had to get some uninterrupted sleep before school tomorrow, but getting up from the couch to go the very short distance to her bedroom seemed too much of an effort. In a matter of minutes, her eyes were too heavy to keep open and she fell into a deep sleep.
Engulfing blackness drew her in and she was powerless to resist the distant voice she could hear calling out to her. Udaya...
Dawn woke with a start; disoriented and gasping for air. Sweat drenched her face and body, but she didn’t notice. She slipped her feet into the white tennis shoes she removed from her feet earlier in the evening, and rose from the couch. In a trance-like state she walked to the front door.
The clock on the wall said it was approaching midnight, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except going to be with him. He was waiting for her. He had been waiting there, on the Superstition Mountains, for a very long time.
Chapter Four
Just a couple of days ago, she traveled this route with Chloe. But it had been daylight and Chloe had been driving. Dawn hadn’t been paying much attention since the entire way they had been talking non-stop about the Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine and their past camping adventures. It had taken them a little over an hour to drive to the location where Chloe parked her truck. Now, even in the dimness of night, Dawn drove from her apartment in Apache Junction, to that exact same spot as if she had been coming here forever.
Wearing the black yoga pants and white T-shirt she had on when she fell asleep on her couch earlier this evening; she had only taken time to put the pair of white sneakers on her feet. Still damp with perspiration, her pale flaxen hair hung limply down past the middle of her back.
Tonight was an unusually cool night for this area, and normally she would have needed a sweatshirt or jacket for being outside in this temperature, but she didn’t notice the odd temperature of the Arizona night as she began walking up the same narrow and steep trails she traveled with Chloe.
Not once did she stumble or fall on the treacherous trail. Her feet seemed to move on their own accord, feeling as if they barely touched the ground since she avoided all the rocks and boulders scattered along the trail she was tripping over when she had been here before. She had no idea how far she hiked, but she didn’t really care. All that mattered was finding him.
“Udaya.”
She gasped when the man’s deep voice broke through the silence. She could see him standing at the top of a ridge about twenty feet above her. Although the moon was not quite full, it was bright enough to cast an eerie light across the rugged mountaintops. But there still wasn’t enough light to make the features of the man’s face visible in this shadowy haze. Even though she longed to see the handsome face she envisioned in her mind, it was her body that clung to the desire consuming her since the first moment this mysterious stranger had come to her in previous dreams.
But this felt more real than the earlier dreams, if that was possible. Could this really be happening? Of course not. It had to be another dream...another incredibly realistic dream.
She had just been watching him up on the ridgeline and in less than a flash he was standing just inches in front of her. Where was the panic she knew she should be feeling right now? It was lost to the overpowering turmoil of her desperate desire for this phantom lover.
Some sort of a blanket was draped over his head, hiding most of his face and covering nearly all of his body. She narrowed her eyes and tried to see his features clearly, but his appearance was still a complete mystery when he began to speak.
“I’ve been waiting for you my entire life,” he said.
“I know,” Dawn answered, although she did not know why. It was just something she knew.
“My grandmother and my mother told me about you when I was a child nearly a hundred years ago. Grandmother also told me you would be called Udaya, which means Dawn in my language.”
Confusion ruled her thoughts. A hundred years? Udaya? His words made no sense. But then, here was no logic to anything happening to her for the past forty-eight hours. And it really didn’t matter.
At this moment she only wanted to feel the way she felt in those crazy dreams from the past two nights...the way his touch caused her insides to melt into a cauldron of lust and desire.
“I know you are confused. Your mind cannot grasp what is happening. It’s only your body responding to me
at this time, because there is no way to resist fate. It was probably wrong of me to bring you here tonight since I’m not ready to take you to the mountaintop to become my mate, yet. But I just can’t stay away from you now that I’ve seen you and held you in my arms. I promise you, I will find a way to come to you in your world before we both must fulfill the destiny set in motion since time first began. You must trust me, Udaya.”
More confusion filled her mind. He kept saying words her common sense couldn’t comprehend. But he was so right when he said the part about only her body responding to him. There was not one inch of her body not yearning for him to touch her in every intimate way possible.
As if he read her thoughts, he was suddenly holding her in his arms. The blanket he was wearing over his head fell to the ground, and Dawn could feel the hard muscles of his bare body pressing against her. He wore nothing other than some sort of cloth around his hips, but it wasn’t enough to contain the hard ridge of his cock, which was once again pressing against her abdomen with demanding intensity. A loud moan escaped from her mouth.
Her hands encircled the back of his neck. Long, thick hair encased her trembling fingers as she buried them deeper into the heavy mass. His lips were kissing her neck and she was sure her knees would have given out if he was not holding her up. Her body was dissolving into a hot mass of shameless needs.
Fiery sensations erupted in her sweating skin as his lips worked their way up the side of her neck and along her jaw line. His devouring kiss encompassed her completely and she opened her mouth willingly, hungrily, for what she knew was about to happen. When his tongue darted into her mouth, she was vitally aware of every exhilarating touch, every heady scent, and every succulent taste. His taste was indescribable; something akin to a sweet and sour candy that made the inside of her mouth convulse with wild explosions of pleasure.
As his lips left her mouth and began to kiss along her neck again back to the hidden area behind her ear, she was prepared, and eager, for the sharp penetration of his bite. When she felt the tiny prick, it sent ripples of ecstasy cascading through her entire being. A climatic explosion ripped through her body. She went limp in the stranger’s arms.
****
It was seven-twenty-three. What the hell? How was that even possible? She always woke up by six every morning. Now, she would be seriously late and she had planned to be there early to prepare for the field trip to Phoenix. Already, she could tell she felt like crap and she hadn’t even moved a muscle, yet.
Her mouth was bone-dry and she needed some water and lots and lots of strong black coffee. But when she tried to sit up, her head started spinning so fiercely she fell back against the pillow on the couch where she obviously spent the entire night.
With her hand pressed over her eyes, she moaned. Her stomach was churning and there was a queasy bulk hovering at the back of her throat. If she moved she knew she would throw up. She felt like she had a massive hangover, but the last alcohol she had to drink had been a couple of beers in the campsite with Chloe on Saturday night.
“This seriously sucks,” she said out loud, then choked back the urge to vomit, because she didn’t think she even had the energy to drag herself to the bathroom. Could this really be the result of a poisonous bug or spider bite she might have gotten when they were camping? Wow, maybe she really could die.
It was more likely she just had a flu bug, which was probably why she had been feeling so strange the past couple of days. Now she would have to call in sick at the last minute. She had only been teaching History at the Apache Junction Middle School for barely a month, so this was not something she wanted to do.
When she was teaching in Colorado before moving here, she only called in sick once in the four years since graduating from college, and that was because she had gotten pink eye from one of her students.
If she missed school today, a substitute teacher would have to take her history class to the Arizona State Capital Museum in Phoenix today, which made it even worse for her to be get sick right now.
Dawn took a deep breath and leaned over to grab her cell phone lying on the coffee table. These slight movements made her feel as if she was going to pass out. Once again, she choked back the bitter taste in her mouth and tried to lay as still as possible until the queasiness eased up enough for her to call the secretary at the school. After she finally managed to make the dreaded call, along with profuse apologies for having to call in sick, she hung up and sank back into the cushions on the couch to try to sort through her confused thoughts. The secretary said she sounded horrible, so Dawn figured she must sound as bad as she felt.
The last clear memory she had of the previous night had been of lying on this couch and feeling too tired to get up to go to bed. That had been ridiculously early in the evening. She must have fallen asleep right afterward, then this lurking and unwelcome flu bug finally claimed her exhausted body during the night.
Without warning, the vivid images of her most recent dream began to flash like disoriented black and white movie stills before her eyes. That man, the faceless stranger, summoning her to the Superstitions, holding her in his strong arms, reducing her to a woman who wanted nothing more than his—and her own—complete surrender. Unconsciously, she raised her hand up and gently touched her lips. She pulled her fingers away as if she had been shocked by a bolt of electricity.
Once again, her lips were tender to her touch, suggesting she been engaged in a fervent make out session. Her hand slid up along the side of her neck where she remembered the man’s lips leaving a blazing path of kisses. As her fingertips barely touched the spot behind her ear that was even more painful than it had been before, a blistering sensation fired through her entire body. An urgent yearning between her legs gripped her again. This was insane. She honestly felt like she just had an orgasm and was only recalling the images from her sick dreams.
This flu was making her hallucinate, but what kind of flu would cause that type of reaction? Maybe she invented a new type of flu…the Orgasm Flu. A humorless chuckle escaped from her parched mouth. That would be the kind of flu all women would want to catch. Right?
She should probably call Chloe and get the name of a good doctor in the area, although at this point she wasn’t sure if she needed a medical doctor or a shrink. At the rate she was going with these nutty dreams it was probably going to be the latter.
Her sarcastic mirth faded as she tried to concentrate on realistic reasons as to what could really be causing her to feel like she was losing her mind. If she hadn’t been bitten by some poisonous bug or spider, then maybe she had some sort of weird illness that really was making her delirious and causing her to have wild dreams about sexy long-haired men who smelled and tasted amazing, and floated down to her from the rocky ledges on the Superstition Mountains. Well, this had to be a new one for the medical books.
Dawn forced herself to sit up, which was a bit easier this time. As she managed to straighten up and put her feet on the ground, she realized her feet felt strange, too. A glance down at her bare feet made her cringe. Both of her feet were covered in dirt, actually they were covered in the fine light brown dust that covered the desert floor throughout this part of Arizona.
Her once-clean white tennis shoes were lying haphazardly on the floor beside the couch as if she had kicked them off in a rush. Last night, right before she laid down, she distinctly remembered removing them from her feet and placing them side-by-side in an orderly manner. Even more puzzling was how her shoes were also covered with the same fine brown sand that matched the dirt on her feet.
Her brow wrinkled in confusion. Those shoes were only worn around the house, to the gym, or whenever she went for a power walk around her neighborhood. Why would they—and her feet—be filthy dirty? She had been asleep on the couch all night, hadn’t she?
That crazy vivid dream flashed through her mind again...no way.
Udaya.
A weak gasp escaped from her mouth. There was more, something about centuries and dest
iny and his grandmother, but his words were shrouded in her foggy memory. She ran her dry tongue over her trembling lips. Don’t remember, she told herself. Please don’t remember. It was only a dream. No, it was more like a horrible nightmare…the kind you didn’t want to remember because then it would seem too real.
Her body felt as if it had just been wrapped in barbed wire as terror pierced through her waning defenses and wiped out all the sensual overtones she previously felt.
Cowboy up, Cupcake.
As always, when she said that silly phrase to herself, she thought of her older brother. Jeremy was her center point when life got a bit overwhelming and she needed to be grounded again. Maybe she should call him later tonight when he was off work. He was the head coach at the University of Colorado in Boulder and she knew this was a crazy busy time for him as the CSU Football team was starting a new season.
He had also gotten married recently, but always made time for his little sister, and was still the one person Dawn could talk to about anything. But could she talk to him about all this unbelievably weird stuff? The kinky dreams? The sexy long-haired stranger? The Orgasm Flu? Going insane? Probably not.
Before long, Dawn realized she was beginning to feel almost semi-normal, physically, anyway. Mentally, well, she wasn’t ready to go there yet. She drew in a deep cleansing breath.
Slowly, she rose to her feet on still-shaking legs. Another relieved sigh escaped her. Five minutes ago, she was certain she would have collapsed or thrown up if she had attempted to stand. In her small apartment it was only a few yards to the kitchen. By the time she got to the sink and reached for a glass of water, she became aware of a throbbing sensation emitting from the sore spot on the back of her neck.
Damn, it was really starting to hurt. She reached around to touch the area again and grew numb. When she pulled her hand away this time and glanced down at her fingers, it was all she could do to keep from dropping down to her knees. A scarlet-colored smear colored the edges of her fingertips.
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