Reverie

For seven months she has dreamed the same room. Tonight she finally says their names.

Elodie Fairbrook is thirty-three, a curvy, careful night archivist with long copper-red waves, freckled fair skin and green eyes, who spends her nights alone under the dome of the Somnarium cataloging other peoples dreams. She knows more about dreaming than anyone in Aldermere. She has never written down her own.

Every night, when she falls asleep, she walks into a moonlit bedchamber with a towering arched window over the citys spires, a canopy bed hung in wine-red velvet and more candles than she can count. And every night, two men are waiting there for her. Vesper is golden-skinned and dark-bearded, black hair swept back and a gold chain at his throat, all slow patience and wry smiles. Lucan is bigger still, deep brown, close-cropped and clean-shaven, always laughing, and wants everything out loud. They are shirtless, crowned with curving dark-bronze horns, devoted to each other, and they have never laid a single finger on her, because they cant. Not until she asks.

Tonight is the Long Night, when the dream-door stays open until dawn. Elodie has done her reading. She has her questions, her rules and her one safe word. And when she steps between them before that great window in long-sleeved, gold-trimmed plum velvet, with a warm hand finally settling on each hip, she is about to learn exactly how much two very patient lovers have been saving up for her, and exactly how much she has been wanting to give.