“Yes,” he murmured. “I love you, Samantha. Let me show you what that’s like.”

“But I-”

“Shhh… Let me love the pain away.”

She thought she should stop him, but his hands were inside her blouse and tracing mesmerizing patterns on her back and sides, and it felt so good. Then he was cupping her breast and the air in her lungs thinned.

It had been so long. She had been so lonely.

This is just a dream…

He lowered her to the bed and followed her down. The spread was cool against her bare skin. He had loosened her hair and it spilled like silk around her. His mouth fastened on her nipple and need tore through her. The need to be loved, to be touched.

His fingers slid into the tangle of dark curls between her legs and she opened to him. He was kind and gentle. He wanted her. Will didn’t. She looked up into his strange light eyes as he poised over her.

“Do you really love me?” she murmured.

Bryce held himself motionless. Energy pulsed down through his body. He felt supercharged, electrified, on the brink of a new greatness. New power.

“Yes,” he answered, knowing it was as true as it ever had been in his life.

“You fucked her, didn’t you?” Sharon spat out the accusation, deliberately choosing the harshest, ugliest word she could to describe what she knew had happened.

Bryce didn’t dignify her charge with a response. He stood before the big windows in the elegant living room, looking out at the night. In fact, he was barely paying attention to his cousin. He felt huge, as if power had enlarged his entire body in order to contain the humming energy that coursed through him. His brain was racing with ideas and plans. In the all-important center of his thoughts, Sharon had already been dismissed.

She didn’t take to the idea with grace. She moved across the dark room like a stalking tigress. She wore her hair slicked straight back from her face, secured in a chignon, a style that only emphasized the harshness of her features. In the tarnished light from the display cases, her eyes glowed with anger.

“She’s so sweet,” Bryce murmured to the world at large, marveling in the concept of sweetness. “I can’t believe how sweet she was, how needy.”

His wonder struck Sharon like a hail of jagged gravel, pelting her ego, biting into her heart. She couldn’t be sweet. She had never held any sweetness inside her. Need she knew too well. What she needed now was to distract Bryce from his preoccupation. If he became too fixated on the girl, he would shut her out altogether. The idea terrified her, but she would never show him that fear. Never.

“We’re all needy,” she breathed, brushing up against him.

She let him feel her full breasts through the sheer fabric of the black lounging pajamas she wore. Rubbing against him like a cat, she started to cup him through his jeans. He turned and moved away from her without a hint of interest.

Panic balled like a fist in the back of Sharon’s throat, and she had to fight to keep it out of her voice. “If she was so wonderful, what are you doing down here?”

Bryce paused by the sideboard, considered the idea of a small drink, then discarded it. He didn’t want anything interfering with the high. He didn’t want anything slowing his thought processes. He envisioned himself as a diamond-brilliant, hard, powerful.

“She’s fragile,” he said. “She’ll need finessing. She’ll probably have second thoughts. If I smother her with possession, she’ll bolt.” He rubbed his chin for a moment, staring off into the middle distance, his face aglow with his pleasure in his own brilliance. “Finesse.” He smiled the Redford smile. “That’s the ticket.”

“How about finessing me?” Sharon said, forcing a smile as she closed in on him again. A subtle tremor of desperation thrummed in her low voice. She hoped he didn’t notice it. Something like a spring coiled tighter and tighter in her chest.

“Not tonight,” Bryce said impatiently.

He walked away from her for a second time. Without looking at her. Without touching her or promising tomorrow. The spring wound tighter.

“Not tonight,” she snapped, her voice low and vibrating with anger. She stalked around a white leather sofa and cut off his path to the window. “You have to save yourself for your precious virgin princess. Is that it?”

Bryce gave her a flat, hooded look. “Spare me the jealous-woman act. You stood right here and told me to sleep with her.”

“For us,” she clarified. “Not for you. For us, for the plan, to get what we want, not so you can wander around in a fog, dazzled by innocence.”

He huffed out a breath. “Take a Valium and go to bed. You’re getting on my nerves.”

“How dare you dismiss me like some bothersome servant.”

“That’s exactly how you’re behaving.”

“You bastard!” she spat out, her voice a feral, animal sound low in her throat as the anger burned away her control. “After all I’ve been to you! After all I’ve done for you!”

When he tried to turn away again, she grabbed his arm and dug her fingernails in to hold him while she tore her top open with her other hand, baring her breasts. “Look at me!” she snarled. “Look at me, damn you!”

He looked. Without desire. Without emotion. He stared at her, repulsed by what he saw-desperation, degradation, dissipation; a jaded, aging harlot whose depravity knew few bounds. Never once did it occur to him that he was looking in a mirror. He was above and beyond. Bound for new glory. Reborn in the eyes of an innocent.

He brought his eyes to his cousin’s and said without inflection, “You’re losing control.”

Sharon fell back, clutching the ruined front of her top together. Ashamed, beaten, stunned at what he had reduced her to. Numb with the shock of it.

“I’m not the one who’s losing control,” she whispered. “Look at yourself. Your brain is infected with this girl. She’s all you think about. A week ago you wouldn’t have given her a second glance.”

“That was a week ago. Now I know her. Now I see the possibilities. That’s one of your many faults, Sharon, you lack foresight.”

“No. I can see perfectly,” she said bitterly. “You’re obsessed with her. The way you were obsessed with Lucy-”

He shook his head and grinned that damned Redford grin, having the gall to be amused at her. “No. You’re so wrong. It’s not that at all.”

She stared at him, forcing herself to read the expression in his eyes, the strange euphoria. “You think you’ve fallen in love with her, don’t you?” she whispered, barely able to stand the sound of the words. She could feel her world crumbling around her. Her mind raced for some way to stop the damage. She had leverage. Bryce couldn’t drop her altogether; she had enough on him to make her an invaluable ally or a formidable enemy. She could destroy him if she had to.

But she couldn’t make him love her. She hadn’t thought him capable of romantic love. He was a man capable of many things, but love was not among them.

He didn’t turn back as he walked to the doorway and killed the lights in the display cases. “I don’t think, I know I love her.”

“She’ll leave you, you know,” she said, struggling for calm, clinging to some small scrap of pride and cynicism. “She’ll find out what you really are and she’ll hate you, and she’ll leave you.”

“No,” he murmured, feeling omnipotent. “I won’t allow that.”

The dream was of death. Filled with a cast of people who were either in fact dead or metaphorically dead to her. Lucy with a clean round hole through her body. Townsend with no skull above his eyebrows. Miller Daggrepont wearing a jaunty purple ascot around his fat throat. Del Rafferty with the lower part of his face gone. Then there was Brad Enright, a stick-on label on the pocket of his Egyptian cotton shirt that read HELLO, MY NAME IS: ASSHOLE. And Will wearing a goofy cap that had been outfitted to hold a beer can on either side of his head. Clear plastic straws looped down in a circuitous route to his mouth.