Dreaming by Jill Barnett

chocolate soufflés. Ummm .” She gave him a little grin. “The dreams don’t have to be incredulous. They are magical because of how one feels about that which they’re dreaming.
    “I can dream about blue skies and puffy white clouds and chattering birds in the middle of a winter storm. I can dream that I danced every dance. I can dream about . . . . ” She looked him in the eye as if she was going to admit she dreamed of him, but to his surprise she didn’t. She looked away.
    “Sometimes I think of romantic myths. Perhaps I’m a titian-haired princess riding a runaway horse. And fresh from his dragon slaying comes a knight atop his white charger. He rides across a bridge just in time to save me.”
    Ah, he thought, she didn’t need to speak of him because she’d turned everything into her own romantic tale.
    She looked back at him and gave him a misty smile. “Dreaming is magical because no matter what the tale, I can be whomever I want. Either the most romantic or the most tragic figure I can think of.”
    She gave him a direct look. “Did you ever notice that in those romantic tales, the women always have long and lovely titian hair? I imagine Helen of Troy and Juliet both had titian hair.”
    She paused and sighed. “I’ve always wanted titian hair.” She grabbed a curly strand of her brown hair and held it in front of her, frowning at it as if it were curling earthworms.
    “Don’t you think I’d look more dramatic if I had titian hair? Oh, you needn’t answer that.” She dropped her hair. “Of course you do. Men always look fairly upon women with titian hair.” She stared at her hands.
    He had wanted to speak, his usual sharp biting words that would tell her this was the cruel world, not some bloody adventure; to tell her that she should give up believing in fairy tales and to tell her how foolish she was.
    But for the first time in his life the caustic words wouldn’t come. He’d used them on fools, on friends, and he’d spent years spitting them at his father, yet when he looked at her, he was suddenly at a loss for something to say.
    She had managed to get him kidnapped by smugglers, had set fire to him, and had even shot him, yet he couldn’t say what came naturally. He couldn’t tell her to be quiet, to give up all her idiotic dreams of princesses with titian hair and knights on white horses.
    And most of all, to tell her that caring for him was an absolute lost cause. He wasn’t a hero, and probably would never be one.
    “ Letty ,” he said more sharply than he’d meant to.
    She straightened and looked at him questioningly.
    He looked away and tried to find the right words. The Earl of Downe at a loss for words. No one who knew him would believe it.
    He glanced up at her again. She sat there, waiting, an expectant look in her eyes. She placed too high a value on him and his words. It was a responsibility he could shirk easily, because he didn’t want to mean anything to her. He couldn’t, even if he wanted to, and he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to look into her eyes and see her heart. He didn’t want to be part of her world.
    He caught the high color in her cheeks and found himself thinking of things that he’d never thought of before. He’d never noticed a woman’s skin, whether it was dewy or soft or pale.
    Yet he noticed hers. He came to a new understanding of why throughout time poets compared a woman’s skin to a white rose. Of all the women he’d seen and flirted with, of all he’d even bedded, he’d never once been intrigued by something as simple as the look of their skin.
    He stared down at his own hands and realized they were rough and hard, weathered. He wondered whether he could still feel softness with those hardened hands.
    For one brief instant, he knew that he might have given her almost anything should she have asked. The air around him turned heavy and was strangely silent, as if the world had suddenly stopped. There