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  The huge, sweat-slicked, armored men all stopped loudly slurping broth from a bowl or noisily chewing pork off knobs of bone to look at me in question. Looking them up and down, twelve men to both sides of the long trestle table in the dining hall, and the mess they were making; I realized the men in my dreams, though fun to look at, seriously lacked any table manners.

  Prince Harry, situated to the right of me at the table, was a little more composed and dignified, but I suspected it was his lack of appetite and broody mood that made him seem so. He sat quietly, carving an apple with his boot knife, staring at the walls of the keep as his mind raced. I knew it was racing. He was a general, in charge of his men and the safety of his brother’s kingdom; I couldn’t imagine a man like that ever truly resting.

  “Parlay?” he finally said, making it sound as if I was insane.

  I’d learned the term from watching Pirates of the Caribbean. Maybe it was only a pirate term?

  I set my hands on the table. “You know…call a truce and open for negotiations. Try and find a solution that will satisfy everyone involved.”

  “We know what it is, my lady,” Harry said quietly. “But one cannot negotiate with Ogres. They simply take what they want.”

  “But isn’t that how kingdoms are formed in the first place?” I argued, standing up. “People like you migrate to a new land and take it?”

  “You’re a wise woman, witch, but the Three Kingdoms do not belong to the Ogres,” Oswald, Harry’s second, said, leaning forward as he centered his attention on the gigantic bone he was gnawing. “They belong to Summerland, Arcadia and Nod.” I could tell he was the type of man who wasn’t used to being challenged by a woman. Well, he’d have to get used to that!

  “But that’s just it,” I argued back. I turned to Harry. “You said the Ogres have lived underground. So doesn’t the Three Kingdoms belong to them, as well? Have you ever even asked them why they’re coming to the surface? Maybe living conditions are terrible down there. Maybe there was an outbreak of disease, or the people are starving.”

  A darkness brewed in Harry’s eyes then. He slid a slice of apple into his mouth and chewed carefully before speaking. “And I supposed we should put our own people at risk in order to help these savages?”

  I shook my head at him. “If your own people were at risk in your land in some way, Harry, wouldn’t you want to preserve them by moving them elsewhere?”

  He seemed to think about that, then sank his knife into his apple and glanced at Oswald, who glanced back at him. They shared a private guy moment, the kind that says, Don’t upset the crazy woman. We’ll make our own decisions later. “I will look into the matter.”

  * * *

  I was so angry I could spit nails, literally! I didn’t even escort Prince Harry and his men out of my keep. I more or less threw them out and returned in a huff to my bedchambers. How dare he condescend to me that way, especially in front of his men? I knew damned well he wouldn’t take my advice, that he’d continue to bully the Ogres despite the good sense I had thrown at his rock-hard, stubborn head. And the fact that I had thrown myself at him, given myself to him, made it all the worse.

  I was such a fool!

  I sat down on the foot of my bed and just concentrated on not crying, on not feeling like some idiot. I wondered why I was getting so upset in my dream. It was my dream. I should have a certain measure of control over it, shouldn’t I? Or, bar that, at least I should be able to control myself.

  The bed groaned with displeasure and the veils blew gently in the dark. One fell across my shoulder as if to say, There, there. Sniffing, I crawled up to my soft nest of pillows and laid my head down. The best dream of my life had turned out to be the worse dream of my life!

  I was suddenly so sleepy, and my big, beautiful bed almost seemed to sigh with sadness around me. My head was down on the pillow only a second, it seemed, and then—

  * * *

  My bedside alarm clock went off, and the clock radio, which I had left on an old 80’s music station, started blaring Wham!’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.” I sat bolt upright in my good old bedroom in East Chicago, the setting sun in my eyes. I was on the night shift this evening, so that only made sense. But for a moment I felt disoriented, as if I’d been literally jarred out of one reality and into another.

  I was sore. I looked down at myself and realized there were small bruises and scrapes on my arms and legs. And there was a deep, almost pleasant, soreness between my legs, the kind you get after a good night of rough sex. I wondered what I had been doing to myself all night. I had a vibrator in my nightstand. Maybe I had sleepwalked? Sleep-masturbated? But that didn’t explain my cuts and bruises, unless I’d gone back to sleep and had been thrashing around something awful.

  Before I could think about it any deeper, my cell phone went off and I grabbed it up. It was Mitch, my hardnosed EMT dispatcher. “Mitch? Wassup, man?”

  “Hey, sleepyhead, any chance you can get in here about a half hour earlier? Looks like it’s going to be a full moon and a crazy night, and I have a whole fucking team down with the flu.”

  “I’m on it,” I said, crawling from the bed and heading to the bathroom for a quick shower. That’s when I discovered my new nightgown had a torn and ragged hem.

  * * *

  “Fern, love, you okay up there?” my EMT partner Clive asked from the back of the ambulance, his voice crackling over my headset. I knew my driving was unusually erratic tonight, full of short stops and narrow misses. Normally, I was a rock-solid driver, which is why Clive usually let me pilot, but I was definitely off my game tonight.

  “Is she all right?” I asked as I ran another red light, siren blaring, cursing all the drivers who didn’t feel they had to pull over at the sight of an oncoming ambulance. It just made my job all the harder—and made me think the human race were basically assholes.

  “Fine, my love, fine, but you’re making ol’ Clive seasick back here, just so you know.”

  “Sorry, hon,” I told him.

  “No worries, my love.”

  Normally, I never would have tolerated a man calling me love all the time, but Clive and I had been partners almost five years. That’s like a fifteen-year-old marriage, in ambulance years. Plus, Clive was British and gay. He called everyone love.

  The patient, a fifteen-year-old girl, had been found unconscious in her bedroom by her mother. She had tried to off herself with her mom’s sleeping pills. Her mom kept babbling on about how the girl was being bullied in school, how none of this was her fault. She didn’t seem to understand that Clive and I were there to resuscitate her and get her to a hospital. It wasn’t my place to judge her parenting skills. But on the back of the girl’s closet door was a huge poster of Ashton Kutcher, so of course I flashed back to my dream of the night before, and Prince Harry. I wish I hadn’t, because now it was seriously messing with my work.

  After we got the girl into Emergency, Clive suggested we take a break, and we drove to our favorite Starbucks for some coffee and carbs at three in the morning. Since the place was virtually empty at that hour, I let myself go on at length about my weird dream of the night before, the good and the bad. Aside from Sierra and Juanita, Clive was the only person alive I trusted with such intimate secrets.

  Clive took a sip of his extra-large Mocha Frappachino and raised his eyebrows at me. “Hell, I wish some hot, medieval hunk would invade my dreams.”

  “That’s not my point,” I said, biting off a corner of a cheese Danish. Clive could eat or drink anything he wanted and he always stayed rail thin. I, on the other hand, would need to visit the gym after work if I was ever going to say goodbye to these calories. “It was great until he acted like a jerk and I lost my shit.”

  “It was a dream, lovey.”

  “I know that. But don’t you see? I was fine with men until Chuck. Now I’m going through life all defensive, even when a guy is just being a guy. I don’t like what I’m becoming, Clive.”

  He gave me sympatheti
c eyes and said, “Smart, beautiful and a real catch?”

  I laughed. “Don’t try and make me feel better!”

  Clive grinned. “Too late.” He took a sip of coffee and got serious again. “Are you sure that’s all it is? Darling, you seem rather distracted for someone who just had a bad dream.”

  I bit my tongue and didn’t mention the torn hem of my nightgown. Clive would think I was crazy, and maybe I was. Maybe I was suffering from some bizarre form of PTSD and I was making all this up in my head.

  That morning, after I got home, I poured myself a bowl of Lucky Charms before bed (breakfast before bed was a huge tradition with me—maybe my years of reverse breakfast were making me crazy?) then showered and changed into a new nightgown. It was with trepidation that I crawled up onto my huge, soft bed and lay there in the dimness of my bedroom, straining to hear the bed sigh or make any untoward moves on me. I stayed awake as long as I could, but the night had taken a huge toll on me, physically and emotionally, and I closed my eyes only a second—

  * * *

  “My lady. My lady!”

  I jarred awake at the sound of the voice and the pounding on the doors of my keep. I sat upright, groaning. The room spun around me, making me wonder if I was awake or asleep. But since I recognized my bedchamber with its huge, veiled bed, old, heavy furniture, and colorful tapestries on the walls, I realized I was probably asleep, having that dream again.

  “Except that dream isn’t a dream, is it?” I said to myself, looking down at the scratches and bruises on my arms, the ones I’d gotten the last time I was here.

  “My lady, are you there!” came Prince Harry’s urgent voice from outside, very loud. He pounded fiercely on the door of my keep. “I bring great news!”

  Just to make certain, I pinched my thigh and jumped…but I didn’t wake up.

  I didn’t wake up…because I was already awake.

  “Shit,” I breathed, and jumped from the bed. I grabbed a long, silken dressing gown and made my way down the stairs of the keep to the door. There I shoved aside the deadlock securing it, and Prince Harry and his men threw the doors open.

  He stood there, radiant in a jerkin of soft brown leather and leather riding breeches with knee-high boots, but I saw that his war leathers were missing. Behind him stood his small army of dedicated men, and behind them another small army of Ogres. I looked the collective men over in wonder.

  Harry was beaming. “My lady witch…” he said and raced forward, his blond curls bouncing around his lean, determined face to take me in his arms. He kissed me with wet urgency before he started talking rapid-fire. “You were right, my lady! We opened a parlay between our two people and have learned so very much. It seems that severe earthquakes have affected the Ogres’ underground world. It turned the air bad, which is why the Ogres now must migrate up to the Three Kingdoms.”

  I clutched his arm as my heart fluttered within me. “So their intentions were true?”

  “They were. And we have begun negotiations.” He turned to indicate a huge, hulking Ogre who was quite ugly but still somehow radiant and proud. He even seemed to be smiling—or it was what passed for a smile on his bulldoggish face. “This is Amir, the king of the Ogres. He wishes to speak to you.”

  Harry stood back so Amir could approach me. He was at least twice as tall and wide as I was, and even when he went to one knee before me, he still managed to dwarf me. He took my hand in his giant, beclawed paw and snorted out some words that sounded very sincere. “We the Ogres are grateful for your idea, my lady witch, and we are equally grateful for a chance to bring our people above ground without violence.”

  I put my hand over his and smiled up at the grotesque but happily smiling creature. “Amir, the pleasure was all mine.”

  * * *

  While Harry and Amir’s men set up a banquet in my dining hall, Harry explained in detail what his plans were for the negotiations. “The Three Kingdoms will all meet and parcel out a single section of their unused lands. Marshes, deserts, any part that is useless for cultivation due to extremes of weather. These lands will be granted to Amir’s people, and they promise they will build a great, prosperous and peaceful civilization upon them. Having lived underground for thousands of years, the Ogres are quite adept at developing inhospitable places, as you can well imagine.”

  “I’m really happy for you and the Ogres, Harry,” I told him with sincerity as he walked me down a long stone hallway lined with lanterns. We stopped when we reached the lab, the place where we had first made love, and I asked if I could examine his wound to make certain it was healing correctly.

  He sat patiently while I unwrapped his wound. It was healing beautifully, though there would be a scar. I found a tincture on a shelf that smelled like it was made of mint and other antiseptic herbs, and smeared a little on. He watched me a long, silent moment before saying, “You were angry when we last parted company.”

  “I was,” I admitted. “I thought you had blown me off.”

  He gave me that now familiar bemused look and I tried to explain myself better. “I thought you thought less of my idea because I was a woman. I felt you were being a…bully.” That last was hard to explain, but Harry seemed to understand.

  “At first, I thought what you had suggested was impractical and potentially dangerous to my men,” he explained. “But then, when I discussed it with them, and with Oswald, we decided it was worth taking the risk and calling the parlay. It was an excellent gamble that paid off.”

  “I’m happy,” I told him honestly.

  “You don’t like…bullies,” he said.

  “I don’t like it when someone takes advantage of a weaker person. Or a species.”

  “You think the Ogres are weak?” He sounded surprised.

  “Not weak, per se…but out of their element. It’s pretty obvious they wouldn’t have survived against your men, Harry.” I stopped and looked up at him. “I didn’t want to see you and your men slaughtering a people who just want to survive.”

  His face softened as he looked upon me. “This bothers you. Were you taken advantage of?”

  I wondered how I could get out of this. Then I wondered why it made me so uncomfortable to talk about. I thought it was time I faced my own issues. “I was married once to a man who hurt me.”

  Harry nodded as if he understood. Undoubtedly, my story had been repeated a million times over in a million other worlds. Some stories, like fairy tales, were universal. “I’m sorry to hear this, Fern. But you may take solace in the fact that should anyone ever want to hurt you again, they will need to go through me to do it.”

  I turned away to put the bottle back on the shelf. “Do you mean that, Harry?”

  “Fern, you are my woman.”

  I kept my back to him so he wouldn’t see me crying over the sincerity of his words. A few moments later, I felt Harry slide his strong arms around my waist.

  I turned and he brushed his thumb down the side of my face. “I promise you, Fern,” he said in a somber voice. “I will never be a bully to you, or to anyone—and I will never let anyone hurt you, even if you are a powerful witch in your own right.”

  I smiled at that. I liked the feel of his arms around me. It made me feel safe and desired. “My prince, do you want to take me upstairs and make love to me?”

  “If it’s what my lady desires,” he answered with a ravenous smile. He swept me up in his arms and carried me easily up the tower stairs to my bedchamber. I had never had anyone carry me to bed before, but I decided I liked it quite a lot.

  He laid me down on the bed and captured my mouth in a fierce kiss, his hands roving over my curves. “How is it you know so much about human nature?” he mused between peppering sweet, biting kisses along my chin and throat.

  I looped my arms around his neck and leaned up and whispered in his ear, “I don’t come from this place.”

  “Do you come from one of the other Kingdoms?” The day-old stubble on his cheeks and chin scraped along my supersensitive fle
sh and made me feel more alive, more awake, then ever.

  I squirmed under his lovemaking and pushed his shirt off his shoulders. “Another world. I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot, actually.” He moved his mouth down the slope of my neck and stopped to kiss and suck delicately at the base of my neck, my pulse flitting against his lips and tongue, the roughness of his cheek tickling me. I moaned in response and struggled to speak. “I think…perhaps…our worlds exist side by side, like playing cards lying against one another…and this bed we’re on is like the doorway between them both…oh!” He’d snagged a nipple through the thin cotton of my nightgown and begun to suckle ardently upon me, wetting the material until it was transparent and nipping at the aching bud with his great teeth.

  I arched up and up into the sweet little pain of Harry’s mouth, sweeping my hands across the muscles of his back. He stopped only long enough to lift the nightgown up and over my head, then he was back, licking and teasing my nipples one at a time, moving back and forth between them, while his hand roved hot and heavy down my body and between my legs.

  “How do you know so much about these things, my witch?” he said, his voice whisking across my skin as he moved steadily down my body, making me jolt with the sensation.

  “Mmm…Star Trek,” I said, and then gasped when his callused fingers danced over my sex, parting my wet folds with his thumbs so he could scent me and lick along my cleft. His hot, wet tongue going into me made me jump and jiggle, making the bed bounce beneath us—the bed that had brought me here, to this place, and to him. I gripped the headboard as his tongue entered me, filled me, curling up toward my sweet spot, tapping over it, and the big, magical bed seemed to sigh and laugh happily around me as if it knew what it had done and was quite pleased with itself.

  I moaned in disappointment when he withdrew, but then cried out when he slipped two fingers knuckles deep inside me. He swirled his tongue over my swelling clit, took it in his teeth and sucked until a warm, electrical heat surged up inside me. “Harry…!” I croaked, and then I was bucking my hips wildly as my inner muscles clamped down around him, as I came for him, spilling myself shamelessly for him.