Dream Lover Read Online Free

his dirty work for nearly a hundred years. But now I’m free! That tiny, almost hopeless subclause I managed to hide in the contract—well, you met it.”
    “How on earth…?”
    “I was bound to perform the little beast’s ordinances until the day a living human came for me, in a spirit of earnest love. Earnest love always crushes the devil. He rather hates it. You can imagine. So I’ve been hanging around here on the off chance most nights for the last hundred years. The first eighty years were dreadfully dull. Nobody slept in here but my great nephews and nieces and their guests. I thought it would be rather wrong to try and seduce them. But when it was bought up by that hotel group, ah, then I began to entertain a vestige of hope.”

    Freya, awed by the depth of Lucien’s sufferings over the course of the century, felt powerless to contribute more than prosaic expressions of sympathy to the conversation.
    “Whatever you did in life, you certainly paid for it,” she ventured.
    “Yes, I did. Every farthing and more. But now you have come. Literally indeed.” He paused to chuckle at his schoolboy witticism, noting Freya’s blush and kissing the tip of her nose. “Magnificently, I should say. And love shall be my savior.”
    “How?” It felt mean to be practical at this hearts-and-flowers juncture, but Freya needed some answers.
    “How?” Lucien wrinkled that fine aristocratic nose. “Well, I’m here, aren’t I?”
    “But what does the future hold? Are you, to all intents and purposes, human again? Or are you some kind of spirit?”
    “Did I feel like a spirit to you?”
    “Ah. No. I must admit. I’ve never been with a human who got, um, to the core of things quite so well though.”
    “That’s just technique. I always had that.” Lucien mockyawned. “Doesn’t make me some kind of poltergeist pervert.”
    “So you’re alive again? You can live a normal life?”
    Lucien sighed and lay back on the bed, his hands cradled behind his head.
    “Normal? I don’t know what you mean. And neither do you.”
    “Good point. You can do all the things that humans can do then?”
    “I can kiss you.” He tilted his head toward her, biting one lascivious lip in almost irresistible invitation. “I can touch you. Let me show you how I do that.”
    “No!” The massive rebellion staged by Freya’s body against her head was quashed for a moment longer. “I have to know,
Lucien. Is this a real…resurrection? In every sense?”
    “It’s a love resurrection.” Lucien sighed again. “All right. I’ll be honest—for once in my life. Or my death. Whichever. There are a few strings attached.”
    Bondage again , thought Freya lightheadedly. No. Stop thinking about sex.
    “Obviously I can’t come back to full life. That’s impossible. There’d be resurrected corpses all over the place if it weren’t. It’d be like one of those zombie apocalypse films.”
    “You watch zombie apocalypse films?”
    “Don’t ask. All the horror movies find their way downstairs eventually. So I’m not completely human. I can’t, for example, impregnate you.”
    “Thank God for that.”
    “Hmm, thanking God doesn’t go down so well where I’ve been. All the same. I don’t have the corporeal functions that you might expect. I can’t eat. I can’t drink. But I can fuck. Oh yes, I can. As much and as hard as I like. But only with you.”
    “So you can’t cheat on me? Why haven’t I considered dating ghosts before?”
    Lucien rolled his eyes in concession to her jaded heart. “In life, I found it difficult to comprehend the desire for monogamy. It has taken a century of suffering to open my eyes to the value of fidelity and constancy. I see it in you, and I admire you for it. Love you for it. I would not blame you if you left me to my fate but…”
    “What would your fate be? If I left you to it?”
    Lucien smiled sadly and took her hand. “Back down to the pit I belong in, Freya. For eternity this time. But