Dream Lover Read Online Free Page A

thank you for giving me this night.”
    “Lucien! You seem very sure that I will reject you. You know that I love you. Do you still have no understanding of love?”

    “I understand that sometimes there are too many tensions around love to allow it to survive.”
    “What tensions?”
    “I, well, if I am to stay in this form, I have to, ahem, take you.”
    “Yes,” said Freya slowly, not seeing a problem with this proposition.
    “Rather often. Nightly, in fact.”
    “I can…do that.” Freya shook her head, blushing. “If, you know, it’s strictly necessary. It’s not such a huge sacrifice.”
    “No, but sleeping here every night might be. Financially, if nothing else. You see, I’m tied to this house. This house and its grounds. I can never leave.”
    “Oh.”
    Freya put a knuckle in her mouth, chewing it consideringly.
    “Never?”
    “Never.”
    “It’s rather expensive,” she said, her face pale and eyes pleading for understanding. “I was going to leave at the end of the month.”
    “So there we have it. Practicalities. Tensions that outweigh love.”
    “No. No. There must be a way. Lucien, I can’t leave you. There must be something I can do.”
    “You should leave me. I’m not even the man you fell in love with. I’m not Lucien Mountfitchet, The Devil’s Amanuensis, as they used to call me. Not anymore. I’m, well, you could say, I’m his good twin.”
    “I don’t care about that! I loved you despite your horrible behavior, not because of it. I knew there was a part of you that was redeemable. That’s the draw of the bad boy, Lucien, surely you know that? The idea that I might be the one to redeem you.”

    “And you are. Freya, you must not throw your life away on me. I forbid it. Better to have loved and lost and all that.”
    “Not for me,” she said stubbornly. “Losing you could never be any kind of good for me. You are my life.”
    “Rather codependent, darling,” murmured Lucien, but he had drawn her to him and his lips were in her hair, his hands caressing her heaving shoulders. “But I tend to feel the same way.”
     
    Freya set off the fire alarms, making sure every guest and member of staff was out on the lawn, befuddled with broken sleep, before dropping the lit match on to the petrol-soaked carpet of Room Six.
    “I know this isn’t ideal,” she whispered from the balcony, looking down to the stable block where Lucien had been instructed to meet her. “And I’m sorry. But it had to be done.” And then the flames, already blackening the curtains behind her, began to fan out onto the stone balcony and she leapt down into the hedge below.
     
    Three months later, Freya and Lucien lay in fresh hay in the nowdeserted stable block, rosy-cheeked as rustic lovers, dreamy and spent after a bout of country matters.
    “So you’ve signed the deeds? The place is really yours?”
    “Yes.” Freya grinned. “If only you could have come to the auction. The auctioneer said some dreadfully rude things about you in his introduction. Called you ‘notorious.’”
    “And so I am.”
    “So you were .” Freya tweaked his elegant nose.
    “You’re such a clever girl. I still can’t believe you sweet-talked all those academics and bigwigs into fronting up the money to buy it. The Mountfitchet Foundation indeed. And it’s still going to be a hotel?”

    “A new kind of hotel. A museum with rooms and a restaurant. The consortium is very excited about the whole concept. They think it’ll take off and the Mountfitchet will be the first of many. A Wordsworth in the Lakes, a Shakespeare in Stratford, a Byron in, I dunno, wherever Byron came from.”
    “I never imagined myself in such exalted company.” Lucien brushed straw from Freya’s forehead. “But you’re the only company for me now. And that’s the way I like it.”
    They kissed with happy passion, finding the stables no less congenial than Room Six had been. Lucien, naked but for his billowing white shirt, gathered