The Dark Dreamer by Heather Topham Wood

Author:Heather Topham Wood [Wood, Heather Topham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-04-12T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

I stared into my bowl of minestrone soup as if it would provide the answers to all of my problems. Even after arriving for my lunch date with Drew, I was still distracted. Drew was talkative at first, but he quieted down after picking up on my withdrawn mood.

Grant had managed to worm his way into exactly the position he wanted to be: inside my brain and poisoning my thoughts. He wanted me to see Drew as a target—a means to an end.

I started to wonder if maybe I shouldn’t be resisting Grant’s advice. He’d trusted my interpretations, predictions that had never failed me in the past, and that was as much a part of why we were here as his own investigation. Maybe we were partners after all. Just because I found Drew attractive, I couldn’t forget he was linked to a destructive future. In good conscience, I couldn’t put a single person’s existence above the survival of the world. Maybe I was fooling myself: seeing Grant as morally corrupt could be for my own benefit. If Grant were devious, then I'd found my justification for pursuing a romance with Drew.

“So, did I do something wrong?” Drew asked suddenly.

His voice broke through my fog. “Huh?”

“You seem off and I wondered if maybe I fucked up my chances with you. First, I take you boxing and then I sleep in late and almost miss our second date.”

A smile tugged at my lips. “No, I’ve had a good time. Although my muscles have been crying since we left the boxing gym.”

He grinned. “That will go away once you start coming with me more.”

“So, I’m a boxing club member now?”

He shrugged. “If you liked it. I’ll pay for your membership and we can go together.”

I leaned back in my chair. “That’s very generous, but I wouldn’t ask you to pay for me.”

“Why not? My family has more money than they know what to do with. If I purchased a Roadster, they probably wouldn’t even notice the dent in my account.”

There was no bitterness in his tone, but his statement was a stark reminder of how we came from two completely different worlds. My aunt had provided for Maggie and me, but she was a single mom with limited resources. Aunt Dina’s ex-husband was never around much after their divorce. While Maggie was barely out of diapers, he had moved on to a glossy new wife in a shiny new town.

My mother had died and left nothing behind. If she did have anything of value, the fire consumed it all. The only inheritance I had was the gift of dream interpretation. And some emotional scars that were etching their ways back into my skin every time I dreamed of her, lately.

“Are you close with your family? I thought maybe you had a falling out and that’s why you’re….” I stumbled over my words because what verb could I accurately use to describe what he was doing. Spiraling? Acting out? Any way I could spin his behavior would sound offensive.

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