Daniel's Dream Read Online Free Page B

such interesting, intelligent and attractive people were incapable of sustaining relationships with individuals of the opposite sex for longer than about three weeks.
     
    In Lisanne’s case this was more to do with her work than any personality problem. Since graduating from university she had been immersed in the world of books and literature, caught up in the commercial side of a business that was notorious for taking over one’s life. By the age of thirty she was running her own literary agency and had since had a significant measure of commercial success, particularly in the notoriously fickle arena of fiction.
     
    Under her guidance and direction, two complete unknowns - writers who had come to her in her early days with dog-eared well-thumbed manuscripts of first novels - had reached the best-seller lists. Such was the financial success of these two protégés that since then she had not looked back. Others - less féted perhaps but still successful in real terms - had followed in their wake and before long the Lisanne Cokely Literary Agency had established a reputation in the business as a small but promising firm that could sniff out good, easy-on-the-intellect fiction for the mass market. Her established best-sellers had ensured that she could afford a holiday each year in the Caribbean and have a comfortable home to return to when, at the end of her increasingly long hours, she finally decided to quit for the day.
     
    This, of course, had been her biggest problem; Lisanne was wedded to her work. She loved words, loved books, loved the ins and outs of contracts and negotiations, felt duty bound always to get the best deals for her authors and, as a result, had not established the sort of boundaries that all self-employed individuals must draw if they are ever to live lives of their own.
     
    Friends had tried to talk to her about it but Lisanne had proved stubborn, and it soon became clear that the only thing that would shake her out of her rather extreme lifestyle was if she fell in love. This was where the problems started, for Lisanne was such a severe, headstrong individual tint only someone equally extreme could possibly have any effect on her.
     
    After several attempts to pair her with perfectly charming and eligible men had failed dismally, two of her dearest friends, John and Antonia, finally hit on the perverse idea of introducing her to a similarly difficult, headstrong and uncompromising character.
     
    They had known Daniel since university, and agreed that someone of his peculiar psychological profile might just be able to shake Lisanne from her own preoccupations. After all, there was no reason why they should not be attracted to each other. Lisanne was lively and attractive and, once away from work, as relaxed and charming a companion as one could hope to meet. Could it work? they wondered that evening, as they brought these two lumbering beasts with their twisted psyches together for the first time.
     
    They did not have to wait long to find out. Whatever chemistry was at work that evening - physical, emotional, intellectual - there was no question in the minds of those looking on that their two most complex and complicated friends had found a common bond.
     
    Conversation at the dinner table that evening buzzed and crackled like an electric storm, with the two protagonists pitting their wits against each other to sparkling effect. Daniel had just returned from the north-eastern provinces of India, where he had been sent by National Geographic to capture the fading remnants of tribal civilisations that had only recently emerged from the Stone Age. He had come back laden with the sort of stories that usualy graced the pages of adventure magazines, and held them all captive that evening with tales of danger and derring-do and of adrenalin-rush exploits reminiscent of the Indiana Jones films.
     
    These stories, with their excitement,