Dream Trysts: A Sleeping Beauty Story (Passion-Filled FairyTales Book 4) Read Online Free Page A

as one can expect,” she said, a frown emerging. “I saw her again.”
    Hilly opened the door further and entered, stepping on the knitted rug in the middle of the wooden floor and walking over to the single bed pushed against the south wall of the house. Hilly sat on the bed and put an arm around Briar Rose. “Don’t be sad.”
    “But she never stays, and she’s my mother. I want her to stay.”
    “You know why she can’t,” Hilly said.
    Briar Rose pulled away from Hilly and frowned. “I know,” she said. “It matters not. I have you and Dwennon.”
    “Yes, you do,” she said. “Always.”
    Briar Rose peeked out the window again. There was no one around, except for the birds and the bunnies. “I do sometimes wish I had a friend to play with,” she said.
    Hilly pulled her closer. “I know it’s tough, my dear, but we must stay hidden. When you’re older, you’ll have all those things. All those things you dream of now: many friends, a mother and father. It will all come to pass. Dwennon has seen it. You simply must believe it.”

Chapter 5
    (Four Years later)
     
    “James,” Briar Rose said. “Are you a real boy?”
    James stood with a scowl on his small face. A few strands of his dark hair bobbed as he shook his head and rolled his eyes. “Why do you ask such things, Rose?” His scowl turned into a devilish grin as he waggled his eyebrows at her. “I’m very real. It is you who are the figment of my imagination.”
    Rose was ten now, and for the last few months, she had been dreaming of James. She had decided she wanted a friend, a single friend to talk to, and when she’d gone to sleep that night, he’d appeared to her. No, that wasn’t quite right. She had said aloud, “Bring me a friend.” And then he had appeared.
    At first, he was confused. He’d asked who she was and how she’d brought him there.
    She told him she was a fairy princess and that she had wanted a friend. “I suppose you could say, I gave a command and my dream obeyed.”
    At this, James had bowed on one knee and said, “At your service, milady.”
    Ever since then, every few nights, on nights she did not dream with her mother, she would think of James and he would appear. At first she thought he was simply a dream, a normal dream. But tonight, when he spoke, he spoke of a grand ball in his parent’s castle. He spoke in a language she had never before heard, one that didn’t sound made up, one that didn’t sound like anything she would ever imagine. She wondered, was he real? Was he like her mother, a person able to share dreams?
    Today they were at the crystal pond, a place in the real world that Dwennon and Hilly took her often. She’d recreated it in her dream, and James was skipping rocks across its smooth surface. “Be serious, James,” Briar Rose said. She stood beside him, watching him flick the rocks across the water’s surface with ease. He had tried to teach her last time, but for some reason, she wasn’t able to get it right. Which was another reason it was odd. In her dreams, things always worked. But this didn’t.
    She put a hand on James’ shoulder and he turned to her, his eyes as blue as the water before them. “Of course I’m real, Rose,” he said. “I don’t know why you think I’m not.”
    “Because we’re in a dream, and I dreamed you up.”
    He shook his head. “You called to me,” he said, adamantly, as if there were nothing else in the world he was more certain of. “I remember it clear as day. I’d been in my bed, in my own dream, about sugar candies my mother had agreed to let me eat, and then I felt a tugging, right here,” he said pointing to his middle. “And the next thing I knew, I was here with you. I am real. Just as real as you.”
    He knelt down on the ground, his eyes searching as his hand skimmed the dirt surrounding his feet, until he found a smooth stone and picked it up. He handed it to her. “Only a real boy could teach you to skip stones.”
    Rose