off. The little girl stopped in her tracks and smiled up at him, her mouth smeared with chocolate, a rather marked contrast with the glittery stuff on her eyes, her hair.
“I think somebody’s looking for you,” he said, nodding to the frazzled woman just before she could catch the girl’s arm.
The woman gave him a thankful look, and as they melted back into the crowd, Joss did the same, moving with the flow.
Nothing here, he thought, distracted, nothing . . .
The road veered in a path off to the left. It wasn’t a conscious decision to follow it, but he did so, following it around the curve, passing behind a shop to a small alcove.
And he came up short, freezing in his tracks.
There she was . . . it was the woman he’d glimpsed earlier, in that figment of a vision, just before the dream had fallen apart, but that gut-deep recognition . . . he knew her.
He knew her face.
Joss Crawford wasn’t prone to melodrama, he wasn’t prone to wishful thinking, and he didn’t much believe in fairy tales. He didn’t buy into those crazy stories of love at first sight.
But he knew there was a woman for him—he’d been searching for her his entire life, had dreamed about her always. He looked for her in every face he saw, waited for the moment he’d find her again.
And here she was, striding down the pavement, her face grim, her eyes dark . . . the sight of her was a punch, straight to his heart. She didn’t look like she should, part of his brain insisted. The rest of him didn’t care. He knew her, in his gut, in his heart, in his soul.
Standing rigid, barely able to breathe, much less move, he waited for her to look at him, to see him . . . to know him. But it didn’t happen.
In fact, she was so busy staring at the pavement and making a concentrated effort to ignore everything around her, she didn’t even seem to notice him. She went to go around him and he just couldn’t stop himself—he stepped right into her path so that she crashed straight into his chest, all lean limbs and long muscles and golden, sun-kissed skin, a nice, solid weight that he figured would fit his body just about perfectly. She stumbled and he reached up, closed his hands around her upper arms, where the cotton of her shirt kept him from touching bare flesh.
He wanted to touch bare flesh . . . after all this time, he figured he just about needed to. But not now.
Right now, she was watching him with dazed, distrustful eyes—wariness flashed through her gaze and he felt her tense.
“You . . .” He didn’t even know what to say. A total stranger, and that’s what he’d seem like to her, he knew. How could he tell her he’d been dreaming of her for always? Waiting. Searching. Absently, without realizing it, he stroked his thumb across her arm, and it rubbed across the bare skin just below the sleeve of her shirt.
As bare skin touched bare skin, he felt something . . . a buzz in his brain.
And more . . . he felt the echo of it in her brain. Followed by a blinding rush of knowledge.
Her pupils flared. She sucked in a breath. “You . .
Her eyes widened.
And a rush of images slammed into them both as that gift he’d absorbed from Jillian faltered under his grasp.
“You’ll come away with me, won’t you, Amelie?”
“And how are we to live, Thom? Hmmm? I do not think there’s room for me on the boat where you work.”
Pushing her golden hair back from her face, he tipped her chin back, kissed her gently. “We’ll be together. And we’ll find a way. I’ll find other work. Just say you’ll come away with me.”
His head was spinning, blood roaring, as he jerked his mind and those hazed memories from another life back under his grasp, shoving his shields up. Her eyes, wide and dazed, stared into his.
“You . . .”
Her pupils spiked, flared, and she sucked in a desperate breath.
She swayed closer, and logically, Joss knew it wasn’t because she was suddenly overcome, like he was. She didn’t know him—he would have known it if she had. But she was closer, and she was there, and he could feel the warmth of her, feel her, and fuck it, he was just too weak.