THE PERFECT TEN (Boxed Set)

sleep and full wakefulness.”
    “What’s it like?”
    “The twilight sleep?”
    “The day sleep?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “How could you not know? You do it every day.”
    “It’s like a mini-death. I just … go away. The little I do know about it, I know from attaching electrodes to my own shaven head and recording EEGs.”
    She blinked. “Tell me about it.”
    “Not much to tell. In the first hours, the cerebrum might as well be switched off, so profound is its state of rest. But somehow, in that SWA state, all the patchwork gets done.”
    “SWA? As in slow wave brain activity?”
    “Precisely. It’s roughly comparable to your Stage 4 sleep, but we don’t cycle up to REM sleep and back down again through all the stages, as you would do three or four times in the course of the night.”
    “What do you mean by patchwork happening? The erasure of the day’s aging?”
    “Exactly. But there’s more. If I’ve cut myself, it will heal completely, leaving not the slightest trace. Hell, if I’ve cut my hair, it grows back. Shaved? Back comes the two-day stubble.”
    Her jaw dropped. “Really?”
    “Really. And let me tell you, it’s an eerie thing to watch at high speed on videotape.”
    “Then what?”
    “Then nothing, for about five hours. That’s how long we — or least I — stay in SWA. No dreaming, no awareness, no waking. But eventually we surface into something that approximates normal sleep, but it’s not really normal since it’s dominated so heavily by REM sleep. Whereas you might have three or four dreams a night, our dreams are packed into the last hour or two of sleep. At this point, we can be wakened. But as you can imagine, in a secure environment, I’m not accustomed to being roused before I waken naturally. Which is why I presumed you were just a part of my dream.”
    “I see. So I take it I must have been a frequent visitor in your other twilight dreams, and you just figured it was more of the same?”
    “Guilty.”
    “Guilty?” She laughed. “Delano, that’s the last thing you should feel. You hadn’t had sex since when?”
    He scowled. “That’s hardly an excuse.”
    She refused to be distracted. “Since when?”
    He looked at the carpet again. There was that blond hair. “1927.”
    “ 1927? Oh, fuck me!”
    “I believe I did.”

 
    Chapter 17
     
    DRESSED AGAIN in her t-shirt and shorts, Ainsley stole back to her own rooms. Mercifully, she managed the quick trip without encountering Eli. She couldn’t have dealt with that just yet.
    She started the shower running, stripped her clothes off and tossed them in the hamper, then stepped under the hot spray.
    Her body still tingled from their lovemaking. And when she closed her eyes to shampoo her hair, images rose to fill her mind. Delano’s dark head at her breast. His head between her thighs, driving her wild with his lips and tongue and fingers. Delano hauling her back up the bed as easily as though she were a rag doll, and God, there was just something so hot about that! His strength, the way he’d taken charge… He’d spread her legs, pushed into her without ceremony, driving her back up again to a third shuddering, helpless climax.
    No doubt about it, she’d been well and truly ravished, unable to do much more than just hang on. Passivity was definitely not her usual style in the bedroom, but he’d taken complete control. Of course, he thought he’d been dreaming, and no doubt steered the dream accordingly.
    What would it be like if they both went into it with eyes open, consciously choosing to make love?
    “Stop it, Ainsley! It’s never going to happen.”
    Concentrating on the very excellent reason why they couldn’t indulge in sex again, she stuck her head under the spray and rinsed the shampoo from her hair. Briskly, she rubbed conditioner into the wet strands, resolving not to torture herself anymore.
    But when she started to soap her body, more erotic thoughts crowded in. He’d said that if he took her blood, he would feel what she felt, and she would feel what he felt. If he were here right now, in the shower with her, and sank those fangs into her throat, would she be able to feel his intense arousal, amplified a hundred times by the infusion of her blood? And if he were to take the soap from her and run it over her breasts and between her thighs, would he feel the bolts of desire shoot straight to her core? And if she knelt and took his phallus into her mouth while the water beat