She awoke, shaking and gasping, her mind clouded from her dream. She sat up, pushing the furs aside, and comforted Fang. The hound cuddled and quieted while the woman considered her disturbed slumber.
She'd had similar dreams before, but they had been disquieting in a different way. The biggest way was in seeming impossible, but there had also been, perhaps because of that, an element of danger in feeling trapped by being held.
Now, though, the vision of sleeping atop her sweetheart was not a threatening temptation, but a tantalising bit of hope. She could almost call it a goal. And her dreamscape kept shifting the hold on her, not letting her panic over feeling trapped, but ensuring that she felt securely loved instead.
She was loved, and knew it, however hard she found it to credit. Loving her, with her difficulties in both communication and touch? It seemed out of the question to her, or at least it had. Yet declarations of love had been exchanged, and they'd found a way to manage what was, for her at least, an unprecedented level of voluntary intimacy.
If there'd been anyone observing, she was sure that onlooker would have laughed at them for how little they'd done,but it was still significant to her. And they had both committed to trying to find ways to make even more work between them.
This made it all that much harder to awaken with only a hound for company, no matter how good of company he was. It was especially hard to be gone so soon after finding that she and her sweetheart had both been building up to admitting feelings for a while. She needed to finish this scouting trip and get home.
Unfortunately, the goblin-kind camps she was finding did not make it easy to be done. There were too many, nestled mostly in gaps where the local inhabitants wouldn't discover them under normal circumstances.
She couldn't just run back without an accurate report to give, though. It went against everything she knew for duty, or even what little good reputation she felt she had.
Just a day or two more, perhaps, and then delivering the news. Maybe then she could have some uninterrupted time with her sweetheart.
