Page 77 of When She Dreams

“Damn it to hell,” Dolores whispered. “He’s going to cut off his association with us, isn’t he?”

“He was annoyed, Dolores. I think we’re going to lose him, and if we do, we’ll lose the drug. You have to do something.”

“Such as?” She went to the window and looked out into the night. “I’ve cleaned up a lot of your messes but I don’t know if I can deal with this one.”

“Don’t say that. Look, I agree with you. We can get by without Oxlade, but we need the drug. That’s what will set the Guilfoyle Method apart from all the other lucid dreaming programs. The drug makes peoplebelieve.”

She looked back at him. “You mean you need the drug, Arthur.You’ve fallen for your own con. You really think the enhancer has opened the pathway to your psychic senses.”

“It’s the truth. I know you don’t believe me. That’s because you’re not a lucid dreamer. You don’t know what happens when someone like me takes the drug.”

“Is that right?”

“Even if you don’t understand how it affects me, you must realize we need the enhancer to take the Guilfoyle Institute to the top.” Arthur started to pace the room. “I’ve been thinking.”

“That doesn’t usually end well.”

“I’m serious,” Arthur said. “We don’t need the actual formula for the drug. I’ll bet a sample of it would be enough.”

“What do you mean?”

“We could take some of it to a laboratory and have it analyzed,” Arthur said. “Once we know the ingredients, we could pay a chemist to make up the enhancer for us.”

She inhaled smoke while she considered his words. For once he had a glimmer of an idea.

“Maybe,” she said. “But there’s the problem of getting a sample of the drug.”

“We know Oxlade brought some with him, enough to run several experiments on me and a few of the conference guests.”

“I agree it would be useful to have the enhancer,” Dolores said. “What about Lodge? Do you need her, too, Arthur?”

“She’s not important. I told you, the only reason I talked to her after the performance was to get her to stick around. I was afraid that if we lost her we would lose Oxlade and the drug.”

He was lying, just as he always did when it came to his women.

“Sounds like you managed to lose Oxlade all by yourself,” she said.

Arthur gave her an anguished, pleading look. “Darling, you have to understand. Everything I did was for us.”

“Everything you did—everything you ever do—is for you.”

“That’s not true. You know you’re the only woman I’ve ever loved.”

“Go away, Arthur. I don’t want to talk to you anymore tonight. I need to think.”

“Sure, right, I understand.” Relief flashed across Arthur’s face. He gulped the remainder of his drink and set the glass on the cart. “You’ll come up with a solution. You always do. I’m going to take a walk in the gardens. You know how it is after a performance. I need to work off the energy.”

“You do that,” Dolores said.

You stupid, self-centered bastard.

She opened the French doors and went out onto the terrace. She had to get control of the situation. Arthur had put all of her goals at risk with his impulsive nature. If they lost the Institute, she would lose her inheritance.

It dawned on her that she had succeeded in marrying a man who was just like her father—a self-centered womanizer who cared only about himself. How had that happened?

She could not afford to waste time dwelling on the past. She had to save the Institute, and that meant saving Arthur from his own worst impulses. As they said in Hollywood, he was the box-office draw. She had always done what she had to do to protect him and their shared future. That probably made her the Institute’s version of a studio fixer.

She certainly knew what it felt like to be forced to extricate her moneymaking star from a situation that could take them both down, a situation he had created.

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