Page 85 of The Bride Wore White

“Okay,” he said.

Now she looked amused. “Okay?”

“It’s an interesting theory,” he allowed.

She laughed. “Which you are not buying.”

A thought occurred to him. “Can you do your dream readings without crystal?”

“Yes, but to get the same sharp focus, I have to have physical contact with the client.” She gave a visible shudder. “I don’t like doing that. It’s much more disturbing than a crystal connection.”

“Too intimate?”

“Yes. And too dangerous.”

“For you or for the client?

“I think it depends on which one is stronger,” she said quietly.

“Youthink?”

“It’s not like I’ve had many opportunities to practice.” She gave him a cool smile. “I told you, when I was in the business of reading dreams, I usually cheated.”

“How does a dream reader cheat?” he asked, once again fascinated by the endless mystery of Prudence Ryland.

“I just asked people to tell me their dreams. That process can be excruciatingly boring, but it’s not painful, not like making a true psychic connection. Frankly, there was rarely any point subjecting myself to the real thing, because the interpretations often fell into one of a handful of standard categories.” She paused and gave him a wicked smile. “It was a lot like identifying, sorting, and labeling criminals using the Wingate Crime Tree method.”

“What are the categories?” he asked, refusing to be sidetracked.

“In my experience, dreams frequently indicate that the dreameris under some form of stress or worry. There are also dreams in which we try to rewrite the past. Dreams that involve sexual fantasies. Dreams that are absolutely meaningless.”

He watched her carefully. “I’ve heard people claim that their intuition speaks to them in their dreams. They say they have awakened with answers to problems that haunted them.”

“That’s true.” Prudence gave him a knowing smile. “But you don’t believe in that sort of dreaming, do you? It would imply that our dreams allow us a form of perception that is not available to us with our normal senses. Horror of horrors, it might indicate a possible psychic sensitivity.”

Jack considered that briefly and shook his head. “No, it would indicate a form of intuition.”

“Haven’t we already decided the border between intuition and psychic sensitivity is impossible to define?”

“Pru—”

He stopped because he did not know what to say, how to explain, where to begin.

Prudence watched him. Her eyes got deeper, more mysterious. She appeared to come to a decision. She straightened in her chair, lowered her arms, and stretched one hand across the table.

He hesitated because he suddenly knew what was going to happen next.

“I don’t think this is a good idea,” he said.

“You have a recurring dream that bothers you, don’t you?”

“How did you—?”

“I’ve done a lot of dream readings. I know when clients are struggling with a nightmare. You want answers. I might be able to give them to you.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” he said.

“The dream will probably plague you endlessly unless you find a way to understand it.”

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