She immediately thought of Derek and that crazy thing he did when he was really close to her. How he made everything look like a fairy-tale picture, one meant to capture your imagination-one meant to fill you with awe, like the pages of a children's book.

"Hey..." His voice pulled her away from the few stars she saw twinkling above the trees.

He sat beside her on a large rock. Not so close that she would have felt awkward, but near enough that the moonlight allowed her to see him. Then she realized this wasn't just any rock; it was their rock. The spot he'd taken her to after she'd first arrived at Shadow Falls.

She'd done it again.

She'd brought him here through the dreamscape, and that was so wrong.

"I'm sorry," she blurted out. "I didn't mean to do this." She closed her eyes and concentrated on moving back, away from the dream. She concentrated really hard, waited for the floating-flying sensation, but it didn't happen. At least she didn't think it did.

She opened her eyes just a crack. Enough to see if she'd moved. Nope, she was still sitting on the rock. Derek was still looking at her. Why couldn't she fly away from the dream? She jerked her eyes open all the way.

"I'm sorry," she said again. "I didn't mean to do this. Just a minute and you can go right back to sleep."

She slammed her eyes shut again and tried really, really hard to concentrate. Back. Go back to sleep. Now!

"Kylie?" His voice tickled her ears as she tried to fix what she'd done. "Kylie."

She tried to ignore him and concentrate.

"Kylie, you're not doing this. I am. I'm the one dreamscaping."

Kylie jerked open her eyes and her vision filled with him sitting there, looking so real. She recalled how the dreamscape had felt different when Red had come into her dreams. She hadn't been able to fly away, she'd had to wake herself up. So that's what she needed to do. Just wake herself up. She didn't do it.

"You can dreamscape?"

He nodded. "Yeah."

The first thing she did was make sure she had clothes on. Hey ... she knew her own tendencies with dreams, and from what she'd heard, boys were even worse.

She had on her pink nightshirt. Nothing sexy or showy. Good thing. A fluttering of relief waved through her that he didn't intend for this to be that kind of dream. Then she couldn't help but wonder if it was because he didn't feel that way about her anymore. He had Ellie.

"Why didn't you tell me you could dreamscape?" she asked, not wanting to think too much about him and Ellie.

He hesitated. "I sort of figured out how to turn it off before I ever got to Shadow Falls. I was constantly trying to visit my dad to communicate with him, even when I didn't want to have anything more to do with him."

Kylie knew all about unwanted dreamscapes. Then she remembered Derek's pain at dealing with his dad, the man who had abandoned him when he was really young. "Do you communicate with him now?" she asked, remembering he'd said he was going to look for his dad when he'd left Shadow Falls. When he'd come back with Ellie, she hadn't thought about Derek's problems, only about feeling betrayed by him. A touch of shame filtered into her chest at her selfishness.

"Not really. But I now know how to work the dreamscape, so I..."

"You what?" Kylie asked.

"Started using it again. But that's not important. Look, the other night when you came to me in the dream."

"I'm sorry about that," she said. "I'm just now learning how to control them. But as soon as I realized what I had done, that I had gone to your bedroom, I left."

His frown tightened. "I know. But before you took off, in that second that I saw you, it dawned on me that I didn't feel it here."

"Didn't feel what?" she asked, obviously still half-asleep.

"I didn't feel the surge of your emotions." He smiled. "When we dreamscape, I can talk to you, be this close to you without it making me crazy."

Kylie felt so many mixed emotions sitting on the rock, staring at his smile. She took a deep breath. "I'm not sure this is a good thing."

"Why not? I just want to talk. To see how you're doing. Is that a crime? I thought you said you cared about me? That you wanted to be my friend?"

"Okay, let me put it another way. I don't think Ellie will think this is such a good idea."

He frowned. "I keep telling you that it's not like that with us now. Ellie and I are just friends."

"Really?" Kylie let sarcasm leak into her tone. "Because it's hard to believe after the picture I saw of you two making out."

He hesitated and then said, "Fine, you're right. When I first ran into Ellie, she was so happy to see me and I was hurting. Lucas was back and you cared about him. I was just as confused as Ellie was. We kissed and ... Look, the important thing is that we both realized it was wrong."

It was that little pause that caught her attention the most. "You kissed and then did what?" Kylie asked.

Obviously in the dream world, she felt braver, able to ask questions she might not ask in real life. "Just exactly what happened between you and Ellie in Pennsylvania?"

Chapter Twenty-four

"Is it important?" Derek asked.

"You had sex with her, didn't you." Somehow Kylie had known this all along. It sucked being right, too.

Guilt filled his eyes. "It didn't mean anything."