Samhain Publishing

Delayed gratification has its place. This wouldn’t be it.

Only In My Dreams was the hardest Puma novella I’ve written. At first, I just couldn’t quite get across why Gabe made the choices that he did, or how Sarah was supposed to react to them. I believe my editor’s words were, “The hero is too stupid to live. Can we fix that?”

Needless to say, I managed to fix it. The end result was close to what I’d originally intended, but left me pondering the age-old phrase, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Gabe is about to become a Hunter, one of the few shifters sanctioned by the shifter Senate to hunt down rogues. Only problem is he has an as unyet claimed mate, Sarah. In order to train he must leave Halle, and Sarah, behind for six months.

Six months. Sarah, needless to say, is not pleased, especially when he leaves without telling her first. And because they’ve met, but haven’t claimed one another, the mate dreams begin. For six months they’re tortured by what they could be doing together, but in reality they’re moving further and further apart as each of them turns to a friend for comfort and support.

Needless to say, neither of them is happy about that either.

So Gabe does all the wrong things for all the right reasons and almost loses Sarah. The only place they can be together is in their dreams, and even that becomes a battleground as they each try and figure out how to make their relationship work. Feelings are hurt, actions are misconstrued and by the time Gabe gets home things might be screwed up to the point of no return. It will take a lot of fast talking on Gabe’s part to make Sarah see that she’s the only one for him.

I think this book was so hard to write because I could see exactly where Gabe was coming from, but I could also understand why Sarah was so upset. What was the right thing to do? Did Gabe do everything he could to ease their separation? Sarah knew what he was doing was important, but could she have looked past her own fears more to see what Gabe was going through?

So Gabe screws up, then Sarah screws up, and before you know it Gabe is considering the implications of an animal related death at thirty thousand feet. Getting these two together was a journey in and of itself, one that I hope you enjoy. I think it was worth everything they went through.

In the end, Gabe makes sure that Sarah will never again doubt him. Gabe doesn’t want to live with just the dream, and being who and what he is, he’ll do whatever it takes to prove to Sarah that reality is so much better.

Dana Marie Bell
Dance with an alpha in the pale moonlight…
www.danamariebell.com