“Affai means beloved. It means heart mate, the other half of my soul. Happy now?” he muttered under his breath, feeling colour rush over his cheeks. He hadn’t blushed since his tenth year. This was worse than the bouquet incident. Much worse.
She stared at him in bemusement, her mouth wide open, and he felt his nerves flare to life. The sudden attack of alarm scared him—that he could feel such fear over a woman’s acceptance, and that he could lose control over his elemental powers as a result. Staring at her wide eyes, his mouth grew dry and he stifled the urge to smash something.
His reactions made no sense. She was just a woman, just a foreign woman from an alien world with no magic, who held no power over the Prince of Fire.
She licked her lips and he swore his temperature rose a few degrees. “Darius? Are you telling me the truth?” She stared at him with suspicion while biting her lower lip, unaware of the vulnerability of the gesture.
“Does it matter?”
Wanting to hear a passionate declaration of love before he admitted to anything more, he knew the remote chance of that happening and felt a huge wave of frustration climbing, needing an outlet. Why couldn’t she tell him how she felt?
He tried to sneak a peek at her thoughts but was rebuffed by a strong inner wall. And she said she had no power. As his frustration built, her napkin began to smoke and she hastily smothered it with her water glass, glancing up at him in surprise.
“What was that for?” she sounded most definitely annoyed, and the prickly tone made him want her all the more.
Damn it all to hell. He was in love.
Chapter Ten
Samantha couldn’t stop staring at Darius’ clenched jaw. She was unable to say anything coherent following his admission, stunned by what he hadn’t wanted to admit.
Affai. Heart mate.
Thrilled yet scared, she didn’t know what to say. She had trouble explaining her own feelings for a man she had only recently just met. Yet the truth couldn’t be denied. She loved him. Was he really saying he loved her too?
She wished she had the courage to ask him outright, but she didn’t want to face rejection yet again. So what, affai meant beloved? Perhaps he’d gotten carried away during sex. Men often said things they didn’t mean in the throes of passion.
Then why had he been so hesitant for her to know what the blasted word meant?
Shoving her scorched napkin aside, she focused on her food. Darius said nothing and continued to eat as well, shovelling his food into his mouth as if the world were about to end.
The silence lengthened. What did he expect her to say? That she loved him with her every last breath? They’d only just met, and she had a life plan to follow. So far the ‘no sex’ rule had gone out the window, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t focus on herself and her career before looking for a man to complete the picture.
She frowned and pushed aside the red and yellow peppers on her plate. Trouble was, she’d finally found Mr. Right. This time, she knew him to be the real thing. Of course, being Samantha Brooks, Mr. Right had to be from another world in which he was freaking royalty! No, she wasn’t impressed with his title, but she was intimidated, just too stubborn to say so.
She glanced up from her tortured food and met his angry gaze. His eyes blazed red behind his contacts before he blinked the heat away.
Why hadn’t she backed off? No, she just had to know what ‘affai’ meant. But as much as she wished the tension between them would ease, she couldn’t help the spark of hope that lingered, that he might actually think of her as his beloved. Could he really feel as much for her as she did for him, despite their different backgrounds?
Yet as much as she cared for Darius, she wasn’t willing to risk being hurt again. She’d been hurt by Josh tremendously and hadn’t felt even half this intensity. And how could she forget that anything she might feel could only lead nowhere? The man had a world—a kingdom—to return to, one to which she did not belong.
She sighed and reached for her water, only to knock it over his nearly cleared plate of food. He snarled something in that foreign lyrical language and pushed his plate away, calling for the cheque.
The evening went progressively downhill from there. They left the restaurant in an awkward silence that continued on the drive. She stared unseeingly at the wooded areas they passed, conscious they were headed not to Greenlake but along a route that would take them to Golden Gardens, a scenic area full of trees and a hint of beach. Too unnerved by dinner to care, she couldn’t help wondering what would have happened had she told Darius she loved him.
His head turned so quickly she feared he’d suffer whiplash. Oh crap! Had her mental shields been lowered somehow?
“Get down,” he said, his mouth grim, and a part of her breathed a sigh of relief. Before she could question him however, he shoved her head towards the dash and wheeled the truck left.
As if the night couldn’t get any worse, freezing rain began to descend, making the road slippery. The truck fishtailed before Darius found control again, and as she was about to ask what had happened, an unearthly shriek split the air.
The hair on the back of her neck went up. She knew that sound. Mirego, the wraith, had made a similar sound before ’Sin Garu had killed him.
Unable to stop herself, she peered over the dash and saw four wraiths flying at them, white eyes glowing in the darkness with a preternatural sheen of hatred. Something large rammed the passenger window and she screamed, surprised by the blow that should have come from the front.
“I said get down,” Darius snarled before throwing a ball of fire through her window into the threat, blasting the wraith that had hit her door into oblivion. Amazingly, the fireball had not damaged the passenger window at all. She watched in shock as, after destroying the wraith, the magical fire cleansed the wraith’s remains from the truck’s outer door and window. Staring, she watched the fireball in morbid fascination before Darius shoved her head down again.
“Darius, get off of me,” she said in a muffled shout. Fear at this dangerous situation gave her the strength to argue with her protector, for which she was undeniably grateful. Otherwise she’d be a quivering puddle of nerves on the floor. Struggling to see, she peered out the front windshield that suddenly cracked under a ball of ice. As if the floodgates had opened, hail the size of her fist began raining down, denting his truck in so many places they’d be lucky not to resemble Swiss cheese by the time the hail ended.
“Shit.” Clenching his teeth, he wrenched the steering wheel a hard right while blasting two of the wraiths, this time with streams of fire shooting from his fingertips.
Glad to see the last of them, she tried to warn Darius about the remaining two wraiths now flanking his blind side, but her vocal cords froze when the truck suddenly went airborne.
Her seatbelt kept her from flying out of the truck, but as the vehicle rolled for what seemed like forever, her entire body ached from the force of the restraint. The truck came to a stop on its wheels, the frame surely crunched but intact enough to have protected them from injury.
Dazed, Samantha tried to release her seatbelt with shaking hands. “Darius?”
He didn’t answer and she saw why. The windshield had cracked in front of him, a large tree limb penetrating the glass. The right side of his face was covered in blood, and his body sat limply in the driver’s seat. Fear beyond anything she’d ever known knotted in her belly, making her tug at her seatbelt hysterically.