The Fire Within

by Marie Harte

  The waiter returned and they quickly ordered. Darius, however, would not let the conversation end, though he sensed Samantha’s relief at the interruption. The insight into her character fascinated him. He wanted to know everything about her, from her likes and dislikes to her dreams and disappointments.

  “Do your parents live near?”

  “No.” She frowned at his persistence in pursuing the conversation. “They live in Philadelphia near my sister and her husband and three kids. I visit during the holidays when I can, but it’s uncomfortable for all of us. Frankly I’d rather spend my holidays alone, or better yet, working.” She speared a tomato off her plate. “Anything else you wanted to know about the Brooks family, Mr. Nosy?”

  He gave her a wry grin and shook his head. Despite the sympathy he felt for her troubled relationships, he couldn’t help rejoicing in her lack of ties to this world.

  “What’s with that look in your eyes?” She sounded suspicious.

  “What?” he asked, all innocence. “I was just thinking we started talking about your gift and somehow got off track. You never answered my question about how much you can see into the future. Do you still have visions?”

  “Well, the vision, I guess you could call it, of that thing with the teeth, that Netharat, and ’Sin Garu was pretty damned powerful.”

  “Yes, but that was something else, an insight into the present. What about the future? What have you seen?” He continued to prod, wanting to see more of the sensual dream she’d had of him, the one that every now and then briefly appeared in her mind’s eye.

  She blushed scarlet and he knew she’d recalled it, but her inner shields blocked him from seeing it. “There was one dream I had shortly after meeting you.”

  He leaned closer, wanting to know what put such a rosy glow on her cheeks. An image of his face tense and hungry over hers, his eyes red and his naked chest looming over her flashed through her mind and into his.

  “Looks nice,” he murmured, staring into her eyes.

  “Yes, well,” she fumbled lamely, turning back to her food. “I was on a celibacy streak and then I met you.” She sounded irritated and he laughed. Then she glanced up at him, no longer abashed, her eyes intent. “In the dream, just as you were making love to me, you called me ‘affai’.”

  His laughter dried up, and he stared in surprise. He searched inwardly for some clever reply but could only come up with, “Really?”

  “Really.” She stared at him, quiet while the waiter cleared their plates and brought the main course, two steaming hot dishes of broiled shrimp and crisp, colourful vegetables. “Funny how you and your brothers clam up at mention of the word. Affai. Affai. Whatever can it mean?”

  Funny, but the more she said it, the better she looked sitting by his side in the Royal House. Morose thoughts of marriage faded under the strengthening bond between them. His body throbbed to join hers, but as he sat talking to her, he revelled in her intelligence, in her charm and wit. She didn’t bow to him, as so many others had.

  “You don’t care at all that I’m a prince, do you?” He had to know.

  She started. “Is this another way to distract me from my question? I asked what ‘affai’ meant, and don’t tell me it’s a term of affection. Cadmus almost swallowed his tongue, and I thought Marcus was going to suffer a fit of apoplexy when I asked.”

  “You’re not impressed with royalty?” he persisted.

  “No.” Her eyes cooled considerably, disdain frosting them into a muted forest green. “I’m not. Just because you come from money or royalty or whatever,” she flailed her hands in the air, “doesn’t make you better than me, than the rest of us.”

  Good answer. No, make that, great answer.

  “Now are you going to tell me what affai means or do I have to beat it out of you?”

  Staring at her, wondering if her tendency towards impatience would complement him or serve as a handicap in their joint rule, he pondered how best to answer.

  “Darius,” she growled and he shrugged.

  “Fine. But don’t blame me if it’s not what you want to hear.” She didn’t so much as blink and he swore, colourfully and creatively in his native tongue. He hadn’t meant to approach her this way, but what the hell? She’d forced the issue. This was as good a time as any to see what she was made of. He just wished explaining the word didn’t make him look like a stupid, heartsick ass.

  “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 f
or 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 GoldenGardens, 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.

  “Darius? Wake up! Wake up, right now!”

  After a minute of futile tugging and cursing, she realised the seatbelt had locked and would not open. She prayed Darius would soon wake. What if he had a concussion? What if he never woke up? Then an inhuman shriek rent the air and she knew the worst had yet to pass.

  Though the softball-sized hail had ceased, if she didn’t do something to free herself from the seatbelt the wraiths would kill her and Darius as sure as the sun set tomorrow. Sudden regret pierced her, that she had not made the most of her time with Darius. How hard was it really to say “I love you,” to take a risk and let the future unfold as it may? Now she might never have the chance.

  Yellow talons appeared by the driver side window and she shuddered, yanking at her restraint. The creature smashed the glass and yanked Darius’ door off its hinges. With a slash of its claws, it freed Darius and tossed him out of the truck as if he weighed nothing.

  Then another creature knocked the glass out of her window and grinned, exposing three rows of blackened, sharp teeth. She could see red stains and darkened tissue within its mouth and prayed she and Darius would not find themselves on the wrong side of dessert.

  “Come with me, pretty,” it whispered, the echoed softness of its voice as frightening as its appearance. It sliced her seatbelt and yanked her out of the truck.

  She stumbled, her body full of aches and pains, trying to cope with too many shocks at once. Dragged behind the surprisingly strong creature, she tugged at the bony hand clamped around her arm and winced when it dug its claws through her flesh.

  “Not yet. Save some fight for later,” it said before laughing. It threw her next to Darius, who had at least gained consciousness enough to sit and see the danger they faced.

  She flew into his arms, almost knocking him over. As she clutched his warm body, she noted the grassy depression they sat upon and the steep rock wall over which they must have fallen. No wonder the truck had rolled.

  Darius pulled her from his embrace and scrutinized every inch of her that he could see. “Are you all right?”

  She gave him a huge kiss, relieved to hear him speak. “I’m fine.” The tension visibly left his stiff frame and she understood the depth of his concern. Warmth unfurled within her. “You?”

  “I’ve been better.” He wiped sticky blood from his forehead and she saw a deep cut over his brow. Then he blinked rapidly, swearing as he removed his contacts. Seeing the real Darius with his bright red eyes made her feel safer, but not as safe as she’d like.

  “I hear that.” She strove for a modulated tone, one that managed to belie her utter terror at the situation they faced.

  The wraiths, not two now but six, circled around them like vultures. Their constant motion made her dizzy so she focused all of her attention on Darius, squirming deeper into his protective embrace.

  “Don’t worry, Samantha,” he said, his voice deep with calm. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”

  “Have you ever tasted one of these females?” one of the wraiths rasped. “Such tender flesh, always succulent and brimming with terror.” It smacked its lips, causing the others to join in nauseating, high-pitched shrieks of laughter.

  Darius drew her tighter against his body. He made as if to stand before closing his eyes in pain.

  “Darius? Are you all right?” she whispered, wishing she could give him strength. As afraid as she was of the wraiths, the possibility of losing Darius absolutely terrified her.

  “My head is killing me,” he growled under his breath. “I’m going to obliterate every last one of them. And I’m going to make it hurt.”

  His anger made her feel better, though the pallor of his face didn’t alleviate all of her concern.

  Darius narrowed his gaze at the wraith nearest them and Samantha waited to see it burst into flame. When it did nothing more than smile at them, her stomach rolled.

  Darius muttered, “Shit,” before two wraiths leant forward and grabbed him by the collar of his jacket, jerking him from her. They threw him ten feet, into the trunk of a very large pine tree.

  The waning moonlight made everyt
hing appear in black and white, and the blood streaming down his slack face looked like a dark omen, a portent of death.

  “I’m done waiting,” a wraith whispered into her ear before wrapping its hand around her hair and bending her head back to expose her neck.

  “You can’t,” another said. “This one’s been marked.”

  An argument ensued above her, and at the angle of her neck, she couldn’t see Darius. Desperate for any kind of contact with him, she tried the impossible.

  “Darius, are you okay?” She thought as hard as she could, beyond frustrated when the wraith holding her yanked her head back farther and made a thin slash along her throat, a stinging cut that drew blood.

  “We have to bring this one to the master intact,” another wraith said above her. “But the Storm Lord is ours to play with. Why not take a turn on him?”

  The squabble continued as a rumble of thunder shook the air. Great. All they needed was more hail.

  “Darius, wake the hell up. I need you here!”

  He moaned and she felt so much relief she wanted to laugh. He was still alive! Her heart blazed with joy and her eyes filled.

  “What hit me?”

  “Two wraiths. And there are four more making a total of six we have to deal with.”

  He didn’t say anything and she still couldn’t see him. She didn’t know the extent of his new injuries.

  “I heard what you didn’t say.” He sounded smug, and for a minute she didn’t understand.

  “You really hit your head, didn’t you?” She could only imagine the pain he felt, love making it possible to ignore the ache in her neck and the pointed nail scraping her flesh.

  “You love me. Don’t deny it. I heard you; I felt it within you.”

  Her neck ached, they were both on the verge of being killed and probably eaten by ugly, disgusting monsters, and he wanted to talk about love? She wanted to punch him.