“Marcus, Cadmus, and Aerolus, meet Samantha Brooks.Samantha, my brothers.”
I nodded politely, surprised to note each brother had a different eye color.Marcus had blue eyes—he must have been the man I saw outside the restaurant yesterday.I frowned at him, recalling how he’d dropped his date like a hot potato.
I turned to the man who’d shaken my hand, the brown-eyed Cadmus, and finally settled a tight smile on the gray-eyed Aerolus.
Weird names for a weird family,I thought with a hysterical burst of humor and forced myself to calm down.
Darius stepped closer to me and placed his arm around my shoulders, acting strangely satisfied.“Welcome to my home, Samantha.”
He led me farther inside to the living room couch, where I took a welcome seat.He sat down next to me.Waytoo close.I was extremely aware of his body heat bleeding into me everywhere we touched.
“I’m sorry to barge in on you like this,” I said to the room at large, the three mirror images of Darius dwarfing the open space as they sat around me.I aimed a glare at the stubborn man beside me.“It wasn’t my idea.”
“No worries,” Cadmus said with a twinkle in his gaze.“Trust us, we know what a jackass Darius is.We live with him.”
“Yes,” Aerolus parroted his brother with a straight face.“He’s a complete jackass.”
His words sounded funny, spoken with a foreign accent I couldn’t place, coming from a stoic face.
Marcus rolled his eyes.“We’re all in agreement on our brother’s lack of social graces.Now Darius, tell us exactly what’s going on.Samantha obviously doesn’t want to be here, so why did you drag her here?I thought the plan was to stay with her at the hotel.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to be here, specifically, but… What do you mean the plan was to stay with me at the hotel?”I jerked away from Darius’s heavy arm.
The others grew silent, but I had eyes only for Darius.He looked uncomfortable, more so surrounded by his brothers.
“Samantha,” he began in a low voice meant to soften me.I didn’t blink, refusing to bend, and he sighed.“I told you I’d explain.”
Silence.
“Well?”I prodded, my arms crossed, my posture screaming at him to give me answers or I’d explode.
“Hell.”His brows knit in irritation.“You want answers?How’s this?We four,” he paused as he motioned to his brothers, “are known as the Royal Four, the next in line to lead Tanselm, a world you’ve never heard of that’s under attack from the same evil you experienced this morning.”
“What?” Aerolus shot off the couch.
Marcus and Cadmus looked stunned as well.
My head throbbed—par for the course this morning.“Say that again.”
“By the Light, Darius.”Marcus shook his head.“I think a decent explanation is in order for all of us.”
Cadmus nodded, his frown disapproving.“You really have no sense of tact.”He turned to me with approval.“Though your taste in women is definitely improving.”
Another of them said something.Then they all began talking at once.
Darius growled, and I held up a hand to stop the insanity.“Everyone just shut up.”I raised my voice to be heard over the brotherly banter.“You, Aerolus, you’ve been fairly quiet.Why don’t you explain this to me?”
The calmest of the four, and the one with the most mysterious eyes, sighed.“With the way my brother acts, it’s a wonder you’re still here.”He glared at Darius, who responded by giving him some weird gesture with his fingers that oddly reminded me of shooting someone the bird.
“Oh, that’s mature.”Aerolus turned back to me.“Samantha, what Darius has said is all true.It may be hard to accept, but we four are from another world, a place in which magic exists and evil and the Light are fighting a battle for control.”
“Of course you’re from another world.I should have guessed that from the start.”I thought I’d said that with minimal sarcasm, but Marcus snickered.
“Take out your contacts, Darius,” Aerolus said.“That might help.”
With a sinking feeling, I watched Darius remove his lenses.His dark eyes turned a startling red, as they had in the hotel room.Well, so much for the I-must-have-imagined-that theory.Not that I could ignore having sex, touching that gloriously naked body.Looking into his red eyes.Hearing him call me affai…
I hastily visualized a mental barrier when his brows drew in puzzlement, then in heat.
