He understood. He felt it too. This connection was terrifying in its intensity. It was too much, too fast, like being caught in a riptide, and there was a very real danger of being swept away completely.
“I know,” he murmured against her temple, pressing a soft kiss to the damp, glowing skin there. “I feel it too.”
Her breath hitched, and he felt her tremble in his arms. Not with fear, he realized. With desire. With a need that was a perfect mirror to his own.
He lowered his head, intending to kiss her again, intending to lose himself in her all over again, but a sound from outside their shelter, a sharp crack of thunder, jerked him back to reality.
The storm was still raging. They were trapped on a narrow ledge halfway up a cliff. Lilani was alone in the cave, probably waking up by now and wondering where he was.
Responsibility, cold and unwelcome, washed over him, dousing the fire that had been burning so brightly. He had to get her back to the cave. He had to make sure Lilani was safe. He had to…
He pulled back, creating a sliver of space between them, and the cool air that rushed in was like a bucket of ice water. She blinked, her luminous eyes hazy with passion, and he saw the confusion there as she slowly came back to her senses as well.
“That was…” she started.
“A mistake,” he finished, though every fiber of his being screamed otherwise.
“Was it?”
He looked down at her—this impossible, beautiful creature who had crashed into his carefully constructed life and turned everything upside down.Our mate, his beast insisted.Ours to protect, to cherish, to keep.
But the rational part of his mind still functioned, barely. And it reminded him of all the reasons this could never work. Her obligations. His exile. Lilani’s fragile heart. The barriers between their worlds.
“The storm hasn’t let up,” she said, her voice a little shaky.
“It won’t last much longer.”
“And then…?”
And then what? Go back to the cave and pretend this hadn’t happened? Go back to the way things were, with him growling and her keeping her distance, with a fragile truce between them? That was impossible. Everything had changed the moment their lips met. The world had shifted on its axis, and there was no going back.
“Then we go back to the cave,” he said, forcing the words past the lump in his throat. “And we talk.”
She nodded, her gaze never leaving his. The brightness of her skin had softened to a gentle glow, and in the dim light of the crevice, she looked impossibly beautiful.
“Okay,” she whispered. “We talk.”
He wanted to kiss her again. He wanted to forget about the storm and the cave and the responsibilities waiting for him. He wanted to stay here, pressed against her in this narrow space, until the end of the world.
But he didn’t.
He just wrapped his arms around her, holding her close, and waited for the storm to pass.
CHAPTER 10
The memory of Valrek’s lips refused to fade.
Ariella lay awake on her narrow cot, staring at the ceiling of her room while the pre-dawn light crept through the single porthole window. She pressed her fingers to her mouth for the hundredth time, feeling the ghost of Valrek’s kiss.
She’d felt so… wanted in his arms. Not studied, not examined, not evaluated for her lung capacity or the efficiency of her gill function. Just desired, like she was a woman instead of a science project.
And I wanted him too.That part was almost as shocking.
She’d thought about boys when she was younger—what girl didn’t? She’d even had a crush on Mathias, the son of one of the village fishermen once. She’d waited for him one day after the boats came in, shyly offering him a shell she’d retrieved from deep beneath the water. He’d smiled and taken the shell, but then his friends had laughed and told him not to touch the “fish-girl” and he’d dropped it as if it burned him.
The lesson had been clear—she was too strange, too other, for human boys. Her father and Merrick had also made it clear that such distractions were a waste of her time and resources. She was an asset, not a person, and her future was already decided.
So she’d shut that part of herself away. She’d focused on her work, on the obligations that would one day buy her father’s freedom. She had never allowed herself to imagine a different future.
