Still, her vision blurred as tears stung her eyes.
Idan was no snowflake, undeterred by her roiling emotions.
He found a cloth and dried the dishes in silence, remaining by her side, unyielding, his presence unmoving, unshaken, a rock through her storm.
A flash of need arced through her, and she cursed.
How did this man have the power to shift her emotions from overwhelming sorrow to a deep physical desire in seconds?
There was a sort of magicfokkeryin his ability to transform her mood with such swiftness.
His magnetism was so overwhelming that it was like she was standing on a precipice of an experience she couldn’t quite get her head around.
Yet something about Idan reminded her of the Riders, men she deeply respected.
Heck, she’d secretly hoped she’d find a man like them.
The truth was that, for so long, she yearned for the same love and steadiness that her sister enjoyed with Kainan and that her best friend Rina shared with Molan.
She hissed at the agonizing reality of her loneliness, then swallowed back guilt for her selfish thinking.
Her friends were gone, and here she was wallowing in self-pity.
Idan narrowed his molten eyes on her.
‘Ko’sawa? Are you in pain?’
His timbre reverberated with a deep, anchoring resonance that held her steady even as she tried to reinforce her internal fortress.
Sheba gave him a tight nod. ‘I’m fine.’
The lie was paper-thin.
Idan reached out, his palm settling in the center of her back.
The contact sent a shock through her, and she shivered, but she didn’t flinch from him.
His warmth seeped through her wool tunic, a wordless acknowledgment of the fracture in her soul, offering comfort without any demand.
‘I can’t get Imani and Brad out of my head,’ Sheba finally whispered.
Her composure shattered, and she bent over the suds, sobs tearing from her throat in rhythmic heaves.
His heated grasp slid to her nape, moving her into the mass of his chest.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she sobbed out.
‘Stop,’ Idan murmured. ‘You don’t owe me an apology for any of this.’
Moving with a fluid, easy strength, he gathered her up and carried her back to the fur-draped bed.
He tucked her into its warmth and then, kicking off his boots, he eased in beside her, pulling her to his chest once more, her spine to his.
His subvox burr drifted into her neural cortex as he stroked her temple and hair.
Even with this loss, you will heal. The soul doesn’t break; it remakes itself in the silence of the void. New life takes root in the hollow spaces left by death. We move from the storm’s fury to the stillness of the stars, shedding old skin to survive the frost. Your next season is already calling.
The words hit home, settling in her heart and silencing some of the static in her mind.
