Pure Destiny (PureDark Ones #12) - Aja James Page 0,44
equal measure.
“You loved me too, Dalair,” she went on relentlessly. “I know you did. When I was Kira and you were the Chief Commander of the Persian armies, the Immortals. I fell in love with you at first sight. Well, in fascination and lust at the very least. It was your keen mind and noble spirit that made me love you. It was the beautiful purity of your soul that drew me like a moth to a flame.”
“Why are you telling me this?” he couldn’t help growling.
The more she talked, the more his head hurt. He needed her to stop. It was torture to listen to her.
She continued to ignore his interjections, as if he hadn’t spoken at all. She was determined to have her say, and unless he gagged her or knocked her out, he suspected she wouldn’t shut up.
“I know I hurt you,” she murmured low, her voice that of a wounded animal. “Badly. We hurt you, Cambyses and I. I should never have gone along with it. I knew it was wrong.”
He could feel her wide brown eyes searing like hot coals into his profile as he kept facing resolutely forward, not meeting her gaze.
“I wanted you so badly,” she breathed, impassioned. “I was so, so selfish. I tried to tell you that first night. Tell you as explicitly as I dared how much I loved you. How much our joining meant to me. Even though a part of me knew you’d misunderstand. The cowardly part that knew it was adultery I was committing. I’m so very sorry. I regret—”
“Shut. Up.”
He wanted to punch something. He wanted to make her stop talking. His fist tightened on the throttle as if it was her neck he was squeezing.
But he couldn’t do it. He simply couldn’t hurt her. This inexplicable connection between them was becoming a risk and a liability. He needed to find a way to sever their bond.
“Dalair…” she murmured, her voice thick with an indefinable emotion.
“My Prince.”
His ears ringed shrilly with the last two words.
My Prince.
He wasn’t her prince or anyone else’s. He’d impersonated his brother to act as protector for both Cambyses and the Princess he was supposed to marry. He was never supposed to fall in love with someone else’s wife.
His brother’s wife.
She was never meant to be his…
All my existence, I have loved one woman.
But she was never meant to be mine.
The words repeated in his mind over and over and over, inundating him with the hopelessness of it all. The helplessness.
The inevitability of Fate.
The Goddess warned me at the moment of my death and rebirth not to want her again. For our paths would cross in the future, though I wouldn’t know the time and place. Nor would I recognize her physical incarnation.
For she was never meant to be mine.
Will never be mine…
But he had recognized her.
He remembered.
The night in his room after he confessed his ill-fated love for Kira to Sophia, never knowing that he was speaking to the same soul. Until their lips brushed by accident. And his soul finally recognized hers.
Just as he did now.
As if Destiny was doomed to repeat itself, Sophia reached out and touched him. Her hand upon his forearm sent a shock of electricity throughout his body, paralyzing and blinding him.
He had to stop this. He was malfunctioning.
Some…thing…was trying to override his program.
Desperate to end the pain seizing up his entire being, his fists crashed down in a burst of uncontrollable strength—
Breaking right through the control panel of the cockpit and sending the helicopter into a tailspin.
Chapter Eight
Sophia’s instinctive reaction was to pull up with all her might on the yoke in front of her, as if she could somehow pull the helicopter out of its death spiral with her insignificant upper body strength.
Didn’t hurt to try. She had no better ideas at the moment!
Dalair was doing the same with his left arm, pulling up on his navigator with so much power his bicep bulged and quivered like boulders shaking in an earthquake, his veins standing out in stark relief, distending from his skin.
With his right hand, he did a number of things so rapidly Sophia could barely keep track with her eyes. She felt a jolt from the tail of the helicopter, and realized that the rotor started churning in the opposite direction, working against the main rotor blades, counteracting the rotational force.
The aircraft shook and bobbed, making Sophia’s stomach lurch and her head feel light.