careful. Outside the car, the wind was rising, bringing tendrils of fog. It rose off the asphalt in long tails, swirling into a thick mist as it gathered over the street. It came in fast, as if from the ocean, smelling of saltwater and seaweed. Corinne forced her gaze away from Dayan's to stare out into the street. "Look at that, Dayan. Have you ever seen fog come in so fast or so thick?" In a way it was quite frightening. She knew they could never drive the car in such weather; no one could see in it. The fog itself seemed strange, as if bizarre shapes and forms were moving in it. She could hear a sound, a continuous whisper of voices buried in the fog.
"You are shivering, Corinne. Do not fear the cover. It is only that. I can safely move around in it without detection." Dayan spoke softly as he always did, but there was something disturbing about his casual observation. As if thick fog were an everyday occurrence.
As if he could command the fog.
Corinne stared up at him, her eyes too large for her face. There were questions in her fascinated gaze, and answers in the steadiness of his return stare. The unblinking stare of a great jungle cat. Of a predator before it attacks its prey. Corinne moved, a subtle feminine retreat, but Dayan only tightened his hold on her. Her heart was pounding erratically again, loud in the silence of the fog-shrouded night.
"Corinne." He whispered her name. Or had he simply thought it so the sound brushed like the wings of a butterfly in her mind? His tone was sexy. Tantalizing. Intimate. He could make her insides melt with the way he said her name. He placed her palm over his heart, his hand covering hers. "Ssh, little love, listen to the sound of my heart talking to yours. You must learn to relax and breathe. Breathing is essential to your life, you know."
She inhaled; her heart was already following the strong pattern of his. She thought about that, the way he worded things. Essential to your life. Her long lashes lifted so she could study his face. Physically he was beautiful, sensual, very male. "Isn't it essential to your life?"
For a brief moment, humor flashed into his eyes, a fleeting glimpse only, and then his eyes were black and deep and fathomless. Hiding a thousand secrets. "Sometimes it is extremely essential. Like now. When I look at you, you take my breath away. It just happens. I find I cannot catch my breath."
Corinne found herself laughing in spite of her resolve not to. He was so outrageous, making her feel beautiful when she was pregnant. "I haven't noticed that peculiar phenomenon occurring. I'll have to pay closer attention."
"Then you must not realize you make my legs weak either." In the darkness, with the fog pressing close around the car and the strange insidious whispering, Corinne was grateful for Dayan's solid frame and the laughter he was generating.
"I think you're making things up just to get me to laugh and forget those men waiting in the darkness to hurt you." She was sliding her fingers up and down his arm absently. "I want to go with you."
His mind was a shadow in hers. She wasn't afraid for herself, she was afraid for him. She was determined to accompany him. "Meltdown." He whispered the word against her pulse, against her bare skin so that she felt him in her, deep inside. The word was a caress of black velvet, a sorcerer's tool.
Dayan felt his insides had gone into serious meltdown, turning his blood to molten lava. Thick and hot and moving through him with urgent demands. She was everything.
Light and laughter, serenity and poetry and hot, steamy sex. She was classy and sweet, she was elegance and candlelit nights and lace and satin. She was the purity of frothy waterfalls and cool, dark forests. There was a wildness buried deep within her that surged to the forefront when she was with him. A wildness that matched his own. He sensed that it surprised her because she hadn't known it existed. Yet she should have; it was there in her music, when she played so passionately, in the songs she wrote for others to sing.
Dayan drew her close to him, so that their hearts beat in the same rhythm, her heart matching his steadier beat. "You will stay in this car, my love, where the fog