Page 8 of Darkhan

Warmth bloomed through him at the feeling of her voluntarily pressing against him. For as used to the various intensities of heat—inside and out—as he was, this feeling was new. And he liked it. It was hard to resettle his hands at her hips, harder still not to seek out her skin with his lips. “I have a driving need to protect you from harm. The streets of New York are hardly a place to be walking barefoot.”

Harmony tilted her head into his chest in a failed attempt to muffle her giggle, then straightened and pointed toward the window and balcony beyond. “Says the man with a massive, movie-style balcony like thirty stories in the air.”

Zeno grinned. “Wait until you see what I do with it.”

Chapter Four

Harmony stared at the tablet Zeno had handed her after she was resettled on his unreasonably comfortable sofa. She had a basic sense for how the device was supposed to work—it wasn’t like she didn’t watch television—but holding the tiny computer in her hands was surreal. Not only had he handed it over to her without any word of caution, he’d said something about giving her a minute to browse and then walked from the room. She could hear him, faintly, in the direction where she’d glimpsed the kitchen.

Her hands remained frozen on the sides of the device as she drank in the vivid color on the screen. She processed the periodically cycling presence of an ad at the top of the displayed page before her brain finally recognized different shapes and styles of shoes. Women’s shoes, categorized for her to choose from, or perhaps scroll through. She wouldn’t know without touching the screen. But before she could unlatch one hand to do as much, her gaze caught on the website logo at the top.

Harmony’s stomach rolled, dropping to the floor.Holy crap.She’d done a poor job of making herself heard before if he thought she could even afford to look through the windows of that store!

“Do you have any food allergies I should know about?” Zeno called as her mind reeled.

Harmony carefully set the tablet beside her on the sofa and twisted enough to look toward the kitchen. From across the penthouse, the kitchen had seemed large and almost imposing with its predominantly dark aesthetic, but with Zeno in it she changed her mind. It suited him. Which was a ridiculous thought to have. She watched him stir what looked like iced tea, just for a second, before blurting, “Can’t I just go to Wal-Mart?” The idea of walking through any store as she was less thanappealing, but she had to be reasonable. She could pay him back the cost of whatever she needed from Wal-Mart. Presuming her parents hadn’t torn through her room and found her small stash of funds.

Zeno turned to face her, setting the spoon he’d been using onto the counter, and a frown bent his lips. “Why would you want to go there? Did nothing appeal to you at—”

“There’s no way I can shop there!” She made a stupid gesture toward the tablet he wouldn’t be able to see from his angle. “I don’t have a job, okay? My parents would never voluntarily let me work, so searching has been hard. I’ve sent out like one email resume so far and I don’t have a lot of hope for that.” It’d been over a week and she hadn’t heard back, and the job listing was gone. She blew out a frustrated breath. “I couldn’t pay you back for something from somewhere so expensive in ayear. I could pay you back for some cheap flip-flops from Wal-Mart when we get to my parents’ house.”

Silence stretched for several long seconds as Zeno studied her. Then he turned toward the fridge, putting his shoulder to her. “You didn’t answer my question.”

Harmony blinked.His question?“Um, sorry, could you repeat it?”

He pulled open the refrigerator. “Do you have any food allergies? I don’t want to keep anything in my home that will hurt you.”

Her mouth moved on autopilot as confusion held her frozen. “Shellfish.”

“Shellfish,” he repeated, as if to himself. His head tilted marginally to the side, the angle drawing her eye to where his hair was loosely restrained behind his shoulders. His hair looked like it should have been wild, like it was permanently windblown, yet it barely shifted with his movements.

She found herself wondering if it was soft to the touchor coarse and stiff with product, her confusion and previous flustered frustration momentarily forgotten.

Then Zeno straightened, knocked the fridge door shut, and twisted in place with a single package in hand. He said nothing as he strode through the kitchen, cutting straight for the window wall and with what looked like barely a press of his fingers stepping onto the balcony beyond.

Harmony slid the feet she’d curled beneath her to the floor, curious about his actions and about the surely breath-stealing outdoor space. Why would he have taken something from the refrigerator out to the balcony?

Her curiosity was immediately answered, and her forward momentum stalled, when Zeno gave a flick of his wrist and tossed the package into the air. Of course, it caught on the wind she could see tugging at his clothes and hair, but that ceased to matter a heartbeat later. The mysterious package of food was barely higher than his head and tumbling outward—possibly downward—when a very bright, unexpected burst of orange-red fire sliced through the open air.

Harmony clapped a hand over her mouth.

The fire blinked out, leaving only the faintest traces of dark gray smoke to waft up into the sky. The package was gone, entirely incinerated. She was as certain as she could be, though she hadn’t seen it happen, that the fire had come from Zeno.

The man who called himself her soulmate had somehow magically generated fire to obliterate something he could easily have thrown away. Or donated. For the life of her, all she could think was she hadn’t known shifters could do that.

Zeno stepped back inside, pulling the glass door shut once again behind him, and retraced his path to the kitchen. He stopped at the sink to wash his hands, then re-entered Harmony’s field of vision as he rounded the far side of the sofa, carrying two glasses of iced tea. “I wasn’t sure how you preferredit, so I made one each way.” He set the glasses onto the coffee table and indicated one. “This one is without sugar.”

Harmony forced herself to keep her breathing steady, absolutely certain he could hear her heart pounding regardless, and licked her lips. “With, please.” She appreciated that he hadn’t assumed, or taken the liberty of deciding for her. Or she would appreciate it, probably, when she could think about anything other than the stream of fire he seemed to have so casually generated moments ago.

Zeno obligingly passed her the sweetened tea before reaching for the other. He watched her over the rim of his glass as he took a long swallow, but didn’t speak until he’d set it down again. “Did that frighten you?”

She choked on her own, coughing roughly to clear her throat and holding tighter to the glass. “Seeing fire suddenly appear in the air like that? Yes. Of course. I don’t know what type of shifter you are, let alone how you did that, but I am a veryburnablehuman.” Officially the most ridiculous thing she’d ever felt compelled to say. “For that matter, what were you even doing? Why dispose of food that way? If it was bad, toss it out or something.”

His brow pinched, just for a second, before his expression settled again closer to neutral. “I apologize for startling you. That was a package of lobster. It seemed better to incinerate it than to risk poisoning you.”

Her heart faltered. She’d watched him immediately dig through his refrigerator, but it hadn’t seemed realistic that he would do something so drastic in response to what she’d said. Feeling a strange combination of guilty and flattered, Harmony said, “You didn’t have to—I mean, you could have just eaten it.”

Zeno made a sound like a disgruntled huff. “There may be any number of reasons you choose not to kiss me in the future, Harmony. Because I’ve knowingly eaten a food to which you areallergic will never be one of them.”

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