Chapter 5

“This is lovely,” I exclaimed when my eyes fell on the large fountain in the center of the garden.

Here, the shrubs had been trimmed and pruned, and resembled more of what I would have envisioned for a palatial garden. I didn’t recognize any of the shapes they were supposed to represent, but imagined they symbolized certain animal life forms in the Pandraxian Empire. Alien-looking flowers bloomed in between, stunningly beautiful.

But once my gaze was drawn back to the large fountain—easily the size of a house on Earth—I had eyes for nothing else. Moonlight played off it, in a crystal vibrance that made me think it had been sculpted from glass or ice.

The water was illuminated by color-changing lights, and the bottom was filled with fish in all shades of the rainbow.

I rushed to the side of the fountain, forgetting about the cumbersome layers of skirts, and promptly got them wet as I sat down on the edge to get a better look at the fish.

Daryus followed me and my breath caught as I became aware of his closeness. I forced my eyes to stay on the fish that drew me to the fountain in the first place, and not to stare up at the man whose presence unnerved me.

“You’re getting your dress all wet,” he observed.

“It’s worth it,” I replied, trailing my fingers through the water and creating a colorful line. “Oh!”

I tried again and giggled as hundreds of different shades burst from where the tips of my fingers trailed through the water.

Daryus lowered himself to sit across from me, with our knees so close that I felt his heat against my flesh. Tiny fish became attracted to my finger and swarmed it, carefully nipping at the tip.

“They think you brought them food,” Daryus explained in a deep voice.

I giggled again. I barely felt their tiny mouths against my skin, but watching them dance around my fingers made my heart happy. Each was about the size of my pinky, and glimmered in different metallic hues, like the Pandraxians themselves.

I became more daring and allowed my whole hand to submerge in the water. Amused, I watched more fish gather and swim around it with their oversized heads and tiny fins. Fins, I noticed, as crystal clear as the water and only discernable by the slight colorful current they created.

When I looked up, I noticed Daryus’s gaze on me, not the fish, and my breath caught at how bright the teal pigments of his irises were. Deepening the longer they stayed on me.

His hand that had been resting on his knee, lifted and cupped my cheek. “You are so soft,” he remarked in a raspy voice that sent shivers of comfort down my spine. I liked the sensation of his warm palm against my skin.

We stayed like this for a few minutes, gazing into each other’s eyes, forgetting about everything around us. Quietly our eyes communicated what we didn’t seem to be able to put into words. One question burned through my skull, What is happening to me?

Because something inexplicably was taking place between us. I felt it in every beat of my heart that heated just like my skin heated under his touch. It felt like it was expanding, as if wanting to embrace the alien man across from me.

The fish still swarmed my hand, but I didn’t even notice, just like I didn’t notice the water slowly creeping up from the layers floating in the fountain, searching to wet more dry material, expanding just like my heart.

Nothing seemed to matter in that moment but him and me.

Until I noticed drops of water on my hair, and with a curse Daryus withdrew his hand and pulled me to my feet.

“It’s raining,” he stated, pulling me back to the entrance.

Rain?

I looked up and watched thick, dark clouds moving overhead, felt drops on my face, and abruptly stopped, laughing. “It’s raining.”

He stopped too, looked at me as if I had lost my mind. But I couldn’t help it, for the first time in many months, I felt normal. I had always liked the rain, and this alien downpour was no exception. I lifted my head higher and tried to catch some of the drops, like I would have done on Earth, turning in circles and giggled.

When I noticed Daryus standing there, staring at me with an unreadable expression, I impulsively took his hand. “Try it.”

He looked skeptical, so I leaned my head back and stuck my tongue out. “Try it,” I encouraged again.

Hesitantly, he copied my moves. The rain was coming down harder now, making it easy to catch not merely a drop but several at once.

“You are getting soaking wet,” Daryus observed after he caught a few drops, drawing his brows together.

I gripped the hems of my flowy dress that was getting more drenched by the second, and twirled in a circle, with my head still leaned back. I was twirling so fast that I predictably lost my footing and would have been splayed down on the ground, had Daryus’s hands not caught and steadied me.

“Easy there,” he mumbled against my head.

For a moment we seemed to be suspended in time, not even noticing the rain anymore, my head leaned against his solid chest, so close that I heard the steady thump, thump, thump of his heart.

His hand reached underneath my chin, his fingers clasped it, lifted it, and my arms moved around his neck even before his lips crashed down on mine.

I opened my mouth and his tongue flicked inside, meeting mine, creating an electrical current that surged through me, from the roots of my hair all the way down to my toes. His tongue was as ridged as his skin as the tip of mine explored it. Every rim I found sent a shiver of desire through me. My arms around his neck tightened just like his grip against my back. One of his hands began to explore my spine, followed it up and down, leaving goose bumps of yearning for more behind.

He leaned forward as if trying to protect me from the rain, but it was coming down so hard, there was no escaping it. With a grunt, he picked me up.

“You are getting soaked,” he said, his lips leaving mine.

“I don’t care,” I said, snug against his chest, drinking in his warmth.

“You humans are so delicate, I don’t want to get you sick.” He carried me through the entrance that had brought us to the roof.

Inside, he set me down and my body realized the truth of his words as it began to assault me with various complaints of wet and cold. I was still laughing though as I wrung parts of my skirt out.

“It did come down pretty fast,” I admitted.

“You should return quickly to your quarters before you truly get sick,” he advised in a harsh-sounding tone that made me look up into an inscrutable face.

I’ll be fine, lay on the tip of my tongue, still in a laughing mood, but something in his darkening features warned me off. He wants me to return to my quarters, my mind supplied, as if I hadn’t heard his words. But what I had thought of as friendly advice turned into something more of an order.

My heart skipped a beat. Had I gone too far? He kissed you, I told myself. Still, maybe that wasn’t how Pandraxian women behaved. Or maybe he didn’t want to kiss a human, maybe he was just swept up in the moment and realized now how foolish that had been.

“I should.” I nodded in response, proud of myself for keeping the hurt that wanted to creep into my voice out of it. I even managed, “Thank you for a wonderful evening, Your Imperial Highness,” before I turned in a quick circle to run out of the entryway leading back into his quarters and out his door, where I startled the guards who made no attempt at stopping me. After all, they were there to prevent people from entering, not from escaping.

All the way down the hallway, I felt hot tears run down my face and couldn’t have even said why.

“You are soaking wet,” Lady Natoi reproached me the moment I burst through the door into our suite, inadvertently using the same words Daryus had.

“I’m sorry,” I stammered, halting in my wild run, “I got… caught in the rain.”

“Well, I hope you didn’t get our emperor caught in this nonsense as well,” she tsked. “Go on, dry off. Hurry.”

I fled into my room and adjoining bathroom to take a hot shower, hoping to combat the chills gripping my body from head to toe, knowing the wet and cold weren’t truly the cause of it.