Carpathian 06 - Dark Fire

climbed to his eyes, spreading heat through her body. "Safer? Is that what you think? It is always far safer to do what I wish."
    He hadn't moved, not a single inch, despite the pressure she was putting on his chest. Tempest sighed softly. "You would say that. Personally, Darius, I'm at the point where I might run screaming into the forest, or doubt my own sanity and have myself committed. Don't push me any harder right now."
    "Do you think you could stand on your own without the tree trunk supporting you?" Amusement tinged his voice.
    Tempest patted the tree trunk, reluctant to find out. She was quite proud of the showing she'd made so far. No fainting. No hysterics. None of the things a sane woman would do. But she didn't want to fall on her face. Her long lashes swept down for a moment. Darius easily read the faint self-mocking humor mixed with concern on her transparent face, the sudden determination just before she shifted, ducking beneath his arm to stand on her own. He liked that, her sense of humor, her ability to laugh at herself in the most extreme situations.
    She grinned at him. "Well, it worked."
    He held out his hand. "Come on, honey. We can just walk and talk."
    She regarded him suspiciously. "Just walk and talk. That isn't code for some other weird activity, is it?"

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    Darius actually laughed. His fingers tangled with hers, captured her hand, and brought it against the heat of his body. "Where do you come up with your nonsense?"
    Her emerald eyes sparkled at him. "I can get worse. Much worse."
    "You are trying to scare me away."
    She laughed in spite of herself. "I think you do a better job at scaring people than I do. You win hands down. No contest."
    His arm slid around her waist to lift her smoothly over a fallen log. He didn't miss a stride, and she couldn't stop herself from comparing him to the jungle cat she now knew he could become. He moved in the same silence, with the same grace. "What does it feel like to change like that?"
    "Into a leopard?" Darius wondered at her question. He hadn't thought of what it felt like in hundreds of years. The mystery. The beauty. How wondrous it was to shape-shift. Her question brought up the total exhilaration, the awe he'd felt as a child experimenting until he perfected the art, until he could shift in midair, on the run, even when using preternatural speed. "It is an incredible feeling of power and beauty to experience the essence of the animal, its speed and energy and stealth, all miraculously in my own body."
    Tempest moved with his rhythm, ambling nowhere in particular. He was so perfectly proportioned, his body its own miracle, strength and power in every muscle, every cell, and he carried it with a casual ease of which he didn't even seem to be aware. "It's fascinating when I communicate with an animal," she admitted. "I would love to be able to actually see things through their eyes, smell and hear things as they do. Can you do that? Or are you still really you?"
    "I am both. I can use their senses, their abilities, yet I can also reason, as long as nothing triggers an overwhelming instinct."
    "Like a survival instinct."
    Darius glanced down at the top of her head. The moonlight was spilling through the trees, touching the red-gold of her hair to turn it to flame. She was so beautiful, he had no choice but to run a caressing hand over the silken strands. "That is what you are to me. A survival instinct. You feel it, too."
    Her long lashes lifted enough for him to catch a glimpse of vivid green before she looked away. "I don't know what I feel." She pulled her hand away and sent him a quick look of censure. "We aren't going there, remember? You stay a foot away from me, and you don't do any one of those things I mentioned to you before."
    His husky answering laughter sent flames dancing in her blood. She glared at him. "Laughing is out, too."
    He caught her small waist and lifted her easily to the top of an enormous downed log, so that the two of them stood close, his hands resting lightly on her hips as she looked down. Ferns grew abundantly on the forest floor, shades of green carpeting the area in a curious aqua in the blue of the night.
    The scenery was so beautiful that she couldn't find her voice, not even to reprimand Darius for forgetting to measure the inches between them. She tried not to be aware of his hands on her, touching her as if she belonged to him. He