Enchant the Dawn Read Free

jaw. He didn’t need to see her figure to know how his body would react to her.
     
    Once his eyes met hers, every part of him reached out to meet her. Despite the cold, he felt the rush of blood as his body made its demands known. The hushed silence was broken with the thrumming of vibrant power. The force that he had felt coiled with him for his entire life began to break free. That energy had found its complement and it reached out with living tendrils to reach for its other half.
     
    Her eyes held the warmth of the earth and the heat of a banked fire. They were innocent and wise, shocked and knowing, aching and fulfilled all at the same time. Most of all, they held a question for which he knew he himself was the answer. He felt a wave of her own power extend from her like a river that had broken through a dam. The force of it knocked him back a step and though he was unaware of it, it did the same to the motley band assembled around him. After only a moment, all of that energy seemed to flow backward into her, pulling part of his soul with it. He kept staring into those deep brown eyes, unable and unwilling to look away. She glowed for a moment, a look of fear and ecstasy upon her beautiful face. Then she collapsed bonelessly upon the patchy snow.
     
     
     
    He expelled a breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding and shook himself. He was inalterably different now. Connected on the deepest level to this Gadgi woman. This perfectly normal American girl.
     
    She had been a goddess moments before. A part of him would always see her as such. In the growing light of day she was a modern woman, like a thousand others you could pass on the streets of New York. Light brown hair, brown fur coat, lovely bare legs beneath that coat. She looked exhausted and fragile now, when a moment before she’d held the lifeblood of the universe in her thrall. He was at her side, his arms around her before he was even aware that he had moved. His ears once again regained their use and he suddenly realized that he and his woman were surrounded by all the others, the women clucking concern and the men shifting nervously from foot to foot, not sure how to be useful.
     
    He had no idea what had happened, other than the forging of their connection. It scared him more than he could say. He’d fled so far away from what he knew because he thought he could escape his fate. Instead he’d run right into it. He knew if he left, he’d never again feel whole. He knew now that up until today he’d never felt whole in his life. But a part of him wanted to run again, to make sure than he and especially she, would be spared the deeper pain of separation should they build a life together.
     
    But Mary and Giuseppe and Irene and even Tommy would not let him just escape so easily. June was already patting the girl down, coming up with a clutch purse in a deep pocket of the coat. Mary bent down with difficulty and was feeling for a pulse.
     
    “Girl’s fine. Just fainted is all,” Mary declared in her smoky voice. Daron merely nodded in response. He should have told her not to bother to check. Daron knew in his bones, without a doubt that his ashavi was healthy. Whether she was “fine” was a completely different matter. Americans always simplified things to a ridiculous extent. He was not sure either of them would ever be “fine” again.

 
    Chapter Three
     
     
     
    Sophia was warm and comfortable. In fact, she was warmer than she could remember being in a long, long time. Not the sticky, sweaty heat of a New York City summer, or the muggy breathlessness of an Ohio August heat wave. This was the happy kind of heat that welled up from inside and kept your soul warm and toasty. This was her heartfire burning brightly, a cheery blaze that made her feel as though she was home.
     
    But she’d never been here in her life. Deep in a forest she’d never set foot in, surrounded by the tallest mountains she’d never set eyes on, she felt