She made a face. ‘My father was an amateur astronomer. He called all our dogs after planets.’
‘All your dogs?’
She ticked off fingers. ‘First there was Mercury, then Saturn, Jupiter, and now Pluto. He’s almost ten years old.’
Darius looked at the woman in front of him and knew in that moment with a certainty he hadn’t felt since he’d woken up in the hospital that he had definitely landed in some kind of alternative universe. And that he did not belong here. Even though he found it appealing in ways that he sensed he should not.
Sofie started walking towards the house. ‘Come on, let me show you around. You’ll be needing to rest.’
Darius felt a flash of assertion—he never rested. He usually pitied people who displayed such mortal frailties. And yet...she was right. He could feel uncustomary fatigue deep in his bones.
For a moment Darius hesitated, frustration biting again at the dense fogginess in his brain. The truth was he didn’t really know anything about himself. He resented this awful weakness, this not knowing.
Sofie was standing in the doorway, waiting. As much as she intrigued him, he suddenly wanted to flee, as if sensing that by stepping through that door he would be risking never going back to who he was. Never knowing.
He saw the car in his peripheral vision and was filled with an impulse to just get in and drive away. But he didn’t even know if he could drive. And where would he go? He was on an island. He had no money. No ID.
He had no choice but to stay. For now.
After a moment’s hesitation Darius went towards Sofie, not liking the fact that she was literally the only solid thing he had to latch on to for the moment. Not liking the sense of powerlessness he felt. At all.
Not even she, with her soft curves and violet eyes, could eclipse that right now.