“I do, Dana.”
Dana turned away from him, no longer able to cope with his look of adoration. No wonder he had been so devoted to her. It was written within the constellations of his very nature to appreciate her, and only her.
I should have known by the way he worshiped me that night in my bedroom.
She began grinding her teeth as Rux placed a hand on her forearm. It was a nervous habit she had as a kid, one she had thought she had grown out of.
“But how do you know, Rux?” Dana said to the window. “We barely know each other. How can I be your one and only?”
“There’s a smell,” Rux began. “A scent we can catch where we just know that this person is our mate intuitively. We would do anything for them, whether they wanted us or not.”
Dana felt her heart pang at the confidence in his tone descending toward the end of his sentence. After all, she was a human, and he must have known that their customs were drastically different.
Dana felt the scratchy sensation of grief creep into her throat before she spoke. She didn’t want to let him down because she knew acutely from her experience with parents what it was like to hold someone’s heart in your hands.
“That, honestly, scares me a little, Rux,” she said, still facing the window.
She felt Rux raise his hand to her cheek, then turned her head to face him. His hands were so soft, so gentle. She imagined that his heart was the same, sitting in a glass bottle in the center of a room, ready to be pushed over the edge of the table it sat on at a moment’s notice.
His eyes bore down on her with their brilliance, making that image in her mind all the more striking.
“I know,” he said tenderly. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.”
Dana wasn’t angry at him. It was more of a disappointment that surged through her, along with an anticipatory sadness.
Her eyes averted from his, and she grabbed hold of his wrist.
“This is a lot right now,” she said.
Rux nodded, but she didn’t have to be a shifter to sense that he, too, was sad. If she was his fated mate, he was going to have to understand and accept that it didn't work the same way for her.
“I’ve got all this with Jennifer and Griffin,” Dana said, “my audition and everything … I can’t sit around and worry about whether or not we are soul mates.”
Dana felt like she had plunged a knife deep into Rux’s heart. He let go of her chin, then turned away. His hands lay in his lap as he stared at the front of the plane.
Dana had the sudden urge to get down on her knees and explain everything to him. How different it was for her, how hard she had been working on her music. How he was a beautiful and wonderful surprise, but a surprise, nonetheless.
But Dana felt her walls rising, holding her legs to the seat. She touched his shoulder in a manner that was much more platonic than romantic.
“This doesn’t mean that we can’t still get to know each other,” she said, edging along the line of pleading.
Rux remained silent, his expression fading to a miserable sullenness.
Dana had decided a long time ago that she wasn’t going to dance around men and their emotions, so she let go of him and turned back to face the window.
She was irritated by him but also understood why he had been so hurt. It was his nature, after all, the way it was natural for birds in the wild to mate for life. He couldn’t control it.
But if she was his mate, then he had to let her find her way there. She never had a long-term partner. She had never planned her life with someone by her side, walking the path of life and achieving both their hopes and dreams.
She had no idea how to balance both and not sacrifice everything she had worked on for decades.
Dana leaned onto her hand, angry and determined not to give in to his silent treatment. She tried to think about Griffin, Jennifer, and Jennifer’s father, who may or may not be dead.
She tried to make a plan in her mind to figure out what had happened to him. She thought she could find an office or a filing system where he kept sensitive information. She could sneak in there somehow, simply by using her charms as a woman.
As she contemplated, Dana gazed at Rux, trying not to let him see her. He still had his hands in his lap and was bouncing his knee consistently. His facial expression had not changed.
They descended the jet about twenty minutes later, sitting in utter silence. Dana hated the fact that he was doing something so juvenile to her. However, she reminded herself that it was kind of exactly what she had wanted to have only Jennifer and her dad’s disappearance to focus on.