"Hey Alex!" I called, rushing out onto the porch with his suit coat in my arms. As the cool of the evening hit my bare legs, I came to a halt before nearly crashing into him. "You forgot your coat on the chair in the study," I said, gazing up to see a quiet cleverness flash in his eyes.

"No, I didn't," he admitted, his voice soft. The light in the front room shone through the screen door to highlight his hands in the dimming day as he took the coat from me. "I sensed you wanted to ask me something after things broke up in there. I was hoping this would provide us with a private moment."

"O-oh? Um, well." I looked down at the porch, the floorboards dark in the twilight. It was true. I did have a question. But maybe it wasn't my place to ask. I wavered, taking a step back and staring off into the distance at the dark sky beyond the valley as it flashed—lightning without sound, or heat lightning to those who didn't know any better. Shortly after having ordered Indy to clean up the wreckage from their tussle, Micah left to burn off the excess power in his body.

Because he didn't want to touch me with a live charge going through him. A pang of angst twisted my middle.

"Your question?" Alex broke the quiet between us. "Eos?" he tried again, and I heard a porch board creak. Something fluttered in my stomach when he moved a step closer.

Swallowing down my nerves, I was finally able to say, "I don't understand her."

"Your former group alpha."

"My aunt. Or, at least, that is what she has been to me for as long as I can remember."

He took another step forward. The light coming from the house made blocks of bright patchwork across his figure, while his face remained in darkness, hidden above the light. His shadowed expression was open, listening.

"Indy's a non-feeling type. Well, limited feeling," I reworked my phrasing. "She's the head of the company she and Mom started, and she governs it with a strict, no nonsense approach. Always in control." Unless something happened to set her off, and then all that control flew out the window. Taking a breath to settle myself, I admitted, "Back in there, just now, I have never seen her like that. I've never—sensed that from her. She was...highly emotional."

"Because it was a battle of passion. Quite unusual for their kind, really." He turned while saying this, until I was viewing his profile. He glanced at me sideways, his expression going neutral when he added, "In all honesty, he shouldn't care as much as he does."

"What do you mean?" An anxious hiccup fluttered in my chest.

Alex shifted to gaze into the distance where the night continued to flash. "Theirs is a culture much unlike what you know from a human perspective. In fact, it is distinct from all other elemental societies."

"What's so different about them?" I asked, watching as he lifted his chin to a gust of wind, the forceful air thrusting his damp hair up and back.

"The lightning culture has no defined institution of family. No mothers, no fathers. The young are taken to be raised according to their gender and pedigree. Males are raised in a monastery setting of sorts to be warriors and guardians. Non-genders, being born without electrical charge, can assimilate into human society the best. Many of these are assigned mentors to be educated. Your aunt would have been placed as such. She grew up with individuals whose only job was to care for her basic needs as they trained her for physical plane fieldwork. She would have been conditioned to regard humans with indifference, spurning all attachment."

"That's—a lot I didn't know." Indy was taught to regard me without emotion?

An image of Mom's time-hazy face, brown eyes framed by short, black hair, floated through my thoughts, and I swallowed at a pang of bitter sadness. Lightning devvis didn't have a mother or a father? To never have had such a relationship, no, I couldn't imagine how an entire society could be like that.

A single, prolonged lightning flash lit up the entire valley, and I took a shuddering breath to say, "Indy told me she pulled Micah out of training at an early age."

"He must have been very advanced to be trusted to keep control of his power while protecting a fragile, human child." Alex shrugged, and then added, "Well, fragile by our standards and not entirely human." He smiled at me then. "It's because of you, you know," he said after clearing his throat. "That they've overcome their cultural upbringings. They've both grown to care." Instantly skeptical and ready to protest, Alex raised a hand for me not to. His eyes were adamant. "You affect the people around you, whether you realize it or not."

"Not," I said softly, wondering why he would perceive me as someone who could affect people.

The glow from the screen door drew my attention to the coat jacket draped over his arm, the thing that had given me the excuse to go after him. It made me remember I still hadn't asked my original question.

"You do affect people," he insisted again. "Given time, as you mature, your abilities will also mature, and so will your influence on others. Someday you're going to wow us all." He took another step closer and my pulse increased as his accented voice went low, almost a whisper when he added, "In fact, I'm already kind of awestruck."

I stepped back and crossed my arms over my chest. Why would he say something like that to me when he'd told Indy he was withdrawing his claim?

"Eos?" he prompted when I turned to stare at the screen door, wondering if it would be rude to go in now. He had his coat. "Aurora," he tried again, switching to my given name when the epithet didn't solicit a response. "I am glad I could be the one you talked to about this matter. The situation with your aunt must be confusing."

I made a soft sound of agreement, and then backed up some more.

Taking in my retreat from him with a thoughtful gaze, Alex glanced at the porch steps. "Before I take my leave, would you like to ask the question that was on your mind when you came out here?

My original question... I gazed out again at the distant lightning. My mouth pressed into a tight line.

Balance faltering, I swayed forward when my attention snapped back from across the valley. His hand shot out between us to hold my shoulder, steadying me, and startled, we paused there, a moment of staring into the other's eyes catching us both off guard.

"Aurora..." The coat forgotten in the bend of his arm, his other hand was suddenly under my chin. Alex tilted my face toward his.

"I wanted to know if you were still going to train me?" I blurted out, unsure of what he was going to do. He'd drifted so close his bangs brushed my forehead, but he was frozen there, probably uncertain of what he was doing himself as a panicked light flashed through his eyes.

My heart pounded as he told me, "Things are going to be different now." His fingers were still touching my face, causing shivers.

"I know that things are different." I lifted my chin and took a step back to put space between us. "They have been ever since you withdrew your claim on me."

"That agreement was with your former Alpha," he reasoned, his voice going deep to stir my middle. "It wouldn't matter anyway now that your group has a new Alpha—since he is your Alpha. All of what was is void, including the agreement which allows you to reside in my territory." He touched my shoulder. "This is going to make things more difficult. But not impossible."

I looked at his hand, then lifted my gaze to his.

"Far beyond impossible," Alex reiterated when his upper body lit up with another bright flash, and a pulse of emotion jumped through him.

"What is?"

"Well, training you, for one," he told me. "When I draw up a new contract, I'll make sure one of the stipulations for you being here is you go through a period of training. You are only going to get stronger once your system is clean of the ambrosia, and you will need to be taught. I'll offer myself as your teacher, though I can't see him being very open to the offer."

"Then I'll sign that part of the contract myself." My hand came up to grip his wrist, pushing it away. "I can do whatever I want. And I want to learn how to develop what I am."

So, educating me, this was what was "possible." Keeping my respiration even, I pushed at his touch again, needing it farther away even as the attraction his presence held over me beckoned.

From the very first time our eyes met in the rain, I'd sensed there was a strong force between us. We experienced something instinctual, perhaps? It was hard for me to describe it exactly. How could you describe an unquenchable lure for which there were no words?

I took in a deep breath—and pushed him and the attraction away.

He continued to gaze down upon me, doting, admiring, almost... longing? No. It can't be longing.

I shook myself free of his emotional signature, but he continued to edge toward me. "Alex," my voice cracked. "Alex, please. Stop."

"Aurora, I don't think you understand why I withdrew my claim." He allowed me to push him away but wouldn't permit any more space between us.

I peered up at him through my hair. "I don't need any verbal explanation, Alex. If I wanted to, I could read your reasoning straight from your heart."

"But you haven't?"

I blinked widely when he suddenly moved fast, flash-stepping to my other side to block my retreat inside.

"No," I said, crossing my arms. I turned to stare off at nothing, trying not to let on that he had startled me with how quick he was. Alex is faster than Micah. "I'm not going to, either. I respect you too much, Alex, and therefore I respect what you decide. And if you think it best to be my teacher and nothing more, then I'll just—"

My feet were no longer on the porch.

I found myself swept up into his embrace, that penetrating magnetism pounding up through me. "You silly girl," he murmured. "You silly, wonderful girl. Why do you act as if I don't want you anymore?"

"Because you don't!" I tilted my head back to search his eyes. "I thought you had found somebody else."

His forehead leaned against mine. "There could be nobody else. I have found you, my siren," he whispered firmly. "You called out to me, and I will never be able to go to another. Your heartbeat would never allow it."

"I don't understand."

"Your heartbeat, even in the very beginning, it beckoned me to you, as the moon herself summons the ocean. My brothers agreed when I told them about you. You must be my siren." He made my pulse leap when his thumb brushed the rise of one breast over the top of my shirt. "You have to be."

His eyes caught the light from the open door, and I could finally see it, his heart throbbing as it sought out a similar rhythm to my heart. I watched his inner-life force pulsate desperately with the desire to be joined with mine—and then I could sense it, his beating heart. Like the reverse-melting of some round, wet candy, the hardness of it materialized in my mouth, at first as small as a grain of sand, it began to grow in size and strength.

I pressed the secondary palpations to the roof of my mouth with my tongue as he told me, "Your body has finally settled into its natural rhythm, a she-devvi clothed superbly in a human's body. Your new heartbeat sings to me—even tonight, back in the study—it resonates as if you have been perfectly tuned for me, and I can't help but respond. No one else on this plane or any other exists with this pitch. Nobody like you exists." Alex brushed his lips across my ear to send a jolt of our combined heartbeats shimmying down my body. He then took a breath to say, "But your sense of self is human. You may have been born standing on the border between the two planes, but you were raised to be human. Your reasoning and identity have been cultivated as such, so that is how I am going to approach you."

He wanted to win me over by appealing to my human side? No contractually arranged courtship?

"I'm not going to ruin this—" He pressed his lips once to my neck and then to my cheek, and I swear I misplaced the feeling in my toes.

My feet were on the porch again as I stared out into the darkness. Alex was gone, his pulse vanished from my mouth. I shifted the fabric hanging over my one arm, the light weight of it comforting, still warm; Alex had left his coat with me.

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Can I get a VOTE for a "misplaced the feeling in my toes" romantic moment?  :)