Chapter 9: King of Pride: Chapter 9

A few screams from the dining room shredded the restaurant’s hushed elegance into tatters. I gasped—not at the cries or the sudden death of light, but at the weight of a solid, muscled male body caging me against the wall.

One minute, I was teasing Kai as payback for his toy question in the car; the next, I was pressed flush against him, chest to chest, thigh to thigh, my lungs inundated with the heady scent of wood and citrus.

Our proximity carried me back to last week, when we’d found ourselves in a similar position in the piano room. Only this time, it was no accident.

The world went hazy at the edges as we stood there, frozen, Kai’s body forming a protective shield over mine. No words, just the rapid rise and fall of our breaths and the adrenaline leaking into the air like battery acid. It ate away at the fog until my senses sharpened enough to distinguish shapes in the darkness.

I tipped my chin up, my heart giving another unsteady thump when I saw Kai staring back at me. It was too dark to make out the individual contours of his face, but that didn’t matter. I’d already committed them to memory—the elegant slash of his cheekbones, the sculpted ruthlessness of his mouth, the heat simmering beneath the cool veil of dark, inscrutable eyes.

The lights had gone out—nothing nefarious, but shocking enough to trigger a flight-or-fight response—and his first instinct had been to shield me.

My heart squeezed. I fisted a handful of tailored cotton and swallowed past the dry husk of my throat. Despite the power outage, electricity sizzled around us, one spark away from catching fire.

Kai shifted, his arm curling around me like he could sense the tension creeping into my frozen muscles. At first glance, he might appear soft, all quiet politeness and scholarly charm, but he had the body of a fighter. Hard and lean, corded with muscles draped in the most elegant of fabrics. A wolf disguised in sheep’s clothing.

And yet, my inner alarms remained silent, my body pliant. For all the theoretical danger he posed, I’d never felt safer.

A buzz and the darkness vanished as suddenly as it’d materialized. Light seared my eyes; when I blinked away the disorientation, my dreamy, cocooned haze evaporated alongside it.

Kai and I stared at each other for an extra beat before we pulled back with the haste of people who’d accidentally touched a hot stove.

Oxygen rushed into my lungs, amplifying the thunder in my ears.

“We should head back—”

“They’re probably wondering where—”

Our voices tripped over each other in a cacophony of noise. Flags of color glazed Kai’s cheekbones, and his jaw tightened before he inclined his head toward the end of the hall.

Neither of us spoke during our walk back to the dining room, but the air weighed heavy with unspoken words. The side of my body facing him tingled with awareness. I hated how he could do that—make me feel so much when I’d vowed not to feel anything again toward men like him.

Rich, good-looking, and far too dangerous for my mental and emotional health.

“There you are,” Vivian said when we returned to our table. “Wasn’t that wild? I’m glad the restaurant was able to fix the outage so quickly.”

In reality, the power outage had lasted less than five minutes, but time stretched so languorously when Kai and I were alone that I was genuinely surprised the restaurant seemed so The earlier screams had subsided as quickly as they’d erupted, and other than a few rattled-looking diners, everyone was carrying on as if the blackout never happened.

“Do you know what caused it?” I smoothed my napkin over my lap and avoided looking at Kai, afraid even the tiniest glance would expose the tumultuous emotions whirling inside me.

The stab of jealousy at seeing him with Clarissa earlier, the breathlessness when we’d touched, the sensation of sinking into a deep, warm bath I never wanted to get out of when he held me. I shouldn’t be feeling any of those things, but I’d never been great at sticking to It was damn hard to keep someone out of my mind when life insisted on pushing us into each other’s path whenever possible.

“I’m guessing it was an electrical issue, but they have a backup generator.” Dante shook his head. “Of all the fucking nights for something like that to happen, it had to be tonight.”

“It didn’t disrupt our meal too much,” Vivian said, always the voice of reason. “I’m glad it wasn’t anything serious. The restaurant offered everyone a complimentary reservation that…”

I tuned her out. I was too busy making sure no part of my body touched Kai’s above or below the table. Judging by the stiff set of his shoulders, he was doing the same.

Nerves rattled in my stomach.

I reached for my wine and took a big gulp, ignoring Vivian’s glance of surprise. I wasn’t a big wine person, but I had at least one more hour in Kai’s company.

I needed all the help I could get.