Excerpt: WindBlown by Jaime Samms
WindBlown by Jaime Samms
Release Date: 09/2009
Publisher: Loveyoudivine
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-60054-383-8
Print ISBN: 978-1-60054-372-2
Buy Link: http://www.loveyoudivine.com/index.php?main_page=document_product_info&cPath=30_51&products_id=548&zenid=813d407c6c1d4c348e22e5f8aa22bee9
Amazon Kindle: Windblown (Immortal Fire from His and His Kisses)
Blurb: Triann has spent years alone searching for any trace of the lover left behind when their world sank below the waves. Garith, swept out to sea on the ships meant to save the mortal people of their realm, never entered the sanctuary of Neo-Atlantis with Triann, and was doomed to spend his long years alone on the world of men. Time outside the sanctuary does not pass as quickly, however, and Garith's will has not been strong enough to keep him alive, despite his immortality. He's fast fading to just a haunting voice on the wind, and Triann is determined to bring him home before he fades to a breath and nothing. Neither Atlantian expects to encounter Tony, a man alluring and strong enough to tempt them both. That temptation could be their downfall. Or their saving grace.
Excerpt:
Wind blew through the trees, tugged at the edges of him. The distant sound of traffic, not really a sound to him anymore, but a sense, trickled through the forest. Like the glitter of the snow; nothing tangible. Just a presence he knew. Intimately. Along lonely tracks to empty cabins, deserted and left to the snow and ice for the season, he meandered, stopping, sliding through an iron gate, caressing stone walls, howling over the chimney opening, blocked out of the warmth, the comfort, to wander alone. He touched it all, with senses that went beyond vision and hearing, so that brilliance cut, sound flattened him, scent pulled him taut. He resisted, huddled in on himself in a crevasse between stone and mortar, where he clung to a vague feeling of safety and strength, and dark, soothing softness as reality tried to pull him back into the blowing void.
"Leave me alone."
"You are alone," a voice echoed across the empty expanses.
Shock shattered him in every direction. He fled. Bits of self skittered across ice, sank into mounds of snow, danced up trunks to rattle in dead, dry leaves. A chuckle followed everywhere.
"Who?" He quested downward from the brittle canopy. "Where?" He lifted out of the soft drifts.
"Settle down."
He showered from above and rolled together, huddling in a dark hollow of a tree trunk.
"Come out."
"No."
"What are you afraid of?"
The words sighed around him, not words so much as ideas, thoughts, feelings he used to know about. The presence settled in everything. It surrounded him. Maybe it always had. He snuck out of hiding and felt a smile.
"Who?" What made him want to know? There was a word, a feeling. He couldn't remember.
"Does it matter who I am?"
It mattered. Identity mattered.
The presence settled, smaller, denser, close, and he flowed out of hiding to find it.
"Lost."
"Yes." The chuckle danced around him again. "You certainly are. Do you know what you are? Where you came from?"
He retreated, away from the trees, toward the people, the sounds, the vibration of traffic, noise, life and the nearest things to memories he had. He waited on the curb again. Beyond the hill, the bus roared, the orange pinpoints of light, the rush of air. He threw himself in front of it. The presence followed as he spun and twisted about the roadway.
Why didn't it work? It never worked. The only time he knew himself was during that moment of shattering, the split second of disintegration, when he should have become nothing. It hurt so much more, this state of not being dead. Much more than not living ever had.