“I’ve been in the turret watching you eat, sleep, and fix my garage door. Who does that?”
“Someone who’s been waiting eight years.”
“I don’t understand any of this, but I can’t stop thinking about you, even though the whole dragon thing terrified me.”
My beast urged me to say something, but Pax needed to express what he was feeling.
“Come inside and get warm and we can talk.”
“Okay.” For the first time since we’d met, I let myself believe that we could work this out.
He took my arm and led me to the house. When we reached the sign, he picked it up.
“You can throw that away.”
Pax tucked it under his arm. “Nah, I think I’ll keep it.”
TEN
PAX
I got Dray inside and pointed him toward the bathroom while I dug through my boxes for dry clothes. His clothes were wet and yet there was steam rising from his jacket.
“Here.” I shoved sweatpants and a hoodie through the door. “They might be a tad small, but they’re dry.”
I made coffee and heated up soup. When he emerged, his hair was damp, but it was no longer dripping. The pants were too short, but they made him look younger and more vulnerable.
I pushed a bowl toward him, and we didn’t speak as he devoured the soup. When he was done, some of the color had returned to his face.
“Thank you.”
“You sat in the rain. Soup is the least I could do.”
“I just wanted a chance to talk to you and explain all the plot holes in my story.”
I'd spent three days in the turret convincing myself this was bonkers. That I should pack up and leave before Dray bamboozled me into believing people could change into dragons.
And yet I’d witnessed it. But my very human brain refused to believe it.
Watching Dray suffer the past few days while refusing to give up had stirred something deep inside me. The same whatever it was that’d had me drooling over the guy since we met.
“I need to understand everything about us being connected.”
Dray set down his spoon. “Having a person on the earth be the one we get to spend our lives with ignores that we all have a choice.”
Exactly, and I was none too keen on having my power removed.
“You used the word decree, but the tattoo is just a nudge toward one another.” He explained that the tattoo was the universe’s sign that we were supposed to be together.
He cleared his throat. “But after or, ummm, if we are, you know, intimate, I’ll give you a bonding mark.” He added that two shifters would experience the connection immediately and mate by marking one another. Mate? I’d never even considered marriage. But mating?
“For you and me, we get to decide if we want to act on our connection.”
He made it sound very clinical, and judging by him taking up residence in my garden for three days, it wasn’t that.
And I was ignoring my own emotions. I thought about the years I'd felt adrift when I never fit in anywhere. Having a mate, someone I was bonded to, was comforting, but thatwasclinical and ignored love and desire.
“Tell me about the marking.”
