Mine, he called me.Mine to protect.
Maybe it’s time to find out what that really means.
SEVEN
SELENE
The smell of food wakes me.
Not the stale scent of canned goods from Grandma’s pantry, but fresh fish and herbs. A smell that makes my stomach growl before my eyes are fully open.
I stumble out of the bedroom, still half-asleep, and stop dead in the doorway.
Drayke is in my kitchen.
He’s standing at the counter, shirtless—because apparently shirts are optional for dragon shifters—gutting a fish with the kind of efficiency that suggests he’s done this roughly ten thousand times. A pile of wild berries sits in a bowl nearby. The morning light catches the hard planes of his back, the muscles shifting as he works.
Don’t stare at his back. Don’t stare at his back. Don’t?—
He turns. Catches me looking.
One eyebrow rises.
“Stalker much?” The words come out before my brain catches up. “Breaking into my cabin, cooking in my kitchen, standing there all—” I gesture vaguely at his entire torso, “like that.”
“You need to eat.” He turns back to the fish. “Training on an empty stomach is foolish.”
“And you need to wear a shirt.”
“Does it bother you?”
Yes. In ways I’m absolutely not admitting out loud.
“It’s distracting.” I head for the coffee supplies. “Hard to take survival training seriously when my instructor looks like he wandered off a romance novel cover.”
A sound escapes him. Low. Rough. It might be a laugh.
“Romance novel.”
“Don’t pretend you don’t know what you look like.” I fill the kettle, refusing to look at him again. “All brooding and muscular and ‘I’ll protect you with my giant sword.’”
“I don’t use a sword.”
“Missing the point, caveman.”
When I finally risk a glance, he’s watching me with an expression I can’t read. Something heated underneath the usual stoic mask.
“Eat.” He slides a plate across the counter. “Then we train.”
The fish is incredible.Flaky, perfectly cooked, seasoned with herbs I didn’t even know existed in the area. The berries are sweet and cold, still damp with morning dew.
I eat in silence for a few minutes, hyperaware of his presence. He’s found a shirt somewhere—one of the flannel ones from Grandma’s closet—but he hasn’t buttoned it, which is almost worse than no shirt at all. Now I have glimpses of chest to distract me instead of the whole thing.
“Where did you learn to cook?” I ask between bites.
“Four hundred years is a long time.” He’s leaning against the counter, arms crossed, watching me eat with an intensity that should be uncomfortable but isn’t. “You pick things up.”
“Four hundred—” I nearly choke on a berry. “You’re four hundred years old?”
