“If there’s anything I’ve learned over the past few years, it’s the opposite.” He pulled her close. “We could have given in to the mate bond when we first saw each other. And what then? You would have had a mate who was so stuck in his ways, he never would have figured out how to make you happy, and safe.”
“Let alone himself. And you would have had a mate who knew how to be the perfect assistant, but had no idea how to make her own desires heard.”
“I like this version of us better.”
“Me, too.” She traced his jawline with a lazy finger. “So, this ritual…”
“It’s not so different from the human version. A ring is still involved.” He thought of his hoard, arrayed in gleaming, orderly rows in his secret lair. “A great many rings. And other things.”
“Ridiculously expensive things, with hundreds of years of history, wars being waged over, and so on?”
“Some of them.” Green flames shimmered at the edges of his wings.
Nothing caught fire, or disintegrated. The patch she’d sewn up on the comforter didn’t magically unravel.
And she felt safe.
Corin leaned down to kiss her. “I believe I can explain the whole process to you now—”
“No.” Maya pressed a finger to his lips. “I trust you. Surprise me.”
She finished packing her bag. Spent more time with her mom, and was amazed at how easy it was to justtalktogether, now that they were talking again.
Because of course her mom had been scared, too. Not only of the magic, though how she dealt with shifting into a dragon in her small apartment Maya still couldn’t believe.
She’d been afraid of all the other things she’d kept neatly tidied away from Maya. The family connections that had frayed and broken while she herself was still a small child. How much she’d worried about being able to provide for her only daughter.
So many echoes and reflections of her own anxieties.It’s almost like we’re related, or something,she thought with a smile.
Corin’s mother offered to help track down those broken connections. But that was a task for another day, and one for Maya and Gabriela to take on together. She was so excited to rediscover her lost family, and find out where their dragons came from.
But it was an excitement that would have to wait. Today, Maya was leaving Tomás with his grandmothers.
And setting out to be claimed.
They traveled by helicopter, Corin stern in the pilot’s seat, Maya wide-eyed at the view stretched out below. Hideaway Cove looked like a treasure chest spilled open. She would neverforget how everyone there had welcomed her with open arms, as protective as the hills wrapped around the hidden bay. She’d had everything she needed to be happy there.
Almost.
She turned her eyes to Corin. Her protector. Her lover. Her dragon. He had saved her from everything she’d been so afraid of since she realized she was pregnant, as neatly as though he’d had a checklist of his own to work through. Tomás was safe. Whoever his biological father was, maybe they would find him, or maybe they wouldn’t. He had a father now, already. He would grow up surrounded by love, and other shifters, and the sort of huge family that terrified her slightly to think about. But in a good way. And she…
She had her own magic. Maybe it was locked away inside her, something to pass on to her children. Maybe it wouldunlockitself when she got older, as it had for her mom. But it was hers. She was part of this wild, magical world.
And the desperate longing that had plagued her since she first set eyes on Corin finally made sense. As did everything she’d done to protect herself from it and which had become armor inside and out. Armor against the outside world—and against her own heart, as well, until she couldn’t even see that she’d stopped letting herself want things for herself.
But that was all over, now. She understood the magic between them. She understood her own heart. And she couldn’t even regret it had taken her this long to discover the truth, because it meant she had her little dragon family.
Rugged coastline gave way to dense forest and, finally, sky-piercing mountains. Corin eased the helicopter into a descent over what looked like the broken path of a landslide. It was only when they were mere feet from the ground that she was able to see what the rockfall was hiding—a flat area the perfect size for a single aircraft.
Or a dragon, she thought as Corin helped her from the helicopter.
“No one else in the clan knows about this place,” he told her, leading her through a gap between two massive, cracked boulders. “Our main hoard is a shared secret, but the locations of our individual hoards are completely secret.”
He pressed a hidden switch on what she’d thought was just another stone, and the rock wall slid away.
The corridor beyond was casually opulent. The air was cool and fresh, and wall sconces lit marble tiles and polished walls.
“Your dragon’s lair?” She toed off her shoes and stepped forward onto a lusciously thick carpet.
