For a moment, she’d felt something like hope. Corin Blackburn could turn into a dragon, too?
Maybe he could help her.
Reality had crashed in like a polar blast. She’d worked for Corin’s grandfather for years, and for Corin himself most of the last year. She could translate every flicker of expression that passed over a Blackburn man’s face.
And the determined shadows in the corners of his eyes weren’t those of someone who wouldhelpher. Corin would take over. He would take what little control she had left over the mess her life had become, and fix things.
But she didn’t trust whatfixedwould mean to him. She’d thought she knew everything about him. But she hadn’t known he was a dragon. And if she’d missed that, what else might she have missed?
So, she’d done the first smart thing she’d done in over a year.
Corin had told her to wait where she was. Instead, the moment he turned his back, she ran.
All the way to a small town on the edge of nowhere. Hideaway Cove. She’d only known the town’s name because her friend Felicity was there on a work assignment. With nowhere else to go, she had put it into her map app and driven like the devil himself was after her.
What she’d found was beyond anything she had ever imagined. A town where people like her son could live openly. Becausethere wereother people like him. So many that there was a name for them: shifters. Living in secret among normal humans like her who had no idea.
And running had been the right choice, because Corin had chased her all the way to the town boundary, until the town’s guardian had turned him back.
Maybe she could have talked to him then. Found out what the fuck that was all about.
But she hadn’t, and that had been the best choice she’d made in a long time.
She’d made it. She’d fixed thingsherself.She was building a life here in Hideaway Cove. Everything. Was. Perfect.
And yet. Six months later, his words still echoed in her mind.
We take what’s ours.
He’d been talking about treasure. But that wasn’t what her heart and … other parts of her body thought, late at night when the world was quiet around her and there was nothing to distract her from the need pressing against her skin.
Dragons took what was theirs and, god save her, she wanted to be his.
“Dummy,” she murmured to herself, checking the time. If Tomás didn’t wake up soon, she’d have to go in and rouse him before it was time to drop him off with his carer and head to work herself.
If Corin Blackburn had wanted her to be his, she would have been. The man—thedragon—was an unstoppable force. Whatever he wanted, he got.
But he hadn’t wanted her. He’d wanted his watch back.
“I am happy with my life,” she told herself quietly. “Tomás is safe here. He’s going to grow up around other shifters. I’m safehere. I have friends and a job that doesn’t take over my life, and a nice house to live in, and…”
The hairs on the back of her neck rose.
The house was still silent—but it was adifferentsort of silent. One she’d learned to be wary of.
“Tomás?” she called out. “Tom-tom? Are you awake, baby?”
No answer but the very slightest change in the texture of the air.
“Oh,shoot.”
Almost everyone in Hideaway Cove was a shifter, with enhanced shifter senses. They could hear a pin drop across a crowded room. But she had been a dragon shifter’s mom for a year and a half now, and her own senses, though only human, had become very specialized.
She crept up the stairs. Surprising Tomás was a bad idea: last week, he’d flown out the window in shock, and the whole neighborhood had come out to watch her rescuing him from where he got stuck on the roof. She still felt guilty at the memory.
“Hey, little baby. It’s time to get up for the day! Rise and…”
His crib was empty.
