*I’m not scared! We’re gonna get them this time!*
The boy leaped in the air. The girl followed suit, but must have got too excited, and shifted mid-jump. She would have landed on the concrete in her seal form, but the man walking with them scooped her out of the air in time.
The mention of theother dragonmade Corin frown.
Long before Maya had made this town her home, Corin had reason to do business in Hideaway Cove. He knew of the town as a sanctuary for shifters, and had purchased property here in case that sanctuary might become useful to one of his own people. Through a number of shell companies, of course, lest other dragon clans catch on and try to do the same.
Like Montfort had. And failed, spectacularly.
And now he had another reason to keep his foothold in this town: to protect Maya. He located the house he was looking for from the air and landed in the front drive.
Dissatisfaction itched beneath his scales even after he shifted back into human form. Maya’s little annex was chaotic perfection; his own property was perfectly maintained, modernized, luxuriously styled sterility.
Tomorrow, that would change. He had people coming to deal with everything the place needed to become livable, rather than a catalog feature. They would be there in the morning.
For now, he was alone.
With his thoughts, his dragon, and the memory of the pain in Maya’s eyes.
Bitterness rose in his throat. He had never asked her about Tomás’s father. When he’d first met, she was already pregnant, and he had used that as another reason not to pursue her: she was already some other man’s beloved. He had stumbled into the middle of a love story already well underway. His dragon had been distraught—the greatest treasure of his life, stolen before he even knew who she was.
Not stolen. The woman who ought to have been his mate hadchosensomeone else, and there was no stealing her back.
By the time he figured out the truth, it was too late.
And it wouldn’t have changed anything, anyway. His power was still too dangerous.
He ate a meal he couldn’t have described if threatened at gunpoint, and showered, memories still plucking at his mind.
I wasn’t ready then.
Was he ready now?
She should be yours! Tell her!His dragon’s frustration made his eye twitch. In the bathroom mirror, gleaming oil-shadows rolled over his irises. He let out a slow breath. Not a snarl. Barely even a sneer. A slow, long, in-control breath.
We both know I cannot do that.
His dragon didn’t speak, but the memories it spat at him spoke for it: Maya’s shock as he pulled away. The blossoming hope he hadn’t seen on her face until it shattered.
And older memories. Pieced together as though his dragon had been working on this argument a long time. He hadn’t known what Maya looked like when she was afraid until that fateful day she brought Tomás to the office and the boy stole his watch. She held herself in such clipped control, he hadn’t recognized the signs for what they were until he’d followed her to Hideaway Cove, meaning to protect her, and all her armor had crumbled around her.
She had been scared before, and he hadn’t seen it. Moments of silence quickly filled when her colleagues asked about her pregnancy or her relationship. A smile too wide and too laughing when she talked about her little baby starting to crawl, to babble, to do the hundred other things babies did. He’d been too busy nursing his own grief that he wasn’t the child’s other parent experiencing those things with her, and now he understood all too well what her forced laughter had been hiding. A child who transformed into a creature that shouldn’t exist; a magic that turned her world to splinters around her.
He had never protected her. He had so entirely failed at protecting her that at the very moment he could have saved her, when her child stole the first piece of his hoard from beneath Corin’s very eyes, she’d instead run from him.
Why was he here? Why did he think he could help now, when he never had before?
He could not even conquer his own power.
He splashed water on his face and stared at himself in the mirror above the sink. His dragon stared back. Possessive. Relentless.
And with a magic that could destroy his mate’s life even more than he had already.
His heart had almost stopped when Maya mentioned his ‘shadowy’ magic. There was no way she could know the truth about it. And if he had it his way, she never would.
Duskfire. That was what it was called, the shadows she had seen without knowing their danger. And why he had never dared claim her.
He was always in control of it. Except when it came to Maya.
