I can feel the thick rope of our connection already and I know that forevermore it will pull me closer to her.
I clear my throat, finding myself unsurprisingly emotional. “I’ve spent a long time here, my mate, a long time doing my duty and guarding the gate. I think… I think I’ve been waiting for you all of this time without knowing that’s what I was doing.” I feel another golden burst of warmth in my chest—like Echo’s soul is giving mine a hug, which spurs me on to continue, “I haven’t spent that much time with other people. I’ve spent a great deal of my life alone, but I’ll try to be a good mate to you, to give you everything that you could ever wish for.”
She presses a soft kiss to my chest, right above my heart and smiles up at me. I am a fierce dragon, a fighter, a protector, but her gentle smile is enough to make me melt like an ice cream left out in the sun.
“You’re not alone anymore, Finn. Neither of us are.”
I guess not. And that just about makes my chest explode with joy.
16
Echo
Bonded.
Bonded for life with a man I barely know.
And yet… it feels right. Natural. Things are meant to be like this.
What wasn’t right was Finn nearly dying on me before I got a chance to get to know him. I snuggle into his chest as he tells me about all his many years of guarding the gate. I’m not entirely surehow manyyears since I’m a little afraid to ask and to discover how many years he’s been alive or how much older than me he is. Although it doesn’t exactly sound like he’s spent his time gallivanting or adventuring, a huge chunk of his life has been here, guarding the gate from various creatures and beasties, risking his life, always alone. Or otherwise greeting the impromptu visitors that accidentally find their way through. He chuckles as he tells me about some of the stranger encounters and the sound makes his chest vibrate and fills me with a warm, tingly feeling.
Then I think about how he’s been alone for so long and it makes my heart hurt even though he says that he likes his own company better than anyone else’s.
“Well, better than anyone other than my mate,” he says with a shy smile and I blush in response.
It’s nuts really. We’re both bashful when he says these sweet words to me, and yet I didn’t blush at all when he was dirty talking like an absolute pro. Phew. I want to see what else he can do with that masterful tongue.
Moving away from my horny thoughts. Finn also tells me about his connection to the gate. It sounds almost like a diluted version of the bond we’ve cemented between us and I wonder if that means that he can never leave the gate, whether he can leave this place.
It kinda seems like something I should have asked about before bonding my soul to his. Does it mean that I won’t be able to leave for too long either? Can we spend time apart from each other without feeling the bond tugging us back together? What would happen if we wanted to go on a little jaunt away from the garden.
Seems I’m a bond first, ask questions later kind of gal.
We chat quietly for hours, learning more about each other and absorbing the information like two sponges. I tell him more about being a kid in the human world and he asks me a million questions about all the things he’s not familiar with, like hardware stores and asks me to describe all the jewelry quarters I’ve ever seen in great detail and it makes me laugh how excited he gets. The guy looks like he could snap your neck in two with just his fingers and then he gets all giddy and excited about the concept of an entire store that sells one of his favorite things—radiators. And then I remember the wall of them he’s got in his cave… lair… den, whatever it’s called, and I realize that he’s a kooky little weirdo.
My kooky little weirdo.
I skip most of the details of my years at the academy since they’re mostly filled with pain and loneliness and there will be plenty of time for us to depress each other with the tales of our sad lives before we found each other at another time. Right now though, I just want to bask in his presence. It feels like I’ve been given a gift and I’m going to allow myself to enjoy it.
The rational part of my brain knows that it’s weird to feel so comfortable with someone that I barely know. But we’re connected now. Not like I can feel his emotions or anything, but I can definitely sense him inside me… inside my chest, that is. He’s like a warm presence that’s just there. It settles something inside of me I didn’t realize was loose.
I chat away to him, telling him about the tours I’ve done over the past few years and he’s interested and enthusiastic about absolutely everything, wanting to know all the things I’ve done and seen. He gets this wistful look on his face when I tell him about the different places I’ve been to and it makes me want to take him there even more. Maybe he can get some vacation time from guarding the gate. Like, after we find Wren, we could all go off on a honeymoon or something with Soren and Brogan too.
Because I’ve not forgotten that I have two other mates that I’m currently not bonded to.
If it feels this good with just Finn as a part of me, my toes curl at how it’ll be once I slot the other two pieces of my soul into place.
I can’t wait.
While I talk to Finn, lying half on top of him, my hands idly play with his hair, he can’t seem to keep his hands off me either. He brushes them up and down my sides and in lazy circles over my back and I feel relaxed and languid, like I could just melt into the bed.
“I can’t get over how good it feels to touch you and be touched by you,” he rumbles with the cutest grin.
Gah, he’s absolutely the cutest, built like a brick house, master dirty talking man… dragon, that I’ve ever met.
After a while, he drifts off to sleep and, yeah, fine; I stare at his handsome face for a whole period of time. My eyes flick from his firm jaw to his plush lips that felt surprisingly soft on mine, to the little lines around his eyes and I sigh.
I certainly got lucky when they were doling out mate bonds.
