“You’re staring.” She didn’t turn around.
I dug my paddle in and pulled up alongside her. “Just making sure you don’t capsize.”
She glanced over, one eyebrow lifted. “Or you’re hunting for your dinner.”
I kept my face absolutely serious and lowered my voice. “You’ll know if I’m hunting you.”
Her lips parted. The paddle stilled across her lap as a flush swept up from her collar that she couldn’t blame on exertion. She held my gaze for a long, charged second before her mouth curved into something sly.
“Noted.” She dipped her paddle and pulled ahead with a clean stroke that sent a small wake rippling behind her.
I laughed. The sound rang across the open water and bounced off the far tree line, and my dragon rolled through my chest like a cat stretching in a patch of sun. This woman was going to be the death of me, and I planned to enjoy every second of it.
I matched her pace and pointed my paddle toward the far end of the lake where the shoreline curved inward and the trees crowded thick along the water. “Head that way. It gets quieter past the point.”
She adjusted her angle and followed my lead. We paddled in tandem, her strokes growing steadier with every yard we covered. Her shoulders had dropped a full two inches from where they’d been when she first stepped onto the beach. The white-knuckle grip on her paddle had loosened into somethingalmost lazy, her wrists rolling through each stroke with the easy rhythm of someone who had stopped thinking about the mechanics and started trusting her body.
This was the first time she looked relaxed around me. Genuinely relaxed. Her jaw had unclenched. The careful, watchful tension she carried in every interaction had dissolved into the quiet act of moving through water, and the bond between us responded by settling from its usual sharp pull into a steady, low warmth that spread through my ribs like embers.
I wanted to live inside this feeling.
The cove opened up ahead of us, a small horseshoe of still water sheltered on three sides by evergreens that grew right to the rocky edge. The surface sat perfectly flat, a mirror of sky and clouds.
Liz stopped paddling. Her kayak drifted forward on its own momentum and came to rest in the middle of the cove. I glided in beside her until our hulls bumped gently, and we floated side by side in the silence.
She rested the paddle across her knees and looked up. “What’s it like to fly?”
The question was so quiet I almost missed it. She asked it the way someone asks about a place they’ve only ever seen in photographs, equal parts curiosity and longing.
I thought about giving her a big answer. The physics of lift, the way the air thinned at altitude, the sensory overload of scent, wind, and thermal currents. All of it crowded into my throat.
I let most of it go.
“Free.” I watched a leaf spiral down from one of the overhanging branches and land on the surface beside her kayak. “It feels completely free.”
Her gaze was still fixed on the sky, and her jaw worked once, as if she were chewing on a follow-up question that she wasn’t sure she had the right to ask.
I leaned back in my seat, and the kayak rocked gently. “I could take you sometime.”
Her head whipped toward me. Her eyes went wide, and her fingers tightened on the paddle. “You’re serious.”
“Very.”
She scanned the shoreline, then the sky, then the shoreline again. “Won’t people see? A massive purple dragon soaring over Ashford would probably make the evening news.”
I grinned. “We have a glamour. It bends light and perception around us. To anyone on the ground, we’re invisible. They might feel a gust of wind or catch a shadow, and their brain fills in a cloud or a bird. They never look twice.”
She stared at me. The gears behind her eyes turned so visibly I could almost hear them clicking. “Reese has flown with Kade?”
“All the time.” I dipped my fingers in the water and let the cold stop me from getting too excited about the thought of Liz riding on my back. “It’s the only way to reach the hoard unless someone is an expert rock climber with a death wish and a lot of free time.”
Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. “The hoard.” The words came out hushed. “Can I see it?”
Heat flooded my irises, and I felt the shift as my eyes bled from blue to violet. The sensation pulsed through me, possessive and triumphant and desperate all at once, because she wanted to see our hoard. She wanted to stand in the place where we kept every precious thing we’d ever claimed, and my dragon recognized that desire for exactly what it was.
Liz gasped. Her hand flew to her chest, and she stared straight into my purple-lit eyes with an expression that held zero fear.
Wonder. Pure, undiluted wonder.
