by Zoe Chant
“It's like a puzzle piece snapping into place,” Reese said, and she realized she had spoken her utterly mad question out loud. “Like waking up. Like falling but remembering at the last minute that you can fly.”
Say something, Tara told herself. You have to say something, you can't just look into his eyes and ... and ...
“That sounds awful,” she said, and it was like dropping an armful of plates onto a cement floor. Reese jerked back as if she had slapped him, but he recovered quickly.
“Why would you say that?”
“Because ... because what about what you want? What about the life that you had created for yourself, and now all of a sudden, you meet someone's eyes across a restaurant, or an airport—”
“Or ... an alley in the middle of the night?”
Tara's heart leaped, and she swallowed hard.
Nope, not even going to spend any time thinking about that one.
“Sure, or an alley, and then, there's someone else there in your life. There'someone who pulls at you, and does it matter what you want anymore? Does anything that you have worked for matter at all, or is it ... is it just gone, because of some weird trick of fate or biology or ...”
She broke off as Reese reached towards her and took her hand.
“It's all right,” he said, his voice surprisingly gentle.
“I don't understand how— ”
“Things change. That's the easiest way to put it. Things change, and even if you didn't see it coming, even if you didn't expect it, it happens. And you change.”
And what if every change in your life that happened like that lost you everything?
And his hand is so warm.
Reese had obviously recovered some of the calories he had spent on his fire-breathing stunt. There was a warmth to him that made her want to snuggle close, and it was almost as if she could see that warmth reflected in his copper eyes.
“Is it ... is it that easy to change?” she found herself saying. Why couldn't she stop looking at his mouth?
“It can be,” Reese said, and he pulled her into his arms.
It was one thing to look at Reese and to see how muscular he was. It was a completely different matter to be pressed against his body and to actually feel those muscles through his clothing, to feel him shift against her as his mouth claimed hers in a deep kiss.
Tara liked kissing, what little of it she had done. She hadn't loved it. It was just fun, and mostly, it was forgettable.
None of that applied to kissing Reese.
His hand came up to cup the back of her neck, and his mouth swept over hers with a sweetness that made her ache. There was nothing hurried or furtive about it. Instead, it was frankly sensual, sending sparks of pleasure flying through her body. She had never thought her mouth was terribly sensitive, but that was before she felt the tip of his tongue gliding along her lower lip.
She could taste the pepperoni he had been eating, but there was something else underneath it, something that drew her to deepen the kiss before he could. He made a soft satisfied sound when she experimentally slid her tongue between his lips, and then he sucked lightly, making her squirm.
Tara steadied herself by grabbing handfuls of his shirt, clinging as she continued the dizzying kiss. He tasted so good, and somehow, he felt even better. There was something about the way they fit together, something she had been waiting for without ever knowing that she was waiting for it.
She moaned slightly when he nipped her tongue with the utmost gentleness. Even when he was careful, she could feel how sharp his teeth were, making her recoil a little.
“Too hard?”
“No ... no, just sharp...”
“Here, let me show you how careful I can be.”
Tara stifled a surprised whimper as she felt the sharp edge of his teeth against her lower lip. She felt as if she were too sensitive by far, and that was before Reese brushed her hair back from her face, tracing soft kisses from her mouth to her ear.
This might be getting out of hand, Tara thought, and then he lapped at her earlobe, making her cling to him even harder. How in the world was he sending this much pleasure through her with just his light touch? What the hell would it be like if she let him do more...?
The thought of doing more with Reese sent a shock of pure need through Tara. She remembered what she had seen in the hall, and she imagined what his clever mouth would do in other places.
Mine. Perfectly mine, perfect for me, all mine, forever.
A shock of confusion and fear ran through her body, making her fall back. She had known him for less than twelve hours, and this wasn't her.
“Whoa. Wait, wait, wait.”
Somewhere in the back of her mind, she had been anticipating an argument, maybe even a struggle. Instead Reese drew back, keeping one hand on her waist as if to make sure that she was still steady.
“Are you all right? What? Too fast?”
Why did Reese have to look so very good after they had been kissing? His hair was rumpled, his mouth was red, and his eyes were as bright as new pennies. There was something almost unbearably sexy about how he was utterly focused on her, every nerve and every bit of his attention locked on her and what she needed.
It should have frightened her, but instead she felt a bone-deep kind of satisfaction settle on her, as if this was the way things should have been, and the world was finally set right.
“I'm fine, I promise. Better than fine, really. But seriously. I don't know you.”
“You do,” Reese said, and she could tell that he was slightly dazed himself. It was sort of nice to know she wasn't alone in being overwhelmed, but maybe it would be better if one of them was capable of being in the pilot's seat.
“No, I met you in an alley, just a few hours ago. I don't know you at all.”
“You do,” Reese insisted. “Can't you feel it? You know everything that matters.”
And the very worst part of it was that there was a part of her that agreed with him. That part had opened its eyes in the very darkest parts of where she assumed other people kept their hearts. It told her that yes, she did know him, yes, she trusted him, and yes, oh yes, did she want him.
It felt like the hardest thing she had done lately to stand up and away from him.
“I'm going to get some sleep,” she said, her voice harder than she meant for it to be. “In the morning, I'm going to want to talk with you and to figure all of this out. I just... I just can't right now.”
Reese studied her without moving. There was a need and a yearning in his eyes, and for a single moment, it took her breath away. There was no telling what might have happened if he continued to look at her like that, but then he shut it away as cleanly as if he had closed a door on it.
“All right. We'll talk tomorrow.”
Of course, after all of that, Tara couldn't sleep. The cool shower she took didn't help her see anything at all more clearly. After everything that had happened that day, she figured that she would be out like a light as soon as she got into bed. Instead, Tara tossed and turned like a pancake on a griddle. Finally, as the small alarm clock on the nightstand ticked its way to four in the morning, she gave up.
I want him, he wants me. At the very least, it'd be a hell of a ride, wouldn't it?
Tara knew that it was insane, but frankly, so was everything else that had happened that night. She might as well get some fun out of the terror and weirdness.
She padded across the hall to the room Reese had taken. She lifted her hand to knock, and then she dropped it to the doorknob instead. Maybe she would look at him and realize what a bad idea this was. Then she could slink back to her own bed without waking anyone up or embarrassing herself.
Reese's room was surprisingly bright. He had left the curtains open, and the moonlight coming into the room gave it a fairyland silver gleam. Reese was sprawled on top of the covers, and she remembered what he had said about running hot. He wore nothing but a pair of dark boxer shorts, and her eyes trailed along his
lean form, taking in his broad shoulders, the thin trail of hair down his chest, the softness of his mouth.
Handsome, so very handsome, she thought, and she wondered if she dared to touch him.
The answer that came to her mind and to her heart was a sudden, surprising and resounding yes. It startled her, because so very little in her life was that much of a yes. Everything else was usually much more of a maybe or a god, probably not. This? This was a yes.
Tara could picture it in her mind so vividly that her skin tingled. She would sit down next to him, trace her fingertips down his face, lean in and kiss those lips that, all right, had been nothing short of haunting her since she saw them, and he would open his eyes...
She came to sit on the edge of the bed and then blinked at the crinkling sound that came from underneath her.
What the — was he reading the newspaper or something before he fell asleep?
She reached for the papers just as Reese reached for the light by the bed. The room flooded with an amber glow, and for a moment, Tara was only amused by Reese's rather epic bedhead and confused squint.
“It's not what it looks like,” he said, which, yes, was far from the most reassuring thing she had ever heard in a near-stranger's bed.
She started to ask what he was talking about, but then she looked at the crumpled paper in her hand. It was a black and white photograph blown up to page size, grainy and taken with a long-distance lens. Tara, distracted, noticed the diner's back entrance first, and it was only after she had placed how very weird that was that she realized that she herself was the subject of the photo.
God, do I look that tired? That young?
She was tugging the garbage can back in the back door, hunched and hardly showing her best angle, but it was without a doubt her.
Tara raised shocked eyes to Reese.
Chapter 6
Don't be Uncle Wilf.
That was the first line that occurred to Reese, because the first thing he wanted to do upon seeing Tara's shock was to pull her to his chest and start breathing flame until she felt safe. Uncle Wilf had burned down the barn when his wife thought she saw a snake, and for the first time, Reese could sort of see how it got there.
Mate upset. Fix it!
To his relief, however, Tara looked nervous, but not actually panicked. Instead, she was searching his face, looking for what, he didn't know, but whatever she found made her nod. Never taking her eyes from him, she went to sit on the bed next to him. Reese thought he had never been more grateful for anything in his life.
“So I'm going to want an explanation,” Tara said. “A good one.”
“I have one,” Reese promised. “I absolutely have one.”
She was beautiful, and he couldn't get over the way she was looking at him. She trusted him, whether she knew it or not, like he trusted her, and...
“So...?”
Reese blinked, because oh, right, staring. Less of that, especially when his mate was giving him a chance to explain himself.
“A ll right. I've been looking for you, or someone in your family for a really long time.”
“How long?”
“Seventy years.”
“Wait, how old are you...?”
“About a hundred. Look, we're not going to get anywhere if you don't let me tell this story. Just ... trust me.”
He waited until she nodded, and then he continued. He knew when he recognized her as his mate that this was all going to come out sooner or later, but he really had thought he had a little more time. Reese took a deep breath.
“So the story goes that we, dragons, that is, are descended from the sun. It's where we get our fire from, why it doesn't hurt us the way it hurts just about everything else in the world. We're descended from the sun, and the symbol of that is our sunstones. These artifacts are handed down in our families, the most precious things we own, and, as far as we're concerned, the most precious things we will ever own. They're the things that allow us to really, truly, be dragons.”
“Um. You know, I don't know if this helps coming from an outsider, but I saw you french fry some dudes earlier today by breathing on them. As far as I'm concerned, that makes you a dragon.”
Reese grinned a little ruefully.
“It means I'm dragon-blooded, and it's not a trick I'm ever going to look down on. But it's not the full range of what I'm capable of.”
He sighed. This part was harder.
“Most people with dragon blood are like me. We're strong, we're tough, we're not scared of fire at all. With the sunstones, however, we become what it is we're supposed to be.”
“And that is?”
“About four stories tall, as long as a parking lot, covered in scales and capable of more than we could ever dream.”
“Like, long scaly tail and all?”
“Yes, short of a truly terrible accident. That's what I'm supposed to be. I'm the oldest male of my generation. My mother's got a sunstone, and she had one from her grandfather, waiting for me to get old enough to handle the transformation. And then when we went to get it ... it had been replaced with a fake.”
Reese willed the rage that echoed through that memory to pass through him. It was still hard to remember, the twin realizations that someone had breached the family vault and that someone had stolen his legacy.
“So we kept the missing sunstone as quiet as we could, gave out word that there had been something of a family argument which was why I hadn't received my sunstone, and I started on my search, alone.”
Tara gave him a puzzled glance.
“Why didn't your mother help? You said you had a whole family.”
“Because it might have tipped the other clans into figuring out what was really going on. The consequences for that could have been dire. The dragons of each family are its protection, its guardians, and its fighting force. If they had known that my mother couldn't suddenly give me something that would turn me into a scaly fire-breathing wrecking ball, they might have decided it was the perfect time to move in.”
Tara nodded. He didn't think she really understood how dire family warring could get with the dragon clans, but it was a start.
“So when I say that I've been looking for the sunstone most of my life, it's not an exaggeration. I've done other things of course, because it would be too suspicious not to, but the biggest thing in my world, the thing that mattered the most, was finding that sunstone.”
Tara bit her lip, shoving her hair back from her face. In the dim light of the lamp, he could see glints of bronze in the brown, almost metallic. His dragon hissed at her beauty, utterly uninterested in anything else.
The thing that mattered most ... well, it was until this evening, anyway.
Reese shoved that part of him to the back of his head again. That was only going to make things more complicated, not less.
“So where do I come in?”
“Right. So the thief went to ground. It made sense, they had stolen from dragons, and that's a good way to get turned into a rather large amount of floating ash. They'd taken the sunstone and a few other things that would probably set them up fairly well for a while. They didn't sell through the usual channels, they didn't brag, they didn't do anything that would have made it easy for me to find them. So I searched, and waited, and followed hunches and shook down informants, and finally, I had a name. It was Theodore Walsh of Boston.”
Tara frowned.
“I don't know who that is. Mom never mentioned any Theodore.”
“Probably wouldn't have. He was a pretty terrible human being, and stealing from a dragon's horde really just seems like the least of the things he was guilty of. Just so you know, as the dragon he stole from, that is saying something.”
Tara rewarded him with a giggle, and Reese felt himself warm a little.
“Of course by the time I heard about Theodore Walsh, he was dust and his estate had been scattered to the four winds. So for the last twenty, thirty years or so, I've been chasing one lead after another,
from one cache after another. The man had a lot of them, and it seemed like he had plenty of friends, colleagues and descendants to leave them to.”
Reese took a deep breath.
“A little while ago, I realized that I wasn't the only one searching out Theodore Walsh's descendants. The cultists you met tonight, they were looking too, and my cousin Alec intercepted some of their messages that made it sound like they were on to something. Those pictures of you, he picked them off some server hidden somewhere in Azerbaijan, and that was how I knew to get on their trail. That's why I was following them tonight.”
Tara shook her head.
“Believe me, if I had an inheritance from some crazy old relative who stole from dragons, I wouldn't be emptying grease traps and rejoicing in fifty-cent tips from ... no. It doesn't make any sense, and you're saying I have a family?”
Her voice cracked on the word, and something about that made Reese's heart break. He had seen edges of it as they talked previously, of the kind of loneliness that Tara had within her, but now he could see it fully in both the longing and the disbelief in her voice.
“No. All of my family are gone. We're not ... that is, none of us have anything that was remotely like your sunstone. It's gone, all right? It's all gone.”
Chapter 7
For a moment, Reese looked as if she had sucker-punched him in the gut. Tara had to resist a sudden and powerful urge to reach for him and to offer what comfort she could.
Wow, that's not right. I'm not one of life's comforting people
She shook her head.
“I'm sorry,” she said instead. “But there's nothing. Less than nothing.”
“I don't accept that.”
She blinked at Reese's tone and the way he sat up straight.
“You're going to have to, I'm afraid,” she said cautiously. “If I still had anything from that time, I'd be happy to let you look, but ... but I don't. There's nothing.”
Reese shook his head.
“I don't accept that,” he repeated. “There's never ... there's never nothing. Everything leaves behind traces, marks of what happened, evidence. I need to know more.”