Montana Dragons Collection: A BBW Dragon Shifter Series

by Chloe Cole

  "Haul yourself out of bed, soldier," he muttered to himself. If he didn't feel like such shit from this flu or whatever, it wouldn't be a problem. He hadn't told anyone about it because he didn't want his bunker mates to worry. They were worried enough with the imminent attack Etienne's uncle warned them of during a navsat phone call to the elder dragon.

  It was clear he wasn't at all pleased with Etienne's decision to bring Taya into danger, or to defend a human that should have, as Rene said, "kept his nose out of places it didn't belong”.

  Mina he didn't mention at all, but Dan saw the pinched look on her face when Rene refused to acknowledge her. Asshole. So far, the French were batting a thousand in his book and he could only hope that Mina's love and trust in the Beauchamp men wasn't misplaced.

  In response to Rene's warning, though, the four of them had spent the past few days discussing defensive positions and attack strategies endlessly. Dan had to admit he was pleasantly surprised at how well-versed both Etienne and Mina were when it came to military maneuvers, and even Taya had some interesting observations, so at least that was something.

  But the constant hashing over the same material was beginning to get on everyone's nerves.

  He needed a shower and he needed coffee and it was a hard decision which to get first. The shower would ease the aches in his body. The coffee would rouse him from his less than sharp state. Deciding on the practicality of being alert for anything that might happen, he pulled on his clothes and headed for the mess hall.

  As he expected, all three of his compatriots were gathered there. Taya placed a black coffee in front of him and Mina barely spared him a glance, per usual.

  "Bless you," he said to Taya, holding up the mug. His head still felt like it weighed a thousand pounds and he sucked down half the hot brew in one swallow.

  "Are you okay, Dan?" Taya asked, her brow furrowed in concern. "You look like shit."

  "I'm fine. I just worked out a little too hard last night."

  Etienne snorted. "Really? That gym doesn't have enough weights in it to exhaust a child."

  "Leave him alone, Etienne," Mina said.

  "Cherie..." started the dragon shifter.

  "It's none of your business," she said more sternly.

  For a moment Dan thought Etienne was going to start muttering in French again, like he did in short spells the past few days, but he just nodded.

  There was no getting around it.

  They were all going stir crazy in this bunker.

  Etienne went to the coffee pot and poured himself what amounted to half a cup with a groan.

  "That's the last of the coffee."

  "We're also running low on anything but canned goods," offered Taya.

  "And I'd feel better," said Dan, "if we had more ammunition for the rifles."

  "Then it's decided. We'll have to go to town and get supplies." This last came from Mina, but she looked anything but happy about the prospect.

  "Dan and I will go," announced Etienne.

  "Think again, dragon," said Mina. "Both of you manly men would stand out in any crowd. If anyone should go, it will be me and Taya. We can blend in better with the suburban housewife crowd."

  "I'm not letting Taya go into a potentially dangerous situation without protection," growled Etienne.

  Dan's anxiety relaxed at the words Etienne spoke. He didn't like the idea of the women going into town alone either.

  Mina glared at the shifter. "As if I'm not battle trained."

  Etienne blew a snort of frustration. "That is not what I mean, Mina, and you know it. Rene told us he didn't know what was coming or in what numbers. Two Valkyries, no matter how well trained, may not stand up to them."

  Dan watched as Etienne and Mina locked eyes and wills. This was not good. Either they fought together or died alone.

  "We'll all go," said Dan. "Etienne and I will stay in the car while you ladies shop."

  Two hours later, Taya and Mina climbed out of the SUV. Dressed in oversized clothes and baseball caps, they hoped to disguise their appearance from spies and inquisitive eyes. From the intel they'd received from Rene, no one had tracked their location yet, but it didn't hurt to be cautious.

  Dan watched their retreating forms. Etienne sat next to him and scanned the skies.

  "That seems to be clear."

  "Really? How far can you see?"

  "Far enough," said Etienne. "Dragons have very good eyesight."

  "But you're in your human form."

  "So? I am always a dragon whether you see it or not."

  "I didn't know."

  "There are a lot of things you don't know about shifters."

  Dan looked away, scanning the parking lot for anything suspicious.

  "I'm learning," he says.

  "Yes," said Etienne drolly, "I heard the other night."

  Dan's skin flushed.

  "I don't know what you are talking about."

  "Don't try to deny it. Dragons have excellent hearing too. You might have been in the same room."

  "Sonafabitch," muttered Dan before going quiet, keeping his eyes alert and on the parking lot.

  "Shifters tend to give everything to the ones they mate with," continued Etienne.

  "Who said anything about mating?"

  "See, that is where the problem would be. I wouldn't want her to get hurt by a man who is living human rules with a shifter lover."

  Etienne leaned over, seeming to fill more space in the cab than before, his breath hotter than it should be. Dan felt the heat rolling off of the shifter in waves.

  Instinctively, his muscles bunched and he straightened to sit higher. "Back off, Etienne," he growled. "What happens between me and Mina is none of your business."

  "I won't let anyone hurt her, Sheriff."

  "Then get in line. I won't let anyone hurt her either."

  "Oh?" snarled the dragon, "why should I trust that?"

  Words failed him at that moment as a single improbable thought crystallized with utter clarity in his mind. It was a thought he couldn't absorb in its wholeness yet infused him with a warm glow that spread through his being. Its truth solidified in his thoughts bringing hope against incredible odds. At this moment he felt like he could conquer anything because there was one thing in his life he never had before.

  "Because I love her. And if we aren’t together it’s her call, not mine."

  "I'll take the left, you take the right," Mina said, steering her cart in the direction of the ammunition. "We meet in ten minutes at the checkout line in the middle."

  Very conscious that moments spent in the open were additional minutes unprotected, she moved through the store quickly, loading the huge big box store carts with food and supplies almost without thought. If the situation wasn't so life and death, it could almost have been a game.

  They met up at the long checkout line that seemed to move at a snail's pace.

  When they finally reached the front of the line, Mina pulled a wad of cash from her pocket.

  "I'd offer to chip in, but apparently only the harem girls get the credit cards," Taya said with an eye roll.

  Mina scanned the area as they talked, but managed a smile at Taya's remark.

  "You're not going to let him live that one down, are you?"

  "I just like to tease him about it. He had them in his life a lot longer than me. But there are definitely adjustments that will be made."

  The look on Taya's face was so fierce that Mina laughed.

  "I love it," said Mina. "Someone has turned the rogue dragon into a pussycat. I never thought it would happen. He is just so damned independent."

  "Sometimes it takes the universe extra time to create that perfect person for you," said Taya. "How old is Etienne anyway? How long has he had to wait?"

  "Oh no, friend, you aren't going to get me to reveal Etienne's secrets. He'll never admit it, but he's vain about his age. I'm not sure I reliably know what it is anyway. Only Rene knows for sure."

  "Sometimes I get t
he sense that he is immensely old," Taya said softly, with a glance around to ensure no one else was listening. "It's the way he gazes out the windows or at the sunset when we are on the top of the mountain. Like he's seen things that the world has forgotten."

  "All the dragons are like that," said Mina. "At least the ones I've met. But Etienne seems to carry that quality in spades. It's that sense of inscrutable wisdom that makes others regard him highly."

  "I think, despite the women, he was lonely," said Taya.

  "Again, another thing he will never admit. Until you, Etienne prided himself on living life day by day. Long-lived shifters have to, otherwise the march of time and how fast the human world moves will wear them down."

  "Is that what you've learned?" asked Taya.

  "I haven't been around that long. I'm only eighty-five."

  "Eighty-five," gasped Taya.

  "Sure, that's not even a tenth of our lifespan. We can live to a thousand years, if we're left to it."

  "Wow," said Taya. "Still so much I need to learn."

  "Yes, I should've spent more time with you. After this is over, I promise to do that, all right? And you can ask me anything...everything."

  She prayed silently she would get that chance with her protégé.

  "So what does that mean for you and Dan? He's human. He'll age and die and you..."

  Taya stopped short and tried to backpedal when she realized what she'd said, but Mina had stopped listening.

  "Silence," hissed Mina.

  "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have brought it up."

  "No. Feel that?" she demanded, an icy trickle of fear sliding down the back of her neck. "Smell that?"

  Taya's eyes widened and her head swiveled to scan the front of the store.

  "Yes," she whispered. "I smell something by the front doors."

  "Shifter," Mina hissed. "Smells like wolverine."

  Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it was just another area shifter shopping for groceries.

  But maybe it wasn't.

  They were almost to the front of the line and Mina straightened with a harried smile. "Shoot, I forgot something," she said, clapping a hand to her forehead. "Can we leave our things here?" she asked the woman behind her. "We'll be right back.”

  The middle-aged mom was busy prying a stolen candy bar from her toddler's fingers and gave her an absent nod. "Sure, no problem."

  Mina grabbed Taya's hand and tugged her back through the line. "Scoot down, to keep below these displays," she demanded. "We're getting out of here."

  Once they were clear of the abandoned carts, Mina straightened and walked confidently toward the aisles. Taya followed with her knees bent and her head down, but their deception didn't last long. Mina heard a raspy growl that put any other theories to rest.

  They'd been found.

  Turning toward the sound, she saw a woman whose anger curled from her in red waves. The woman chuffed in inhuman fashion.

  "Run," Mina muttered.

  With that the two women ran toward the back of the store, to the area that serviced catalogue orders. The woman, and now a man, followed them moving with preternatural speed.

  "Go, go, go!" spat Mina.

  She flew through the catalogue room and burst open the doors to the stock room. She pushed Taya in front of her and swept merchandise off pallets in the way of the pursuing shifters.

  Coming to an open back bay door, she urged Taya to jump the four feet to the ground. Mina, still on the inside, held the button to lower the door to a shut position, and just as the wolverines were on her, she dropped and rolled to the ground. The fall was short but painful.

  But not as painful as to what happened to one of the wolverines. It had shifted and stuck its paws through the opening getting smaller and the door landed on them. The shifter screamed, a mixture of animal and human sounds.

  "Hurry," said Mina. "Let's get to the boys."

  They poured on every ounce of strength and ran, neither looking back. A couple short minutes later, they rounded the building and bounded through the lot to the parked SUV.

  "Go, go, go!" said Mina urgently. "Wolverines!"

  Mina and Taya didn't have time to put on their seat belts before Dan jerked the SUV out of its slot and onto the main road.

  "Christ, what happened?" demanded Etienne. "Are you all right? I knew we should've gone with you."

  "They've found us," Mina said grimly. "Tonight, there will be war."

  Chapter Fifteen

  "You go to the east along the mountain and lay out the trip lines there," snapped Etienne. "I'll travel west."

  "Do you know how to set these things?" Dan demanded. He didn't mean for his voice to sound so irritated but the events of the day had left him feeling raw.

  Etienne started muttering in French again, and by his tone, Dan assumed the dragon was bitching about the stupidity of humans.

  "I was setting trip mines long before you were born, human," Etienne spit.

  Shit.

  Of course he had. Clearly, it was going to take a little more time for him to get used to hanging out with creatures who had impossibly long life spans. But even so, the idea that Etienne pitted his old age against Dan's daily, real world experience jacked his annoyance up a few pegs.

  "Fine," snorted Dan, "just make sure you avoid the traps Mina and Taya set." He spoke bouncing his anger against the Frenchman. That was easier than facing what was eating at his gut.

  "No problem," snapped Etienne, every bit as annoyed as Dan. From the shifter's tone Dan suspected they were struggling with the same issue.

  They had sent their women into danger and they had barely gotten out safe.

  The idea of nearly losing Mina churned his stomach. Hell, just admitting to Etienne the depth of his feelings for her was enough to pitch him into uncharted territory. The rush of fear that accompanied their flight from town mixed like a whorl of crows in his mind with the memories of holding bloody comrades dying in his arms. He loved those battlefield brothers too, a desperate clutch of emotion born of the immediacy and the fellowship of shared dangers.

  Was what he felt for Mina jumbled with that and lust conceived from one night with her followed by too many nights alone?

  No, he decided. There was something more between them than two warriors of different genders finding relief from the stress of imminent battle. Dan knew that when they were joined to each other's bodies.

  What alchemy they achieved in ecstasy went beyond the sharing of sex.

  Dan had nothing to compare this to. The love of his parents paled to the need that thrummed through him for Mina. The camaraderie he shared with his war buddies didn't hold a candle to the fiery depths Mina plumbed in his heart.

  There was only one conclusion.

  He was hers and she was his.

  It was that simple. And that complicated.

  Losing her was a no go. Punch out. Mission aborted. And almost achieved by ignoring his gut reaction to protect her. He should have been in that store with her to neutralize the threat those attackers posed. Just like they were attempting to do now.

  There was, not surprisingly, a lack of major ordnance in their bunker. Apparently, that was all cleared out when the base was abandoned. Once they'd utilized all the supplies they'd brought to create a first line of defense, they'd gone digging for more and managed to find some caps, nails, paper clips and an assortment of click pens. A few cartridges from his precious supply of rifle ammunition and a spool of fishing line he threw into his duffle for exactly this reason rounded out the requirements for homemade trip mines. They might not do serious harm to preternatural beings. But the explosions and, hopefully, howls of surprise would give the defenders a bead on their attackers' location.

  Mina found some lengths of rope. Taya hauled in a garbage can of old glass soda bottles. He sent her to find some bedsheets and tear them into strips. When he asked Etienne to siphon some gas from the SUV, the dragon comtemplated Dan with suspicion.

  "Why should I do that?" Etienn
e said with his jaw set and stubborness gleaming in his eyes.

  "Because I can make firebombs from these bottles and that gasoline."

  "You don’t need firebombs. I can spit all the fire we need."

  "That's good to know, but I'm assuming that you could get busy. It would be nice if the rest of us have the advantage you do."

  "None of you have the advantages I do," said Etienne. But he did what Dan asked.

  While Dan made the bombs, he gave Taya and Mina the job of stringing trip lines of simple fishing wire along the paths carved by the military up the mountain.

  "Set them," he said, "at irregular intervals, one or two each path. The idea is not to stop them but to get the enemy disoriented by not knowing what is coming at them."

  Once he finished his work, he met up with Etienne to place the bombs on the mountain.

  After their terse conversation, Dan parted ways with the shifter, moving east of the entrance of the bunker. After choosing the locations based on the likely trails the enemy would walk, he installed three snap-noose traps. The devices were as simple as they were diabolical. It involved twisting the rope around branches so that the trigger made of a small branch easily released when something, or Dan hoped, someone pulled against the noose on the ground. The hardest part was pulling the counterweight up high in the trees, but it felt good to put his muscles to work on something useful.

  After constructing those, he set a dozen of the tripwire traps. On Etienne's suggestion, he rubbed his hands repeatedly with pine needles to mask his scent as he laid the mines out. Shifters, Etienne reminded him with his annoying French accent, had excellent olfactory senses. Now Dan's hands smelled like a god damned Christmas tree. But it was a small price to pay for a little more security, which he hoped he provided now with these little gifts for their attackers.

  The sharp crack of an explosion rent the quiet of the forest. He jumped and turned to the sound. Listening intently he caught a growl of annoyance bouncing off the rocks from Etienne's direction.

  "Setting trip mines since before I was born," indeed.

  But Taya's concerned call up sent him jogging toward the pair. Not that he was worried about Etienne, but between him blowing shit up and his woman calling his name, they might as well just hand their coordinates to their enemies. Pine needles and leaves flew from under his feet as he ran and slid toward the two women close to the base of the mountain.