“All of it’s true. The natives passed the story down.”
Marlee couldn’t think of a response to that. It was almost harder to believe that they could possibly be as old as he was saying they were than it was to believe they were dragons.
She discovered when Eli settled her on the side of a pool of water at the back of the cavern that they had company. Eli didn’t especially look pleased about it, but he seemed to shrug it off. He splashed her as he dove in and she discovered the water was hot, not cold as she’d expected.
The pool was also deceptively deep—so clear it seemed the bottom couldn’t be more than a few inches away and yet deep enough for him to dive in. He slung his long hair back when he surfaced and sloughed the water from his face. “Come on in. It’s warm. It’ll make you feel better.”
Marlee glanced at the others as they, too, dove in. It was one thing to be intimate, privately, with three of the brothers and something else entirely to get naked and swim with them. She didn’t have a change of clothes, however, and sitting around in wet clothes didn’t appeal to her. “You mean … undress?” she whispered and then reddened when it echoed around the room.
She might as well have used a megaphone!
She discovered the men were grinning at her.
“Baby, I didn’t know you were so shy,” Eli murmured, laughter threading his voice.
“I’m not! I’m just not an exhibitionist.”
“Well, I can promise you if you take everything off … we’re all going to look.”
Marlee gaped at him when sank in. “That’s what I was afraid of!”
Eli flicked water at her face, chuckled and turned to swim off. She watched them a little enviously for several moments. She was sticky and dirty, too, and her hair felt horribly matted.
Sighing in defeat, she undressed since it seemed they were all focused on enjoying their swim.
She discovered when she’d shimmied out of her jeans, however, that she had their undivided attention. She covered her mound with one hand and clamped an arm across her breasts.
“Too late now, baby. We already saw it all,” Eli said, laughing.
She shook her head at him, moved to the edge and jumped in, sending a wave of water over his laughing face. By the time she’d surfaced again and shoved her hair out of her eyes he was laying in wait for her. She hadn’t anticipated retaliation. She was pretty sure she snorted about half the water he shoved at her.
He caught her around the waist when she began to sink. Holding her until she finally managed to stop coughing. “You alright?”
“No thanks to you!” she said without heat. “I don’t think I’m thirsty anymore.”
“Well, hell, baby, you aren’t supposed to drink this water!”
She sent him an anxious look, wondering if there was something wrong with it. “Why?”
“Cause we’re bathing in it.”
She stared at his face for a long moment, torn between the urge to shove his head under and the urge to laugh. Finally, she merely curled her arms around his neck and nuzzled his ear.
“I love you, Eli.”
His arms tightened around her. When he eased her away, he studied her face. “You feel the blood bond, baby?”
She frowned at him in confusion. “Blood bond? I don’t understand.”
The light in his eyes dimmed a little. He cupped her face between his large palms. “It’s alright, baby,” he murmured, tilting his head and matching his lips to hers.
His kiss warmed her and yet uncertainty still flickered through her. “It’s not alright, Eli,” she said quietly when he broke the kiss. “I want to understand.”
He frowned. “It’s hard to explain something I don’t understand completely myself,” he said wryly.
“Try.”
“You’re carrying my baby. We mated. I’m bound to you by blood. It’s a bond I could never break even if I wanted to.”
Marlee smiled her relief. “It binds us, too, Eli. Whether we want it be that or way or not—even if a man and woman stopping loving one another in time—the bond is still there when they’ve had a child together.”
That was the difference, Eli thought unhappily. Humans could and did stop loving one another and go their separate ways, and sometimes the love turned to hate. The feelings he had for Marlee would remain the same. He might want to hate her when and if she stopped loving him and left, but he would never be able to stop the yearning. He would always feel torn apart without her. Still, it was something that she felt that she loved him when she knew him for he was. He hadn’t looked for that much. He’d thought, just as the others had, that as soon as she discovered he wasn’t the man she thought he was everything she believed she felt would disappear, as well. “If you’ve soaked long enough to suit you, I’ll take you to the fountain.”
Surprise flickered through Marlee, but she nodded and followed him as he crossed the pool to the other side. The shadows were so deep in the back that she didn’t see the opening that led deeper into the mountain until they’d reached the edge of the pool and climbed out. She shivered as she got out of the warm water, sorry she’d left her clothing on the other side, but she followed Eli and the others through the opening. Fortunately, it wasn’t far at all. The shadowed area was a small ‘room’ of the cavern little more than eight feet by eight. At the back, water trickled from the rock and into a basin it had worn in the rock below it from the many years it had dripped there. It was so icy cold it numbed her fingers and gave her brain freeze. “All the comforts of home,” she murmured when she’d drank her fill.
Eli lifted his head and looked around. “It seemed that way to us … and safe. I guess it was.”
Discomfort flickered through her that she’d been so flippant about it and he’d noticed.
“You remember it?” Marlee asked tentatively.
He dragged in a deep, shuddering breath and expelled it. “Yeah. I remember it.” He smiled a little crookedly. “That’s the curse of the dragon, baby. They remember everything.”
Chapter Thirteen
Marlee spent much of the day catnapping. She thought if she could’ve actually gotten comfortable it wouldn’t have been napping but the deep, healing sleep she really needed from both the injuries and the emotional trauma. She certainly didn’t feel completely recovered in any sense.
She thought it had been more shocked disbelief that had sent her barreling down the hill when she’d seen the guys in dragon form than actual fear. There was no getting around the fact that she’d also been afraid, but she hadn’t been afraid of the guys from the start. Suddenly becoming terrified of them because their appearance had changed, she thought, was akin to abruptly rejecting someone you’d loved because they’d suffered disfigurement of some kind.
Their appearance might be and usually was a part of the package you loved, but true love, she thought, was about the whole package and that didn’t change, or shouldn’t, because the exterior did. If it did, then you’d just never truly loved at all or you weren’t capable of it.
The incident settled one thing completely in her mind. She loved them. It didn’t matter how unconventional it was or how unreasonable it might seem to outsiders. She loved them—and not just Gabriel, Eli, and John. Her fear of their appearance had instantly switched to fear for them when she’d thought they might be hurt or, worse, killed, and that fear had been far more devastating … and telling, at least to her.
She couldn’t help but wonder if, as Eli had suggested, she’d suspected for a long time, maybe even knew in some carefully guarded part of her mind, that they weren’t human but something else that appeared to be human. She just hadn’t been willing to accept it. She didn’t know, but she thought if not for the incident with Fletcher, it would’ve taken her far longer to progress as far as she had in accepting.
And she still hadn’t fully accepted it. Maybe she never would. It defied everything she’d ever thought of as the ‘real world’. People that actually believed in anything outside th
at narrow perimeter were fruitcakes. It was alright to fantasize and entertain oneself with stories of ghosts and goblins and fairytales about dragons, unicorns, and other mythical creatures, but the feet were supposed to stay firmly planted in reality—and reality was accepted knowledge and/or scientific theory based on observations.
Of course, as advanced as mankind was actual proven knowledge about the world and the universe would just about fill a thimble. It wasn’t just the holes between known and unknown either. The ‘known’ fell apart so regularly with new discoveries that it was hard to figure out where to stand anymore.
The certainty that this or that was nothing but a myth invented by ignorant, superstitious savages had also been disproven time and again. She could certainly testify to the one about dragons!
The thought swamped her with guilt that she hadn’t realized she’d been nursing. She’d almost singlehandedly been responsible for wiping out the last of them. It didn’t matter that they’d made the decision to forfeit their lives if necessary to protect hers. She was an investigator, both by nature and training, and she’d been going around with blinders on. She should’ve paid more attention to Fletcher’s behavior instead of simply dismissing him as a lecher and vulgarly, morbidly curious. Everything he’d said, suggested, and asked, and every mannerism he’d displayed should have set off alarms in her head, should have drawn her focus until she’d figured out what he was up to.
Instead, she’d been so focused on her own concerns and caught up in the wild courtship of the dragon brothers that she’d either ignored or neatly shelved everything. She should’ve at least made an attempt to figure out what he wanted and what he was up to and why he was fixated on her—because she had noticed that even though she’d misinterpreted it! If she had, she would’ve realized that he wasn’t going to give up just because she seemed to have vanished.
He must have been looking for that legendary pot of gold for years! That was a sign of serious, dangerous greed and absolute dedication to do whatever it took to satisfy it!
She was almost as sure that he’d fully intended to murder her once she showed him how to find what he wanted as she was that he hadn’t actually anticipated or intended to kill anyone else. Even knowing she was an FBI agent, he must have considered that, being a woman, she wouldn’t be difficult to handle or dispose of. And since he’d been the one that had suggested Native Americans might be involved to start with, it probably hadn’t taken him long to put her with Eli and figure out where she was likely to be.
John had caught him off guard and it had scared the pure piss out of him to find himself confronting what he perceived as a young, virile male far stronger and more agile than he was.
He must have been watching her from a distance for quite some time, long enough to know that when the guys went up the hill they all went and they were all gone for a long time and that that was all he could count on. There was no pattern for him to take advantage of beyond that. They went when the ‘mood’ struck them, and it was the only time she was alone for any length of time at all.
Her deviation from pattern must have thrown him off. If he’d been watching long enough to figure out the pattern, then he must have been waiting for the next opportunity and been thrown completely off kilter when she’d left the house before he could grab her. She didn’t think he would’ve taken a chance on waylaying her otherwise. He would’ve been worried that her deviation might prevent him from grabbing her and making off with her with enough time to elude the men—which meant he’d already been shaken up. He’d probably half feared what had happened and that had been enough to thoroughly rattle him.
Seeing his plan falling apart, he’d made one mistake after another, shooting and killing John, he thought, and then nearly killing her. He couldn’t have planned to pistol whip her when he needed her to show him the cave. People with head injuries didn’t make very good guides and she didn’t think he’d been stupid.
She had put the dragon clan in danger. As long as they kept to themselves they were safe from detection by humans and safe from eradication by them. As strong as they were, they weren’t invincible and that was something they’d always known when their mother had been slain for the gold humans thought she was hoarding—might even have seen her slain.
Now she understood completely why John had warned Eli that it wasn’t safe for them to interfere in human affairs. They’d put everyone at risk just by becoming involved themselves.
She’d thought she’d understood even then. It was standard procedure to investigate anyone that reported an accident or crime because quite often the people that reported it were involved.
And they couldn’t afford close scrutiny. All the police would’ve had to do was demand a DNA sample from them, or forcefully take it, and they would’ve been on the run just like she had been.
She had to suppose their dragon DNA from the baby was what had piqued her government’s interest in her.
That was an unpleasant thought on several levels. It meant she was a continuing threat to them, at least as long as she was pregnant. It also meant she couldn’t afford to risk getting prenatal care. She’d been leery of trying it even before she knew. It didn’t comfort her to know positively that that wasn’t an option for her. That might not have been such a terrifying prospect if she’d ever had a baby before. At least she would have some experience to fall back on! As it was, she was completely in the dark and completely on her own!
By afternoon, John and Gabriel had recovered enough from their wounds to shift to human form. That was a great comfort to Marlee. She hadn’t realized she’d still been worried sick about them until she saw they’d regained enough strength to manage the shift.
It was really disturbing on another level, however. Instead of having four beautiful males pacing restlessly around the cave stark naked, she then had six and it was really hard to keep her mind off of that fact. She began to suspect, in point of fact, that their restlessness was at least partially connected to her preoccupation with all the swinging dicks. When she’d first noticed, they’d all been pointing at 6:00. By noon, they were drifting toward 3:00 and by mid-afternoon most of them were going on 12:00 and she was going on stir crazy.
———
She was reacting to them, Eli thought when he could think at all. He knew that had to be why Marlee was aroused and it didn’t do a damned thing to cool the rising blood.
None of them had considered what the results of being confined with Marlee in such a small area for such a prolonged period of time might be, but by mid-afternoon Eli realized Marlee wasn’t just aroused. She was going in to heat.
It defied logic that she could when she was breeding already, but there was no getting around the seductive, subtle alteration of her scent. They were making her go into heat with their pheromones just as they had that first time because it sure as hell wasn’t ‘natural’ to her. He considered, several times, hauling her off to a place with some privacy and scratching her itch before it got completely out of hand, but he’d been afraid that would only precipitate the disaster he wanted to avoid.
Joshua, Luke, and Aaron had been on edge for weeks now and getting worse because they wanted Marlee and they refused to assuage their needs elsewhere.
Or maybe they had and it just hadn’t done any damned good because Marlee pulled them right back in the moment they got close enough to come under the spell of her scent?
Regardless and despite his own preoccupation, he could see that they were getting perilously close to falling completely into the mating fever and neither Gabriel nor John were strong enough at the moment to help him fend them off of her if they lost control. Ordinarily, he might have been able to handle it by himself, but this sure as hell wasn’t an ordinary situation.
‘Ordinary’ was just pissed off but still in possession of the ability to see reason. ‘Ordinary’ would never include the potential that they might consider fighting to the death if that was what it took to get their hands on her.
&nb
sp; He considered dragging her to the pool to bathe again in the hope that it might give them time to cool down. As long as she was in the pool, they wouldn’t be able to detect the scent.
Unfortunately, he was afraid it was the first bath that had set the wheels in motion to start with. It had made Marlee more aware of them and them more aware of her. Convincing her strip down again might tip the scales in the wrong direction.
He should’ve known when she covered herself that that was a sign that she was acutely conscious of the others, but he’d been too damned focus on her himself to consider it might create a problem.
If he could just think of some distraction, for all of them, that would be the best bet, but there wasn’t a hell of a lot to work with when they didn’t dare leave the cave for fear of attracting just the attention they didn’t want. Food would’ve been a welcome distraction, but they didn’t have it and couldn’t get it.
It was the growing need to work off some of his excess energy that finally produced the solution he’d been trying to come up with. In all honesty, he’d been far more focused on working it off with his fists if he could find a place far enough from Marlee to keep her from knowing what he was up to, but he didn’t particularly care how he worked off steam as long as he could. “I think I’m going to explore the cave system,” he said tightly, abruptly surging to his feet and staring at Joshua, Luke, and Aaron pointedly. “Why don’t you three come with me?”
It was enough to distract them from their hungry appraisal of Marlee, but they stared at him so blankly for several moments that he thought they’d completely missed the hint. Joshua’s face hardened after a moment, however, and he got up.
“Good idea!” He punched Luke on the shoulder. “Come on. You, too, Aaron.”
Uneasiness slithered through Marlee. “Are you sure that’s a good idea? I mean, we don’t have lights. What if you get lost?”
Eli smiled at her thinly. “We aren’t human even if we look like we are. We can see well enough that isn’t going to be a problem—and follow a scent trail for that matter.”
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