Daniel’s big square jaw bulged. “I’ll remember, Sheriff,” he said stiffly. “Scaring the gazelle was unintentional.”
“Excellent.” Unexpectedly, Wally chuckled. “The town council is certainly going to be glad you showed up, Admiral. Now they won’t have to decide if they have to throw a fairy off the island.” He nodded and went out, still chuckling.
“What is this place?” Daniel asked. “First a gazelle shifter and now a rabbit? What the heck is going on? Is there some sort of convention?”
“Like Wally said, the island of West Haven is a sanctuary,” Angie explained. “A sanctuary for sensitives. It was settled by fairies and most of the permanent residents are sensitives. After a while you get used to being openly paranormal, because around here the paranormal is normal.”
“And yet they want to throw you off the island?” Daniel’s deep voice dropped an octave and became even quieter. A sure sign of mounting anger. When he used that voice it was time to take cover. “You’re coming back to Sweden with me, but...” What he meant was, no one throws my wife off of any island.
“The Mystic Bay Town Council controls this island, Daniel. But I’m a relative and guest of the mayor, Robin Fairchild. Even if I’m a dragoness-made, they probably won’t throw me off for being a hunter.”
“Let me see if I have this right, shifters are okay, except for dragons?” He barely suppressed his growl.
Angie shrugged again. “Predatory shifters do live on West Haven, but none sit on the council, and people seem a bit nervous about them. Robin tried to explain it to me, but I fell asleep in the middle.” Lately, she seemed to drift off every time she rested her eyes.
She waved a hand. “It can’t be anything too serious. My cousin Moira who owns this store is a fairy who married a dragon. They just had a little girl.”
She had distracted Daniel. “A dragonette?” Surprise and hope filled his voice.
“Yes. First one born to a Drake on this side of the Atlantic. I don’t know what Cousin Lexi did, but the curse has been lifted.*”
“Maybe we’ll have one too. In Stockholm,” he added firmly.
“I left you for a reason, Daniel,” Angie retreated behind the counter again. “I got tired of being alone and lonely.”
“I don’t pick my assignments,” he said through his teeth. His lovely straight white teeth. Why did he have to be so mouth-wateringly handsome?
It was true Daniel didn’t pick his assignments. But he picked to serve in Special Operations. And he picked to do the bidding of the head of the House of Lindorm. When Lord Lindorm snapped his fingers, his grandson Admiral Daniel Lindorm only asked how high he should jump. And Thorvald Lindorm frequently snapped his fingers.
“I’ve been gone a full six weeks,” she pointed out. If she had been important to him, it wouldn’t have taken her husband this long to show up.
*Dragon’s Christmas Captive
CHAPTER TWO
Daniel~
She was just trying to get him going. Angie had been able to wind him around her little finger since the day he had been introduced to her. And wind him up in nothing flat.
Nothing new there.
She was still the most beautiful dragoness in the world, still his fated mate. His pregnant fated mate. After three decades, he had assumed they were not to be blessed with firelings. But here she was sweetly rounding with his baby.
“I knew where you were,” he said indignantly. His nephews had located her within days. “I knew you were safe. At least I thought you were. I didn’t know you had decided to spend your days on your feet, carrying heavy things around.”
“I’m fine.”
“Pregnant women should take it easy,” he said. He hesitated. “You’re not as young as you used to be.”
Angie’s green eyes narrowed. “Fairies are immortal. Remember? My mother was older than I am when she had me.” She patted her stomach, a tender gesture. He relaxed infinitesimally.
“May I?” He longed to touch his infant. To hold his wife and child.
She stepped backward and pressed against the counter.
“I’d never hurt you,” he ground out.
“You already have. Admit it, if you hadn’t found out I was pregnant, you’d still be scouring the seafloor looking for Russians.”
“Someone has to.” The cold war might be over, but the Russians were still engaging in espionage. “And I didn’t know you were pregnant until I walked in here.”
“I’m not showing.”
He laughed. He couldn’t help it. His tiny wife had retained her fairy powers even after her transformation into a dragoness. Part of her talent was dressing herself. Today’s pink and white dress floated around her in delicate translucent layers that alternately concealed and revealed her luscious curves.
She didn’t look pregnant. Just sexy as all get-out. But she smelled pregnant. A delicious extra top note had been added to the fragrance that had driven him wild since he was a young man.
“How could you take my son and run away?” He felt the heat in his face. He hadn’t meant to blurt out that question. Blurt out his hurt. But the pain of her abandonment was intensified by the knowledge that she had stolen his child. Their child. Their long-hoped-for child.
“What makes you think my baby is yours?” she threw at him.
When he became aware of smoke trickling from his human nostrils, he saw her through a red haze. He clamped iron control on his emotions and his talent. She wasn’t cowering as a dragoness who had declared her infidelity should do.
No, his stubborn, reckless little mate was enjoying yanking his chain. Her green eyes were sparkling and her plump cheeks had flushed a pretty pink.
“It’s mine. There’s a lot you’re capable of, my darling. Adultery isn’t on the list.”
She pouted. No other word for it. Those red lips he had just been kissing were pursed in disappointment because he hadn’t lost his temper. He folded his arms across his chest. “It’s mine.” He dared her to lie.
“Yes.” Her voice was sulky.
“You’ve achieved your goal. I’ve come for you. I don’t have long. Just a couple of days. Your cousin will have to find someone else to stick with this store.” Why the heck did his wife need to work in any store? She had her own money, and she received a generous annual top-up from the Lindorm Fund.
“I am not going back to Stockholm to spend my time waiting for you to come home for a few hours every few weeks, Daniel. Worrying if you will this time.” Her voice was so low he had to strain to make out the words.
“I always come home.” Certainly he had been wounded a few times, but he had always returned from his missions.
“So far. We’ve been married for thirty-three years, Daniel Lindorm. You’ve only spent four of them with me.” She held up her fingers. “Four! It’s not enough, Daniel. Not for me. Not for our child. I’m not a trinket you can stick in a drawer for whenever you have a spare moment.” Tears rolled down her cheeks and she smeared them away with fingers that trembled.
“You have your art,” he reminded her. Angelina Lindorm’s bronzes graced the finest homes in Europe. They were always in hot demand. He had never stood in her way. He was proud of her. “A whole life in Stockholm. Your friends are worried about you. Not to mention your agent and Hans Holm.” Holm had built the reputation of his gallery on his exclusive right to show Angie’s work.
Her face tightened. “Even with all those people around, I was lonely. And you never even noticed. I deserve better than a marriage of moments. And my child deserves better than an occasional father. It’s typical of our marriage that you just show up and expect me to drop everything to rush back to Sweden, so you can go on yet another adventure. Well, not this time. I’m sorry, Daniel. Not this time.” She didn’t brush her tears away but let them drip on her bodice.
Her tears appalled him almost as much as her words. “You want me to retire?”
“You are most of sixty.”
Dragons lived a long ti
me. He still looked like a young man. Still felt young. He was as strong as any other member of his team. Why was Angie wrecking their perfect arrangement now? Sure their lives had largely been separate. But that only meant they skipped the boring parts of marriage. Plus they had had those terrific reunions that he looked forward to. Was looking forward to. Delightful reunions that leavened the danger of his career.
“I’m not ready.” He set his jaw. Even for his fated mate, there were limits to the sacrifices he was willing to make.
“Then our marriage is over.”
“At least you are still wearing your rings!”
“I can’t take them off,” she said in outrage, her lips tightening and her eyes narrowing. “The stones are full of clay and I can’t even clean them!”
At least the rings were obeying his command. “I did seal them to your hand,” he reminded her.
“I’ve been taking them off to work for decades,” she said through her teeth.
There was a certain satisfaction in knowing that her defection had made her rings stick tight to her finger. He reached for her left hand. She was correct. The emeralds and diamonds he had placed on her hand were cloudy with clay residue and their brilliance obscured. At his word of power, they slipped into his hand.
It was his turn to narrow his eyes as Angelina placed her hands behind her back and glared at him. He breathed lightly on the rings, restoring their luster. Another breath removed the traces of clay stuck in the gold setting. Like a sulky child, his wife continued to hold her hands behind her back.
Daniel held her engagement ring to the light, letting the sun strike sparks and send a blaze of rainbow light around the room. “Isn’t that better?”
Her lower lip protruded further. He casually stuck both rings into his shirt pocket. Her mouth fell open. He had rattled his fairy. Good.
CHAPTER THREE
Tidewater Inn,
Robin~
“He’s come for her, all right,” Sully announced.
They were both looking through the one-way mirror in Robin’s sitting room straight into the dining room of Robin’s inn. Angie was sitting at a corner table with her handsome husband. Admiral Lindorm looked fierce and furious.
It was the summertime, and every hotel, bed and breakfast, and hostel on the island was booked solid. The dining room was full to capacity. There wasn’t a spare bed anywhere. Robin had offered Angie her spare room so Admiral Lindorm could have her cottage.
Lindorm clearly resented being excluded from Angie’s bed, but Angie didn’t have to sleep with her husband if she didn’t want to. Besides, being cut off might bring this autocratic dragon to his senses faster than any other measure.
“They certainly are made for each other,” Sully continued. “Their auras resonate perfectly. What’s gone wrong between them?”
“I agree.” Robin peered at Angie and Daniel again. The couple’s auras blended as they should, after what her cousin had said was a three-decade marriage. But those auras showed the signs of stress that indicated that their marriage was in trouble. Desperate trouble.
“Poor devil doesn’t know what’s hit him,” Sully said sympathetically.
Robin’s widowed lover was a powerful sorcerer and the head mage of the sorcerers of West Haven. Until her sister, Nightingale, had sailed west, Gordon Sullivan had also been her brother-in-law. His principal talent was weather working, but Robin wasn’t surprised he didn’t detect the underlying misery in Angie. He was a great matchmaker, but no marriage counselor.
Even in the sophisticated aspect Gordon assumed when he visited her home, he didn’t look like Cupid. Elegantly trimmed beard and hair notwithstanding, he was just too big and brawny.
When he dressed in his ancient, greasy oilskins and let his gray hair run riot and his beard bush out over his throat, he looked like the rugged skipper he had been for years before he turned his commercial fishing boat into a whale-watching vessel.
No one’s idea of a marriage broker. Yet matchmaker he was. As was Robin.
Like her, Sully was on the Town Council. In fact he was deputy mayor. He knew how vital this match was. Getting Angelina Lindorm to stay on the island permanently would be a coup for Mystic Bay.
The Tidewater Art Fair had enhanced Mystic Bay’s popularity with tourists. Her artists’ colony was creating the art that was the biggest draw. Admiral Lindorm was forced to stay in Hyacinth cottage, because the Tidewater Inn was fully booked through to Labor Day and there was no spare accommodation anywhere on the island.
Every restaurant in town would be as full as her inn’s dining room. Every bed and breakfast would have a no-vacancy sign outside even on this mid-week night. The Mystic Bay Artists’ Co-op was steadily selling the work of local artists for top dollar. Business was booming. And this year’s Tidewater Art Fair hadn’t even gotten going yet.
Robin and Sully had big plans to revitalize not just the town of Mystic Bay, but to reverse the declining population of West Haven. They needed fresh blood. Angie Lindorm, famous sculptor and Robin’s own fifth or sixth cousin, and her husband, the dragon lord, were exactly the sort of wealthy sensitives West Haven and Mystic Bay needed. It was a bonus that Angie was pregnant.
“He doesn’t want to be here,” Sully observed warily. “Just look at his aura.”
Lindorm’s aura pulsed darkly. He was frustrated and angry. But not out of control. That was what counted. Robin glanced up at Gordon. He too was dangerous and capable of violence. But she was not afraid of him. He had enormous self-control to go with his enormous gift. So too did Angie’s dragon.
“Has she told you what has gone wrong between them?” Gordon asked. “Besides her cutting him off.”
“Just that he’s away a lot. Reading between the lines, and looking at his aura, I’d say the admiral is an adrenaline junkie. Angie wants him to settle down.” If you had eyes to see, as Robin had, Lindorm’s restlessness and craving for adventure was laid out in his aura, as were his extreme sense of responsibility, highly developed honor, and his adoration for his wife.
“Hmph. So our job is to get him to choose Angie and West Haven over the Swedish Royal Navy and Stockholm?” Gordon asked wryly. “And to get the council to overlook the fact that he’s a hunter and she’s a fairy about to pop out another hybrid?”
“Indeed.” Sully was correct about the council’s disapproval, but she thought they could handle the council. They always had. It might take some work, but she had confidence in their diplomatic skills.
She and Gordon were working hard to change West Haven’s entrenched prejudice against hunters and hybrids. The fear dated back to the nineteenth century and the reign of terror imposed by a grizzly shifter, his fairy bride, and their hybrid whelps. The Haverstocks had been psychopaths, terrible and cannibalistic. For decades they had raped, plundered, and murdered the residents of West Haven with impunity, until halted by an army of hunters.
It was long past time that the council stopped equating hybrids with criminals. Stopped fearing hunters. After all, hunters like the Drakes* and Rutherfords** had taken down the Haverstocks. But people’s prejudices weren’t rational and the facts didn’t have as much impact as meeting real hunters. Sully and Robin had decided to do an end run around the bigotry and normalize hunter hybrids. Once folks got used to them, they would stop fearing them.
“Thought about what would happen if the council decided that another fairy-dragon baby was one too many?” Gordon murmured. “Suppose they go after Moira and Quinn? And little Rowena?” His arms went around her.
Robin leaned into his chest and argued. “The Archibald Drake Maritime Museum employs twenty full-time staff. Only two of which are off-islanders. From noon to four, there’s a line halfway to the Bean and Bran to get in. And the visitors each spend an average of seventy-three dollars in Mystic Bay businesses. The Council isn’t about to shoot the goose that lays those golden eggs.”
Gordon pondered those facts and didn’t argue. The Drake family were long-time summer reside
nts. They had built and endowed the Maritime Museum and filled it with artifacts.
No one had been so crass as to say so, but the museum was both compensation for the reality of a dragon marrying a fairy* and a reminder that Drakes had been instrumental in suppressing the Haverstocks. A condition of the town’s ownership of the museum and the generous endowment was that the council permitted the Drakes to retain ownership of their land.
“Even if the council has had to accept Moira and Quinn and baby Rowena, those kids still have to live on West Haven.” Sully growled into Robin’s head. She could sense his worry. His justified worry. Rowena was as close as they were going to get to a grandchild, and dear to them both. Any threat to the baby was personal. If things got too awkward, Moira and Quinn might take Rowena and leave for good.
“We’ll just have to tread lightly.” Robin pressed buttons on her remote. The window into the dining room dissolved into a gilt-framed oil painting of a garden at sunset. “Shall we eat?”
*Desired by a Dragon
**Cherished by a Cougar
CHAPTER FOUR
Daniel~
“How did you find this place?” Daniel gazed around in disapproval.
The layers of Victoriana were cozy enough, but to his mind they were dark and cluttered. Oppressive. He preferred the bright, pale, Scandinavian simplicity of their flat in Stockholm. It too was Victorian, but Angie had decorated it with modern furniture in light blues and cream. It was serene, elegant, and comfortable, with dragon-sized furniture. And it was where they both belonged.
“The Tidewater?” Angie looked up from arranging her napkin on her lap.
Was she playing dumb? “Not the inn, the island.”
“You might say West Haven found me.” Her smile riveted him. “The Tidewater Art Fair got a huge write-up in the art magazines last summer. First prize went to a painter named Quinn Drake.”
Adored by A Dragon: A Shifters in Love Fun & Flirty Romance (Mystic Bay Book 4) Page 2