Have you ever had revenge fantasies where a person who you know has wronged you crawls back and grovels? Have you ever wanted to kick them in the face while they’re licking your boot?
Deep down, Willow was way past that level of anger. Arawn had broken her heart, and then he’d walked out with a baloney explanation as to why. When he’d left, he hadn’t even looked at her during most of his quiet, careful speech.
She had assumed that he’d met someone else or realized that he’d never given a damn about her in the first place.
But now, he was offering to explain why he had abandoned her.
She did want to know, even if it hurt, even if it was something intrinsically, disgustingly wrong with her.
Maybe she could fix herself. Maybe she could hide that part of herself next time she was in a relationship, if she were ever in another relationship. Just then, even thinking about another man and being in love again was more than she could handle. Her heart was numb from the pain.
But she did want to know why.
“I’ll eat lunch with you, but I don’t want you to pay for me,” she said.
“We’ll go up to the top-floor restaurant here. The casino’s soft open isn’t for a month, and I don’t think the credit card setup has been activated. Will that be okay? No one pays?”
She bobbled her head. Trust Arawn to come up with a solution that met her criteria and yet he had totally won. When she’d insisted on paying him rent after she’d moved in with him, he’d told her to give him twenty bucks and then bought her flowers every month. “All right. Fine. Let’s go. But I don’t even know how to get up there.”
He opened his hand and gestured down the hallway. “The elevator is this way.”
After the dragging ascent up to the restaurant, Willow stepped out of the elevator just behind him. Walls made of shadowed glass framed the room. The sun-drenched city stretched away from the hotel, flat and tan and dust-covered, the buildings stuttering and dying out as the parched desert and bare hills took over.
The view wasn’t beautiful. The austere city and landscape were somewhat depressing, but at night the glittering lights of Las Vegas would look like jewels sparkling in the black velvet of the desert.
Arawn led the way to a round booth in one of the corners of the room.
A woman wearing a black suit trotted out of the swinging doors near the back of the restaurant, calling, “I’m sorry! Sir and ma’am! We’re not open for—oh, it’s you, Mr. Tiamat, sir. I’ll bring menus.” She disappeared through the doors again.
Willow watched the hostess go and turned back to Arawn. “You are hot stuff around here, huh? And I thought you were just an assistant professor at the university.”
Arawn shrugged, the white tee shirt that she’d poofed up for him moving over his broad shoulders as he did. The fabric clung to him in all the right ways. “I was working as adjunct faculty while I was writing a master’s thesis in global security analysis.”
“I remember when you were finishing up, and I edited several chapters of your thesis while you were writing.”
“Yes, you did.”
“You were almost done with it, then. Is that what precipitated your—” She had to be careful about how she phrased this because if she got too angry, she might throw the menus that the woman dropped on the table as she cruised by right at Arawn’s head. “—Your decision to move back to LA?”
“No,” Arawn said. He opened a menu, glanced inside, and slid the black leather folder back to the edge of the table. “No, finishing my thesis was not what prompted my decision at all.”
So, it had been her. It was something that she had done or something that she was not. “Oh.”
“Let’s order, and then just let me talk for a while, okay? Just let me lay it all out because it’s not what you think.”
The hostess walked back, mincing over the thick carpeting in her black, stiletto high heels, and listened to their order without writing anything down.
Willow ordered the large Greek salad with roasted chicken and an additional serving of shrimp with extra bread on the side, thinking that maybe she could take some home for tomorrow. Her refrigerator was empty except for that slowly spoiling egg drop soup and some leftover chow mein.
Arawn said, “The burger. Medium-rare. Fries.”
He always had been a man of few words.
This long, complicated explanation about the end of their relationship was probably going to be torture for him.
That suited Willow just fine.
She sat, arms crossed tightly over her chest, and waited.
Arawn spread his arms, resting them on the back of the booth, and watched the hostess walk away—his rigid expression wary and almost angry—until the swinging doors had stopped moving.
He turned his head to look at Willow, his vibrant blue eyes looking directly into hers, and he said, “I have missed you so much.”
Willow grabbed the table to keep from falling out of the booth.
He clasped his hands on the table between them. “I fell in love with you maybe a month or two after we met again at that party, in the kitchen. When I suggested that you move in and you did, I thought everything would be all right, but it wasn’t. No matter what I did, no matter how I tried, it never happened.”
“What didn’t?” Willow asked, her heart shattering again. “What did I do wrong?”
“Nothing,” he said. “You were perfect. You were always perfect, in my eyes. Everything you did—from surprising me with cinnamon rolls and fruit for breakfast on weekends, to sliding under the sheets and wrapping your leg around mine as we slept, to just being there when I got home—was perfect.”
“Then why?”
Dang, Willow was being too needy, too pathetic.
And she didn’t care.
“I need to back up,” Arawn said. “I need to tell you some things first. But it wasn’t you. You didn’t do anything wrong. It was always me. There’s something wrong with me, and I don’t know how to fix it.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” she said, almost as a reflex.
“There is.” Arawn looked down at his hands, which were woven together on the table. His eyebrows twitched, which she could just see under his blond hair that had fallen over his forehead. “There’s something wrong with me. Being a dragon is just the start of it.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being a supernatural.” A lot of supernaturals internalized the fear and loathing that naturals felt for things they didn’t understand. “It’s just a thing, like height or whether you can carry a tune or,” she gestured at him, “being blond.”
“I need to talk to you about dragon shifters,” he said.
“I’m a witch. You don’t have to tell me about supernaturals. I’ve known several shifters. There was a wolf girl in my Macro-econ class in college—”
Arawn said, “Dragon shifters have fated mates.”
That was weird. Willow wasn’t sure how to react. “Wait—what? You mean, like arranged marriages?”
“Not arranged. No one does it. No human, anyway. There’s an energy, a magic force, that binds us to our fated mates and guides us together.”
“A girlfriend of mine in high school was a bear shifter. She said they have a dating service when they get old enough. She was too shy to ask anyone to go on a date or even to say yes when someone asked her to go out. I kept telling her that she needed to talk to someone about that social anxiety, and she just kept shrugging and saying, ‘Nope. Bear.’”
“A lot of other shifter kinds don’t have fated mates. I’ve looked it up and asked around. I learned a hell of a lot about fated mates in our last six months. Bears don’t have fated mates. Wolves do, and so do dragons. I did a lot of research when we were dating and living together, because the problem is,” his voice cracked, and he didn’t look at her, “no matter how much I loved you—no matter how much I wanted to be with you—the problem is that you aren’t mine.”
Willow leaned back in her s
eat, the booth soft against her back, and stared at him. “I’m not?”
“I don’t think so. I mean, there’s no way to know for sure. I talked to the healers and the priests of our clan, trying to find some information, trying to find a way to know or some way to bring on the mating fever, but they all stared at me like I was insane. I went to the prophet, and she tried to look with her crystal ball and cards and so much incense smoke that I had a coughing fit. Do you know how much incense smoke it takes to make a dragon cough? I breathe fire. I’m used to a little smoke around my face.”
Arawn cleared his throat and puffed a smoke ring out of the corner of his mouth.
She watched the gray circle float and dissipate in the sunbeams slanting through the windows.
After that, he seemed a little more dragon.
He said, “The smoke was so thick in there that I couldn’t see my hands. But nothing. She couldn’t see anything about my fated mate.”
“But then how do you know that I’m not your fated mate if they couldn’t see who it was? I still could be, right?”
He shook his head. When he looked up at her, his bright blue eyes held so much pain. “If you were my fated mate, I would have gone into mating fever. It’s a process. I mean, mating fever is a process. For most dragons, it starts slowly, and there’s a transition period of a week or two or even a few months before they are fully possessed by it. But once it starts, it can’t be stopped.”
“Maybe we just didn’t wait long enough. Maybe it would have happened if we’d have stayed together.”
Arawn sighed. “Once a dragon encounters their fated mate, most of us only last a few weeks, at most, before we fall into mating fever. Sometimes it’s only a few days before the changes start to happen. Sometimes, it happens instantly. My father said when he saw my mother, he fell to his knees, and when he stood up, it was already upon him. He was already changed, completely under the effect of the fever.”
A wisp of jealousy rose in Willow, that for other people, it happened so easily. “So, it should have been fast.”
“It can be. At the most, the fever always sets in within two months. No one has ever heard of it taking longer than three months until onset.”
“We were together for over a year,” Willow said, dread settling over her.
“We lived together for six months. We dated for over a year,” he agreed.
“But just because no one has ever heard of it taking longer than three months—”
Arawn shook his head. “I tried everything I could to bring it on. Remember when we went to Paris?”
She laughed. “When you took me to Paris. You wouldn’t even let me buy you coffee.”
“You were a college student. I wasn’t going to allow you to spend your money on me.”
“And then you bought me those gorgeous earrings and the ring.” That she had pawned last month.
He nodded, the desert sunlight shining on his pale hair. “Dragons like shiny things.”
She’d almost thought it was an engagement ring at first, but he’d swept her right hand up in his, not her left hand, and placed it on her middle finger.
She bit her lip. “And then we hardly left the hotel room for two days.”
A bit of a grin sneaked onto his face. “Yeah. I tried everything I could think of that way, too. And then I planned the camping trip.”
“At that cabin up in the Arizona mountains. We didn’t see anyone else the whole time. We just brought a ton of food and wine in those coolers and cooked and drank and read and played board games for a week. And, well, you know—”
He nodded. “I tried everything I could to bring it on.”
All his small weirdnesses began to make more sense. The long talks about nothing and everything late at night in bed, their naked bodies twined around each other. The waltzing under the moonlight on full moon nights. His ravenous appetite for sex outdoors, and indoors, and on auspicious magical days, and in places that she’d known were imbued with magic but he shouldn’t have unless he were a supernatural, too. “You were trying to mate us. Or bond. Or whatever.”
He nodded. “To force myself into mating fever.”
“But you didn’t get sick,” she said. “You never get sick. That one time when I had the flu, you took care of me for a week and didn’t so much as sneeze.”
“Dragons don’t get sick very much, but mating fever isn’t like that,” he said. “It’s not an illness. There are physical changes. It’s more like a metamorphosis. I would have known if I were falling into mating fever. I watched for signs of it all the time.”
“You were always staring into the mirror while you shaved. I thought you were giving yourself a morning pep talk.”
“More like a morning berating for not being able to make my body do what I wanted.”
“Oh, Arawn. You could have told me.”
“Not if you were a natural.”
A natural wouldn’t have understood, and then she would have been a liability. “What were you looking for when you were staring into the mirror?”
Arawn toyed with his napkin, rubbing the hem between his fingers. “My eyes would have changed first.”
He had such beautiful blue eyes. Willow had stared into his eyes just to look at them. Changing them would have been terrible. “I always liked your eyes.”
“There’s a mature dragon eye characteristic that dragons acquire when they mate,” Arawn said, gesturing with one finger at his face. “My eyes might have changed color. Some dragons’ do. Or they might have stayed blue. That’s more likely. But our eyes take on a different aspect, like they glow or become full of sparks. It’s obvious. And there are changes to our dragons and some other differences. Once you’ve seen a mature, mated dragon or dragonmate, you know exactly what you’re looking at.”
Willow would have to take a closer look at Bethany, the next time she saw her. “What would have happened then, if you had gone into mating fever?”
He chuckled one sad laugh. “I would have explained the supernatural world to you, probably several times, due to the shock naturals go through.”
“I had been dreading that conversation with you. ‘So, I’m a witch, and I can cast magic spells.’”
Arawn closed his eyes, shutting them tightly. “Are you a potions witch, then? Or something else, a healer or a zo-witch who handles animals? I don’t even know.”
In all their time together, they’d never had these basic conversations that supernaturals always do. “Our coven’s witching woman said I’m a potions witch, that I have the methodical, technical personality to brew potions.”
He nodded. “That’s why you were a chemistry major.”
“Yep. Chemistry. Other than I occasionally made a potion instead of a reaction in the lab and had to explain the shooting, golden sparks. And once, a thousand spiders jumped out of an Erlenmeyer flask.”
Arawn nodded. “But I was going to try to tell you, and then I was going to get down on one knee and ask you to be my dragonmate.”
“Dragonmate, not wife,” she clarified.
“There’s a difference, an important one. There are some benefits, too, from what I understand. But it’s a magical bond, not a mere legal one.” He paused and then said slowly, distinctly, “A lifelong, unbreakable, magical bond.”
Hurt still bubbled in her. “What would you have done if I’d said no?”
He shrugged. “Dragons have always taken that risk.”
She noticed he didn’t answer her question. “And what would you have done if I’d said yes?”
“Mated with you. Married you. Bonded with you for all our lives. Been your devoted protector and provider and devoured you in the bedroom. Fathered your child and raised our little dragonling to take his place in dragon society as the next Duke of Tiamat.” A trace of hoarseness roughened his voice, but that was all, of course.
Lords of Magic, that wonderful dream could have been her life. “You sound sure it would have been a boy.”
He shrugged. “
Statistically, it’s more likely. About eighty percent of dragonlings are males. We tend to mate with other supernaturals. Naturals, too.”
Something was wrong with that. “Wait, I thought most dragons die when their mates do, so regular supernaturals don’t live to be two centuries old, unless you guys marry a lot of fae.”
Arawn nodded. “Dragonmates take on many dragonish characteristics, including the changes to the eyes, the resistance to natural diseases and dragonfire, the metabolism, and the longer lifespan.”
Willow laughed at him. “Getting married doesn’t change a person’s body. It’s not magic.”
“The dragon mating bond is magic.”
Willow was skeptical. Supernatural kinds had sharp dominions. Witches and fae could perform magic. Angels and demons had their own types of powers. Shifters harbored second souls and could change into their animal forms, but they couldn’t cast spells. “I didn’t know dragons could perform magic.”
“It’s limited. We’re mythicals, so we have a few special traits that other shifters don’t.”
“Like not getting cancer or heart disease.”
Arawn raised an eyebrow at her. “Some friends of mine have succumbed to a horrible case of ‘dad-bod.’ It was tragic to watch.”
She couldn’t even laugh at the joke. “So, we would have been all right, if you’d gotten mating fever.”
He nodded, and his eyes creased at the corners. “Yes, we would have been all right.”
She might as well face this head-on. Her anger had turned to a mournful wistfulness. “But it didn’t happen that way.”
“No, it didn’t. I couldn’t force it, no matter how much I tried. No one can. I wanted to marry you anyway. I asked our king for permission to marry you even though you weren’t my fated mate. He refused.”
That sounded so weird. Every supernatural kind had its own societal quirks. Dragon shifters must have a semi-feudal society. The Fae were fully feudal. “Witches don’t have to ask anyone to get married. We inform our parents and the Coven Council that it’s going to happen, and they do the magic to mote it be.”
Dragons and Mayhem Page 9