Above her, Isaac paused. With his hands resting on her thighs, he must have felt the change. Concern made his brows dip low over his soft eyes. At her sides, Quinn fisted and un-fisted her hands. She fought the urge to curl in on herself, to pull her knees to her chest and avoid this altogether.
“Did I do something wrong? Was this too fast? Because I can stop,” Isaac sat back, but left his hands on Quinn’s thighs as if he couldn’t fully separate himself from her yet. As if he still yearned for the feeling of her skin against his.
She pressed her lips together, a botched explanation cramped behind them. What could she say? That she was afraid sleeping with him would be like sleeping with any other man? That wasn’t something any guy wanted to hear, dragon or otherwise. It would break his heart and she wasn’t ready to do that. She never wanted to break Isaac’s heart.
Finally, her shoulders slumped. She let her head fall back and stared at the ceiling above her to keep from gazing into Isaac’s puppy dog eyes.
“It’s alright,” he said, suddenly. “I think I understand. You went from believing you already had a mate in Kenji, and now you found out you never had a mate. This is a… a rebound and you’re not ready for that. I get it.”
She laughed, a nearly choked sound. That was most definitely not it. She looked back at the dragon man trying to be as unimposing as possible. It was hard with his broad shoulders and barrel chest. He looked like he could sweep the floor with a room full of people. He looked safe in a way that promised to rain hell down on those that hurt you.
Quinn cocked her head to the side. “Do you not know?”
Isaac’s eyes widened, his brows shooting upward before confusion took over again. Slowly, he shook his head.
Emboldened, Quinn leaned forward to crawl across the mattress on her hands and knees toward him. She smiled up at him and watched the confusion war with his need, but he left his hands on his knees. Perhaps sex would feel not much different than it had before, but that wasn’t what the mate bond was about.
It was about finding the one person in the whole universe that could make her happy. It was about being that person for Isaac. Dragons lived a very long life. She’d been expecting that long lifespan since Kenji told her about their supposed bond. Quinn found that she was much happier about the prospect of living that long life with Isaac.
“I’m not lacking a mate, you big dummy.”
It took a moment, the gears working behind his eyes until they grew to the size of saucers when he realized what she was saying. It was hard to believe this man hadn’t figured it out before. Isaac was a smart man, the kind to rely on his brains before his brawns.
He leaned forward, grasped her face between his hands and pulled her in for a kiss. Overtaken by the surprise and joy of the news, his lips pressed against hers with need. He pulled her lip into his mouth and nibbled like he would forget the taste of her if he didn’t do this one thing.
When he pulled back, she could tell there was another question from the look in his eyes. It nearly masked the pain hidden in the depths of his eyes.
“Then why did you tense up earlier?”
Could she tell him what she’d worried about? Could she risk hurting him like that? The only way to start a relationship was with honesty, Quinn convinced herself. This was only the beginning of their bond. She wanted to be open with him, with her mate.
“I was afraid,” she confessed, lowering her eyes to the bed. “I was afraid that the bond would turn out to be nothing special. I was afraid I would lose interest. I don’t want to be my mother.”
Isaac slithered toward her, his arms snaking around either side of her until he could pull her in his lap. He took a long moment to nuzzle her ear, laying a trail of nibbles and kisses down the length of her neck that made Quinn’s mind go blank. She missed him when he pulled away, but his voice cut through the fog his touch made in her mind.
“I cannot proclaim to know much about the bond of mates, dragon to dragon or dragon to human. What I can say is that those that I have seen mated find themselves disappearing from my presence quite a lot.”
Quinn’s brow furrowed. Her brain was too slow, fogged from her drinks and from the anticipation still coiled in her core, to keep up with whatever it was he was trying to imply. He laughed softly as his breath whispered over her skin.
“What I’m trying to say is that the sex must be good because the two mated pairs I’ve met cannot seem to stop fucking.”
Quinn let out a loud laugh. Her hands began to move over Isaac’s skin. She let them travel up his arms, feeling the hills of his bulky muscles. Her fingers reached the edge of his floppy curls. There was enough hair that she could thread her fingers through it and pull his head back so that he was at her whim. There was a growl that slipped from between his lips when she did, but it wasn’t one of threat.
The rumble of his growl, like thunder in the sky, vibrated through her body from where they pressed together. It made things low in her stomach tighten in anticipation.
Together, they fell back onto the bed. Isaac’s body hovered over hers and, once again, she could feel his need growing against her abdomen. She’d yet to reach down and free the growing cock from his pants and see just how large it truly was, but she had a feeling he was quite large. Could she handle all of him? Or, would it hurt?
Quinn squirmed out from beneath him again. Her head was spinning. It was going a million miles an hour, hitting every speed bump on the way. She couldn’t stop the awful train of thoughts spinning in her mind. She needed to stop. She needed to collect herself.
Fear gripped her. Fear that she would love and leave. Fear that she couldn’t please him. Fear that they wouldn’t be compatible. It made her stomach lurch, the vodka and hot wings threatening to rise.
Isaac sat back on his haunches. He clearly desired her, if the bulge rising in his jeans was any indication. She was amazed he was able to put space between them with that kind of need. She groaned, bemoaning her own inability to give him what he clearly wanted.
“Hey,” Isaac’s voice broke her crazy train of thoughts. She looked up to find him readjusting and settling back down. “If this is too fast, I understand. I… I want you, but not if you aren’t ready for it. I want all of you. I want so much more than just sex. If what I said about the other mates gave you the wrong idea…”
Quinn shook her head. “That isn’t…” how could she tell him that she was afraid. Quinn never feared much. She took life with a grain of salt, taking enjoyment where she could, taking the thrill of living when she could.
This was different. This was the man fate thought she should spend the rest of her life with. She knew it was true this time, knew it like she knew her own name. But, Quinn didn’t know if she was right for him. She felt like he deserved so much better. She thought he deserved a woman who would stand beside him and not run off at any opportunity.
She ran her hands through her hair, tugging slightly to let the feeling clear her mind. She would blame this on the vodka. She would tell Isaac she wasn’t feeling well. It was an easy ploy, a lie at best, an avoidance of the truth at worst. He bought her words, but didn’t stay on the bed. Instead, Isaac retreated to the tub once more.
Feeling guilty, but unable to ask him to sleep any nearer for the fear she would betray her conviction to wait, she tossed him a few pillows to pad the tub with. It wasn’t ideal, but Isaac said nothing. He snuggled into the makeshift bed and closed his eyes.
Quinn rolled over, tears burning her eyes. She wouldn’t cry. She wouldn’t allow herself to. Isaac would hear her, for one thing. What she needed to do was work through the confusion clouding her mind and heart.
The man sleeping in the tub was her mate. He was also one of the smartest and most loyal men she’d met in a long while. Kenji had his charisma and his strength going for him, neither things she highly valued. While he could easily read a person’s motives and the meaning behind their words, having a conversation about anything in popular science bored him.
She had a feeling Isaac would know exactly which article she was referencing, maybe even more than she did.
He was good for her, she thought.
She only wished she’d be good for him.
Chapter Six
Quinn had gotten up before Isaac. Seeing him slumped and snoring in the tub was like a knife through her stomach. Guilt hurt. It was her fault that he was forced to sleep in the tub, alone and cramped. If only she knew herself better, if only she knew she wouldn’t betray this man’s heart.
Breaking Isaac’s heart was not an option. She sat on the edge of the bed and watched the gentle rise and fall of his chest and even found his snoring endearing. Fate had tied this man to her like a sick joke. Not only had he lived through something so horrible his mind locked it away for his own sanity, but Mother Nature herself was trying to kill him. Add to that a mate with a penchant for being flighty and unreliable, then Isaac had surely been handed every short straw life had.
Yet, he didn’t seem to mind much. He took life moment by moment and remade himself. He tracked weather systems and devoured books in his spare time. If anything, Isaac seemed content. Would he also be content to watch his mate run around the world? Or, would he be like the others she’d seen, looking as if they were only moments away from grabbing their mates and locking them away forever?
With her stomach feeling heavy and her mind uncertain, Quinn pushed herself up. She needed to do something. She needed to go somewhere. At the door, she paused and cast one last look back. While she wanted to crawl into the tub and curl into Isaac’s body, she knew that she would betray everything she’d said the night before in an instant.
Outside, the engine of her motorcycle rumbled and asked where they were going today. Not far, she thought. Out and about was all she needed before she and Isaac went hunting for the GOE truck that was carrying her friends. After an hour of meandering the streets and taking breakneck corners, Quinn found herself standing in a small donut shop. It might not be the best apology, but she’d learned that the best way to wake a sleeping dragon man was with food. She left with a baker’s dozen of all sorts of donuts that she wanted to try with Isaac, including a Mexican Hot Chocolate donut.
Stacked in a narrow box, she was able to slide it into the carrying compartment saddled on the side of her bike and made the trip back to the motel with a lot less meandering. Overhead, the sky was beginning to turn hazy. Quinn didn’t think much of it, just chalked it up to pollution and humidity.
Back at the motel, she pulled in to the parking lot to find Isaac sitting on the curb with his head face down in his hands. Her stomach sank. She watched his fingers curl against his scalp and his leg shake out the tension gripping him.
This was her fault.
He thought she’d run away, just like she said she was liable to do the night before. Seeing him sitting there, distraught, was painful. As the bike rolled closer, Quinn had a realization. It hit her in the side of the head like a baseball and sent her reeling. The bike staggered beneath her and she had to fight for control of it again while she dealt with the emotions hitting her.
She would always find her way back to this man. The whole, meandering ride, she’d thought of Isaac. She’d thought of their mission and of feeding him. Isaac was her true north, her only home. It made her smile as she kicked the stand and tossed her leg over the bike. The donuts were a bit squished from being tossed around during her ride, but she was sure they would still taste the same as she plopped down beside Isaac on the curb.
He didn’t lift his head, but instead leaned into her as if the feeling of her presence was enough to help center him. That was enough to tell Quinn that it wasn’t the fear of her leaving that was troubling her mate. There was something else at work.
She reached for his hand and pulled it away so that she could look him in the eye. With the other hand, she silently offered a maple glaze and bacon covered donut and waited for Isaac to speak first. He would talk when he needed to; she didn’t need to dig for answers this time.
After a long moment of silence, Isaac finally forced himself to lean back and took the offered donut from her fingers, plucking off a piece of bacon, but only staring at it. Silence lingered in the wee, dark hours of the morning. The only sounds they could hear was the rumble of the strips on the side of the nearby highway when a tractor trailer hit it.
“I got a call while you were gone,” Isaac said, his voice barely above a whisper. “You left your phone here and missed the call meant for you, so Dane called me.”
Quinn felt cold wash over her like someone dumped a bucket of ice over her head. Her mouth moved, but no words came.
“More dragons from your family were taken last night including Lucia Avila. The settlement is moving and they refuse to tell my family where they plan on going. It seems they don’t trust us anymore. Not that they really did to begin with.”
Quinn shot up from her seat on the curb. Her spine went ramrod straight, the horizon looming before her and spinning far away. She wasn’t there to help them pick a good location, to help them avoid more GOE agents. She wasn’t there to leave with them. They’d been her family for over two decades now, but they were leaving without her.
Would Kenji call her and let her know where they went? Or, would he push her out of his life completely now that they both knew she wasn’t his mate? Her heart clenched and she slapped a hand over her chest as if she could ease the ache by rubbing the bone above her heart.
They didn’t trust her anymore. That was what this was telling her. She’d chosen the site the family settled at this time and GOE had found them. GOE had taken more than just two, weak dragons.
“We need to get moving,” Quinn said. “We need to catch GOE with Ruby and Casper now if we’re going to be able to do anything about Lucia.”
Isaac threw his hands in the air. “We don’t even know where they are. How are we going to track down two GOE vehicles before they make it to whatever facility they’re taking the dragons to?”
Quinn held up a finger and ran over to the saddlebag on her bike. There was a small amount of sprinkles rolling around the bag, but her trusty, marked up map was there. She plucked it out and asked Isaac to put the flashlight on his phone over the map as she unfolded it. Laying flat, it revealed all the work she’d done on tracking the GOE facilities across the 48 continuous states. Each facility was marked with a red circle, ones that dragons claimed to have escaped from were solid red dots with little exclamation points over them. All the roads leading in and out of the facilities were marked with red lines, like the veins beneath thin skin. Quinn pressed her lips tight as she looked down at the map, her eyes following roads and possible paths from the settlement to the facilities around them.
She slapped her finger onto the worn paper. “Here. This is where they’re going.”
Isaac gave her a skeptical look. How was she to know something like that? How could she?
“After Lucia nearly destroyed the supposedly defunct facility that Luc and his mate nearly got caught in, they transported her to another nearby facility so that they could focus on rebuilding. This is the one they took her to. I’m convinced they’ve upped their security measures there and they plan to take her back. The others are probably on their way there, too.”
“Lucia destroyed that facility?”
Quinn laughed, a nervous laugh at best. Lucia Avila was trouble. The experiments they’d forced upon her had formed fissures in her mind. The beast and the human were no longer separate in Lucia’s mind. They were one entity with all the desires and instincts of both. It made dealing with her precarious and was the big reason Hector forbade the twins from their settlement. Who would want to see the animal their mother had become?
“Lucia is a force unto herself. You’ve never meddled with a dragon who turned black, so you wouldn’t understand.”
“Like hell I haven’t,” Isaac spat. He stood up, snatching her map from the ground before closing the space between them. “Our family is far from pe
rfect and has seen some deep scars. Both of our leaders, Dane and Liana, are black dragons. I can’t tell you what happened to Dane. He doesn’t talk about what happened, but I was in Wales when the white dragons tortured her and pulled her scales off. I was there while we helped her adjust to the new beast inside of her.”
Quinn stood, rooted to the ground. It never occurred to her. She hadn’t travelled with the American Territory leader when they came to the settlement and when he landed, she’d been kind of distracted with Isaac’s tumbling entrance.
“I’m sick of your family assuming we’ve had a perfect life. Our family has come together not by the ties of blood, but by the need to survive. Most of our dragons are probably related to yours, so many of them coming to us after their family members disappeared. Noelle, our Chinese fire dragon, spent most of her life looking for her sister. The twins were eating out of trash bins and off stolen food before Dane found them.
“Hell, I was just a half-starved, wandering fool myself when Dane and the twins found me. We aren’t free of our share of scars and nightmares.”
Quinn nodded. “Perhaps, I should tell you now then. What Kenji said… How he blamed the storm on you. It was because he’d met young dragons during his captivity, dragons the scientists had changed and were trying to raise as their own. He said that nature was trying to find ways of killing those young dragons.”
Isaac’s eyes raised to the skies above them. “You think…?”
Quinn nodded. “It makes sense. I hate to be the one to tell you, but Mother Nature hates you.”
He shrugged and laughed. “Makes sense. Guess that must be why I’m more fond of technology than being outside.”
His laughter caught on and Quinn found herself smiling and a laugh rising up her throat. It didn’t last. Her mind went back to her family members, suffering in captivity all over again. She didn’t think Lucia Avila’s mind would survive this again. If they could get her back, then they could have Dane and Liana help the woman, but they needed her back first.
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