Clint had been happy to agree to that, and had arranged the meeting he was now sitting in. And since Sunny hadn’t mentioned the kiss, he’d told himself to follow her lead and not talk about it either. But he couldn’t stop thinking about it. And he couldn’t stop thinking about her. What was he getting himself into? It wasn’t possible that Sunny was his lifemate, was it?
Clint wished he could talk to one of his friends who had already found their lifemates. He wanted to know what they had felt when they first saw the woman who would become their lifemate, or when they had known. How they had known. He just wanted to know anything that would give him a clue as to why his heart seemed to be going haywire on him right now. It wasn’t like him to get emotional, especially not over a woman. And yet whenever he thought of Sunny now, he felt a strange, giddy feeling. Was this love?
Clint hadn’t been able to talk to his friends, though, and he wasn’t sure he’d have a chance to anytime soon. Now more than ever, the High Council was going to want him to focus all his energy on fixing the dragon disappearance problem. Councilor Morgan was standing, shaking his head in wonder.
“Sunny, I think the other Councilors would agree with me that this is the best news we’ve had in a long, long time. What do you need from us to perform the counter spell properly? The resources of Torch Lake are at your disposal.”
Sunny glanced nervously at Clint. He smiled at her, hoping to put her a little bit more at ease. She looked back at Councilor Morgan and started speaking again, her voice a little stronger this time. “Well, both the disappearing spell and its counter spell are difficult to cast properly. Both spells work better when you are in close proximity to the person or objects that the spell is being directed toward, which means that I need to be as close as possible to the next dragon you go after before the scouts are sent out to him. I need to be there before the Dark Warriors are alerted to which dragon you’re going after next.”
Clint sat up straighter. “That means the Dark Warriors are probably going to be close to the dragon, too.”
Sunny nodded. “Probably. I’m sure they’re doing their best to keep themselves hidden, but my guess is that they’ve been pretty close to all of the dragons you’ve gone after thus far.”
Councilor Morgan frowned. “You’ll need protection then, Sunny. We’ll do our best to keep you from being seen, of course, but if the Dark Warriors discover that you’re there, they’re likely to attack.”
Sunny nodded. “Yeah, I’m sure they would be only too happy to kill off a wizard using ancient magic against them. But the problem is that the more guards I have with me, the more likely I am to be seen. It’s probably best if I go alone, despite the risks.”
“Absolutely not!” Councilor Isviar said, slamming his fist on the table. “We can’t let you go off on your own with no guards. You’re far too valuable to us.”
Clint sat up straighter. “I’ll go with her.”
All eyes in the room turned to him.
“You will?” Sunny asked, her voice barely more than a whisper.
“I’ll go. One dragon will offer a significant amount of protection, but by myself I won’t attract too much attention. At least I hope I won’t. It’s the best way to guard Sunny without having to send a whole squadron of soldiers with her.”
“Are you sure?” Councilor Isviar asked. “Things could get quite dangerous if the Dark Warriors discover that you’re there.”
“I am a dragon,” Clint growled. “I don’t back down from danger. Besides, you’ve all chewed me out constantly for supposedly not doing enough to help in the dragon recruiting effort. Well here I am offering to do more. So do you want my help or not?”
Clint saw Sunny’s eyes widen as he spoke, probably because it was unusual for anyone to use such a strong tone when speaking with a High Council. But Clint was too frustrated to care about things like propriety and respect right now. He wanted this dragon disappearance problem stopped, and he wanted Sunny safe. And he was sick and tired of the High Council acting like he didn’t have what it took to take care of the dragon recruiting problem.
Councilor Morgan crossed his arms and regarded Clint with shrewd eyes.
“Very well, Clint. If you are sure that you want to take on this responsibility, we will send you out with Sunny. When do you think you can be ready?”
“Well, we already have a scout ready to go track down a dragon shifter who is hiding out north of San Francisco. We could dispatch the scout tomorrow and trail right behind him. Usually, the dragons seem to disappear the day after the scout seeks them out. So as long as Sunny and I leave at the same time as the scout, we should be there in plenty of time for her to perform the counter spell.”
“Very well. Sunny, how does this all sound to you?” Councilor Morgan asked.
“Sounds good to me. I just hope I can manage the counter spell. It’s a difficult one.”
“Just do your best,” Clint piped up. Sunny turned her eyes toward him and he gave her another encouraging smile. The High Councilors started talking all at once, making plans for what resources Sunny and Clint would need for their mission, but Clint hardly heard them. For a moment, he and Sunny were the only two people in the room. His eyes were locked with hers, and, despite the fear and worry in her eyes, she smiled at him. Clint felt his stomach flutter in a funny way he’d never felt before.
He couldn’t believe he was going to get to go on a mission with this beautiful woman. He was actually going to be paid to spend time with her, which meant he pretty much had the best job in the world. Now if only they could manage to actually stop the Dark Warriors from making another dragon disappear, life would be perfect.
Sunny looked away, but Clint kept his eyes on her profile, and felt another flutter in his stomach. He knew he had to remain professional around her when they worked together, but it was going to be so hard not to kiss her when they were alone on the road. He already had a feeling that this was going to be a mission to remember.
Chapter Twelve
Oakwood was a sleepy little town about one hundred and fifty miles north of San Francisco, and it made the perfect place for a dragon shifter to hide out. The townspeople here were tough, outdoorsy types who liked to keep to themselves. They were happy to discuss the best hiking and fishing spots with you, but they didn’t like any personal questions. In turn, they didn’t ask any personal questions. Clint himself might have settled down in this town before moving to Torch Lake, if he’d know it existed. He could understand why the dragon shifter they were trying to recruit had bought himself a little house on the edge of Oakwood after the Great Dark War. No wizards or shifters were likely to bother the dragon shifter here. Or so he thought.
Clint himself had thought for a while that it was possible to hide from the world of magic and shifters. He had tried to blend into the human world, until Jake, a dragon from Torch Lake, had found him and convinced him to move to the up and coming shifter-wizard town. Now, Clint understood better than most that you could never truly hide from who you were. That’s part of why he had trusted Sunny to make the right decision about revealing who she was. He knew if he gave her a chance to think about it and decide for herself, she wouldn’t be able to resist helping the people of Torch Lake.
Now, Sunny was sitting in their hotel room and staring out the window to the woods beyond, tapping her foot nervously. The trip out here had been uneventful enough, but Sunny was still a ball of anxiety.
“Want to go for a walk or something?” Clint asked. “We could see a little bit of Oakwood. I hear there’s a great fudge shop downtown.”
Sunny shook her head no. “It’s too dangerous. We don’t want to take the chance that someone from the Dark Warriors might see us and figure out who we are.”
Clint sighed as Sunny went back to her nervous tapping. She was right, of course. Walking down Main Street of Oakwood would be a pretty risky move. But Clint didn’t know what else to do to take her mind off of the task ahead of her. It would be at least tomorrow b
efore she would need to cast the counter spell, and in the meantime all she could do was freak out about everything that could possibly go wrong. Besides, he was feeling a little trapped himself in this room. It was a small room, with barely enough room to walk around the two double beds that had been squeezed into the space. The effect was mildly claustrophobic.
“A walk in the woods, then?”
“There might be Dark Warriors hiding in there.”
“Yes, there might be. And there’s a small chance that we’ll run across some of them. But you can’t just sit here and stare out the window for the next twenty-four hours.”
Sunny looked back at him and frowned. “Fine. But only a short walk.”
Clint nodded. He would take what he could get. And he was hoping that once she was outside and breathing the fresh air, she would relax a bit and walk longer than she intended to.
Once they were outside, he found himself relaxing, too. He hadn’t realized how tightly wound he had been, but the warm air and sunshine soothed him. Signs of spring were everywhere, with bright green leaves slowly unfurling and the merry cheeping of birdsongs all around. Clint breathed in deeply and savored the balmy air. He and Sunny walked in silence for a while, content to just take it all in. Sunny finally broke the silence with a wistful sigh.
“Spring was always my favorite season back in Eagle Thicket. The winters were strong there, with lots of snow, so the arrival of spring was always a dramatic change. I loved watching all the new plants and baby animals. Everything felt so fresh and new. When my High Council sent me into hiding, spring had just begun. I have such strong memories of hiding in the forest, surrounded by all the new life. Little did I know that my old life was about to be completely burned away.”
Clint gave her a sorrowful glance. “I’m really sorry about your clan.”
Sunny shrugged, even though he could tell she was blinking away tears. “Thanks. It happened to pretty much everyone during the war, though. We all lost so much.”
“Still, I’m sorry. The fact that others lost everything too doesn’t make your loss hurt any less.”
She nodded, and walked in silence for a few moments. Then she turned to him and gave him a curious look. “You don’t talk much about your old clan. How did they fare in the war?”
“Not great. We were a small clan to begin with, and couldn’t defend ourselves well against the massive armies of dark wizards and evil shifters. Only a few of us survived, and I wasn’t that close to the ones who did. The others all went to live in Falcon Cross. I initially tried to escape to a human city, but Jake convinced me to come live in Torch Lake.”
“Jake the People’s Governor?”
“Yup, he used to work in the Dragon Utilization Department back in Torch Lake’s really early days.”
“I didn’t know that. But I guess there’s a lot about Torch Lake I don’t know.”
Clint laughed. “It can be a surprising place. There are so many different people from so many different backgrounds. It keeps things interesting.”
“That’s part of why I moved there, you know? I thought with so many different types of people, it would be easy to hide who I was.”
“I could see that. You might have hidden for a long time if it hadn’t been for the fact that we happened to be dealing with this dragon disappearance situation right now.”
“Yeah. And if Mocha hadn’t insisted on burying my Academy of Ancient Magic t-shirt in your flowerbed.”
Clint laughed again. “Remind me to buy that dog a nice juicy steak when we get home.”
Sunny laughed too. “Seriously, though, I’m sorry about Mocha’s digging. I know you just wanted a secluded house with no one bothering you, and then in I came with a misbehaving dog to boot. But I don’t know how to make her stop digging holes.”
“I’m pretty good at dog training. I’d be willing to work with her, if you want.”
“Oh my god, I would love that. I’m completely at a loss with her. She’s so sweet, but so stubborn!”
“I’ll see what I can do when we get home. In the meantime, though, stop apologizing for invading my space. It was pretty ridiculous of me to think I was going to have a street full of houses to myself forever. Torch Lake’s population is growing fast. Even if you hadn’t moved in, the rest of those houses will be filling up sooner rather than later. Besides, as far as neighbors go, you’re pretty great.”
“Really?” Sunny sounded surprised.
Clint took a deep breath, stopped walking, and turned to face her. “Really.” His voice sounded husky now, and he knew his eyes were giving away his feelings. If he had any sense about him at all he would have at least waited until they were done with this mission to show Sunny how he felt. But it was hard to be sensible when a woman as beautiful and sweet as her was standing right next to him. They still hadn’t talked about their kiss, and, honestly, Clint didn’t want to talk about it. He just wanted to kiss her again. And again, and again. The more time he spent with her, the more he knew he was falling for her.
“Well, um, you make a great neighbor, too,” Sunny stammered out. Her cheeks had turned bright pink, and she was chewing her bottom lip nervously. She looked so adorable that any last shred of caution he had disappeared on the soft spring breeze.
“Stop that,” Clint said.
“Stop what?”
“Chewing your lip like that. It makes it too hard to do this.”
And then, he bent down and kissed her. She did not resist. Her lips were soft and warm, and she let him slip his tongue past them and into her mouth. She tasted sweet, and she felt warm and welcoming—just like the spring after a long winter. Clint smiled and wrapped his arms around her, and she reached to wrap her arms around him as well. They kissed long and deep, until finally, she pulled away and gave him a shy smile.
“We should get back,” she said softly. “It really isn’t safe to be out here,”
Clint nodded. He knew she was right, but damn. He could have kissed her all day. Maybe one day he would. But not today. Today, they needed to focus on the mission at hand. Besides, if he kept kissing her they were eventually going to have to have some sort of discussion about it, weren’t they? Wasn’t that what girls always wanted? To have “the talk” and know where they stood?
Clint glanced over at Sunny as they walked, and she looked right back at him and bit her lip in that irresistible way.
Something told him she knew exactly where she stood.
Chapter Thirteen
Action movies weren’t exactly Sunny’s thing, but she hadn’t protested when Clint chose the latest war movie for their evening entertainment. She had too many different thoughts swirling through her mind to pay much attention to anything with a plot, anyway, so she might as well let Clint revel in watching a bunch of ridiculous battle scenes.
As she sat on the hotel room’s bed and watched a bunch of ancient Greeks charging across the screen with spears, she tried to review in her mind the steps to performing the counter spell that she would need to do tomorrow. The spell was complicated, but she had brushed up on how to do it, and she felt reasonably confident that she could pull it off. She hoped she was right. And she hoped that whoever was performing the disappearing spell itself wouldn’t be able to tell where she was by her magical aura. There were some ancient magic locater spells that allowed you to locate someone within a certain radius when they were performing magic spells. If whoever was behind the disappearing spells knew how to use the locater spells, Sunny and Clint would be in trouble. Sunny tried not to worry too much about that, though. The locater spells were even more difficult than the disappearing spells, and the only wizard Sunny knew who could do them with consistently good results was her old mentor Barnabas.
Sunny frowned. She didn’t want to think about Barnabas. Doing so only made her sad. And she didn’t really want to think about the counter spell any more either. She would have enough time to worry about it tomorrow. After the scout left the dragon shifter’s house, Sunny would ha
ve to be on constant alert, waiting for the disturbance in the magical atmosphere that would tell her a strong spell was being used nearby. That would be her clue that someone was performing the disappearing spell, and she would then make her attempt at the counter spell. Even feeling the magical disturbance in the atmosphere required a knowledge of ancient magic spells. Sunny shook her head slightly thinking about how long it would have taken the High Council of Torch Lake to figure out how to train a wizard in ancient magic from scratch. They were lucky she had come to Torch Lake when she did. Otherwise it might have been a good five years at least before they could stop the Dark Warriors from thwarting their dragon recruiting efforts.
In an effort to stop thinking about spells and counter spells, Sunny let her mind wander to Clint. A small smile played at her lips as she remembered his kiss earlier today. He hadn’t said anything about it since, just like he still hadn’t said anything about their first kiss. But it didn’t take a genius to see that his feelings for her were growing. He would softly touch her arm, or the small of her back, at any opportunity. He held the door for her whenever possible, and she’d caught him gazing at her hungrily on more than one occasion. She liked the little game they seemed to be playing, of finding whatever excuse they could to touch each other. But she’d be lying if she said she didn’t want more.
She shouldn’t be thinking that way, she knew. But she’d thought he was gorgeous since the first night she met him, when he came out to help her unload the moving truck in the rain. The realization that he found her attractive too sent little thrills through her whenever she thought about it.
“Hey! Earth to Sunny!”
Clint’s voice cut through her little daydreams and brought her back to the present moment, where she realized to her disappointment that the credits were now playing for the movie. That meant Clint was going to go to his bed and she’d be here on this bed, alone. She hated to let him go, but she was too unsure of what was going on between them to insist that he stay.
Dragon Protecting (Torch Lake Shifters Book 4) Page 7