“Work up to what?”
“Our mating.”
“If you say that word, or a derivative of it, one more fucking time—!” She broke off to draw in several deep breaths. “There will be no mating between us, slow or otherwise. Now, do whatever it is you have to do to get me back to Wales. Snap your fingers. Tap your heels together. Whatever it takes, do it!”
His eyes narrowed to silver slits. “Why do I have the feeling you’re both humoring and mocking me at the same time?”
“Probably because I am. But don’t worry, I’m mocking myself too.” She gave a self-derisive snort. “I had absolutely no idea all this weird shit was bouncing around inside my head.” Tears glistened in her eyes. “It’s a little worrying, to be honest.”
This seesaw of emotions in a human mate was something else Garrett’s human sisters-in-law had warned him about. And Billie might like to present a hard exterior, but inwardly, she was obviously frightened by what she thought were hallucinations plucked from the dark and depraved depths of her own mind.
Probably not a good time for Garrett to tell her that now he had started the mating by kissing her, they only had three weeks in which to complete the mating or they would both die.
“I want to go home,” she told him shakily.
No, not a good time at all, he conceded with an inward wince.
“I think for the moment, we should stay where we are,” he soothed gently, resisting the urge to put one of his arms comfortingly about Billie’s shoulders. It was probably for the best if he didn’t touch her again right now. “How about I make us something to eat while you take a nice relaxing dip in the pool? The water is always hot. Afterward there will be plenty of time for us to talk about what we want to do next.”
Billie was feeling too shaky to want to argue with him about his constant use of the word “we.” Although that fierce sexual need did seem to have eased a little now that Garrett no longer held her in his arms or kissed her. His mention of food also made her aware she couldn’t remember when she’d last eaten anything. Nor, stuck inside this cave, did she even know whether it was night or day. Garrett said they had been here for twenty-four hours, so it had been days rather than hours since she last ate.
Even so, what she could really do with right now was one of the strong cigarettes she occasionally liked to smoke. But as her handbag was probably still sitting on the floor in the back of the SUV that was wrapped around a tree, she didn’t think they were going to magically appear either.
Maybe, as she hadn’t brought them with her into this illusion, something was telling her it was time to quit.
Oh God, she really didn’t have any idea what was real and what wasn’t anymore. It had all become so muddled inside her aching head.
She nodded. “Some food sounds good.” She looked longingly at the bubbling pool. “I—I don’t have anything to bathe in.”
“I’ll keep my back turned while you undress and slip into the water. It’s slightly cloudy, so your modesty is assured once you’re in,” he added practically.
Billie gave him a searching glance. His dark gray gaze didn’t waver from meeting hers. As a show of his sincerity?
With how weird everything else was, did it really matter whether or not Garrett meant what he said to her?
Not really, she answered her own question.
And maybe once she stepped into the hot water, this illusion would be broken, and she could go back to sorting out what had become her shitty life.
“Fine,” she agreed before moving away from him.
“I’ll find you a towel,” he offered.
“Thanks.” Billie walked over to stare down into the cloudy water. Iceland was known for these hot pools that sprang up all over the country, but she had never thought she would dream about one, let alone take a swim in it.
She glanced across to where Garrett was now searching through some shelves behind the bed, probably looking for that towel. His polo shirt stretched across the defined muscles of his wide shoulders and back, turning sideways revealing an expanse of those taut abs. And his ass really did look edible in those snug-fitting jeans.
If she really had lost her mind, she could think of worse people than Garrett Pendragon to share the madness with.
Chapter 4
Garrett made a point of keeping his back turned as he searched through the kitchen cupboards for tins of food, until his sensitive ears heard the slight movement of the water in the pool, which told him Billie was now undressed and in the water.
Not quite so easy to keep his gaze averted as Billie immediately began to make murmurs and groans of pleasure.
She was sitting on one of the ledges around the side of the pool with her shoulders beneath the water, her head resting back on the rocks, and her eyes closed. Those sounds of pleasure were obviously in response to her enjoyment of the soothing heat of the hot spring against her aching body. She had no doubt acquired a few bruises in the crash earlier.
Garrett’s mouth tightened as those gouges down Billie’s throat from the pressure of Grigor’s talons yesterday were clearly visible now that her hair had fallen away from her neck to cascade onto the rocks surrounding the pool behind her.
Billie would have the ability to heal more quickly once the two of them were fully mated, of course.
If they mated.
Being a dragon shifter’s mate wasn’t easy or for the faint-hearted. Not that he thought Billie was that; she was probably in her midtwenties and appeared to have an independent nature and a definite dislike of bullshit. His brothers might have succeeded in persuading their equally independent human mates to accept the claiming, but there was no guarantee Billie would do the same. It had been touch-and-go with a couple of his brothers’ human mates as to whether or not they would agree to the mating.
There were a lot of things to consider. Such as, did Billie have family and friends who would miss her when she necessarily had to duck out of their lives because she wasn’t aging and they were? A dragon shifter’s fated mate aged much more slowly than a human and lived for as long he did.
Which, with Billie as Garrett’s fated mate, was currently either for an eternity or three weeks.
An eternity with the mating.
Three weeks if the claiming wasn’t completed.
He really shouldn’t have kissed her.
The water was so pleasantly hot that Billie could feel her body totally relaxing as she rested on a ledge the perfect height for sitting with her shoulders just beneath the water. She had allowed her arms to float to the top of the water, and the heat was soothing away the aches and twinges from the accident. As she had suspected there might be, she had a livid bruise on her shoulder from where the seat belt had tightened when the SUV hit the tree.
But sitting in the hot water was relaxing and clearing the chaos from her mind as well as easing those aches from her body.
It had been so long since she’d been able to relax. Weeks and months since her life had once again been thrown into turmoil, and for the same reason.
Her father.
It had just been the two of them when Billie was growing up, her mother having left shortly after Billie’s fifth birthday. Billie hadn’t seen her since.
Much as she’d adored her father, she’d been too young to suspect there was anything wrong with his haphazard work ethic when she was younger. He always made a point of taking her to school and collecting her in the afternoons, and there was always enough money for food and going out on the weekends.
Billie’d had her suspicions as to where that money came from once she was old enough to go to university, and there was never a problem paying the fees. Her father would often disappear for days at a time then, usually returning with an excess of money to spend.
But her blinkers were ripped away completely when he was put in prison for armed robbery shortly after her twenty-first birthday.
Not the first time he had committed a crime, apparently.
She had learned i
n court that Edward Rider had been a minor crook during her childhood, but had advanced to more serious crimes once he had taken up employment with the Romanian Mafia.
Her father had now served four years of his sentence and could possibly be out for good behavior in three more years.
Except…
The Romanian Mafia, once it had its claws in you, didn’t let go. When Cezar Fescaru, the head of the Romanian Mafia in London and her father’s employer, learned that Billie was employed as Gregori Markovic’s personal assistant, it hadn’t taken him long to come knocking on her door.
Well, strictly speaking, he had sent one of his gorilla-like henchmen to knock on her door, the huge man then dragging Billie off to the warehouse in the docklands where the Fescaru masterminded and ran his illegal businesses. The Romanian had explained he wanted Billie to work for him in her father’s stead. She was to feed him information about Gregori Markovic, or her father would be the one to suffer the consequences of her noncooperation.
Crook though he undoubtedly was, Billie still loved her charming rogue of a father and made a point of visiting him once a month at the prison. She certainly wouldn’t allow any harm to come to him if she could prevent it. And until Fescaru had instructed her to steal Markovic’s money, as much a test of her loyalty to the Romanian as it was a deliberate act against the powerful Russian, she’d managed to avoid doing anything too seriously damaging or illegal.
It now seemed she had the Pendragon brothers howling for her blood too.
Well…not all of them. Garrett didn’t seem to harbor any murderous intentions toward her. No, he just wanted to fuck her and mate with her!
That wasn’t going to happen, Billie told herself firmly, because when she opened her eyes, none of this would be real, and she would somehow be lying in the bath in her apartment. No doubt still trying to make sense of how her life had become so complicated. But Garrett Pendragon, and all that nonsense about dragons and fated mates, would simply be figment of her imagination.
“You’re going to turn into a prune if you stay in there much longer.”
Not a figment of her imagination!
And she really was in a cavernous cave in Iceland, Billie accepted once she’d opened her eyes and looked up at the vaulted rock ceiling above her.
Her lips felt slightly numb as she lowered her gaze but didn’t turn to look at Garrett. “This is all real, isn’t it,” she stated rather than asked.
Because she could feel him close behind her. The warmth of his body. Could smell his compelling sexual musk. It caused her nipples to harden and her labia and clit to swell in arousal.
“All of it, yes,” he confirmed unnecessarily.
Billie tilted her head to one side as she turned to look at Garrett crouching on his haunches on the rocks beside her. He looked just as delicious as he had earlier: tousled dirty-blond hair, dark gray eyes, chiseled features, and that killer body. One that could literally turn into a lethal dragon twenty feet tall!
And she, Garrett claimed, was the fated mate of both him and that imposing dragon.
Garrett watched the emotions flickering in and then out of his mate’s expressive blue eyes. Wariness. Confusion. Lastly, a grudging acceptance.
Of the existence of his dragon, if not that she was Garrett’s fated mate.
He reached out a hand to run his knuckles down the smoothness of her cheek. “You’ll feel better when you’ve had something to eat.”
“You said that about the soak in the pool,” she reminded him dryly.
Garrett had said that, yes, and at least Billie was no longer completely freaking out about their surroundings or his dragon. “Was I right?” he teased.
She gave a rueful smile. “Partly, yes.”
“Then maybe the food will help with the other part?” he cajoled.
A frown appeared between her eyes. “You’re the charming rogue of the family, aren’t you.”
“My brothers have occasionally called me impulsive and hotheaded, yes,” Garrett conceded, knowing that of the eight Pendragon brothers still alive, he was probably considered the easiest to get along with.
Living for sixteen hundred years had shown him there wasn’t a lot of point in getting too uptight about anything, and that in another hundred years, it would have been forgotten anyway and the world would have moved on. That included the two world wars in the previous century.
He and his brothers had been fighting battles from the age of thirty-five, the moment their dragons came into existence. First at Arthur’s side, and then for whatever cause or government they’d deemed worthy of their dragon warriors. Pendragon Security was the legitimate front to those activities in the twenty-first century.
But all that was before Garrett met his mate. Now Billie, her happiness and welfare, had become the complete focus of his existence. Her pleasure and protection his priority. He would kill anyone who tried to take her away from him.
“Hmm,” Billie murmured.
“What?” he prompted warily, sensing there was something more behind that remark.
“Could I have my towel now, please?” She looked pointedly at the fluffy gold towel draped across his knee.
“Oh. Yes.” He straightened to shake out and hold up the towel.
Billie raised her eyebrows. “Let me rephrase that… Could you put my towel down and then disappear back to the kitchen area while I step out of here?”
“Spoilsport,” he teased as he placed the towel down on the rocks. “There’s also a robe. It will be too big for you, but I’m guessing you won’t want to put your dirty clothes back on,” he added before strolling back to the kitchen area.
The brothers all left tinned foods in their caves for emergency use only. They usually preferred to shift into their dragon and go hunting for their food. But he didn’t think Billie would appreciate him disappearing and returning with a rabbit or some other prey that needed skinning and cleaning before being cooked. Garrett’s dragon would have eaten it raw, but he didn’t think Billie would like that idea either.
Consequently, he had heated the contents of a couple of tins of soup and found a box of crackers to go with it. It wasn’t exactly cordon bleu cooking, but he could hunt later for something more substantial for them to eat tonight or tomorrow. The important thing now was to get some sort of hot food inside Billie before they continued with their conversation.
“I didn’t realize I was so hungry.” Billie gave a self-conscious grimace as she looked up from eating her soup and found Garrett watching her with that intense gray gaze. She’d eaten half the vegetable soup in her bowl without pausing except to draw the occasional breath. “I guess being hunted by members of the Russian bratva and Romanian Mafia, and now dragon shifters, will do that to a woman,” she attempted to joke.
Garrett wasn’t fooled for a minute. “Do you feel like discussing what got you into this mess in the first place?”
She sighed. “Not really.”
“You don’t seem the type to become involved with men as dangerous as the Romanian Mafia and Russian bratva.”
She eyed him derisively. “Oh, then, what type am I?”
“Blunt. Straightforward.”
Billie felt the color warm her cheeks at the thought of how Garrett had come to that conclusion. She hadn’t exactly been subtle in her demand to have his cock inside her earlier. “I’m not usually that straightforward,” she defended uncomfortably.
“I’m not complaining.”
“Whatever is in your saliva is pretty powerful stuff.” And she’d felt a return of that complete physical awareness of Garrett buzzing beneath her skin ever since she sat down at the table with him to eat their meal.
It didn’t help that she was completely naked beneath the too-large black silk robe.
Or that she wanted to take off that robe, unzip Garrett’s jeans, and take out his cock before straddling his thighs and lowering herself until she’d taken all of that silken and pulsing nine inches of flesh inside her.
She didn’t have time for this right now, had too many other things occupying her thoughts and time, to deal with a sixteen-hundred-year-old dragon shifter with a powerful aphrodisiac in his saliva.
She gave Garrett an appreciative glance. “Are you really that old?” He looked to be in the prime of life with those good looks and toned and muscular body.
“Yes, but in appearance, I stopped aging when I reached the age of thirty-five and was able to shift into my dragon. All the Pendragon brothers did.”
No more freaking out, Billie instructed herself firmly. “That hardly seems fair for the rest of us.”
“Once you’re my mate— If you become my mate,” he amended as Billie’s eyes narrowed, “you’ll more or less stop aging too.”
“Wow, incentive enough right there to say yes!” she drawled.
“Except you aren’t going to, are you,” he guessed shrewdly.
“No,” she confirmed.
A scowl darkened his brow. “Why not? As you said, not aging is a definite plus. Then there’s the exclusivity of your dragon shifter mate. And the guarantee there will also be lots of amazing sex,” he assured confidently.
Billie didn’t want to think too deeply about how he knew the sex would be amazing. Nor was she sure what he meant by “exclusivity of your dragon mate.” Did that mean Garrett would be with only her for the rest of her life? What happened when she died? Did he find himself another fated mate?
“That is a definite plus,” she dismissed. “But I’m guessing from the fact that all your brothers and their wives live at Pendragon Castle too, that any mate of yours would also be expected to live there?”
“It isn’t as crowded as it sounds.” He frowned. “We own a security company, so some of us are always away on business around the world. Chloe and Tegan work from home anyway, and Izzie is attending the local university to finish the law degree she started in Russia. Not sure what Gayle is going to do yet, because she and Grigor are still pretty new. But you worked as Gregori Markovic’s assistant. Why did you choose to work for the known head of the Russian bratva in London?”
Garrett (Dragon Hearts 6) Page 3