Copeland wouldn’t live to see the morning.
Zed knew it with a sudden urgency and conviction. There would be no saving him. He felt no regret or remorse over the realization.
Copeland had managed to get Paulette out on a little out cropping, her hands and feet bound, and she pressed herself into the side of the mountain, as though she were afraid the very wind would wrap itself around her and pull her to her end.
Zed felt that stretching in his shoulders, the ache that came from being denied his wings. In a heartbeat, he knew he could free the beast and change the dynamics of the encounter.
But, just as quickly, the man had stepped out onto the ledge, yanking Paulette to her feet, pushing her in front of him and toward the edge, so there was nothing between Zed and Paulette’s wide, frightened eyes.
“Zed,” she said, and her voice was hoarse. Hoarse, and pleading, and scared, and relieved all at once.
His jaw clenched, anger swelling within him.
Copeland gave Paulette a playful little push toward the edge, like he just wanted to hear her cry out. Like feeling the fear that was seeping out of her brought him joy and satisfaction.
Zed heard a snap, and realized it was coming from him, his tenuous hold on humanity shattering into nothing. He felt that ache of his shoulders again, punctuated with pain.
One minute he was there. The miner and Paulette were watching him, the miner gleeful at his position of power, Paulette desperate for rescue. And the next, Zed was gone, and in his place was the massive dragon, caught between the trees and craggy edges of the mountain.
His neck was long and proud, arched, his teeth were sharp and on full display. The sound he made was caught somewhere between a bellow and a mechanical screech, and it filled the air between them, plumes of smoke and dirt making it hard for either Paulette or the miner to see.
But neither needed to see.
Paulette felt her body jerk, and just like that she was free of the miner, the man nowhere to be seen.
She heard the strong beat of wings against wind, felt the rush of air against her face. Then the dust and smoke was clearing, and it was just her on the outcropping, still bound.
The dragon was still there, his wings huge and outstretched behind him, perched a few yards from her on a large bounder, his back toward the open air behind him, his wings and tails unhindered by the earth, moments away from carrying him off into the sky.
It was impossible. The whole thing was impossible. It was impossible that she had seen Zed turn into a dragon, entirely impossible that there was a dragon here at all.
But here he was, watching her, large, diamond snake eyes, unblinking, watching her balefully. The strong flick of his tail, the way he threw his head back, gave another one of those indescribable screams, and then was wheeling backwards, tipping into the sky, wings and scales and all, just a moment later, barely more than a dot, a hazy recollection of what might have once been a dragon.
Paulette collapsed back against the rock, left alone once more. Was that dragon Zed? Whether it was or not, she was going to have to sit back and wait for him to come back and get her.
It had been a mistake. Zed knew that. He shouldn’t have let the beast claim him. He shouldn’t have let Paulette see what he truly was.
He pulled a hand through his hair and paced another small circle.
The look in Paulette’s eyes. It was enough to kill him.
He’d seen terror in all kinds of eyes. His lifetime was long and it had spanned many encounters with humans. As the dragon. As the man, the shifter. But he had never cared as much about seeing the fear as he had when it flared in Paulette’s eyes. It was a punch to the gut. And maybe it was deserved. After all, he had sent that miner flying to his death.
Zed wasn’t going to be able to pace much longer. He was going to have to face whatever it was Paulette was going to say to him when he saw her.
He knew she was up there still, alone in the dark, waiting for the rescue he had promised her. He knew she was frightened, possibly more frightened after his rescue, just as much a captive as she had been in Copeland’s grasp.
Would she be afraid of him? Would she cower from him the same way she had from the miner? Would she welcome him, like she had when she placed supper in front of him? Would she keep his secret?
What if she refused to protect his identity? He wouldn’t be able to hurt her. He wouldn’t be able to threaten her into submission. He would leave it all, leave her.
Somewhere in this world there had to be an unoccupied mountain top, not besieged by miners with picks and hopes of finding gold. If this place could not be his, if she could not be his, he would find some other place that would have him. He would learn how to live without Paulette. Without Abigail.
He took a deep breath and forced himself to move up the mountain and back toward Paulette, straightening his shoulders, embracing his resolve. The time was now. Waiting would do no one any good.
8
The sun had long since set, the dark settling around her. She could almost pretend that precipice wasn’t merely a few feet away. It had grown chilly on the mountainside, the wind picking up, slicing through her dress, blistering against her skin.
Paulette wondered if, at some point, it would be safer for her to try and go than it would be for her to sit and stay. Except there wasn’t going to be a way for her to navigate that ledge while still trapped in restraints.
She’d brought this whole mess down on herself, really. She didn’t like to think about it that way, but there it was. This could have been avoided, if only she’d given half a thought to what Zed had said to her. If only she hadn’t gone on thinking it was impossible for her to be wrong.
She was running her hands over the rocky ground beneath her, the walls behind her, looking for anything that might be sharp enough to help her escape her bindings when she heard him say her name. It barely carried on the wind, and she supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised that she hadn’t heard him approach.
Animal. Monster. Whatever he was or had been, now he was the man she’d known. The one who had been kind to her, who had given her a place to live, her daughter a future, when so many men would have turned away from her, wouldn’t have cast her a second glance.
“Zed.” She answered in a soft voice. Too soft, she thought, and she wondered if he would be able to hear her over the winds and the rustle of the trees.
But she needn’t have worried, because he was there before her, hands reaching down to slice through her bindings and pull her to her feet. His hands were warm, grounding. They reminded her of everything he had done for her — not the least of which had been saving her life that day.
Then she was standing in front of him and his hands were moving over her arms, the side of her face, twisting her this way and that as though he could see despite the darkness, like he was checking for any signs of damage.
“You are well?” he asked, and his voice was gruff and sincere, laced with emotion and no longer detached, like it had been when he had said her name moments before. His touch was all the things she had remembered it being from the time before, where his mouth had been hungry on hers, his hands moving gently over her skin.
She laid her hand on his arm. It was solid, comforting and human. Not like it could ever belong to the monster she had seen before, the one trimmed in scales and teeth and plumes of flames. This was the man she had come to know.
When she didn’t pull away from him, he folded her into his arms, like she was something precious he had come a long way to keep. He was murmuring something in her ear, words she didn’t recognize, couldn’t make out, but sweet and reassuring nonetheless.
Then his mouth found hers, and she melted into his kiss.
“I’m so sorry, Zed, I should have listened when you told me about Copeland. I just…I didn’t think —”
“No apologies, Paulette. If I had told you more, the rest of the story, if I had done a better job…If I hadn’t left you alone so much, n
one of this would have happened.”
His words were hard and unwilling to compromise. A silence settled between them, lulling Paulette into a sense of peace, the day finally catching up to her, exhaustion close on its heels.
“Come, there is something I want to show you,” he said, taking her hand in his and leading her down the way they had come.
It was dark and she was slow, but he never made her feel like she needed to rush, even though it was clear he would have been moving much faster on his own. And truthfully, she wasn’t worried, Zed had her hand in his, and she was certain he would keep her safe. They wound up and down and around, until they were on a large flat portion of mountainside that led into the mouth of a cave.
From here she could appreciate the dramatic backdrop of the ocean and the moon, beautiful in its wild, untamed, and raw way.
“This is where I spend my time,” Zed said, sweeping wide with his arm, encompassing the empty space in front of them and the darkness of the cave behind him. “When I am not with you, I am here.”
He turned, melting into the darkness of the cave, and Paulette hurried to step in after him, certain that if she lost him in the blackness, she would never be able to find him again, that he would remain lost to her and she would be in the cave alone, endlessly.
She set her hand on his shoulder, looking to ground herself, and he turned back toward her, his hand wrapping around hers and pulling her forward. “You needn’t worry; you won’t lose me.”
Even though it was dark, she could hear that little grin in his voice, the one that was dangerously close to a smirk. She imagined she could see the flash of his teeth, the warmth of his smile.
Smirk or not, it soothed her to hear the words.
She wasn’t sure how deep the cave went, or whether they were in the main body any more or not, but she could no longer see moonlight filtering in, and the blackness surrounding them seemed total, infinite.
“We’re almost there,” he murmured, as though he could feel the tension welling up inside of her, as though he knew she needed to be reassured that they were going to end up where he had planned on taking her all along — that they wouldn’t be lost in the black caves he considered his home.
There was a scrape, a shuffle, the clink of flint, and then there was light, soft and blinding because they had been without for so long.
And in the room with them was treasure — there was no other word to describe it. Bars and coins of gold and silver, a stash of jewels and priceless art, stacks of paper money.
Her gasp was audible, even loud in the room that held nothing else but the stash. Not even a chair for Zed to sit on.
And the room itself was huge. She had felt like the paths they had taken to get there had been tight, just big enough for them to walk through side by side, but this space was wide open, cavernous, in the true sense of the word.
She thought about the big monster with the triangular head and flaring nostrils.
Certainly large enough for him.
“Is there another way in?”
If he seemed surprised that, of all the questions she might ask, that would be the first she would ask, he did not mention it.
In the light she could make out his eyes, sharp, dark and handsome. Not those same eyes she’d looked into earlier in the day, the gold and green flecked with a slice of black through the middle.
“There is,” he said.” It is on the cliffside and more direct. It is not reachable. For humans.”
He said it casually, and carefully, like maybe he still wasn’t sure how she would react to hearing that said aloud, to hearing that maybe there was something else out there besides humans in the first place.
Paulette hesitated, like she didn’t know how to bring up what she wanted to say, as though she were concerned she might offend him, or say something she could never take back. “The miners who’ve come in, they’ve talked about the monster who guards the mountain.”
There was a long silence, while she waited for him to speak and then she continued. “It’s you. The monster.”
He turned his eyes away from her, and she wondered if, perhaps, he didn’t appreciate being called a monster.
“It has always been me,” he said roughly. “Always, since before there were even people here to complain about it.”
“Are there…others?”
It seemed impossible to think that there could be a whole group of people like Zed, who could change at their whim into another being altogether. Dragons. Paulette found herself wondering what other imaginary creatures might be more fact than imaginary.
He shook his head. “Our kind is an endangered one. The dragons are lost. Those, like me, who straddle the worlds, we are few. Babies are seldom born. I have met a handful like me in my life, and we do not linger together long. You see how it is here, for me, and there is only one. We do not go unnoticed, even when we try.”
She stepped toward him, bold and unafraid. She drew one hand over his chest, pausing over his heart to feel its steady rhythm beneath her hand. “But you seem so…human.”
Now she got to see the smirk instead of just hear it. “Oh, yes. When I am not monster.”
She frowned. “You know I didn’t mean it like that. I don’t think of you like that. A monster.”
She hadn’t thought about it that way until she was saying it out loud, but she supposed it was true. At first, she had considered the word monster, but only because she didn’t have another word for it. When it came down to it, she thought of him as a man — a man who had given her an incredible gift, a great opportunity in taking her in. The man who brought her things because — she realized suddenly, with his treasures around her — he wanted to share those treasures he valued with her.
She was sliding her hand down his chest, stepping into him, until his body was just a breath’s space from hers. She couldn’t bear to meet his eyes, feared the rejection she might see in them, because he was all of this, had all of this, and she was just a human woman, with nothing much to give. A human woman who couldn’t even follow his directions, who put herself in danger, who caused him trouble.
He stood still beneath her caresses, as she slipped one hand up toward the back of his head, her fingers tangling in his dark hair, the other hand moving down the front of his shirt, like she was waiting for permission to unbutton his shirtfront.
She hesitated at the top button, as though she wouldn’t be able to go on.
“Don’t stop,” he growled, and there was an urgency in his voice that couldn’t be missed or mistaken. The buttons passed easily through her fingers, until she was pushing the white fabric off over his shoulders, the thin cotton undershirt quickly removed, until he was nearly naked in front of her, his skin glowing a rich amber in the semi-lit space, infused with the same gold as their backdrop.
His chest was broad and heavily-muscled, the strong cut of his shoulders inviting her touch.
With the shirt gone, his skin was almost hot to the touch, and Paulette could feel that thing inside of her she’d been barely holding at bay come roaring through her, to the surface.
She knew with a certainty that this, this caress, was not going to be enough.
As if he could read her thoughts, he brought his own hands to her waist, carefully pulling free the sash she wore, spinning her around to unfasten the pearl buttons at the top of the high collar dress.
Like her, he made short work of the task, his fingers nimble as they moved down the line of buttons, following the curve of her back.
He slipped the dress off of her shoulders, let it fall to the ground so her pale skin was exposed, the thin silk of her undergarments the only thing hiding her from his eyes.
He pulled her around again, so she was facing him, and the heat in his eyes, the glow from the room, made her feel like the undergarments were doing very little to protect her from his eyes.
She could feel his desire. It was coming off of him in waves, wrapping around her, pulling her close and intoxicating her.
And she wanted him just as badly. That night at the dinner table kept playing through her mind, and all those times she’d thought about what might have been to come, what else might have happened between them.
It was going to happen now.
He was pulling her toward him then, suddenly anxious to taste her, his mouth on hers, his hands moving to divest her of the scrap of silk she wore, until she was naked and perfect before him.
She couldn’t say how it had happened. They were upright, and his hands were on her body, tasting her curves, the shape of her breast and the swell of her hips, and her hands were caught in his hair and tugging at his trousers, and then, suddenly, they were on the floor of the cave, the stone cool and hard beneath her, his body warm and heavy on top.
And hard. She felt him press against the inside of her thigh. Thick and long and fully aroused.
She let her hand brush up against him, capture his length, stroke him while his tongue invaded her mouth, while his hand moved toward her core.
Then he was sliding his fingers up against her, finding her warmth and delving into her, setting an easy pace, like he had nothing to do but watch the pleasure move across her face and move in waves through her body.
It had been a long time since she had been touched like this. When she had been a newlywed, maybe, before she’d set off on the journey west, where every day had been exhausting and she and Robert had been completely taxed, and then she’d been pregnant and nothing about this — pleasure for the sake of pleasure — had been a high priority.
And then, just like that, she’d found herself a widow, and it seemed like moments like this were something she might never have again, something she had even forgotten existed, forgotten that she might want.
Paulette could feel the ache building insider of her. She wrapped her hand more tightly around Zed, loving the sound he made in return, suddenly desperate to have him inside of her, to fully give herself to the man who had already given so much to her.
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