Dancer Dragon: Bodyguard Shifters #6

by Chant, Zoe

  Heikon

  "So are you going to talk about what's bothering you, or sulk around the Aerie driving everyone insane?" Anjelica said tartly.

  "I am not sulking." Heikon clipped carefully at the tip of a pear branch. It was night, but floodlights illuminated the garden. Since all their supplies had to be shipped in, they provided as much as possible of their own produce, including growing out-of-season tropical fruit in large greenhouses. There were a number of fruit-breeding and tree-splicing projects that Heikon and some of the other interested dragons were working on, to increase their local produce yields.

  "Cousin ..." Anjelica sighed and leaned against the trunk of the tree. She was his cousin once or twice removed, one of the Aerie's several wingless Asian dragons. Anyone else he would have thrown out, but she was almost as old as he was, and extremely stubborn. "It's her, isn't it?"

  "Don't be absurd." How could it have been a mere 24 hours since he'd last seen Esme? She was in his every thought. He had awakened this morning feeling as if he should be able to reach out and touch her—had, in fact, rolled over before he woke up enough to realize that she wasn't in his bed.

  Would never be in his bed, the way things were going.

  Anjelica huffed at the look on his face. "If she's getting to you that much, Cousin, go to her."

  "I have no idea what you're talking about."

  "If you want her, you have to go get her," Anjelica said impatiently. "What, do you think she's just going to drop out of the sky into your lap?"

  Which was the exact point when Esme's dragon, with impeccable if accidental timing, landed in the garden with an earth-shaking thump.

  Heikon dropped the gardening shears. Anjelica jumped and began instinctively to shift. "No!" Heikon said, catching her arm. "That's a friend. Esme, have a little mercy on my security staff."

  "Oh," Anjelica said, through a mouthful of fangs. She relaxed back to her her human form. "Sorry, Lady Esmerelda. I didn't recognize you for a minute there. Didn't the sentries challenge you?"

  "I saw them," Esme's dragon said in her melodious voice. She towered above them, and Heikon took a moment to appreciate the grandeur of her wings and scales before she dwindled to normal human size. It looked like she'd come straight from her dance studio; she was still wearing a swishy dancing dress, this one pale violet, very striking with her red hair. "And I flew right by them. Really, Heikon, leaving juveniles in charge of your perimeter?"

  "They have to learn somehow. I wasn't expecting you to stop by and test my defenses," Heikon said. He was torn between embarrassment and the almost overwhelming urge to grab her and kiss her.

  "From what I can see," she said, a bit stiffly, "your defenses are just fine. Your security, however, leaves something to be desired."

  Anjelica cleared her throat as the air in the garden became frosty. "I'll have a word with them. And welcome back to the Aerie, Lady Esmerelda. Will you be staying the night? I can have a room prepared."

  "I'm not sure," Esme said, and for the first time she looked hesitant.

  "Get a room ready," Heikon told Anjelica. She nodded, shifted, and flew off in the corkscrew way of the wingless dragons.

  They were left alone in the floodlit garden. The clear, cool artificial light picked out the edges of every curl, brought definition to the lace edging on the dress's neckline, above her full breasts.

  She was unbearably beautiful. And she was here.

  "Esme," he said gently.

  "Don't 'Esme' me. I flew all this way and I find you gardening?" Without waiting for an answer, she strolled around the fruit tree, looking at it. "What is this?"

  "It's a graft of different varieties of pear," he said, seizing gratefully onto the conversational topic. "I've been trying to develop some different types that will withstand our harsh climate here in the mountains. It's not the best climate for agriculture."

  "I had ... forgotten, I think, that this was something you used to love." She looked up at the tree's spreading branches, her face half in shadow.

  "There's so much I've forgotten about you, too." Maybe it was the wrong thing to say, but all he had for her now, all he could give her, was honesty. "There's a lot to relearn, but I'd really like to try, if I can."

  "You left," she said, looking up at the tree.

  "You asked me to."

  "I was expecting you to come back."

  He wasn't sure what to say to that. She turned to look at him, her lashes casting long shadows across her cheekbones.

  "I ... apologize," he said.

  Esme shook her head. "I don't want apologies. I want ..." She took a deep breath, and looked around at the gardens, not finishing the sentence.

  "You know," he began cautiously, hardly daring to hope, "the gardens are finest at night."

  "I'd think you wouldn't be able to see anything."

  "That's what the lights are for." And he offered an elbow.

  There was a pause—the longest of his life, while his heart teetered on a fulcrum. And then she took his elbow with the slightest of smiles.

  They strolled through the multilevel garden, his passion for centuries. Heikon had put great thought into the placement of every bush and tree—only to have most of the original garden ripped out during Braun's tenure as clanlord, including irreplaceable trees that were hundreds of years old. He could never fix that. But they had replanted and rebuilt. The damage from the fight with the gargoyles was also being repaired, though they passed draped plastic sheeting covering the worst of it, and spindly saplings starting to establish themselves where full-sized trees had once stood.

  But that was the way of gardens, wasn't it? They were never truly finished. Heikon had yet to meet a single gardener who considered their garden complete. It was the nature of all living organisms to grow and change, and a garden was made up of living things. Even if you could eventually achieve the mythical state of a complete, perfect garden, the plants themselves would still suffer attacks of beetle and fungus, would die in a harsh winter or fail to thrive as their neighboring shade tree grew too wide for their sun-loving leaves.

  Gardening, Heikon believed, taught you flexibility. It taught you that not everything was in your control. He sometimes thought that his comparatively young and reckless counterpart—Darius Keegan, lord of the Keegan clan, father of Esme's daughter Melody—would have been a happier and less controlling person if he, too, had taken up gardening as a hobby.

  Of course, Darius had eventually learned to bend and change because of his children and grandchildren ... and his cats. Heikon couldn't help smiling at the thought.

  "What's funny?" Esme asked quietly. She had walked in silence, looking around at the floodlit flowers and the fairy lights draped in the bushes, but he hadn't felt the need to break the silence with words. The comfort between them was more than enough.

  "I was thinking about Darius," Heikon admitted. "Believe it or not."

  She snorted a short laugh. "You're walking in a garden with me, thinking about my ex?"

  "Okay, it sounds weird when you put it that way ..."

  "Heikon." She stopped him with a hand on his chest. They were under one of the garden's handful of remaining full-sized trees, a spreading willow with its branches draped with fairy lights twinkling like captive stars. "Don't forget, it was you who once reminded me that we've both lived a long, full life. Taken lovers. Raised children. Before what happened with us, before I knew what a true mate feels like, I would have welcomed you as a lover, had we both wanted it."

  "And now?" he asked, all but holding his breath. She was so near. It would be the matter of an instant to take her in his arms.

  "Perhaps we can't be mates, not as we once were. But ..." She tilted her face up to his. "I feel as if it's possible we might be more than lovers. Do you?"

  His dragon, uncharacteristically, was silent. It wasn't rising with joy at the presence of his mate, as it had done before. But he felt no resistance, no disapproval.

  "Perhaps," he breathed, and he pull
ed her to him, and took her mouth with his own.

  Esme

  If this was kissing without the mate bond, it was probably just as well, because a kiss fed with that underlying channel of soul-deep connection would have melted her.

  They kissed and kissed, and she couldn't even remember when his hands in her hair dislodged the pins—but it was down, falling all around her, stirred in the nighttime breeze.

  "Are you—" he breathed against her lips, and she whispered back, "Yes."

  The branches of the willow tree, woven through with lights, were like a bower all around them, shutting out curious eyes. Heikon drew her down onto the soft moss under the tree. He stripped out of his jacket and spread it like a blanket.

  "Will anyone—"

  "Anjelica will keep them away. I think she read the situation better than I did."

  His undershirt followed the jacket, and then she was finally able to run her hands across the planes of the sculpted body she'd dreamed about for twenty years.

  Every touch seemed to ignite the fire blazing between them. She didn't want to hope, not after all this time—but was it possible ... could this ultimate connection repair the mate bond?

  Only one way to find out, she thought, and gave herself over completely to the heat blazing in her, the hot well of need between her legs.

  Her dress followed his shirt, and then it was skin on skin, moving against each other in the semi-dark. The sweat-slick friction of their bodies—his hands guiding her hips—her mouth sealed against his—

  They were one being, united in frantic, passionate need. Twenty years of separation built rapidly toward a blazing climax, and she shuddered through the throes of an orgasm like nothing she'd experienced in two decades.

  They collapsed together, limbs twined around each other. The fairy lights cast white and blue patterns across his skin.

  With sated bliss purling through her, she opened herself wide, reaching out, straining for what she had once felt whenever she was near him.

  Is it possible ...

  And for a moment she almost thought—

  But there was nothing there. She felt relaxed and good, but only in the normal, post-sex kind of way. Whatever this consummation had done for both of them, it had done nothing for the mate bond.

  Esme turned her face into his shoulder.

  "Esme," he said, shocked, as her hot tears soaked his skin. "Esme. Dear Esme." He held her, rocked her, and then drew back and took her face in his hands. "What's wrong? Wasn't it—wasn't it good for you?"

  "No!" she said, shocked that he would even think that. "No, no, please—it was good. So good. I missed ..." She pulled in a shuddering breath, and tears sprang to her eyes for a new reason, splintering the fairy lights to a kaleidoscope of bright splinters. The raw truth was pulled out of her, one painful word at a time. "I missed you so much."

  "Oh, Esme." He buried his face in her neck. "I missed you too. So much. So much."

  She clung to him, feeling him against every part of her, and in that moment, she decided. So what if the mate bond wasn't back? So what if all they ever had was an ordinary love between the human parts of them?

  It was so much more than most people ever got. So much more than she'd had before she met him.

  If the world wouldn't give them what they wanted, maybe they'd just have to take it for themselves.

  * * *

  The night air was growing chilly on their naked skin. They dressed under the tree, and Esme opted to carry her shoes rather than trying to walk in them. The garden paths weren't friendly to high-heeled shoes, but the rounded gravel was smooth enough on her bare feet.

  "We could go flying under the moon," Heikon said, and then he laughed quietly. She loved that laugh, a deep warm chuckle that seemed to go straight through her. "Or we could go up to the Aerie, where there are soft beds and hot cocoa. You know, I think I might be getting old."

  "If you are, then so am I, because that sounds wonderful to me."

  "I know you don't want apologies," he said as they climbed a flight of stone steps from one garden level to the next. "But I am sorry that I didn't come back tonight. That you had to hunt me down."

  "I'm not," she said. "If you had, I would never have had a chance to decide for myself if this was something I was willing to fight for. Sometimes you have to feel yourself on the edge of losing something before you realize it's worth keeping."

  She stopped there, because she could feel the gulf widening between them again at the reminder of everything they had lost, through twenty years' silence.

  But she could admit to herself now that it wasn't just Heikon. Twenty years. She could have come back. She could have searched for him. She could have decided not to take the severing of the mate bond as an ending, but rather an opportunity to fight.

  I think we both have a lot to learn about fighting for what we want.

  It was all too easy when you were a shifter to think that love would be delivered to you on a silver platter. Someday you'd find your mate and then things would be simple. Right?

  It had never been simple with them. Apparently it was never going to be.

  But wasn't the best hunt the most difficult, and the most rewarding dance the one that had taken the longest to learn?

  "Heikon?" she said, and he turned to her. She was used to being the tallest person in the room, as she usually was among humans; it was strange and wonderful to be around someone who was slightly taller than she was. "Have you ever looked into getting the mate bond restored? I mean, is it something that could possibly be done?"

  "I ..." he began, then fell quiet, and climbed a few steps in silence. They emerged onto a patio surrounded by ornamental bushes, with a wide veranda opening onto it. "I sought out stories," he said at last, giving her a hand up onto the veranda. "It's such a rare thing to lose the mate bond that there are no reliable records of it. I hoped an answer could be found in the lore of our kind."

  The veranda, like the garden, was decorated with lights. She remembered now how the Aerie, back in its heyday twenty years ago, used to shine like a Christmas ornament from afar. The one other time she'd been here, they had just suffered the gargoyle attack and the mountain was in a state of emergency. Now it was starting to glitter and shine again.

  The fairy-tale effect was suddenly spoiled by the clatter of tiny toenails on the floor and the whisk of something past her legs, under the edge of her skirt. Esme yelped and jumped. Her dragon's predator instincts took over, and she whirled around and pounced, pinning whatever it was before it had a chance to get away. Her shoes went flying, forgotten. She straightened up holding a small, squirming, reptilian shape that nibbled at her fingers and then abruptly shifted into a plump toddler, about two years old, with wide dark eyes and curly dark hair.

  "Pixie," Heikon sighed. "Give her here."

  "Nope, I caught her, she's mine now," Esme said. Pixie giggled and shoved her fist in her mouth, and Esme was suddenly, wildly nostalgic for Melody as an infant. Becoming a grandmother might make her feel about a thousand years old, but she couldn't wait for grandchildren.

  Heikon collected her shoes, and she carried Pixie across the veranda, occasionally flipping the little girl upside down to make her squeal with laughter.

  At the door leading inside, they were met by a panting, wide-eyed teenage girl. "Where are they? Oh, thank goodness!" She took Pixie back from Esme, and peered past her. "Did you see another one out there?"

  "Which one?" Heikon asked.

  "Feodran! It's always Feo. He's going to be such a troublemaker when he grows up." She heaved an exasperated sigh. "He's a troublemaker now. I should put a bell on him."

  Seeing her up close in better light, Esme realized that the girl was not a teenager after all. She could easily be in her late twenties or early thirties, perhaps much older since she was probably also a dragon. She was just small and baby-faced. Esme hadn't met very many dragons who were extremely short in their human form, but this one was barely over five feet. From t
he way she was cuddling Pixie, she was probably their mother.

  "I can do better than that." Heikon looked around, checking for clearance, but the hallway was large and wide, designed for dragons. "Step back."

  He shifted, and suddenly his vast gunmetal dragon filled the hallway. "Feodran!" The order rang out in his deep dragon's voice, reverberating off the walls and echoing with alpha command.

  A moment later, from some unseen alcove above them, a tiny dragon pounced onto Heikon's great spined back with a high-pitched yipping noise of delight.

  Heikon shifted back, twisting as he did so to catch the little dragon. "Here," he said, handing Feodran back to his mother.

  "Thank you," she said gratefully, trying to hang onto both of them. "No, settle down, it's bedtime. Feo, stop getting your sister so exited. It's very nice to see you again, Lady Esmerelda!" she said over her shoulder as she hurried off.

  "How does she know me when I don't know her?" But Esme could answer the question for herself. "Oh. She was one of the fighting dragons in the battle against the gargoyles, wasn't she? I met so many that day, and then many more later when I was tending the wounded. I'm impressed, by the way, at how well you've rebuilt in such a short period of time."

  "It's one thing we have regrettably gotten a lot of practice at, rebuilding." Heikon picked up her shoes. "That was my granddaughter Kana, by the way. I would have introduced you, but—"

  "No, as a mother myself, I completely understand. Anyway, I expect I'm going to need a chart to keep all your grandchildren and great-grandchildren straight."

  "You're in luck, then." Heikon smiled as he opened a door to a flight of stairs. "One of the great-nieces actually did make one on her computer. I'm sure she'll show it to you if you like."

  The stairs took them to an extensive kitchen complex, all quiet now, shut down for the night. They went through the edge of it, past enormous ovens and refrigerators large enough to supply a restaurant. Esme noticed a large kitchen-duty whiteboard on the wall, with a sketched-in calendar and dozens of names.