by Juniper Hart
“How have you been?” The question came out tenderly and sincere.
Olive’s eyes fell to the table, and then she shrugged, taking a long pause before replying. “I’ve been okay…” She’s lying. “How about yourself?”
Asher could have softened his answer, or he could have played it off like he was just fine without her to seem tough and unphased. Maybe it was best if he did—but he had been so bottled up with things he wanted to say to her since the moment he realized she was truly gone that he didn’t have it in him to sugarcoat it or lie.
“I’ve been devastated,” he whispered, his voice cracking. Olive physically winced, and her lip began to tremble again. “Liv, I’ve been so…” Asher’s gaze went to the ceiling, as if the words would be written for him up there. He shook his head. “Lost. I’ve been lost without you. I’ve been mourning you every single day. It felt as if literally half of my brain was missing, you know? I couldn’t function or think straight…” Asher’s jaw began to repetitively clench again, and he blinked rapidly as he still tried to hold back his tears. The scabs that had just started to grow over the wounds she had left were ripped off, and he was feeling all he had in the past six months at once. “I never thought in all of my years—” He stressed those words to remind her just how long he had been roaming that rocky planet, “—that a person could leave such a crater in my life.”
In an instant, Olive broke into a sob, crying heavily and having to make painful gasps to draw in air. There were instances where Asher thought she was trying to speak, but he couldn’t understand her. As her arms unfolded to lift her hands and shield her face, Asher acted quickly and reached across the table to grab them both. She flinched at his touch, but then she squeezed his hands as tightly as she could.
“Breathe, baby, breathe,” he croaked, a few tears of his own escaping the corners of his eyes. “You gotta breathe, you’re going to worry me.” He burned to move over to her side of the booth and take her in his arms, but knew he needed to take this one step at a time.
Olive’s sobs didn’t subside for several minutes. He could feel the diner’s staff shooting him glares, but he would have gladly told them to mind their business if they had dared to speak a word. Eventually, Olive took deep breaths until they evened out. Asher rubbed his thumbs across the back of her hands rhythmically. She wouldn’t meet his eyes anymore, more than likely embarrassed because of her crying.
“I swear, I didn’t want to leave… I… I miss you so much. Every day.” Her voice trembled, the warning sign of another sob. She was silent, fighting the urge. Then, her eyes found his. The whites of her eyes were pink from crying, and her eyelids were puffy. It made her look even younger, innocent, and so very broken. “But I had to leave. I had to.”
“Why?” Asher pressed. There was no response. “Was it because of Esme?” Still, no response. Asher needed to know, but Olive was so fragile. The last thing he wanted to do was push her too far and have her leaving again. For the time being, he was going to have to leave it alone. “Olive, I can’t even put into words how relieved I am to see you’re alright. How overjoyed I am to be sitting here with you… To hold your hands,” he breathed, giving her hands a gentle squeeze. “Can you at least tell me about your road trip? Where you’ve been?”
“You really want to know?” Olive asked, sounding profoundly doubtful.
“Of course.”
“But… why? Shouldn’t you be mad at me?”
“Perhaps,” Asher sighed. “But strangely enough, I’m not. I’m just… happy. Content, even. So come on now, humor me.”
Olive drew a hand back to wipe her face with the sleeve of her jacket. “Well, uh… I don’t know. We’ve been around a lot. We’ve basically been traveling the entire time. Feels like we’ve seen every tiny town in the state.”
“They’re surprisingly different, aren’t they?” Asher smiled, though he felt a sharp pang in his chest. He would have loved to have been the one to experience those towns with her. She had always been inexplicably fascinated by culture; it had been the reason she had chosen to major in English. When she had first told Asher, he asked why she hadn’t chosen History instead. Her eyes had lit up as she explained that language was the base of every culture, and whenever she learned new things about the English language and the rich history within the English-speaking world, it gave her the insatiable craving to know more. The look on her face as she rambled on about it had been the most wondrous sight to him. He had never wanted her to stop talking.
Even with a red face and runny nose, Olive’s face lit up at his response. It was a dimmed light, but it was still there, and it sure was enough to make him melt even more than he already had.
“Yeah, it’s been pretty cool to explore. I never would have thought there was so much I hadn’t seen in the state I grew up in.” Olive sniffled. Then she glanced down at the table between them. “Like that beach we just left. I don’t think I’d ever been to that one. I loved the shops there, though I guess they were a little bit more on the touristy side of things. And the beach itself was so clean and serene.”
Asher flinched then. “What beach?”
“Come on, you know,” Olive sighed, shuffling nervously in her seat. “I know you were there, too. Esme spotted you, and… well, we ran for it. I’m sorry about that. It caught me off guard, and I just went with what Esme was saying we should do… I wanted to see you myself, but I was scared.”
Asher stared at her as if she had grown a third head. His mind was struggling to wrap around what she had just unknowingly confessed. He opened his mouth to speak but snapped it shut. His senses were so overloaded by the bond he and Olive shared that it was hard for him to even smell the bacon grease and coffee that the diner reeked of—now that his mind was back on the mystery woman, he swore he could smell a faint trace of her scent on Olive. His mind wasn’t putting all the pieces together, overwhelmed by her presence and the discovery that they had been at the same beach. Was it possible that Esme was the one carrying a dragonborn? It would make sense as to why she would run at the sight of him. From what Asher gathered from Olive, though, Esme would have been more likely to confront him, or at the very least rub it in his face that she had Olive and he didn’t.
“Is Esme pregnant? Is that why you left town with her?” he blurted out.
Olive was flabbergasted and confused for a brief moment before her face flushed, and she withdrew her hands from his and crossed her arms yet again. “Why would you ask that?”
“Olive, tell me.”
Suddenly, it looked like Olive was going to be sick. Her cheeks stayed rosy while the rest grew pale and green. The look on her face was nothing short of sheer panic. Was it because she didn’t want to sell out her friend?
Finally, all the pieces floating around in Asher’s head clicked into place. He stared at her, unaware that his mouth was open. The clouds of shock subsided, and the grasp their bond had on his senses loosened. The smell of a dragonborn was so strong in the air that he nearly gagged on it. The world stopped turning. No longer could he hear the quiet clatter of dishes in the background or feel the lingering eyes on the back of his neck. There was only Olive.
Without a formulated thought in his head, Asher had nothing to say. Or, he had plenty to say, but it was so jumbled up in his mind that he couldn’t even find a syllable to utter. The shock was so immense, it outweighed how he’d felt when he had come into the diner. His legs and arms were numb, and if he had been standing, Asher would have swiftly met the floor.
Olive was pregnant… was that why she had left? Without telling him she was carrying his child?
Unbeknownst to him, he was the father of the first dragonborn in five hundred years. That realization fell on him like a ton of cinderblocks. What would his father think? What would they do? Despite the gravity of the realization, it was surprisingly fleeting. Those concerns would be dealt with later. Asher was more consumed by the betrayal of his lover.
“Olive…” he croaked. He stare
d at her as if to tell him it wasn’t true, that he was crazy for even thinking so. That she would never hurt him like that.
A fresh supply of tears fell from Olive’s eyes in steady streams, her body shaking with a hand clasped around her mouth. She didn’t even have the courage to say anything. She had been the one to do this, and she needed to come clean. A ferocious match of tug-of-war was taking place with Asher’s temperament. He was so hurt and angry that he felt the urge to demand answers, to drag them out of her if necessary. Explanations were the least he deserved. However, his conscious mind reminded him that she was pregnant and was bound to be very far into it at this point. She was hormonal, emotional, and fragile at every level.
Asher noticed, for the first time, that her jacket was too large and apparently covering what she was attempting to hide from him, the table assisting in skewing his view of her body. His dark brows were pushed together, his brown eyes giving away his every emotion.
“Why would you keep me in the dark about this?” he asked as softly as he could.
“I was scared,” Olive admitted through her tears, her voice further muffled by the hand over her mouth.
“Scared?” he repeated back to her, utterly shocked. “Scared of how I would react? Olive, you know me better than that.”
“No, not of you,” Olive clarified, shaking her head.
“Then of what?” Her fear was palpable, and Asher’s eyes grew wide. His hand jetted across the table and took one of her hands into his. She was even afraid to vocalize it, but why? What was there to be scared of? And why hadn’t she come to him with this when it first arose? “You have to tell me, Olive. Okay? Just tell me.”
“You’re going to think I’m crazy…”
“I can see how terrified you are even just thinking about it, sweetheart. I’m not going to think you’re crazy.” His words didn’t appear to ease her woes enough, if at all, as Olive was still shaking her head. It was only then that Asher, as with as little force as possible, pried her hand away from her mouth and squeezed both of her palms. “Look at me. Look at me, Olive.” Once she did, he spoke firmly yet calmly. “You want to know why I won’t think you’re crazy, no matter what it is? Because I know that you were scared enough to run away, and even though it hurts me deeply that you did that, I can rationally understand you were doing what you could to protect… our child.”
The final words were foreign and felt wrong in his mouth, yet right at the same time. The weight of everything had crashed down on him, but it didn’t mean the reality of it had sunken in. That was going to take some time. Christ, he was going to have a child in a matter of weeks. Asher absentmindedly wondered if it wouldn’t hit him until he held the little one.
“Your dad,” Olive choked out. “Your dad is what terrifies me.”
Just as Asher had thought he couldn’t get any more baffled that night. “My dad? He would never do anything to hurt my child, our child.”
“You don’t know that,” Olive pushed back. “I know he’s your dad, but… Ash, he’s terrifying. He’s hungry for power. What do you think he’d do to me, to the baby, to figure out how this even happened? He could possibly want him for his own. He could potentially use our son as a tool to stay in power! And it’s not even just your dad, okay? It’s that entire part of your life… I know I don’t get exactly how big a deal this is, but I grasp the fact that there would be a target on his back, no matter what.” Olive chewed her lip nervously. “Besides, Esme told me not to trust any of them… not even you.”
“What does she know?” Asher scoffed, bewildered that her friend had any input whatsoever.
“She knows more than me, it seems,” Olive murmured. “She said that—” She stopped herself and looked around for people close by. “—that dragons are charming and deceitful. That I shouldn’t have believed you when you said you were sterile because obviously you aren’t, or else how would this have happened?”
“Sterile is just… semantics, okay? I wasn’t lying to you; it’s just complicated. I was planning to explain it to you one day, I swear. But we were together for a short duration of time, and I felt like I had given you enough to process for the time being.”
“Why are you deciding what’s too much for me instead of letting me make that call for myself?” Olive demanded, insulted.
“Because you don’t know and don’t understand,” Asher groaned, releasing one of her hands to run a frustrated hand down his face. “I didn’t want to overload you with all this, not all at once.” Olive deflated. He knew she was just being defensive. “Back to the point. How does Esme know anything about my family or what we are? Did you tell her and she’s drawing conclusions?”
Olive shook her head. “She already knew. She said her family are historians and have studied dragons for generations.”
Well, that was a complete lie. Any relics that could be traced back to their Kingdom was within the family estate walls. They had always been extremely cautious with that sort of thing. Not even bones would be found; it was in their tradition to burn the bones to ashes. It took at least two dragons to get the job done, and Asher had been a part of many cremations, both ceremonies and impromptu occurrences. Nothing Olive was saying about Esme added up whatsoever.
That was when Asher’s eyes caught a glimpse of something metallic peeking out from the opening of Olive’s jacket. “What’s that?” he questioned.
She followed his line of sight and held out an amulet, studying it herself. “It’s a locket,” she simply stated.
He didn’t have to hold it in his hand or even get a closer look before his eyes were aflame with horror. “Where did you get that?”
Olive eyed him then, looking confused and hesitant. “Esme gave it to me. It’s a good luck charm.”
“That’s no good luck charm,” Asher mused. He stood from the table, still holding her hand to gesture for her to follow. “We have to go.”
“What? Why?”
He shot her a pleading look. “Do you trust me?”
Olive wanted to resist giving an answer, and he understood why. She was a mortal, and in the course of a year and a half, she had been thrust into the world of mystics. Dragons were real, and she was the mate of a dragon prince. She was carrying his child, which happened to be the first dragon shifter born in five hundred years—and she had been provided conflicting information with absolutely no unbiased information to go off on. Asher couldn’t imagine how fast her head must have been spinning. Thankfully, he did have the upper hand with her. They had a bond that was undeniable, and she knew that, too. His only hope was for her to go with her innate instinct to trust him. Asher would never, ever lead her astray or put her in danger.
He was awash with relief when she finally nodded. “Then will you come with me so I can explain in the car? I swear on my life, if you want to leave, you can leave. I’m not going to hold you hostage.”
Slowly, Olive stood from the booth. Asher’s breath was taken away as he finally saw her in full view, her body no longer hidden by the table and jacket. Olive’s petite frame was full from motherhood. Her stomach poked out in a perfectly round shape, her hips were wider, her thighs a bit thicker, and her breasts full. In no way was Asher’s gaze objectifying or sexualizing her, but purely admiring. He was in absolute awe.
It took him more than a moment to kick himself back into gear. They needed to get out of there and far, far away from that damn witch.
11
Olive wasn’t entirely certain that she hadn’t fallen asleep in the motel room after all and this had all been a dream. The only thing indicating to her that it wasn’t was the fact that she had been plagued with nightmares since getting pregnant. If it was a dream, despite the hurricane of emotions, Olive didn’t want to wake from it. Not anytime soon, at least.
As she approached the passenger side door of what she assumed was a rental car, a large, gentle hand rested on her shoulder. Tilting her head, she was met with an embrace from Asher. She practically dissolved in his hold. “S
orry, I know I said we had to go, but I can’t help myself here,” he whispered into her hair.
Latching onto him, she breathed in the scent that was so comforting to her, the scent she associated with the word “home.” The sentiment was cheesy and cliché, and she would never tell a soul that. Burying her face in Asher’s chest and allowing her fingers to comb through the curls on the back of his head, she drank at the moment. It felt as though a lifetime had passed since the last time she was in his arms.
It was then she realized that the embrace was a little awkward, the two of them having to lean over to have a full embrace because of her stomach. Asher took notice as well and peeled back to look down at her belly.
“Can… Can I…?” he began anxiously before his voice trailed off. He didn’t need to finish the sentence for Olive to know what he was asking. The first wide, genuine grin of the night came to her face.
“He’s not really moving around right now,” she warned him as she lightly placed his hand down on top of her stomach. Olive’s eyes were fixated on Asher’s face as he stared down. He moved his hand around gradually, a crease forming between his eyebrows as he concentrated. “Like I said—”
The sensation of the baby moving about cut her off. She took in the look of infinite wonder that brightened Asher’s handsome, chiseled face.
“Oh my god,” he breathed. His head shook side to side in disbelief. “That’s just… wow…” Asher kept his hand there, hoping for another little bump or kick, and his face lit up even more when it came. His chin lifted to glance at Olive. “Inside, when we were talking… you called it son…” Asher’s voice was raspy, not at all matching the excitement on his face. He was holding back a new wave of emotion.