Chapter 17
Seventeen
Ella
True to his word, Dirk was all business when I emerged from the chalet. Already in his dragon form—which also bore many missing scales and painful-looking wounds—he waited patiently with his wing already extended for me to climb aboard.
I did so without a word, noting the satchel of clothing gripped tightly in one paw.
“Ready?” he asked as I settled around his neck, speaking with that deep fluid gravitas that could only come from the mouth of a dragon. But it was still flat. Empty of any emotion.
I said I was, and we lifted into the air without any further preamble.
Just like that. It was so utterly different from the man who had pierced my bubble in the hallway ten minutes before.
Gone was the heat and the sexually charged, intense, lustful desire that had permeated every inch of his battered but still magnificent body.
There were no signs of that man, nor even the friendly, easy-going guy that Anna described and that I had seen briefly before … my fingers twitched to my right side. Before.
This wasn’t Dirk. It was the Ice Prince. Cold, businesslike, and nothing more. I had told him that was all I wanted, and he had obliged completely and totally.
Except I hadn’t been completely truthful.
I’d told Dirk I didn’t want him, or us, or anything to do with it, but there was no denying that the sight of him in the hallway wearing nothing but a towel with a huge hard-on had … stirred things in me. For a moment I had almost let him do what he wanted to me.
Even now, I was still struggling with the mixed desires. The part of my brain that had shied away from men for so long was in all-out war with the physical desires that continued to slowly pulse between my legs.
More than once, I nearly opened my mouth to tell him to land and take me, a sentence that horrified the rational part of me that remembered my past.
That’s not the mission. You need to be focused on awakening your dragon, not being bent over the side of a rock until your screams echo off the mountain. You are not in heat, and you are stronger than this. Act like it.
Resolutely wrenching my brain away from the idea of being mounted by the likes of Dirk’s powerful body, I closed my eyes and stretched out my arms. Perhaps if I focused on flying and the sensations that came with it, I could trigger something that would bring her back to life.
Assuming she wasn’t actually dead and could be revived. Dirk said I still smelled like a dragon, but that was the only sign.
The cool night air rushed over my exposed arms and tugged at my braided hair, pulling wayward strands free as we soared through the mountain range. I didn’t bother to watch where we were going. I trusted Dirk to find the way back.
You’re trusting him with a lot more than that. You’re very high up, and if you fall …
Given I’d essentially told Dirk I didn’t trust him, this was a very abrupt change.
Not once had I given a thought to my own safety on the journey.
There was no hesitation in climbing on his back.
I believed he would do anything to keep me safe.
Not just believed, I knew it because he’d done it once already.
“There,” Dirk said, interrupting my thoughts as he began to descend.
I stopped feeling the air and held on tightly to his neck as the ground came up fast. At the last moment, Dirk spread his wings, and we slowed abruptly until his claws dug into the snow and we were down.
He extended his wing as a ramp once more, and I picked myself up, easing around the wounds on his back. More proof that he would keep me safe, even if I didn’t want him to do anything else.
A sliver of guilt at the way I’d treated him gnawed at my stomach, only amplified as I dropped off his wing into the snow and stared at the fallen brellwood tree.
Dirk had nearly been crushed by it because he’d tried to save me.
It was my fault, my inability to stay on the ground had nearly gotten him killed.
Maybe he deserved more kindness in my rejection.
I walked over to the tree, my boots crunching into the snow until it was just over my ankle. It was nice to be wearing clothes this time around. Running my hand over the splintered and fragmented bark of the tree, I came to a halt at a depression in the snow.
Reaching down, I brushed the windblown cover aside, revealing a dark-stained patch of snow. In my mind’s eye, I could see Dirk’s limp form lying there. Unmoving. Overhead the trunk of the tree was giving way with a horrendous noise. Any moment now it would come crashing down and kill him.
I recalled the screams as I tried to get him up. Tried to drag him aside, and then realized there was no use. No way I could save him.
“What happened?” Dirk asked, extending his neck until his snout was hovering over me. He eyed the patch on the ground.
I twisted my head around to look up at him. “You don’t remember?”
“No.” Frosted air poured from both nostrils at the end of his platinum-white snout, the tiny little scales there glittering under my night vision as the moisture coated them.
“The last thing I remember is snatching you out of the air as we fell. Then emptiness until I woke up back at the chalet. I assume since that’s my blood, that I landed there? ”
There was no accusation in his voice, no blame. Only simple curiosity as to the events.
“Not quite.” I told him the story about him catching me, encasing me in the ice-globe to cushion the fall, and then how I’d been trapped in the snowbank. “You melted it, and by the time I came back up the slope, you were in a heap right here. Then I looked up, and saw the dent in the tree.”
Dirk looked at the tree with giant blue eyes. “I dented the brellwood?”
“I think you hit the tree at full speed in your dragon form. You broke much of the trunk, and then it eventually came down. Only your brother showing up saved your life. He managed to move it to the side as it fell. Somehow.”
The dragon was quiet. Then he pulled his neck back and curled it around his body. In the blink of an eye Dirk was there, facing away from me. I found myself staring, trying not to giggle at the most ridiculous observation: Somehow his ass had avoided any injury.
He dressed and came over to the impression.
With a gesture of his hand, the fresh snow sitting on top of the frozen bloodstain slipped away, revealing the true size of the dark area.
His eyes came away bright as he looked at me for a moment and then walked to the base of the fallen tree, staring up at the remains of the dent from his impact.
“No wonder everything hurt so much,” he grunted at last. “Damn things are impossibly strong.”
“I guess it’s a good thing your head was harder than the tree.”
Dirk didn’t even twitch. Not a single acknowledgment of my joke, my attempt to lighten the atmosphere between us.
“And that Caz showed up in time,” he rumbled, tapping on the trunk with a closed fist.
“Very lucky that he followed us, or we would have been killed.”
Turning back, Dirk looked at me oddly. “We? Why would you have been crushed by the tree, Ella?”
I cursed silently. I hadn’t really been thinking about the fact I’d thrown myself on his body like some sort of shield in the moment. Why had I done that?
“Um, I just meant, I was trying to pull you out of the way.”
Covering his body with mine wouldn’t have changed a thing. The tree was big and heavy enough to make paste out of both our bodies without trying. I eyed the trunk that was at least four times as wide as I was tall, suppressing a shiver at how close I’d come to death.
“Why wouldn’t you have gotten out of the way when you couldn’t move me?”
I swallowed nervously as Dirk came closer, the intensity in his eyes practically glowing.
This wasn’t the sort of emotion I had wanted to reinject between us.
All I wanted was to talk with Dirk, not the Ice Prince.
Now I had … this man, whom I both loathed and never wanted to be apart from, trying his best to wring a truth from me I desperately did not want to admit—to him or to myself.
“You know, I guess I would have. I just didn’t have the chance to before Caz came.”
It was a lie, but before I had the chance to tell if Dirk bought it or not, his head whipped around as something came charging through the snow and undergrowth at us.