Chapter 15
Liz
My eyes swept the clearing’s perimeter as I walked toward Lucan and Kade. Tall grass bordered the tree line, but there were no camera crews or signs that the area had been altered to trap a woman who’d had a lapse in judgment.
Where was the trick? And, more importantly, where was the ask?
Every setup led to one. Maybe this was some elaborate mountain-man hazing ritual they pulled on every new tenant at Wings End.
Get the lonely woman to drive into the middle of nowhere, convince her dragons were real, and then what? Laugh about it over beers?
Lucan watched me approach, his posture relaxed, hands at his sides. His gaze dropped to the bear spray again.
“Good call bringing that.” His voice carried no mockery or amusement. He said it the way someone might compliment a hiker for packing a first-aid kit.
“I learn from experience.” I stopped about ten feet from him.
Kade gave Lucan a brief nod, then walked to Reese, who leaned against the front of her truck. They moved to stand near the driver’s side, close enough to see the clearing, far enough to give us room. Reese caught my eye and offered a small, encouraging lift of her chin.
Having them there loosened the knot in my stomach by a fraction. At the very least, I had two people who could drive me to a hospital if I completely lost my grip on reality.
Lucan’s eyes held mine. The morning sun caught them, and I could swear there was a violet thread woven through the blue iris. He took a slow breath. “Once you see this, there’s no going back to the way things were.”
It felt like a hand was pressing against my sternum from the inside. I resisted the urge to rub it again. I’d already done that once, and the way his eyes had tracked the movement told me he’d noticed.
“The way things were wasn’t exactly working out for me.” I kept my tone dry, even though my heart hammered so hard I could feel it in my teeth.
He stepped backward, moving toward the center of the clearing. The grass reached his shins, and sunlight poured over his shoulders, catching every ridge of muscle.
He stopped about thirty feet from me and turned to face me fully.
My fingers tightened around the bear spray until the plastic bit into my palm. I knew I wasn’t going to use it with a strange certainty. I gripped it because it was the only thing in the clearing that still felt real.
The forest had gone quiet. Even the breeze stilled, like the trees themselves were holding their breath.
Lucan held my gaze across the distance. His chest expanded with one long, measured inhale. “Don’t run,” he said gently, like a request he knew he had no right to make.
My jaw clenched. My knees locked. Every synapse in my brain fired conflicting signals, screaming to flee and demanding I stay rooted to this exact spot.
I gave him a single, firm nod.
In one breath, he was a man. The next, he was gone.
A dragon filled the space where Lucan had been. There was no shimmer, no slow transformation, no Hollywood morph where bones cracked and skin rippled. One blink. That was all it took.
I had blinked, and thirty feet away stood a creature that redefined every dimension of the clearing.
He was enormous. The word felt pathetic the moment my brain supplied it because “enormous” was for trucks and buildings and things that still fit inside the framework of a normal day.
This was something else entirely. His body stretched longer than Reese’s truck, and his wings, folded tight against his sides, hinted at a span that could blot out the morning sun.
Scales covered every inch of him, deep purple so dark it looked almost black in the shadows beneath his jaw.
His head alone was practically the size of my entire car.
The bear spray canister hit the grass at my feet.
I didn’t drop it on purpose. My fingers simply stopped working, the signals from my brain dissolving somewhere past my wrists as every ounce of processing power rerouted to my eyes.
I heard the dull thud of plastic against dirt and could not make my hands care.
My lungs locked. My mouth hung open. A sound came out of me, high and thin, the noise a person makes when the floor disappears and the fall hasn’t started yet.
He was right there. Maybe fifteen feet away now that his body took up so much space. Each exhale from his nostrils stirred the grass in a wave that reached my ankles.
I could smell him, woodsmoke and pine and something hot, like sun-baked stone. His eyes found mine. They were still unmistakably Lucan’s, except now they burned with violet light from the inside, pupils slitted vertically against glowing irises.
Those eyes watched me with a stillness that had no business belonging to something that large.
I felt small. Small in a way I hadn’t felt since childhood, when the world towered above me and I couldn’t reach the counter or unlock the front door.
My body understood the message before my brain translated it.
I was soft and breakable, and the creature in front of me could end me with a careless flick of his tail.
My knees trembled. Tears burned the corners of my eyes, and I couldn’t have told anyone why.
Then a thought arrived, quiet and clear, slicing through every wall of panic like a blade through smoke.
He could have taken the knife back at any point.
He was this. This massive beast with claws that gouged furrows in packed earth and jaws that could snap a pine tree like a toothpick. He could have walked into my campsite, reclaimed his property, and I would have been powerless to do anything except watch.
He could have claimed me.
Bear spray wouldn’t have stopped him. A locked car door wouldn’t have stopped him. Nothing in my small arsenal of self-defense would have mattered.
He hadn’t.
He’d left the knife for me. He’d left a cashier’s check at my door. He’d brought me anonymous gifts. He’d stood between me and danger without hesitation.
He had all the power in the world, and he had chosen patience.
My throat ached. My vision blurred. I pressed my palm flat against my sternum, where the pull toward him blazed so fiercely I half expected to look down and see light pouring through my shirt.
The dragon—Lucan—lowered his massive head, slow and deliberate, until his chin nearly touched the grass. The movement brought his glowing violet eye level with my tear-streaked face. A low rumble rolled through his chest, vibrating the ground beneath my feet, and the sound wasn’t threatening.
It was careful and tender, if something that size was even capable of it. It was a purr of sorts. He wouldn’t hurt me. Not his dragon. Not him, the man.
I didn’t understand how I knew that was the message he was sending, but it was. I believed him.
The pull in my chest built into something overwhelming, spilling through me and filling every empty place I hadn’t even realized was there. My ribs ached with it. My vision swam. And the thing that terrified me most was that none of it felt like fear.
It felt like recognition.
My feet moved. I didn’t tell them to. They carried me forward through the tall grass, closing the distance. Lucan held perfectly still as his eye tracked me, the pupil adjusting as I drew closer.
I stopped at the side of his head, close enough to feel the heat radiating off him. My hand lifted before I could second-guess it, my fingers pressing against his cheek.
There were no scales there. The hide was smooth like suede that had been warmed in the sun for hours. Underneath, I felt the dense firmness of muscle and bone.
I spread my fingers wider, and the warmth soaked into my palm, up through my wrist, and settled where the roaring pull lived.
My hand followed the curve of his jaw to the column of his neck where the scales began. They overlapped in rows, each one smooth on the surface and thicker than expected. The center was as hard as polished stone, with edges that tapered to a razor-like thinness.
I stood there with my palm pressed to a dragon’s throat, and for the first time since my life imploded, I felt steady.
There was solid ground beneath my feet and breath in my lungs.
I was a woman with no money, no plan, no safety net, standing there with tears on her face and her hand on the impossible.
My gaze found Reese across the clearing.
She stood with Kade’s arm draped over her shoulders.
She was smiling. It wasn’t a “gotcha” smile or a “wait until you see what’s next” smile.
It was a “welcome to the club” look. The kind of expression one woman gives another when words would only cheapen what just happened.
I swallowed hard and turned back to Lucan.
The shift happened as fast as the first one. One blink, dragon. The next blink, man. Lucan stood in the flattened grass, naked and breathing hard. His skin was damp with sweat, and his purple-tinged eyes locked on mine.
Kade was already crossing the clearing with a pair of athletic shorts in his hand. He tossed them to Lucan without breaking stride.
Lucan stepped into the shorts and pulled them up as Kade stopped beside him. “You two good?”
Lucan looked at me, and I nodded.
Kade clapped Lucan’s shoulder once, then turned and walked toward the ATVs where Reese was waiting. They climbed on, and within seconds, they disappeared down a trail, leaving Reese’s truck behind.
Lucan watched me. He looked at me as if I were the center of his world. Like the mountains and the sky itself existed only as a frame around the place where I stood.
The danger shifted inside my chest. “He might hurt me” dissolved, and in its place, a fear bloomed that was so much worse. I sat down hard on the ground.
He might be the only thing that could make me feel whole again.