Chapter 18
Lucan
Ishould have been a gentleman and stepped back, given her space, and let the moment pass like a decent human being.
I leaned closer instead.
“Sitting on top?” My voice dropped to a murmur near her ear. “You’re not helping your case.”
The innuendo could be taken either way, depending on whether her mind was actually in the gutter. And judging from the flush on the back of her neck, it was.
Her fingers froze on the buckle. I watched her throat move as she swallowed, and my dragon pushed against my ribs with a hunger that nearly buckled my knees.
The instinct to close the remaining inches, to press my mouth to the patch of warm skin just below her ear, settled inside me in a slow wave of heat.
I held perfectly still. Every nerve in my body locked down around the impulse, containing it, because this moment wasn’t about what I wanted. It was about what she’d let herself want.
I counted her breaths. One. Two. She didn’t pull away.
On the third breath, she leaned back. The motion was barely perceptible, a fraction of an inch, her shoulder blades settling closer to my chest. My heart slammed so hard I was sure she could feel it through the life jacket.
“You missed a buckle.” I reached around her left side and found the lower clip, fastening it with hands that had no business being steady. My forearm grazed her hip. She sucked in a sharp breath through her teeth.
I stepped away before I did something irreversible, like wrapping both arms around her and not letting go for the rest of the afternoon.
“All set.” I cleared my throat. “Let’s get you in the water.”
She turned around. Her cheeks were blazing, her brown eyes wide, and she looked like a woman who had just been caught thinking something she had no intention of sharing.
I walked to her kayak and crouched beside it, gripping the edge of the cockpit with both hands to hold it steady against the sand. The hull sat half in the water, half on shore, rocking gently with the small waves lapping at the beach.
“Step in with your right foot first, then lower yourself down.” I tilted the kayak to show her the seat. “Keep your weight centered.”
She approached with the cautious determination of someone defusing an explosive. Her sandal hovered over the opening. She shifted her weight, wobbled, and grabbed the edge.
Every instinct I had screamed for me to scoop her up and place her in the seat. My hands twitched on the hull. I could lift her easily, one arm around her waist, and she’d be settled in two seconds flat with zero risk of falling.
I locked my jaw and held the kayak.
She needed to do this herself. I’d watched her long enough to understand that every small thing she accomplished on her own terms was a brick in a wall she was rebuilding. I wasn’t going to yank one out because my inner reptile had zero patience.
Her right foot landed in the hull. The kayak shifted, and I braced harder, my shoulders absorbing the rocking motion so it stayed level. Her hand found my shoulder for balance, fingers gripping tight, and the contact sent a jolt of heat straight down my spine.
“You’re good. Just lower down.”
She dropped into the seat with more grace than she’d probably give herself credit for. Her hand left my shoulder, and the loss of it hit immediately.
I pushed the kayak forward until the hull cleared the sand and floated free, then grabbed my own and slid it into the water beside hers in one practiced motion. I climbed in, dipped my paddle, and pulled alongside her.
“Match my stroke.” I demonstrated a slow, even pull. “Don’t fight the water. Work with it.”
She dug the paddle in too deep on the first stroke, and the kayak lurched sideways. She overcorrected, splashing water across her knees. A curse slipped out under her breath that made me grin.
“Shallower angle.” I adjusted my pace to stay beside her. “You’re stabbing the lake. It didn’t do anything to you.”
“The lake and I are still negotiating our relationship.” She tried again, and this time the blade sliced cleanly through the surface. The kayak glided forward in a smooth line.
“There you go.” Pride swelled in my chest, fierce and entirely out of proportion to the moment.
We paddled in silence for a few minutes. The tension in her shoulders loosened with each stroke, her rhythm steadying as muscle memory took over from anxiety. She stopped death-gripping the paddle and let her wrists relax. Her breathing evened out.
I fell back a half-length so I could watch her without making it obvious. The afternoon light hit her at an angle that made something behind my sternum ache.
The October trees blazed orange and crimson along the shoreline, their reflections shimmering across the water in long, liquid streaks. Liz cut through the center of all that color, her dark hair catching the sun, her profile sharp and focused against the backdrop of fire-colored leaves.
She looked like she belonged in this landscape. Like the mountains had been waiting for her. It made my dragon settle into a low, contented hum that resonated through my bones.
“You’re staring.” She didn’t turn around.
I dug my paddle in and pulled up alongside her. “Just making sure you don’t capsize.”
She glanced over, one eyebrow lifted. “Or you’re hunting for your dinner.”
I kept my face absolutely serious and lowered my voice. “You’ll know if I’m hunting you.”
Her lips parted. The paddle stilled across her lap as a flush swept up from her collar that she couldn’t blame on exertion. She held my gaze for a long, charged second before her mouth curved into something sly.
“Noted.” She dipped her paddle and pulled ahead with a clean stroke that sent a small wake rippling behind her.
I laughed. The sound rang across the open water and bounced off the far tree line, and my dragon rolled through my chest like a cat stretching in a patch of sun. This woman was going to be the death of me, and I planned to enjoy every second of it.
I matched her pace and pointed my paddle toward the far end of the lake where the shoreline curved inward and the trees crowded thick along the water. “Head that way. It gets quieter past the point.”
She adjusted her angle and followed my lead.
We paddled in tandem, her strokes growing steadier with every yard we covered.
Her shoulders had dropped a full two inches from where they’d been when she first stepped onto the beach.
The white-knuckle grip on her paddle had loosened into something almost lazy, her wrists rolling through each stroke with the easy rhythm of someone who had stopped thinking about the mechanics and started trusting her body.
This was the first time she looked relaxed around me.
Genuinely relaxed. Her jaw had unclenched.
The careful, watchful tension she carried in every interaction had dissolved into the quiet act of moving through water, and the bond between us responded by settling from its usual sharp pull into a steady, low warmth that spread through my ribs like embers.
I wanted to live inside this feeling.
The cove opened up ahead of us, a small horseshoe of still water sheltered on three sides by evergreens that grew right to the rocky edge. The surface sat perfectly flat, a mirror of sky and clouds.
Liz stopped paddling. Her kayak drifted forward on its own momentum and came to rest in the middle of the cove. I glided in beside her until our hulls bumped gently, and we floated side by side in the silence.
She rested the paddle across her knees and looked up. “What’s it like to fly?”
The question was so quiet I almost missed it. She asked it the way someone asks about a place they’ve only ever seen in photographs, equal parts curiosity and longing.
I thought about giving her a big answer. The physics of lift, the way the air thinned at altitude, the sensory overload of scent, wind, and thermal currents. All of it crowded into my throat.
I let most of it go.
“Free.” I watched a leaf spiral down from one of the overhanging branches and land on the surface beside her kayak. “It feels completely free.”
Her gaze was still fixed on the sky, and her jaw worked once, as if she were chewing on a follow-up question that she wasn’t sure she had the right to ask.
I leaned back in my seat, and the kayak rocked gently. “I could take you sometime.”
Her head whipped toward me. Her eyes went wide, and her fingers tightened on the paddle. “You’re serious.”
“Very.”
She scanned the shoreline, then the sky, then the shoreline again. “Won’t people see? A massive purple dragon soaring over Ashford would probably make the evening news.”
I grinned. “We have a glamour. It bends light and perception around us. To anyone on the ground, we’re invisible. They might feel a gust of wind or catch a shadow, and their brain fills in a cloud or a bird. They never look twice.”
She stared at me. The gears behind her eyes turned so visibly I could almost hear them clicking. “Reese has flown with Kade?”
“All the time.” I dipped my fingers in the water and let the cold stop me from getting too excited about the thought of Liz riding on my back. “It’s the only way to reach the hoard unless someone is an expert rock climber with a death wish and a lot of free time.”
Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. “The hoard.” The words came out hushed. “Can I see it?”
Heat flooded my irises, and I felt the shift as my eyes bled from blue to violet.
The sensation pulsed through me, possessive and triumphant and desperate all at once, because she wanted to see our hoard.
She wanted to stand in the place where we kept every precious thing we’d ever claimed, and my dragon recognized that desire for exactly what it was.
Liz gasped. Her hand flew to her chest, and she stared straight into my purple-lit eyes with an expression that held zero fear.
Wonder. Pure, undiluted wonder.
I pulled the reins back on my dragon and felt the color recede, my vision clearing as the blue reasserted itself. My voice came out rough, scraped raw by the force of what had just torn through me.
“I would love nothing more than to take you there.”