Quicksilver Dragon

by Chant, Zoe

  He did like to think of them as a package deal. He interlocked their fingers.

  If Lindsay has started to look sick to her stomach, Zeke now looked worse. Her scars on her face and neck stood out like fresh welts, flushed with an apparent rush of shame; her eyes were red and shiny from restrained tears. A minute ago she’d been determined, and now she looked like her whole life was falling apart, however much she tried to hide it. She shook her head.

  “I can’t let you do this.” Her voice was a croak. “If something goes wrong, it’ll kill you.”

  “Wait, why are you worried about us?” Boone said, feeling like he’d fallen through a rabbit hole into some upside-down Alice in Wonderland universe.

  For someone on the verge of tears, Zeke was capable of producing a pretty good eye roll. “The guilt would kill you. I can’t ask the two of you to risk dumping a menagerie into my head, not when you’re nice and friendly and couldn’t live with it afterwards. I’m not going to risk ruining your lives. You’re the first friends I’ve made in forever.”

  Lindsay let out an enormous shaky breath and wrapped her arms around Zeke, hugging her tightly. “God, Zeke. Thank you.”

  Zeke hugged her back—tentatively at first, like Lindsay would dissolve, and then fervently, almost clinging to her.

  “You were willing to consider it,” Zeke said. “That means a lot. I—I haven’t met too many good people in my life, people who try to keep their promises. I’d rather not accidentally send them to prison.”

  “I appreciate that,” Boone said. It was hard to think of a statement he’d ever meant more.

  “Maybe there’s still a way for me to become a dragon,” Zeke said. She pressed her lips together for a moment and forced a smile. “Maybe someday. But at least it’s not the only thing I’m pinning my hopes to now.”

  “The world gets bigger,” Lindsay said softly. “That’s what all this was like for me. Becoming a dragon, meeting Boone, finding out about the war. Everything that mattered to me before still matters, but the world is so much more than I thought it was. It wasn’t just becoming a dragon that made it that way. It was everything.”

  Zeke nodded. “There’s so much to do.” This time her smile was more genuine. “You guys kept your promise to me. Get out of here and go keep your promises to each other, okay? The vicarious sexual tension is killing me, and we just agreed you weren’t going to kill me. Go take your vacation. I’ll see you for more shifter research when you’re back in the game.”

  As she ushered them out, Boone saw that even though she hadn’t gotten what she wanted—even though she’d almost had it and then had had to give it up—Zeke looked happier and more alive than he’d ever seen her. If her world had plunged into color too, he hoped she was enjoying it. They would need her.

  But for right now—for right now, all he needed was Lindsay.

  He bent down and kissed her, savoring the smooth lushness of her mouth under his.

  He said, “I’ve got some promises I want to keep.”

  Epilogue

  In the end, Lindsay even told her boss a version of the truth. Her apartment had been burglarized and trashed, and she needed to spend a week trying to put it back together again.

  She did need to spend a week trying that.

  She just wasn’t spending this particular week trying it. Boone’s own trashed house was good enough. The bed was intact, and that was all they needed.

  No, this week all remaining urgent practical duties were being handled by someone else. Henry and Ursula had dealt with Octavian. Zeke was keeping her ear to the ground trying to monitor any internet chatter related to the now-not-so-Unchangeable. Lindsay had even begrudgingly let someone else take over her work to-do list for a few days.

  The dragons had searched the caves, nooks, and crannies along the cove and turned up dozens of hiding places of squirreled-away items. Lindsay had hoped her laptop and iPad would be among them, but all the technology they found had been damaged by the salt air. None of it worked, and she couldn’t be sure which of the identical MacBooks might have been hers anyway. It was a lost cause.

  Well, she had to live with that. She could accept that irritation with at least as much grace as Boone had accepted the loss of his private gallery of work.

  Speaking of that...

  “Hold still,” Boone said.

  “I am holding still!”

  “You are the worst artist’s model in history,” he said, laughing. He put his paintbrush aside for a moment and just looked at her, his golden-brown eyes brighter than any colors he could have chosen. He closed his hand playfully around her ankle. “You said you wanted me to paint you.”

  Lindsay looked down at her nude body, now almost completely covered with the edible paint Boone had used to decorate her. Her ankle was one of the few parts of her left untouched by that paintbrush—and the paintbrush was not what she wanted to be touched by. But Boone had been delighting for an hour now in teasing her with his fingers and tongue and the delicate flick of the brush against her overheated skin.

  “I did want you to paint me,” Lindsay said. “I didn’t anticipate suffering so much for your art.”

  “That’s not my fault. I warned you I was a perfectionist when it came to my work.” He circled her ankle with his thumb. “Besides, I’m almost done.”

  “This is not a relaxing vacation. ‘Here lies Lindsay Garza, dead of unconsummated lust because her boyfriend was a tease...’”

  “What about a fiancé?” Boone said quietly.

  Blood pounded in Lindsay’s ears, her heartbeat thudding loudly. “What?”

  “What if I were doing all this to you,” pausing here to take his hand off her ankle and brush a chocolate-raspberry paint heart where his fingers had been, “but instead of being your boyfriend, I was your fiancé?”

  “You’re proposing to me?”

  His smile was bone-meltingly sexy but also completely adorable; he had a little smear of body paint on his lips and teeth from where he’d smeared some of his own handiwork. “Yep. We don’t have to tell anyone about it yet if you think people will say it’s too fast—”

  They would. She didn’t care. “Yes.”

  “Yes, they’ll say it’s too fast?”

  His eyes were sparkling. She knew he knew what she meant.

  “Yes, as in I want to marry you, you... artistic sadist.” She shoved at him. “Take your clothes off.”

  “Miss Garza, I believe I’m working here. Please don’t be unprofessional.”

  “I want to turn this,” Lindsay said, gesturing up and down the length of her elegantly painted body, “into one of those paint-splatter paintings. I want to turn you into one of those paint splatter paintings.”

  His gaze darkened with lust. Of course dirty art talk would do it for him. He made a low growling sound and tore his shirt off and then everything else, too, pressing his naked body against hers. The paint between them turned into splotches. He sucked at the blue vanilla necklace he’d painted on her neck and followed the line down to her collarbone. She licked a stripe of smudged peppermint-pink off the flat, hard muscles of his stomach.

  After so much waiting, they had finally hit a point where their need for each other had become urgent. When he tried to lower himself to kiss between her legs, she shook her head frantically and pulled him up.

  “I need you,” she said. “All of you. Please, Boone.”

  When he slid into her, she came at once, crying out and clenching her body around him. The bed was a mess of colors. They were a mess of colors. But the ones she loved best were the ones on his skin, where the sweat and caress of their bodies had blurred them, where Boone himself shone from underneath the smeared colors like she was seeing him through stained glass. This was the most transcendent thing she’d ever experienced, and somehow Lindsay knew that it would only get better from here. The more they knew each other, the longer they’d loved each other, the more thrilling it would be to touch him.

  “Lindsay,” Boone
said. He looked dazed.

  She kissed him, the body paint flavors mingling on their lips, and felt him come inside her. She clutched at him, rolling her hips to ride it out with him. She never wanted to let go.

  *

  Afterwards, Boone drew a ring on her finger.

  “I wanted to go get you one yesterday,” he said as he carefully circled her finger with a band of lemon-yellow body paint. “But soaking up time with you before the next crisis outweighed wanting to do the proposal by the book. I hope this works until we get to a jeweler’s.”

  “This is beautiful,” Lindsay assured him.

  He lined up the tubes of paint for her inspection. “What kind of stone do you want?”

  “I think we should go traditional, don’t you?” She examined the colors and flavors. “Marshmallow is probably closest to diamond.”

  “A marshmallow and lemon ring it is, then.” He added the marshmallow gemstone to her painted engagement ring very carefully, not just as a blob but actually as a defined shape. He really was a perfectionist.

  Once he was done, he blew on it a little to dry it, and then let her admire it.

  “I almost don’t want another one,” Lindsay said. This did look perfect, and it wasn’t like it didn’t fit. “But I guess it would be hard to show it off to my family and explain the concept of edible body paint to my parents.”

  Boone went pale. “I will absolutely get you a real ring. Please don’t introduce me to your parents as the guy who kinkily debauched you.”

  “I’m glad you can go into actual war and monster war and still be afraid of my parents.”

  “Any guy would understand that,” Boone said. Apparently reassured that she was going to give her family a PG-rated at most version of their relationship, he relaxed a little and put his arm around her, letting her cuddle up to him. She rested her left hand on his chest so they could both keep looking at the ring. She wanted to soak it in.

  They were going to get married. She’d have to ask Henry and Ursula if dragons had any traditional wedding customs.

  She wondered if Zeke would be okay with being a bridesmaid.

  This sounded like material for a bullet-pointed to do list, and she almost itched to get up and start working on it—this would be the most thoroughly planned wedding anyone had ever had—but the sleepy rhythm of Boone stroking her hair overpowered her. She yawned.

  “What should we tell people about how we met?” she said, closing her eyes.

  “Leaving out the dragons, monsters, battles, betrayals, destined true love?” She could hear the smile in his voice and then he yawned too, settling down around her. “I guess we still have my adorkable, heroic fiancée picking up trash on the beach. We can start with that.”

  * * *

  A note from Zoe Chant

  Thank you for buying my book! I hope you enjoyed it. If you’d like to be emailed when I release my next book, please click here to be added to my mailing list. You can also visit my webpage, or follow me on Facebook or Twitter. You are also invited to join my VIP Readers Group on Facebook!

  Please consider reviewing Quicksilver Dragon, even if you only write a line or two. I appreciate all reviews, whether positive or negative.

  The cover of Quicksilver Dragon was designed by Augusta Scarlett.

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