The man nearby moved forward. “Did you hear the family has a history of pagan rituals? I’ve heard they gather on witch holidays to sacrifice live animals.”
Another man shoved his chair back from his desk and joined in. “I don’t know about any of that, but my cousin’s friend said he saw the quarry employees partying with animals once. Not like their pets but bears and wolves.”
The woman rolled her eyes. “Your cousin needs to lay off the hallucinogens.”
The second man corrected her, “I said my cousin’s friend, not my cousin.”
Their suspicions floated around Moira like a foggy cloud. She wanted to bat it all away, but there was always some nugget of truth to rumors. They had to start somewhere. The VanTassels and the quarry employees were up to something.
She recalled the monstrous shadow lurking under the cover of the trees. Just thinking about it made her heart skip a beat and her stomach flip. Moira knew the shadow wasn’t just Devin. He was a tall man, but not so tall that he would create such a massive shadow.
No, she told herself. She couldn’t spend any more time with the VanTassel family. Whatever secrets they hid would have to stay hidden, because Moira wouldn’t be the one to uncover them. She would write the silly article about how Devin was an eligible bachelor and fill it with all sorts of embellishments to make him seem great.
Yet, hands poised over the keyboard, that wasn’t the story that spilled out. She deleted paragraph after paragraph, groaning with frustration at herself. Everything she tried to write came out too nice. Words spilled from her heart and she couldn’t stop them. Finally, after too many deleted beginnings, she closed the word processor.
Moments away from letting her forehead hit the desk, her phone buzzed. Curious and looking for any sort of distraction, Moira pulled it out of her purse. She shouldn’t have because Francine’s number flashed across the top of the screen.
Unable to stop herself, Moira opened the message.
I have a two-for-one deal for you. The quarry is having a party this weekend. You should come and interview Atticus, too. Not for a dating article, obviously. I know the community is curious about him, though.
A moment passed then Francine sent another message. Sound good?
Moira wasn’t sure how to say no. She couldn’t even type the word because when her thumbs danced across the screen and hit the send button, she belatedly realized she’d agreed. This wasn’t the article that would get her a promotion. It wasn’t really anything other than a nice surprise that her editor would like.
What is the dress-code? Moira added.
Moira gripped her phone, watching the screen for a response. If she had to get a last-minute formal dress, she wouldn’t even bother with this party. Formal dresses were a nightmare, both for her wallet and her fragile sense of self. Trying to find just the right one took months of preparation.
Casual. We wouldn’t have it any other way. Francine followed up with the address, which Moira googled. It was the location of one of their quarries. Moira could only assume there was a building on the site that the company used for gatherings like this.
She couldn’t decide if this was a sign to pursue Devin or the bigger story. She couldn’t have both, because she knew the second would destroy the first. He’d called her a mistake, though. She hadn’t thought the things he’d made her feel were a mistake, but if that was how he saw their chemistry, then she told herself to have no shame.
Moira sank deeper into her coat as she trudged through the new snow that’d fallen over night. She’d parked with the other cars, but the moment she got out, she realized there was no building anywhere nearby. All she could see were other cars lined along the road and asphalt that disappeared behind snow-covered pine trees.
While she thought about heading back to her car to find a closer parking spot, she heard a crash to her right. She startled, her breath freezing in the cold air, and searched the woods for the source of the sound. Nothing moved, but Moira knew what she would find.
Emboldened by the prospect of discovering the VanTassel secret, she slid down the shoulder of the road and lurched into the tree-line. Without the heat of the sun on the back of her neck, a shiver raced down her spine. It told her to turn back. Unfortunately, Moira didn’t listen.
She followed the sound of snapping twigs. The thing from the woods behind Devin’s house would be ahead of her. She dug her phone out of her pocket, set it to silent, and opened the camera in preparation. A few footsteps more, she reached the edge of a grove.
A black creature stood in the center. At first, she couldn’t make sense of what she saw. Moira recognized the shape, that much was easy, but her brain screamed that it wasn’t possible. The creature had a horned head and a long, scaled neck that led into muscled shoulders. Its tail whipped back and forth like an annoyed cat.
She stared, jaw dropped, at the dragon before her. Before pressing record on her phone, she took a single step back, so the trees obscured her. The great beast stamped its foot and tossed it’s head, a single plume of smoke slipping through its teeth. Then, before her eyes, the beast began to shrink.
Melting snow turned to steam around it, filling the air with billowing clouds. Moira held her breath, confused, until a familiar figure stepped out from the fog. Naked and unaware, Devin shook his head. She watched him clench his teeth and snarl. She wondered who he was fighting with until she realized the fight happened inside him.
He fell to his knees, hands pressed over his chest like he was trying to block blows. He couldn’t defend against an attack that came from inside him, though, not when he’d folded that great, black dragon into himself.
Moira spun on her heel and raced back toward the road. She should have taken more care to keep from making too much noise, but her screaming thoughts drowned out everything else. She scrambled up the hill and back onto the road as someone drove by. Breathing heavily, she shoved the phone into her pocket and bent double.
The car on the road slowed, and the window rolled down. A blond man leaned out and asked her if she was alright.
“Yeah, fine. I just…” she paused. “I slipped down the hill into the ditch here. Wasn’t watching where I was going, I guess.”
The blond narrowed his eyes at her. She waited for him to curl his lip at her, like her very presence offended him. His gaze flicked to the woods behind her. Could he see her footsteps? Was he like Devin?
Moira swallowed and tried to put on a reassuring smile. “I’ll try to be more careful, I promise.”
“Are you sure you weren’t snooping around?” the man growled. “I’ve never seen you around here before.”
Moira wanted to pull her phone out and flash the invitation she’d received, but she knew the first thing she would pull up would be the video and she didn’t want to risk anyone seeing it. Not yet. Not until she could figure out what was going on.
“Everything alright here?” Devin asked behind her.
She squealed, and he pressed his chest to her back so there was nowhere for her to go. She clutched her phone tight inside her pocket and prepared to run.
“I caught her screwing around on company land,” the man said, clearly suspicious.
To her surprise, Devin stepped around her and put himself between her and the man in the truck. “Cool down, Colton. Your sister invited her. Is this how you treat your sister’s friends?”
Moira considered clarifying that she wasn’t really Francine’s friend, but it didn’t seem important in the moment. Instead, she kept her mouth shut. Devin had the situation handled. He told the man to keep going, and like that, they were alone.
***
His beast had scented her in the woods. That explained the fight his beast started. Devin followed Moira’s scent out to the road, all the while wondering what she’d seen. He couldn’t bring himself to ask, though. He didn’t want to shatter the wall he’d started to erect between them.
Once Colton disappeared, she turned a bright smile on Devin. His heart stutte
red, but he turned away from her and shoved his hands into his pockets to keep from touching her. He didn’t understand why Frankie had invited the human woman. Moira would be surrounded by shifters, all bigger and stronger than her.
He paused when he realized Moira wasn’t following him. When he glanced over his shoulder, he found her standing in the shallow snow, looking lost and confused. The expression made her seem small, and all he wanted was to wrap his arms around her.
“Well?” he asked instead. “Are you coming?”
She sucked on her lower lip. Devin waited, hands closing into fists in his pockets.
“You’re not wearing a jacket,” she noted.
He felt like the big, bad wolf wearing grandma’s guise. Next, she would point out how his breath turned into dense clouds of fog in the air. Then, she would notice how his eyes shifted around her.
Frankie made a mistake when she invited the reporter. Devin couldn’t control himself around her. The beast thrashed inside him, enraged that Devin wouldn’t give it what it wanted. The damned beast wanted to kidnap Moira and carry her off to his abode where he could fuck her until she forgot where she was.
This wasn’t some twisted fairy tale. His greedy dragon wouldn’t get the princess in the end of this story. Devin would get nothing, which was about as much as he deserved.
“I’m not cold,” he lied.
Moira cocked her head, features twisting in disbelief. He expected her to turn and run back to her car, but she shrugged, jogged up to his side, and twined her arm with his.
“Damn, you’re so warm. How do you get through the summer?” She rested her bare hand on the crook of his arm and breathed a contented sigh.
Devin snorted. “I’m a basement dweller in the summer months. It’s much cooler underground, and my—I like it that way.”
If she noticed his slip of the tongue, she didn’t show it. Moira rested her cheek against his bare arm, and he got to watch her lips part.
“How’s that article going? You must be making most of it up considering the fact that you asked me about four questions in two days.”
“I haven’t started it yet,” she said. “I didn’t get into this business to write about eligible bachelors in the area. I thought I’d be writing about things that actually mattered.”
“What matters to you?” Devin should have shrugged her off, but he couldn’t bring himself to bother her.
“The same things that should matter to you. Global Warming, corrupt politics, and other topics like that. Instead, I’m writing about some dude who doesn’t even want to talk to people.” She gave him half of an apologetic smile, like she wasn’t really sorry.
Devin laughed. “What’s stopping you from writing about those things?”
“I have a boss. He has a boss. I’m pretty low in the hierarchy at work, and that means I do what I’m told, or I lose all chance of ever moving up. Then again, if I always do what I’m told, then I face the same problem because no one will think I’m capable of anything more than fluff pieces.” She pressed her face to his arm and groaned. “I don’t want to work on Which Grilled Sandwich Are You quizzes for the rest of my life.”
Devin arched both brows. “How does that fit in a newspaper?”
“The quizzes are on the website. The paper wants to be more like the big article sites, but it just ends being a bad facsimile. If I want to write better articles, I either have to push the boundaries of my assignments or leave the paper altogether and take my chances with a personal blog. Those don’t really pay the bills.”
Devin couldn’t rescue her from her problem. It wasn’t his place. The dragon didn’t rescue princesses in the stories. If anything, the dragon was always the problem, the beast meant to be slayed by a perfect prince.
Still, Devin wanted to help her some way. He hated hearing the sorrow in her voice, that flat and dead tone that gave away her hopelessness. Perhaps inviting Moira to the party hadn’t been a bad idea, after all. He thought she could use a bit of fun in her life if all she ever thought about was how her job had trapped her.
Yet, when they stepped up to the edge of the party, she froze. Devin waited patiently alongside her.
“Why is everyone…outside?” Moira stared at the bodies, at people in t-shirts laughing and teasing each other.
Nothing about this had ever seemed strange to Devin. He’d always been one of them, a shifter that burned too hot even in the coldest months of the year. His fire always blazed inside him like a pilot light. The pack parties had always taken place outside. In the summer, they hooked up sprinklers to rain overhead.
Someone broke from the sea of shifters, her hair pulled back in a half-ponytail. Althea cut a sidelong glare at Devin as she approached Moira and clasped her hands around Moira’s, effectively removing the human from Devin. A snarl started to curl his lip, but he caught himself. The beast tested the chains he’d thrown over it in his mind, but it couldn’t break free.
Moira didn’t belong to him. He couldn’t keep her at his side.
But as Althea dragged her into the party, Moira threw a look over her shoulder that silently asked for help. He stumbled forward, unable to say no, and followed both into the fray.
“You’re positively freezing!” Althea led Moira to a table on the other side of the party and filled a Styrofoam cup with a steaming liquid. “Here, drink some cocoa.”
“Oh!” Moira accepted the cup with a look of astonishment.
Devin couldn’t tear his gaze from her. Her joy sparked a new kind of fire in his chest. He should have taken to the skies and put a million miles between himself and her, but he knew his beast wouldn’t let him leave her side.
“So, you’re the one who is supposed to make our boss seem like a nice guy,” Althea began, looking Devin up and down like she knew it was an impossible task. “From all of us to you, good luck.”
Moira’s brow furrowed. She lifted the cup to her lips, sipped, and blinked several times in surprise. “This isn’t just cocoa!”
Althea laughed. “What do you think keeps us all warm? I’ll give you a hint. It’s bourbon.”
Devin growled. “Please tell me you have a separate batch for Crystal.”
“Do you think I’m a horrible person?” Althea uncovered a box of individual cocoa packets next to a carafe of hot water. “There’s enough for both Crystal and Frankie.”
So, everyone knew about Frankie’s second pregnancy then. The wolf shifter couldn’t hide it from anyone. Not when it was clearly taking so much more out of her than Crystal had. During her first pregnancy, Frankie had almost glowed. It was as if the child was trying to trick her into thinking another pregnancy would be just as easy.
“Frankie?” Moira mused. “Do you mean Francine? Atticus’s wife?”
Althea jabbed Moira with her elbow. “Don’t let her hear you use her full name. She’s rather aggressive in correcting people.”
Moira paled for a second. Devin assured her she would be fine but wondered why Moira would panic. He hadn’t thought she would be afraid of confrontation. She’d stared him in the eye as she gave him a verbal thrashing.
Devin pulled Moira close, despite the unspoken warning Althea tried to give her. For a moment, he thought Moira might listen and duck out from under his touch, but she didn’t move.
“What are you all celebrating?” Moira asked.
“The pa—employees like to get together every now and then,” Althea said. “Today, we’re waiting for Frankie to announce her second pregnancy. She and Atticus have been hiding it from us.”
Althea nearly slipped. Devin had done something similar earlier. The pack was so used to being around one another that they all forgot how to behave around humans. They couldn’t let Moira know what they were. He couldn’t imagine her fear if she found out everyone around her had a beast inside them.
He wondered if she knew about him. Had she seen his beast and run earlier? Or had she stuck around long enough to watch him shift back to his human form? He didn’t know how
to ask, especially since there was a chance she’d seen neither. Moira might have had to pee, wandered into the woods out of need, then chickened out and returned to the road.
Devin fed himself excuses, other reasons Moira might have been in the woods, even though he knew she’d likely seen him. Either way, Moira had stuck around. Did that mean she was unafraid? Hope made his heart flutter, but he shut it down quickly.
Devin could not have a mate. No one should have to live with him for the rest of their days. As a human, Moira’s life would be short. He didn’t want to make it miserable as well.
“I see you brought someone cute along,” Mac said as he sauntered up. The shifter had grown out of his rat face and into a man with strikingly sharp features. “If you keep her close, she might cancel out the stink-face you give everyone. People might actually start treating you like a pack mate.”
Devin bared his teeth in warning. Moira didn’t seem to notice. If she caught Mac’s slip of the tongue, she must not have thought anything of it. As much as Devin wanted to say Moira wasn’t his, the beast zipped his lips. The creature knew Mac would advance on her fast as lightning, and Devin couldn’t let that happen.
He couldn’t keep her. Yet, he also didn’t know how to give her up.
Chapter Five
The bourbon in the cocoa warmed her chest. She relaxed into Devin and forgot about the phone and the footage in her pocket. Joyous laughter and the sound of plastic balls hitting plastic cups soothed her worried soul.
Moira hadn’t realized how stiff her back had been until the tension eased, and she could breathe easier. Devin never left her side, glaring at anyone who tried to step too close to her. The blond-haired man returned, but he watched from a distance.
“Don’t mind Colton,” Devin whispered in her ear. “If he gives you trouble, tell Frankie. She’ll set him straight.”
“Why Frankie? Couldn’t you do something?”
Devin cleared his throat like it pained him. “Not everyone here trusts me. It would ruin the party if I spoke up. Frankie is Colton’s older sister, though. I bet everyone here would pay good money to watch her rip into him.”
Dragon Desire (Tooth & Claw Book 1) Page 4
