Alpha's Second Chance_Shifter Nation_Werebears Of The Everglades

by Meg Ripley

  “It’s not that. My boss knew I was going to see you for that interview. I took a cab to your building, but there’s no evidence that I ever left. I didn’t call in to work. Someone might come looking for me, and it could lead straight back to you.”

  Ethan bit the inside of his lip to keep from smiling. “You’re concerned about the safety of your captor? I’m sure there’s a name for that.”

  Her frown of worry turned to one of anger. “Doesn’t it concern you? Sure, you’ve basically brought me here against my will and held me captive. But what would happen if the police came around to find out about it? They’d want to know why you did it.”

  He shook his head, not concerned. “I don’t think we need to worry about any of it. I have your phone, and I sent your boss a text. You have laryngitis today.” He began lifting the plate covers, revealing steak that had been carefully grilled indoors on the stove, large sweet potatoes that he had steamed and drizzled with butter and caramel sauce, and a pot full of bacon green beans. His stomach growled. It had been far too long since he’d had a proper meal.

  Resa didn’t look at the food, focusing on him instead with a look bordering on horror. “How did you get it unlocked? It requires my fingerprint.”

  “For most people, yes.” Ethan grabbed a steak with a pair of tongs and put it on her plate, watching its juices pool around it as he set it down, making his mouth water. “But you forget that tech is what I do for a living. It doesn’t take much to hack into a phone, fingerprint or not.”

  “Oh.” She held out her hand to stop him from putting any more green beans on her plate. “Well, I don’t know if I should be pissed or grateful. Or scared. In fact, I think that pretty well sums up how I feel about you in general.”

  Ethan smirked. “That seems fair. Fortunately, I didn’t see any evidence of what happened on the rooftop when I went through your phone.”

  “I told you so.” Resa took a big bite of sweet potato, her eyes widening. “This is good. Did you make this yourself?”

  “I suppose you imagined that I have a professional cook or something?”

  “Well, let’s see. You head a massive company. You drive a McLaren and live in a big house in the suburbs, and your home is gorgeous.” She ticked off the points on her fingers. “I don’t think a personal chef is too far a stretch of the imagination.”

  “Maybe not, but it would involve having people in my home. That’s not something I really like.” Ethan frowned as he cut into his steak. When was the last time anyone had been there, anyway?

  “Unless you’re keeping them prisoner, of course. Still, it’s delicious. And much better than the cinnamon roll that was pitched at my forehead.” Resa twitched her eyebrow teasingly.

  “I’m sorry about that.” Ethan felt genuine about his apology. He’d been angry and indecisive, and he hadn’t made the right choices. Things already felt better, now that he was treating Resa with a little more respect and getting good food in his stomach. The steak had been grilled to perfection, seared nicely on the outside, but pink and juicy on the inside. “We started off on the wrong foot. Now, I think it’s time we get down to business. Do you agree on what I proposed? Taking turns asking questions?”

  Resa set her fork down. “I do, but I don’t really understand. Why do you want to?”

  “I want to know more about you, so I can figure out what to do with you, quite frankly.” He couldn’t just kill her and leave her somewhere, convenient as that would be. Resa might not work for The Wall Street Journal, but it was likely that she would be missed eventually. And she was simply too beautiful. It was a trait he wished she didn’t have, because it would have made all this much easier. “Besides, I’ve learned that you’re not the type of person to simply cooperate. I know I’m going to have to give you something in order to get what I want.”

  “Very astute of you. Who gets to go first?” Resa picked up her fork again and cut into her steak. Ethan didn’t miss the look of appreciation that crossed her face as she took her first bite. “Do we flip a coin?”

  “I’ll go first. I want to know what your interview with me was really for. You claimed it was for the paper, but I have this sneaking suspicion that it was actually for your blog.”

  This was something that had refused to leave his mind. If she had been there on legitimate business, then there would be no reason for her to come and find him on the rooftop. But she had done it anyway, and it had put them both in one hell of a situation. It shouldn’t really have mattered either way, but he had to know.

  “The paper. My editor at The Chronicle wanted something a little bit more exciting than what I had been doing, and I thought an interview with an elusive CEO would do it. Turns out you weren’t all that exciting. Granted, the more interesting information I found out about you would have been much better for the blog, but I was originally there on behalf of the paper.” Resa’s eyes drifted up to the ceiling as she thought. “I guess you don’t have to be very exciting as a human when you can be a dragon.”

  He narrowed his eyes at her, but he didn’t feel the need to explain himself. “Your turn.”

  Resa sat up straight and laid down her utensils. Her hands touched the table and her pockets, instinctively looking for something to write or record with. Finding nothing, she leaned forward so she could look him in the eyes. “Why did you bring me here instead of killing me? Wouldn’t that have been easier?”

  “Would you rather I have killed you?” Ethan challenged. “I might be a dragon part of the time, but it doesn’t make me a monster. You were foolish and rude, but I’m not sure that means you should die for it. Now, I’d like to know how you found me on the roof. And why.”

  The reporter finished off her steak and stabbed a forkful of green beans, taking her time. She liked to torture him, he could tell. “The ‘why’ really isn’t that hard to figure out. You didn’t give me any information at all for my interview. I couldn’t just go back to the paper with nothing. My boss already thinks I’m not serious about writing, and I needed that interview to get back in his good graces and back on my feet as a reporter.” Resa dabbed at her mouth with a napkin, staring down at the dark, shiny finish of the table with a distant look in her eye as though she was still envisioning herself at her work. “As for how, that’s pretty simple, too. I stuck around in the stairwell while everyone else left. Nobody uses it except for a few people and yourself. I just followed you up there, because I needed to know more. For all I knew, you kept a private garden of illegal plants up there or you liked to dance naked in the moonlight. I was just looking for a story.”

  “I suppose you found one,” Ethan mumbled. “You said you had been looking for a dragon your whole life. Why?”

  She frowned at him and didn’t answer at first. Instead, she picked at the food on her plate, but set her fork down again. “It’s actually my turn to ask a question, but I’m going to go ahead and let you have this one. I’ve been looking for dragons because I’ve known since I was a little kid that they exist. This isn’t one of those things where I just desperately wanted to believe a fantasy. I knew.”

  “How?”

  “So much for a fair exchange of questions.” Resa took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Her hands lay gently on the edge of the table, her fingers barely touching the wood as though she was drawing power from it. Even like that, she was absolutely exquisite. “When I was a kid, my family and I went for a picnic. We’d been living in the city for a while, and we were all ready to get out into the fresh air. I guess I was even more enthusiastic than my siblings, because I refused to stay in the open area of the park where the grass had been clipped and a playground had been set up. I wanted desperately to go into the woods, but my parents said it was too dangerous. I had to wait and one of them would come with me in a little bit, but I wasn’t patient enough.”

  “That certainly lines up with what I know about you.” Ethan stabbed the last bite of his steak and put it in his mouth. He normally would have savored it, but he wa
s too interested in Resa to pay attention to his food.

  “Anyway,” she continued, the annoyance clear in her voice, “I went by myself. There was a narrow track through the trees, and it was just so beautiful. The sun shone down through the leaves, and the sound they made when the wind rustled through them called to me. I was just going to step inside the shade, and I wasn’t going to go far. Before I knew it, I was so far into the woods that I couldn’t even see the park anymore. It was just me, alone in the world. But I wasn’t scared; I just wanted to keep going. And then it was there. This massive creature, completely covered in scales and with wings so big and beautiful that I just couldn’t stop looking at them. I remember I put my arms out to my sides, wishing that I could have them as well.” Her hands floated up into the air, gracefully imitating the dragon she had once seen, and she smiled. It was a genuine smile, not one of sarcasm or wit, and it looked good on her. “We just stood there staring at each other for a moment; I don’t even know for how long. But then my dad came crashing through the brush, calling for me, and the dragon was gone.” When Resa opened her eyes to look at him, a tear escaped. It clung to her lower lashes for a moment before sliding down the smooth plane of her cheek, and she wiped it away impatiently.

  Ethan pursed his lips, concerned about this story. It was a long time ago, and there was no way of knowing just who that had been in the woods. Even if it was a member of the Darkblood Society, it was doubtful that he would remember Resa as a child. “Did your father see the dragon?”

  Resa shook her head slowly, her expression sad as she tipped her head slightly to the right and played with her napkin. “No, and he didn’t believe that I had. Nobody did. It was just a figment of a child’s active imagination. I went on about it for a long time, so thrilled that I had been lucky enough to see such a thing. In fact, I insisted so fiercely that I had seen a dragon that my mother eventually took me to see a therapist. They told her it was like an imaginary friend, something I had made up because I was lonely and anxious from moving around so much. But I knew, no matter what some doctor in a cushy office said, that I was right. And now here you are, all the proof I need, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  Ethan couldn’t argue with her on that point. But her story made him wonder how many other times someone had seen a dragon and not been believed, and if there was anyone else like her out there who was convinced of their existence. “I’m sorry.”

  “No, you’re not.” Resa swiped at her face with her napkin, erasing the last vestiges of her makeup from the day before. Her voice was deep and strong again, the wistful tone she had shared her story with gone. “You don’t want anyone to know you exist, and you’d be perfectly happy to confirm what my therapist said. I’m crazy, and that’s what the whole world is going to continue to think.”

  “You can’t really blame me.” Ethan suddenly felt attacked, even though he knew the story hadn’t been about him. “By sneaking around in my building and spying on me, you only hurt me and possibly yourself.”

  Her eyes were wide with alarm. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means I don’t know what to do with you!” Ethan tossed his napkin on the table and stood up, sending his chair skidding backwards across the hardwood floor. “If I’m exposed to the media, life as everyone knows it will change. Not just for you and for me, but for everyone else. You’ll be causing a complete paradigm shift when everyone suddenly realizes that their worst nightmares are actually true. Ironically, I’m not the kind of monster that I’ll be portrayed as. I couldn’t just have thrown you off the roof of the building, as convenient as that would have been.” He paced up and down the length of the dining room, running one hand over his short-cropped hair. “You’ve put me in a terrible position.”

  Resa’s mouth tightened. “Yes, I feel so sorry for you. With your shifting abilities and all the money in the world and the fact that you aren’t being held prisoner, you lead such a terrible life.”

  He was on her in an instant, his hands wrapping around her shoulders and his face only an inch away. Ethan couldn’t even be certain how he had gotten around to her side of the table. Rage pounded in his bloodstream. “I’ve been living in a prison my entire life! I can’t just go outside and stretch my wings whenever I want to. I can’t be myself. I constantly have to watch my back, and apparently I have to look out for nosy little reporters who have no idea what’s good for them!” His wings threatened to burst from his shoulder blades and rip right through his shirt, and he nearly let them go.

  She had cringed away as he had grabbed her, but Resa recovered herself and pushed her nose right against his. “I might have done something stupid, but it’s not my fault you’ve been miserable your entire life! You think you’re the only one who has problems, Ethan Beaufort, but we’ve all got our crosses to bear. You’re a monster and I’m insane, so don’t we make the perfect pair?”

  Ethan’s heart thundered, his breath coming heavily. Resa’s skin sent fire through his palms and up his arms. He felt a need for her that stretched down the length of his body, pulling at him to close the minute gap that still remained between them. She was solid and attractive, not a fantasy of something, but incredibly real. The way her eyes shone, the way her chest heaved as she, too, panted with anger, was almost too much to bear. He wanted to believe that he had control over her as long as she was in his house, but he knew that wasn’t really true. It only turned him on more, and his tongue pushed against the inside of his teeth as it longed to taste her.

  But he pushed himself away and went to the bar, leaning heavily against the countertop as he composed himself. Ethan could do anything he wanted with her, and she would never be strong enough to stop him, at least not physically, but he couldn’t. “I suppose there’s no denying that we’ve each had our secrets. It’s just been a long time since I’ve really had to confront it.” He had complained to the other Darkbloods, but they sympathized in a quiet way that never satisfied him. They had come to accept that the world would never know their true forms. Resa was just…different. “I’m sorry. I’ve made some dessert. I’ll be right back.”

  If he had thought about it, he never would have left her alone in the dining room while he went to the kitchen. Resa, no matter how attractive or how right she was, was still his prisoner. He couldn’t let her escape. But he had a distinct feeling that she wouldn’t try. She was too curious about him, and that drove her harder than any need to be free of him.

  Ethan retrieved the last covered dish and paused a moment to press his forehead against the cool granite countertop. His dragonfire was begging to get out, but this wasn’t the time. He had promised Resa dinner, and he was going to see it out or be damned.

  Despite his conviction that she wouldn’t try to get away, he was still surprised when he came back in the dining room and found her sitting quietly in her chair. Her back was ramrod straight, and she stared ahead blankly. A stab of worry slammed his stomach. “I…I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

  She started and turned to him, looking at him for a moment before shaking her head. “No. No, I’m fine. I was just thinking that you’re the first person I’ve told about my dragon. I mean, other than my parents and my therapist, but they don’t really count. And you didn’t call me a liar or ask me if I’d had too much wine. It was nice, in its own way.” The corner of her lip tipped up ever so slightly.

  Ethan once again felt a fire of yearning flame up inside him, but he forced it back down as he set the dish on the table. “I hope you like pears. I braised them in a brandy orange sauce.”

  Resa’s lips twitched again as she watched him dish out the dessert. “Do dragons like pears?”

  “Does that count as one of your questions?” he challenged.

  “You do owe me some, but I don’t think we’ll waste it on your dietary interests for the moment. I think it’s time you tell me why you’re so sensitive about the image of dragons in the public. Why do you have all those books about dragons? You said you want to
find out what the world thinks of dragons, but you refused to tell me why.”

  He had been trying to reconcile his clashing feelings toward her. Ethan had bounced back and forth between anger and regret ever since he’d found Resa on that damn rooftop, but now there was something more added to the mix. Ancient memories of loss and grief hung on the edges of his mind, and he wanted desperately to push them away. “It’s rather complicated.”

  She shrugged as she picked up her dessert fork. “That’s okay. Apparently, I’ve got all the time in the world since you’ve taken the liberty of calling off work for me.”

  Ethan watched as she sliced the side of the fork through the pear. He savored the way it looked as she brought it into her mouth through her lips, practically feeling the smoothness of it himself. No, this wasn’t the time for that. He sat down heavily. “You had asked earlier if there are more of us, and the answer is yes. There are shifters all over the world, but our numbers are few. It’s a genetic thing, mostly staying with the males of the line. When a shifter has children, there’s always a chance that they might not be dragons. My brother and I both were, much to my parents’ delight.”

  He pressed his finger to his lips as he remembered an old warehouse his father had brought them to. It was dingy and empty, but it was a good place to stretch their wings out of the sight of others. Some work associate of his had told him he could use it, and Ethan’s father had pretended they were using the space to practice with their remote-controlled cars. Instead, they climbed up the walls, pushed forth their wings, and dove toward the floor, catching themselves at the last moment and rising up to the metal ceiling. It was warm up there, a delightful heat that had radiated through young Ethan’s scales and let him pretend he was flying close to the sun.

  “But my brother was sick. It was the sort of thing my parents were able to manage on their own for a while, hoping he would outgrow it. But he grew weak, and he needed treatment in a hospital.” Brandon had been so thin at the end that Ethan had barely been able to stand looking at him, but he would still sit next to him in his bed and play. Even at a young age, he had known there was something very wrong with his brother, and that this was not some ordinary flu. His parents spoke in hushed tones behind closed doors and left the room to take phone calls. It was serious, but nobody would talk about it. “The thing is, you can’t treat a shifter in a hospital. Our bodies look human, and in many ways, they are, but we don’t react the same way to medications. There was a huge risk that whatever chemicals they might have put in my brother’s body would kill him or worse: they might make him spontaneously shift. It was the kind of risk they couldn’t take.” This much had been explained to him, but he hadn’t truly understood it until he was much older.