by J. K Harper
“I’m… I’m here. Sorry. Yes,” Marley stammered as Daelan took her suitcase with his free hand and started walking back toward the Camaro like it was the most normal thing. “I can’t believe it…”
“What? What can’t you believe?”
“Nothing! Sorry. What is it, I mean, what can I do for you?”
“I’ve been trying to call you for hours! You can’t just take off like this, meeting a stranger in Idaho of all places, and not expect people to worry. Are you okay?”
Hank’s voice softened immediately and Marley could hear a very real note of tension and worry in it. Her throat was dry and her eyes were glued on Daelan’s back, even as she gave a faint wave to Slate – grinning like he knew everything and she didn’t even have a clue – and started after him.
“I’m okay, yeah. It’s fine, don’t worry about me. My flights were delayed a little so I must have been in the air when you called me before, but I’m perfectly safe and well. We’ve touched down now and someone came to meet me.”
“Who’s the someone?” Hank asked, sounding immediately suspicious again.
It was kind of sweet, the way he worried about her. Though they’d been working together for years now, Marley hadn’t thought them to be that close. Sure, they always took their lunch break together, and Hank was known to pick up coffee for her sometimes when he was out for a meeting and she was cooped up at the station, but that was it.
The fact that he knew she was in Idaho to begin with stemmed from a moment of weakness a few days ago, when she felt like she had to tell someone. The words had come pouring out of her mouth during lunch and Hank had looked incredibly worried and disturbed by what he heard. So much so that Marley had even contemplated calling the whole thing off.
If the always calm, collected and cool-headed Hank thought it was a horrible idea, maybe it was?
And yet here she was.
And here he is, she thought numbly, as Daelan wrestled with getting her suitcase to somehow fit in the back of the Camaro.
When he slammed the trunk shut, there was an almost victorious smile on his lips for a moment. It was the cutest thing she’d seen, other than just about anything Deon did, of course.
“Marley?” Hank asked hesitantly, rousing her from her wandering thoughts again.
“Right! He’s just…he’s a guy. I know him. I’m fine. I’ll be in a place called Shifter Grove. If I don’t call you in a few days, send the Mounties or whoever after me. Don’t make a mess of the station! Thank you for checking in! Bye!”
“Mar-“
She ended the call before Hank could say another thing, feeing a twinge of guilt go through her for it. Her heart was beating out of her chest as she tucked the phone back in the bag and made her way to the car as well.
Daelan was standing next to the passenger side door, holding Deon in his arms. They seemed to be having some sort of a silent conversation that Marley couldn’t begin to pretend to understand. Watching them together…well, she’d thought it would never happen. And yet here he was, the man who she thought was lost to her forever.
“Hey,” she said hesitantly, stopping in front of him.
He even smelled great.
Damn him.
Taking a deep breath, which only served to make her inhale more of his intoxicatingly masculine scent, Marley tried to center herself. He’d disappeared on her more than a year ago, he’d never seen his kid, he’d never left anything to find him by…and now he’d tracked her down and flown her to Idaho without a word of explanation.
That did not warrant her getting all touchy-feely about him, no matter how good he smelled.
But he did smell good. All piney and testosterone-y and…well, like Daelan.
“Hey,” he said in return, wearing a tentative smile, which Marley found herself answering.
Dammit, you’re supposed to be strong here!
“I think we need to talk.”
Marley applauded herself for having her voice not shake at all when she uttered those words. Score one for her!
“You’re right,” Daelan agreed with a nod, his voice dropping slightly lower.
He handed Deon back to her carefully and held the door open for her.
“It’s a long drive.”
I bet it is.
Chapter 5
Daelan
If there was one thing that was true about dragons, it was that they didn’t get nervous. There was no reason to, for one thing. They were the biggest predators around, always, and as it would stand, they were usually also the richest, the most powerful, and the most self-assured due to all of the above.
Yet here stood Daelan Silvertip, nervous out of his mind.
She was still as gorgeous as he remembered her. Full curves, only 5’5’’ tall, but he knew she fit perfectly in his arms. Every lush part of her would be heaven against him, her tan skin so smooth and delicious to kiss. And those plump lips… He was getting hard just from looking at her, and this was no time to get distracted.
Despite wanting nothing more than to grab her, kiss her, and run his hands through her wild dark brown curls, he resisted the urge and held the door of the car for her instead.
She’ll be the end of me, he thought.
A part of him couldn’t wait for that end, though.
Though Marley gave him a questioning look, she clambered into the car regardless, and he carefully closed the door after her and the baby. He could feel the little boy tracking him with his green gaze, so much like his own, as he walked around the car and got in. With his throat dry, his heart heavy, and his gut in knots, he put the safety belt over himself and started up the car.
Hard rock, something from Metallica, started screaming out of the speakers. All three of them jumped and Daelan launched at the controls, trying to turn the volume down.
“Shit,” he muttered, realizing what he’d said a split-second too late.
He looked at Marley, feeling the color drain from his cheeks. Just then, he managed to turn down the volume and take a breath that filled his lungs with a start, like he’d forgotten to breathe for too long. He probably had.
“I’m sorry. I forgot I turned the volume up. Pretend like you didn’t hear that, little guy,” he told Deon, giving him a look that in his mind should incite understanding.
The kid smiled at him, his chubby cheeks rounding even more.
“Okay,” the boy confirmed.
“Cool.”
Marley, however, didn’t look quite so convinced. Clearing his throat, Daelan switched the Camaro into gear and peeled out of the airport. From the rear-view mirror, he could see Slate leaning on his airplane, shaking his head a little with good-natured amusement.
Damn small town. He’d been here for a week and already everybody knew who he was, and he knew who everyone was as well. It took exactly one evening at Austin’s Texas, the only local bar, and another at the Sunrise Diner, before he’d been told everybody’s life story.
Daelan had Donovan to thank for that one. A hidden dragon could only remain hidden for so long if he was kicked out of his cousin’s mansion and forced to find a place to stay in the close-knit town. Even his magic couldn’t make credit card charges and lunch orders disappear.
They drove in silence for a while, with the music turned low and Marley sort of staring out of the window, while the baby watched Daelan like a hawk. He couldn’t help sneaking glances at the kid. Though plump with that healthy baby fat, the boy was obviously already strong. His features reminded Daelan of himself a little, but he looked almost a spitting image of Daelan’s dad, Dominic.
Probably the slightly darker eyes is what does it, he mused to himself, nearly missing the right exit from the highway because he was so preoccupied with admiring the baby dragon next to him.
“So, are you going to start, or do I have to?” Marley asked, the tiniest hint of uncertainty in her tone.
“Right. I probably should,” Daelan said, slicking his hand through his hair. “I’m not sure what to s
ay.”
He really wasn’t.
He’d tried several times to put together some kind of a speech, or something of the like, and failed every time. Eventually, he’d decided to wing it, assuming the words would come to him the moment he saw Marley. Now, however, it appeared that the words he was looking for had been misplaced somewhere along the way.
“How about starting with why you brought me here? And what’s with the secrecy? Couldn’t you have told me it was you to start with?”
“I wasn’t sure you’d come if you knew it was me,” Daelan said before he could catch himself.
He wanted to slap a hand over his mouth, but didn’t. There was very little left of his cool bad boy attitude under the watchful gaze of his baby momma and even that was fading fast. Guilt was not an emotion he wore well.
“Why not?”
Marley’s voice was softer and Daelan glanced at her, frowning.
“I left. Without a word.”
“You did, but I didn’t expect anything,” she said after a moment of hesitation. “It wasn’t like I expected you to stay with me and make something of it that wasn’t there. I understood.”
Her hand went to her neck and Daelan felt a familiar flash of warmth flood through him the moment her fingers made touch with the stone pendant. He must have gasped, because Marley looked at him sharply, her fingers still around the necklace.
“Is something wrong?”
“The…the necklace,” he started, clearing his voice again like a nervous teenager. “Do you know what it is?”
“No, what?”
“It’s a dragonstone,” Daelan said, returning his eyes firmly to the beaten road leading toward Shifter Grove now. “I left it for you and I’m glad you wore it. I knew you were safe because of it.”
From the corner of his eye, he noticed her looking at it curiously now, the dark glow of the pendant seeming stronger now than the last time he’d seen it. It made sense, of course.
Dragonstones always came to life when worn by a dragon’s mate.
All the implications of him leaving the pendant on her pillow when he left that morning flooded back to him. The way he’d stood there, by her bed, for half an hour, just watching her sleep. The way he’d wrestled with himself to get him to walk out of the door. The way he’d wanted to go back every damn minute of every day, and the way he felt her every time she touched the pendant…
Worst of all was that he hadn’t told her about any of it.
And I can’t, he reminded himself. She deserves better. We’ll just do this thing and it’ll be over and she can go back to a better life without me.
The bitterness was almost palpable, even if they were just thoughts. Daelan resisted the urge to shake his head as if that would clear the cobwebs. Instead, he simply tightened his knuckles around the steering wheel and willed the road to end faster.
He couldn’t drive the way he usually did, on account of the child and the woman next to him.
My mate. My son.
It was an equal mix of pride and dread. To the very second he’d seen her walk out of that airplane with the boy in her arms, he’d thought that maybe, just maybe, both his dragon and Donovan and the whole damn Silvertip creed of magic was wrong. That Marley was really ‘only’ a one-night stand who he’d gotten lost in.
But the proof was sitting right next to him. He’d known her to be his mate the first time he saw her, and he had no doubt that the boy was his son. Some things, a shifter simply knew. Even if they perhaps didn’t deserve to.
“What does the necklace do, exactly?” Marley asked curiously, rousing Daelan from his uncomfortable musings.
“It’s sort of a beacon. It lets me know if you’re in trouble. I get a…well, a feeling. I assume you know what I am now, right?”
He snuck one guilty look at her and she nodded.
Of course she does. Her baby’s a dragonling, that’s hard to miss.
“I have to say, I was sort of freaked out when the baby was born partially scaly. The nurses freaked out. But there was one midwife there who rolled her eyes at everyone and told me what was going on when we had a moment alone. I knew the baby was going to be a shifter baby, but you don’t find a lot of information about dragons…”
“I’m sorry,” Daelan blurted in the middle of Marley’s monologue.
“For?”
“I should have told you.”
“You couldn’t have known I was pregnant. And I get it, you dragons have to fly under the radar, pardon the pun.”
Marley was smiling now, one hand running through the baby’s hair, who was resting comfortably against her shoulder. He still kept his eyes on Daelan, but his eyelids were getting heavy.
“I think I did, though,” Daelan muttered under his breath.
“What was that?” Marley asked, straining toward him a little.
“Nothing. I was wondering, what did you name him?”
Marley Philips was an interesting conundrum of a woman.
She worked in media, but kept herself strictly off of any social media. She didn’t have a single account other than the SassyDate one that Daelan could tie to her. Short of going through every hospital in Boston and shaking them for information, he’d had to settle for simply not knowing whether or not she’d had a child like Donovan had said, let alone what she’d named him.
“Deon,” she said, her hazel eyes lovingly on the boy in her arms. “I named him Deon.”
“Deon,” Daelan repeated, letting it roll off his tongue. “I like it. Good choice.”
He nodded, approving of it. There’d been a Deon in the Silvertip family lines. In fact, he’d been the one the Silvertips fondly remembered as Deon the Stubborn, because he’d stuck his mate in a castle until she finally accepted the fact that he was the love of her life.
It wasn’t a practice condoned by the Silvertips anymore, though Daelan had to wonder if it didn’t have some merit to it.
Maybe I’m the one who should have gotten locked up with her instead.
“You’re dodging my questions, by the way. I’ve got half a mind to tell you to stop the car and hitch a ride back to the airport, you know.”
The scenery was passing them by quickly, the rough road rattling under the tires of the Camaro. It was unseasonably green still, the first snow being entirely stubborn about falling this year, though they were a week into December already. At this altitude, Daelan would have expected to have to resort to keeping his dragonfire blazing in his stomach to keep warm, but his leather jacket was enough.
“I am,” he confirmed with a smile. “Tell you what. I’ll make a deal with you. You tell me how you’ve been, and I’ll tell you why this whole thing is happening over some apple and cardamom pie at Cerise’s. It’s an hour down the road.”
“Are you afraid I’ll flip out and you’d rather have me somewhere in public so I can’t strangle you then and there?” Marley asked, her words dripping with sarcasm.
Other than the part about her strangling him, which was preposterous because it would take a whole lot more than a curvy woman to choke the life out of him, Marley wasn’t too far off the money. The closer they got, the more hair-brained his scheme felt, and the guiltier he felt for it.
You’re playing with fire here, Silvertip, he mused sullenly, putting in as genuine of a smile as he could.
“That’s exactly it. Or maybe I want to keep your sass and fire under the lid a little. I remember how this works.”
He tossed her a wink, and Marley blushed immediately. It was the cutest thing, the way her cheeks lit up like he’d said something so impossibly rude. She was a firecracker in bed, though. There was no erasing those memories from Daelan’s brain.
“You’re assuming a lot here, mister,” she chided, trying to hide her blush by putting a hand to her cheek.
“I’m not assuming anything. I’m thankful that you came down here, and I’m even more glad that you brought Deon with you. Anything on top of that is a bonus, if you ask me.”
That much, at least, was the truth. By the seven ancestors, he would have never expected her to actually come down here. Though he’d hoped, sure, but hoping and dreaming had never gotten him much in this life.
“So tell me something I don’t know, Marley. Please,” Daelan said, turning the music down lower so it wouldn’t wake up Deon.
The little boy had finally given up on his quest of staying up forever, his eyes closed and his breathing calm. But it didn’t matter, because even like that, Daelan could sense the powerful dragon growing within him. One that might just be as stubborn as his own animal was.
For Deon’s sake, he’d have to hope it wouldn’t be quite as bad.
Marley stayed quiet for a while. The woods were the thickest they were going to be, before they’d have to climb over a low forest-covered ridge and then begin their descent into the valley that is Shifter Grove.
Daelan was beginning to worry she wouldn’t say a word, but he urged himself to have patience. With his eyes on the road and his whole body tensed, he waited, perfectly on edge. When she finally started talking, it was like someone came to him and physically lifted a giant boulder off his chest.
“Well…I mean, what’s ever new in Boston?”
“Everything. Tell me all about it.”
He ate up every word like it was the oxygen he needed to breathe and for the first time in more than a year, his dragon was perfectly content.
Chapter 6
Marley
Filling the silence of the Camaro came easily enough, and the drive scooted by fast.
I’m not sure if it’s the nervous energy or the relief that it’s Daelan, not some masked murderer, but I can’t shut up…
Marley didn’t mind too much, though. Within a few minutes, she had Daelan laughing, and then he had her laughing, and then everything felt like good old times. It was just right, the chatter flowing seamlessly between the two of them like it had been that weekend in Boston.
