by Ava Benton
Table of Contents
Prologue
Alan
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Afterword
Alan
Dragon Heartbeats
Ava Benton
Contents
Alan
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Afterword
Alan
Emelie’s hell-bent on finding Keira. What woman wouldn’t be if her best friend up and vanished off the face of the earth after traveling to the Scottish Highlands?
She didn’t count on being kidnapped by a bunch of mysterious badass women.
She also didn’t count on being saved by even more badass dragons.
Alan. Well, being the head of a clan isn’t easy. No one said it would be, but why do these damned humans keep trespassing on his land and ruining his tranquility?
Once and for all, this dragon shifter would like things to settle down. He didn’t count on a hacker like Emilie entering his realms, though.
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Prologue
Keira
“Oh, you’ve gotta be kidding me.”
I read the email again, like something would change if I did. Like that would make it better.
“Son of a bitch.” I pushed back from the table and wasn’t sure whether I would throw up or scream. Maybe both, one at a time. I never thought she would do anything like it, or else I would have tried harder to keep her away.
Stupid me, thinking the more I tried to keep Emelie away, the more she would want to see what was up. The last thing I needed was for her to poke into my new life.
“Tamhas?” I called out when I burst into the corridor.
Most of the clan was in the common room, watching an American football game.
Apparently, the clan from Appalachia had gotten them into it when they crossed paths in St. Lucia. It sort of made me feel more at home to hear the announcers and the names of the teams.
Tamhas was in there, sitting with Dallas and Owen.
I hated to break in on his good time, because it did seem like he was enjoying himself.
When he saw the look on my face, the good times were over—though he was smart enough not to give himself away when he stood and joined me outside the room.
“What is it?” he asked as I dragged him down the hall toward the room we shared.
I held a finger to my lips to quiet him until we were completely alone with the door closed between us and more than a dozen pairs of interested ears.
When we were alone for real, he turned to me. “Okay. Now, what it is?”
“Emelie.” I wrung my hands together and shook my head as I paced the length of the room. “She’s here. Somewhere.”
“Here?” he gaped at me.
“In Scotland. Somewhere in Scotland. God, how could I have been so stupid? It was naïve to think she wouldn’t want to find me!”
“All right, wait a second. Calm down.”
I hated that he tried to calm me down when I had every reason in the world to be upset. “Calm down? How can you even say that? You know what this means.”
“You don’t know she’ll find us. Don’t worry yourself too much about it when you don’t yet know what’s come of her.”
“She emailed me a week ago, Tamhas. A week ago.”
This seemed to knock him crooked for a second. “Oh. I see.”
“Another stupid fault of mine,” I muttered. “I should know better than to let so much time pass without checking, but…”
“But you feel as though you’re further and further removed from the old life,” he murmured with a knowing smile.
“Yes. That’s exactly right. I shouldn’t have forgotten about her like that.” I sat on the bed with a thud and bent to hold my head in my hands. “She was all I had back before I met you, and I was all she had. How could I forget about her? She deserves better.”
“Hold on, now.” He sat beside me and draped an arm around my shoulders. “I wouldn’t let it get that far without first knowing what she found—if anything. Remember, now, the woods surrounding the mountain are all but impossible to navigate for a human. That is part of our protection.”
I raised my head slowly, telling myself not to glare at him. He was only doing his best to make me feel better, after all. “You’re telling me she might have starved to death out in the woods by now.”
“No, of course not.”
“Because now, I’m seeing her dead body in my mind’s eye and I can’t shake the feeling that something bad happened to her.” I bent to pull my hiking boots from under the bed and shoved my feet into them.
“You’re not going to look for her, are you?”
“Do you have any other suggestions?” I finished lacing up, then looked at him. “Tamhas, she was the one who showed me where to find you. She’ll know where to go.”
He sighed as he stood. “All right. Let’s get out there and see what we find.” He sounded like he was on his way to the dentist’s office or something, but I would take all the help I could get if it meant finding Emelie.
My heart was in my throat the entire way down the long tunnel leading outside. What would she have done if she got lost? She was a smart girl, she had always been the smart one out of the two of us. She wouldn’t keep going if she didn’t think she could find the mountain.
Unless somebody who meant a lot to her was missing and she needed to find her.
Tamhas took my sweaty hand in his. “I’m certain she’s all right. More than likely, she got a bit lost and turned around. She returned to her hotel, I’m betting.”
“Then why did she not email me again to tell me she couldn’t reach the mountain?” I countered. “No offense, truly, but you don’t know her as I do.”
“Aye, that’s true. I do not.” He remained silent as we finished our walk, still hand-in-hand until we got outside.
I shaded my eyes against the sun in order to look around.
Think, think, think.
What would she do? I tried to call upon my instincts—another thing about me, something Tamhas had chosen to ignore.
My instincts had always served me well. They were what made me a top-notch bounty hunter and freelance private eye. Not to mention the benefit of being able to “see” what my MMA opponents were going to do before they did it.
It wasn’t cheating if I didn’t know I actually had legitimate powers—and back then, I didn’t. I hadn’t found out about my relation to a bunch of long-gone witches until I came to Scotland to find Tamas.
My instincts were going crazy, pretty much screaming in my head. I stopped in my tracks and closed my eyes in the hopes of making sense of all the noise inside.
“What is it?” Tamhas asked. I only shook my head and kept concentrating.
&n
bsp; In a matter of moments, the noise started to quiet down. I drew a few deep breaths and let my inner voice come through.
If Emelie was here, where was she?
When my eyes opened, I followed the place my voice told me to go. Into the woods, past this tree and that bush, turning at random. Or what seemed like random. Tamhas followed me without saying a word. He knew better by now.
We arrived at a place where one of the trees had fallen over until it leaned on another one. I stopped, turning in a slow circle as my eyes scanned the clearing. “There’s something strange here.”
“What do you mean, strange?” He came to me, touching my shoulder.
“I feel something.” I balled up my fists and touched them to my stomach. “Something happened here. I don’t know what. It just feels wrong.”
Under the leaning tree, there was a spot where the fallen leaves had all been brushed or kicked away—everywhere else, the leaves made a carpet on the ground.
“What’s this?” Tamhas leaned down and came up with a bracelet.
Something got stuck in my throat. A lump. I couldn’t speak.
All I could do was reach for the string of beads. Seven colors, one for each of the seven chakras. I had seen it on Emelie’s wrist almost every day since I gave it to her as a Christmas present years earlier, when she was getting into sort of woo-woo spiritual things.
“It’s hers. Jesus, it belongs to Emelie. I bought it for her.” I clutched the bracelet to my chest. “What are we going to do?”
He blew out a hard, sharp breath through flared nostrils. I knew his dragon was going nuts—he had an inner voice, too. “We’re going to find her, of course.”
1
Emelie
Keira used to tease me about my awful sense of direction. She once told me I could get lost on my way to the bathroom.
And she wasn’t wrong. Even if I had a detailed set of directions, I’d find a way to mess things up. No matter where I was going.
Moving to New York wasn’t helpful, either. It took a solid six months for me to get the hang of the trains and subways and transfers and all that. Good thing I worked from home, or I would never have made it to my job on time.
Because at least I could make it from my bed to my desk without having to check a maps app.
All of this came to mind as I wandered around the woods.
In Scotland.
Because I was a complete idiot.
“Kiera, you’re lucky I love you,” I whispered, turning around in a full circle to get a look at what was around me. Not like it mattered, since everything looked like everything else. It wasn’t like there were any trees that looked different than the other trees.
And there weren’t any signs pointing to the mountain peak I was looking for.
What was the deal with this place? I pulled out the printed Google Earth image which I had shoved into my backpack before leaving the hotel after breakfast and looked at it again. For the millionth time.
“It should be there,” I whispered, looking up over the treetops, where I could see nothing but blue sky. “It’s got to be there.”
It wasn’t. On the print-out, which I had assumed would be right because the picture was taking from a freaking satellite, there was a definite mountain peak, followed by several smaller peaks which trailed behind it.
“This has to be true.” If I said it enough, I would be right. Because it had to be true. I was holding the proof in my hands.
Did I do something wrong when I tracked the location the email to Keira came from? No. Impossible. I was too good at my work to make stupid mistakes. And the last time I checked, entire mountain formations did not disappear overnight.
Oh, God. What if Keira got as lost as I was? What if I led her to the wrong place and something terrible happened? I looked around again in a panic, half-expecting to find her rotting corpse somewhere nearby.
It would be all my fault. And here I was, so full of myself. Thinking I was the world’s best hacker or something when I screwed up royally and got my best friend killed.
No. She told me everything was all right—so good that she wanted to stay. But that was the last time I heard anything before she dropped off the face of the earth. Two months later and nothing. Zip. Which was why I bought a plane ticket.
So she had found something. But what? Tamhas? Or something dangerous? Something she couldn’t tell me about, maybe.
I could feel the panic starting to spread through me—my breath went short, my heart started racing a mile a minute. Sweat beaded on my forehead and trickled down the back of my neck. I wiped it away with a shaking hand.
Was this how she felt when she searched the woods? Because she might have had a better sense of direction than I did and she might have had those sharp instincts or whatever, but even she couldn’t find her way to something that didn’t exist.
If she had turned around and gone back to her hotel, why did she tell me everything was okay, and she was going to stay? Why? What didn’t she share with me?
My imagination was running out of control, and I knew it. I had to rein it in before I went into a full-blown panic attack. I hadn’t had one of those since I was a teenager in the worst foster home of all of the millions I had been in and out of. This wasn’t the time or place to start that shit again.
I sat down on the nearest fallen log and did all the old tricks. I deliberately tuned in to all of my senses, one at a time. The feeling of the breeze on my face. The solidity of the log underneath me. The sun warming my skin. The fluttering leaves, the singing birds, the sound of my breath as I slowly and purposefully inhaled and exhaled. The smell of damp earth, rotting leaves, fresh air.
A few minutes later, I was in control of myself again. I could reason through the mess I was in.
First, I needed to know the time. I had no idea how long it had been since I started wandering around and was starting to feel disoriented. My phone was in one of the pockets in my backpack—I wouldn’t have a signal in the middle of nowhere, but I’d be able to use it as a clock, and the compass app I had installed would come in handy.
At least I had the foresight to do that much.
“Wait a minute.” I squinted at the screen, then stood up and held the phone away from me like people always did when they were searching for a signal.
Only I wasn’t searching for one. I was checking to make sure I wasn’t seeing things, that there wasn’t some sort of glitch in the software. Because I did have a full signal—and, according to the display, a Wi-Fi connection.
“What is happening here?” I tested a couple of websites and was able to access them. I shouldn’t have been able to do that, out in the middle of the woods. The phone’s clock told me I’d been hiking for three hours, so I had to be pretty far from the road and civilization in general.
The only reason I could see for being able to connect was the presence of a Wi-Fi network somewhere close by. And a cell tower.
The strangeness of this alone was enough to keep me moving. I continued north, as the compass told me to do, holding the phone out in front of me and checking from time to time if the signal weakened. Meanwhile, all sorts of questions fought for attention in my head.
Where was I, really?
I never got the time to figure that out.
Nobody could ever accuse me of being the outdoorsy type. I had to buy a decent set of hiking boots just for the sake of searching for Keira. My skin was so pale, I could pass for a ghost. The most light I ever got was the light from my computer screen.
But even I knew what it meant when a twig snapped in an otherwise quiet place.
My head snapped around in the direction the sound came from. Total reflex, done without thinking first. If I had thought first, I might have run. Not that it would have made much difference.
Four women entered the little clearing I had just walked into. The leader was tall, beautiful, with caramel skin and black hair. Her light green eyes competed for attention with her hair and nobody needed
to be that gorgeous.
She carried herself with grace—they all did, like trained dancers. Only they looked like no dancers I had ever seen. There was anger all about them. Anger and strength. Fierceness.
They reminded me of Kiera, in a way.
All four wore black dresses, full-length, simple, tight at the top and a little more flowy in the skirt. No jewelry, no makeup, but covering their bare shoulders and chests were intricate tattoos I couldn’t make sense of from a distance.
The leader’s full lips parted to show white teeth bared in a snarl. “Who are you?”
I gulped as the four of them slowly surrounded me, all of the women sort of floating through the leaves covering the ground. But no, that was impossible. I had to be imagining things.
What I didn’t imagine was the tension in the air. I wouldn’t have been surprised if my purple hair stood on end. Just the way they looked at me, like I was trespassing on their land. It couldn’t be theirs, could it? How could it belong to anybody?
“I—I’m just a hiker,” I whispered, wishing I could back away and keep backing away until I reached the road again. But they wouldn’t let me do it—they were closing in on me all the time.
“Just a hiker? Hikers do not simply appear here, child.”
Child? The girl looked like she was my age. Where did she get off?
Another, this one with almost white-blonde curls and skin as pale as mine, held up a hand. “We have seen them before, remember. People have taken up this hiking business as a sport, it seems.”
“Oh, yes.” The leader nodded. “I tend to lose track of what falls in and out of popularity.”
