Love in Troubled Times

by Gayle Riley

  Rowan calls for a vote and the people declare their acceptance of a ruling counsel by a resounding chorus of yesses. Griffin and Dahlia ask the gathering to stay and witness their hand fasting as they become mated. More roars of approval ring out. The ceremony begins.

  Rowan once again sits atop the highest mountain peak, surveying his kingdom. Though much is different since he last sat here, he still desires a mate. He needs one with powers comparable to Griffin’s, Dahlia’s and his own. Yet he wants the kind of love he sees Griffin and Dahlia share. Far below, in a sheltered spot hidden from prying eyes, Rowan spies movement. He watches closely as an unknowing Athena finally removes her cloak. The setting sun hits her skin and a bright golden blaze pierces Rowan’s eyes. Athena’s skin is golden. Rowan gasps as she transforms into a beautiful golden dragon. The prophecy is coming true before his prying eyes. Their savior is here and she is glorious. As she takes flight into the darkening sky, Rowan follows. His heart tells him that she is his mate. All will be well.

  THE END

  Bonus 26 of 30

  Coming Together for the Holidays

  Description

  A night of torrid passion with someone she should not have loved made Mina desperate for a change. Leaving her home and altering her appearance bought her distance, but could not quell thoughts of that night, of the man she had left behind, from her mind. Isolated from her family and kept away from her hometown out of concern of what might happen if she went back, Mina’s sudden change had become the talk of the Harper family.

  But she would have to come back someday, and her stepbrother would be there when she did.

  Now, Mina has returned home for the holidays and her stepbrother, Dirk, clearly remembers what they had done together, and is interested in continuing where they left off. Will Mina be able to resist his charms?

  Or will Dirk’s charms wear her down, make her give in to another night of forbidden love?

  Chapter 1

  When Mina was asked why she had changed so drastically, she lied.

  This was, in large part, because most of people who would ask were members of her family, who had seen the sweep of her life in its entirety, the person she had once been and the person that she had become over the last year. The difference between those two states was stark. Gone was the redheaded flower child of what Mina, at twenty-two years old, had taken to calling her youth, replaced with a young woman of a decidedly darker tone. She had cut her hair short, dyed it black, taken to long pants and men’s cut shirts as, slowly but surely, the old Mina had faded away. Piece by piece, she had changed.

  Talk around the family, she had heard, was that Mina had “turned” gay, shacked up with some Goth woman in some dingy apartment in her new city, and there was some truth to that. Mina’s roommate was a Goth, and their apartment was not… luxuriously furnished, but that was as far as it went. Anne certainly wasn’t of romantic interest for Mina, nor were women in general. Change does not have to be sexual, though in Mina’s case it was, albeit not in the way the rumor mill seemed to think.

  Her own story was far more vague. When Aunt Callie called to invite her back home for the holidays, Mina had stumbled over her thoughts some, so that when Callie broached the question of why she had changed her appearance so drastically, she was already off her game. The pause that followed the question was, perhaps, longer than Mina might have liked, suggesting more than she wished to reveal. When she finally marshaled her thoughts enough to speak, it was with a slight stammer, a hitch in her breath that was similarly involuntary.

  “It was just… time for a change, Auntie.”

  Mina liked that answer, like she liked most half-truths; the rhetorical utility of them was rather lovely, in a squirming, dishonest sort of way. Words that used the truth to obscure other parts of the truth. That it had been time for her to change herself was not up for debate. Her family always failed to ask the correct follow-up question, though:

  What was it that had made it that time?

  Chapter 2

  Snow crunched below the tires of Anne’s borrowed car, the ill-repaired sedan struggling as it went. Somehow, both the slick ice and the mounded snow caused it trouble, but then, flat surfaced roads often did too. Anne had bought a car that had no advantageous terrain, each attempt at driving it somewhere only another opportunity to show off new and unique ways in which it could fail its driver. It shuddered to a stop at the curb outside her parent’s house, then mysteriously managed to slide back half a foot, causing Mina to cry out and fumble for the handbrake.

  Cursing, she struggled to push the door open, the handle resisting for several moments before the door flew open far too fast, to the sound of metal slamming against metal. Mina winced and pulled herself out of the unfortunately bucket seat, struggling over the edge and ruminating simultaneously on the nature of cars with not a single user-friendly component in them.

  Predictably, her feet almost slid out from under her the moment they touched the ground.

  Dragging herself up from a near horizontal position, Mina knocked clinging snow from her shoes and made her shuffling way up the treacherously sloped inclines of her family’s estate. Business had been good for the Harpers, good enough that several new additions had sprung up on the place in the year since Mina had visited, a large overhanging shade over the garage prime among them. The snow gathered roughly at the outline of this, piled up on the roof above, and it was here that Mina struck out for, that little haven of uncovered ground deeply inviting considering the slippery wetness beneath her now. Once beneath it, she afforded herself a moment to clean off her shoes and clothes more thoroughly, brushing off the thick white flakes that clung to her black jacket and pants, tousling it out of her pixie-cut hair.

  She could hear voices from within the house and, despite herself, cast her gaze around suspiciously, looking for anyone approaching.

  “Is that Mina? Girl, I haven’t seen you in ages!”

  Mina didn’t manage to prevent her shoulders from tensing in time, but she did lower them quickly, turning it into a sort of surprised turn as she moved to face her mother and become the instant recipient of one of Marta Harper’s bouncing, jostling hugs. The woman was short and somewhat stout, her embraces a near tectonic event, a jumble of feet stepping on feet, waving hair and a full-body jumping that almost seemed to shake the world, so tight was Marta’s grip. Mina found herself laughing, the breath leaving her in great, gasping exhalations at the terminus of each bounce upward.

  “Hey, Mom!” She grinned, but couldn’t help herself from looking through the doorway that Marta had opened to reach her, seeing nothing, much to her relief. Mina allowed herself to be hurried inside and out of the cold, seated in the prized armchair by the fire, which crackled in a marble hearth that hadn’t been there when Mina had last visited. The rug they had bought to cover the large, hardwood expanse of the living room floor when Mina had been a kid and they had just moved into this house lay just at the edge of her feet, more scuffed than she remembered, the passage of time having exerted its pressure on the rug just as it had on everything else.

  Mina hadn’t been the only one to have changed.

  She sat back and closed her eyes for a second, sinking into the familiar softness of the old armchair, a favored piece of furniture from her youth that clashed spectacularly with the new renovations of the home itself. Her fingers moved on instinct, finding a fraying thread in the worn gray fabric, one of the strange, multi-colored ends that inexplicably sprouted from the chair like alfalfa. She picked at it, worrying the little thread gently between thumb and forefinger, a habit that had formed in every member of her family, one by one, who had spent any significant amount of time in that chair. Mina’s stepfather had once pulled hard enough to tear a four-inch hole in the cushion, something she suspected she could probably find if she rubbed her fingertips around the side of it now. Instead of repairing the thing, Robert Harper had simply flipped the cushion and said no more about it. He was a practical man by natu
re.

  Thinking of the rip in the chair made her frown, however, even as her mother came back, bearing hot cocoa and a tray of cookies that looked as though they had been baked from pure sugar. Mina could remember what had happened to cause the hole, who had set off her stepfather’s bout of irritation and made him forget his own strength, tearing open the cushion as he yelled at he who had, at the time, been just a boy, a teenager only somewhat older than Mina herself.

  Her stepbrother, Dirk.

  Heat prickled at Mina’s cheeks, a lightness roiled in her belly, nerves and a blush all in one. She shook her head to dislodge the memory, turned her attention to her mother, hoping that it wasn’t too obvious that her thoughts were drifting.

  “So how is San Francisco treating you?” The older woman asked, as Mina descended upon her cocoa, still tingling from her time in the snow.

  “The Bay is fine,” she replied with a shrug, already shrinking back from the attendant follow-up questions she could already see brewing in Marta’s eyes. Why had she left so quickly? Why had the move come with such a drastic change of appearance? Why had she put herself at such a remove from her family?

  “I like what you’ve done with the place,” Mina continued quickly, as if to stall the questions a little. She really did; the old furnishings set in the middle of a recently refurbished house clashed in a way that had its own charm, a sort of dissonant hominess that Mina found herself enjoying. It was as though the mainstays of her childhood had been transplanted into a new house, the familiar and the new commingling.

  “Oh, we did all this over the course of the year, bit by bit,” Marta waved a hand vaguely. “It’s only new to you because you’ve been gone so long. I wish you’d visit more often, Mina. We miss you.”

  “I’m here now.” There was a hopeful note in Mina’s voice, a soft upward lilt that suggested they seize the day, that perhaps things could return to normalcy. “And I took a few days off so I could properly be here for the holidays. Let’s make up for lost time a little, huh?”

  “Yeah.” Marta’s face split into a wide smile, one of those vibrant, bright, motherly smiles that she excelled at, the kind that told everyone in view that everything would be okay. “I know a few people who’ll be happy to see you. Your father’s out back, I’ll have to go get him.’’

  “No trouble, he’ll come in when he’s ready.” Mina held off for as long as she could, running an idle finger around the rim of her mug, before she could stand it no longer, and asked, trying her hardest not to sound nervous. “And Dirk?”

  “Not here yet, but he’s on his way. He’ll be here today, assuming it doesn’t start snowing too hard again. The roads were closed earlier this week.” This last part was imparted as though it were vital information, the idea that it might snow in the winter in Colorado apparently novel. Mina found herself smiling. Her mother really had begun the slide into doddering middle age very gracefully.

  Still though, Dirk was coming, and that knowledge formed a sort of pressure over Mina’s head, a ticking clock counting down to the time that he would arrive and things would get awkward.

  But there was a meantime and that meant time with her parents. After a few more minutes of pleasantries, Mina excused herself to go find her stepfather, winding her way through familiar rooms and hallways rendered just slightly different by the work that had been done on the house, before finding herself at the sliding glass door. It still caught and resisted as she tugged on it, the ancient rollers struggling in their track; of all the things to have been replaced or changed, this remained the same.

  Snow piled up in big, powdery hills beyond it, the wind occasionally stirring the top layers into luminous, roiling motion. Mina squinted as she stepped out onto the clear portion of the patio, the glare off the dunes all-encompassing, the product of a now clear sky, all the clouds further north on the horizon. She could see the distant figure of her stepfather at the far end of the yard, knee deep in snow and wrapped up in so thick a coat that he was near spherical. He stood by a copse of trees and shrubs set in an elevated garden bed, in the depths of the swaying shadows the greenery cast, stretching up at something in the branches. It was anyone’s guess as to what.

  Robert was a proponent of what Mina had taken to calling arbitrary gardening. Though he had no set schedule or aims for it, the man would prune and shear and plant with great enthusiasm at random intervals, with no attention paid to whether it was at all appropriate to do so. Checking the garden had become second nature in her youth, whenever she had needed to find him, and even now it wasn’t unexpected to see him leaving social engagements in the middle to do a little gardening. It was like a compulsion that came over him from time to time.

  Mina sunk into the snow up to her calves as she crossed the garden toward the figure, ice crunching beneath her shoes into the thick grass, which offered far better traction than the slick driveway out front did. She was able to raise her feet above the line of the drifts, taking long, high strides through the chilly dampness that, somehow, didn’t attract Robert’s attention. Mina managed to sneak up on her stepfather, putting her arms around him from behind and squeezing hard enough for the pressure to penetrate his thick coat, causing him to stiffen and turn.

  “Mina!” he exclaimed, his deep bass voice resounding off of the snow, filling the air. He looked her up and down, an eyebrow arching. “Well, nobody is going to miss you in the snow, Miss Tall, Dark and Grim.” Mina shrugged black-clad shoulders, shot Robert a lopsided smile. She was tired of fielding questions and comments about her newly dark appearance, and so she gestured back to the house. “Not much greenery at this time of year. Come in, Mom made cookies.”

  They both picked their way across the garden, sending skirls of snow drifting in the air. From the patio, the sounds of movement could be heard from within the house, the sound of footsteps matched to the crunch of tires on the other side of the fence. The telltale squeal of the front door, of old hinges grinding together, suggested quite clearly that someone else had arrived, some other relative home for the holidays. For the first time, Mina could smell her mother’s cooking, a distinctly heavy scent of meat and gravy, of carbs and marinade, the sort of thing that made the mouth water and the fingers twitch, desiring to hold knives and forks.

  She only had the briefest of moments to enjoy the smell, though, before Marta completed opening the front door and a familiar, male voice filtered in. Mina’s shoulders tensed immediately, her pace faltering just outside the house. Without realizing it, she drifted away from the transparent glass door and toward the relative cover of the nearest wall, cowering in her own family’s home from the man who had just entered.

  Dirk.

  Chapter 3

  She could see him on the far side of the open plan living room, embracing their mother in the entryway. He towered over her, not just figuratively but literally; it was no secret that both Robert and Marta were short, Mina was taller than both of them, but Dirk was easily taller than her. An inch over six feet tall, he was a strong, well-built man bristling with defined muscle and an easy, long-limbed grace that made him straddle the line between handsome and intimidating. He had a broad, lopsided smile that showed no teeth, just the curved line of his full lips, set into a prominent jaw covered in dark stubble. Calm, intelligent eyes the color of the clouds outside regarded Marta fondly, before sweeping into the house proper and alighting on his father.

  With a barely contained squeak, Mina turned, pressed her back against the exterior wall. She took a deep breath. This had always been a possibility, she thought she was strong enough to handle it.

  She had to handle it, here and now.

  Rounding the corner and entering the house, Mina arranged her body to look as fearless as she wished to feel, striding into the living room with purpose and conviction. Her stepbrother stood in the middle of the room, taking the position one used to being the center of attention naturally would, gesturing animatedly in conversation with his father, who had gotten ahead of Mina. Wh
atever they had been talking about had been sports-based, but it stopped the moment Dirk caught sight of his sister, his hands falling to his sides for a moment, expression turning hooded, betraying nothing.

  They stood like that for a moment, silence yawning between them, cavernous and far more lonely than the year they had spent apart. Mina offered a smile, choosing it carefully; not too bright, nor dim enough to seem forced. Nothing that might suggest what she was thinking, but sufficient to intimate that she was happy to see him. Mina was somewhat surprised to discover that, actually, she was. Her time in San Francisco had made her happy to see all of her family, but after what had happened last year she had struggled to predict what she might feel in the presence of her stepbrother again. Would she be angry? Nervous? Saddened that such a thing had occurred at all?

  For some reason, happiness rang vaguely of betrayal. Of herself, of the principles she had stuck to so fastidiously… everything. Mina pushed the thought aside, perhaps too forcefully.

  “Hey, Dirk.”

  “Mina! I… wasn’t expecting you back.” Dirk’s smile showed actual teeth, one of few times that had ever happened, denoting true enthusiasm. “It’s good to see you!”

  She allowed her brother to close the gap and hug her, even returned the embrace in a way she hoped didn’t come across as reserved. Her smile was tight and pinched as they withdrew, but no less genuine for the tension there. A blush crept along her cheeks, hot and red, and Mina’s hands found each other behind her back, fingers twisting together in nervous knots. She was a step away from Dirk, closer to him now than she had been at any time during the past year, and that proximity unbalanced her completely. Her eyes strayed down, across the man’s strong chest, before she caught herself and returned her gaze to his face.