“Melanie is safe too,” Moira continued. “Kean went and talked to her at the police station, where she was giving her statement. She agreed not to say anything about what she thinks she saw…” Moira flapped her hands like wings, looking pointedly at Siobhan.
“Hey, I didn’t have a choice,” Siobhan told her. “I had to save her life, and I was up against an explosive force. Everyone got out alive, right?”
“Yes,” Moira agreed. “We’ll have to follow up with her though. Later. When she’s not so shaken. Apparently she had no idea, when Xander first took her, that that was the son she’d left when she was younger. She agrees that her parents were abusive, although they never did to her what they did to him. She’s going to need a lot of therapy. All these years later and she’s started a new family, and this happens.” Moira shook her head. “It’s awful.”
Siobhan didn’t disagree, although she thought that Melanie was right to feel a least a little ownership in the situation, especially if she had known that her parents were abusive. She had just been a kid and wanted to escape, and she didn’t deserve what Xander had done to her, but he didn’t deserve to be abandoned in those kinds of conditions either. It was why she had been so determined to try to save his life throughout all of this, despite what he had done to Julian. She wanted him stopped, she wanted justice, and she thought he was a dark, twisted person who she would be happy to never see again in her life.
But she also knew that he was once just three years old, scared, alone, abused, and missing his mother.
It was a complex set of feelings to have about the man who had tried to kill her and the man she loved.
“Knock, knock.” Ronan walked around the curtain, still looking tired, but smiling as he gave Siobhan a hug. “Hey, tough dude. How are you?”
“Fine, fine,” Siobhan said, hugging him back. “Sorry you’ve had to drop in on me twice today.”
He smiled and tapped her nose. “No worries. I can’t stay long, but I wanted to see you for myself. And meet your man over here.” Ronan turned toward Julian, who wasn’t even trying to hide the fact that he was straining to hear every word. Chuckling, Ronan walked over and shook Julian’s hand—carefully. “Hi, I’m Ronan. You must be Julian. It’s a pleasure to meet you. I hear that you’re a new member of our…extended family.”
Julian shook Ronan’s hand firmly, despite his injuries. “I’m part of anything that Siobhan is part of.”
“That’s an excellent answer.”
“Are you her brother?”
Ronan laughed. “No. Not by blood. But in every other way. I’m sure you’ll meet Siobhan’s parents soon enough—they’re nice. Very normal. No need to worry.”
Julian winced. “Mine are anything but, so she has me there.”
“Thank you for going after her,” Ronan said, looking back at Siobhan with one arched eyebrow. “Since she didn’t call any of us.”
“It was personal,” Siobhan told him again. “I had a connection with him. I had to handle it myself—and with Julian. Why can’t you stay longer?” she asked, switching topics. “Are you going somewhere?”
“I just can’t,” he said, walking back over to her and kissing her hair. “I’ll visit you again later. But I have to go home for a while.”
“Is it a woman?”
He rolled his eyes at her. “No! I wouldn’t leave you here for a woman.” Ronan shook his head at Siobhan. “This girl sometimes.”
Before Siobhan could come up with a witty response, Ronan was already walking away, his back toward her and his gate…odd. She shook her head too, though in a far more serious way than Ronan had. “There’s something wrong with him,” she told Moira. “I want him to just tell us what it is. I can’t stand not knowing and him being so distant.”
“He came to see you,” Moira pointed out. “That’s something. I know that it’s hard. It is on me too, watching him suffer. But this is what he’s chosen to do, and until he lets us in …”
Siobhan scrunched her nose. “We’ll see how much time I give him before enough is enough.”
Clearing her throat, Moira brought Siobhan back to the present. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine,” Siobhan said, shrugging. “A little fuzzy. No big deal. I’ve had much harder knocks. And I’m just glad that we all get to sleep easy now. Melanie is safe and getting the therapy she no doubt needs. Xander is getting help. Nobody’s trying to murder us—and that bullshit warehouse covering for a drug business burned to the ground. Win, win, win, win.”
Moira smiled, hugging her again. “They’re going to release you in a few minutes, I’m sure, but I bet you’re not going anywhere without your guy. How about I come back later today, after lunch, and check in to see if they’ll let him go yet. I’ll drive you guys home.”
“Thanks.” Siobhan squeezed her friend’s hand. “I really appreciate everything you guys did to help me with this one.”
“Anytime,” she promised. Then Moira stepped back, waving to Julian. “See you guys in a few hours.”
Everyone was gone and the nurses were busy attending others. Directly across from each other, Siobhan and Julian smiled, looking into each other’s eyes. “I love you, you know,” Siobhan said, although she’d said it a hundred times already. “Waking up in that cellar with you there—I’ll never forget it.”
“I will always come for you,” he told her, and somehow, in her head, Siobhan got a flash of the two of them, standing on a beach, her in a white dress, with him saying those exact words.
Epilogue
Julian
He loved making love to her.
Julian could easily have spent the rest of his life buried deep within Siobhan’s body, their hips moving together, their lips meeting, their hands exploring each other, and their hearts melding as they reached their peaks. In the past three weeks, since they had both been cleared to resume normal activities, they had done little else with their free time but learn each other’s bodies inside and out, and it was paying off in the best way.
Lying in his bed, he kissed her again, slipping his hand down between her legs to start them on their second round that morning. As she always did, she parted her legs for him, lifting up into his hand as she moaned, anticipating what was about to come. She was about to come.
He stroked her between her slick folds, teasing her sensitive bud and thrusting his fingers within her without warning. Siobhan closed her eyes, riding the waves of pleasure that he was producing within her, and seeing her in such a state only heightened his own desire. He had just spilled himself inside of her, but he was already ready to do it all over again.
Siobhan cried out his name as she came, her body tightening around his fingers and her clit throbbing against his thumb as she writhed, and before she had a chance to come down from the high, he was inside of her, pushing her toward the edge all over again.
He rolled her onto her side, wrapping his arms around her as he entered her from behind, kissing up and down her neck and nibbling on her earlobe.
“I love you,” he whispered, over and over. “I love you; I need you; I want you. You’re mine—tell me.”
“I’m yours,” she moaned, thrusting back against him as his hand anchored her hip and slid down the smooth silk her thigh. “I’m always yours, Julian. Always.”
They moved together seamlessly, Julian drawing out their pleasure, letting her come again before he released his own pleasure, shuddering as he pulled her closer and buried his groans in her hair. Afterward, they lay in bed, limp, slick with sweat, and with him still buried within her.
It was almost ten o’clock in the morning, but he didn’t care. It was a Saturday, and their only agenda was to visit a new restaurant that he was scheduled to review on his more-successful-than-ever food blog. The downtime that he’d been forced to take after his injuries had allowed him to refocus the blog, and it had taken off, proving that he could turn passion into something productive.
He was still an accountant, and he would be for
a while, but being with Siobhan gave him the inspiration to branch out and try new things. He didn’t want to be stuck in an office all day every day, and if he could make a career out of food, then he would.
And she would support him, every step of the way.
Stretching, Siobhan slowly moved her body off of his and turned around, blinking up at him sleepily, a smile on her lips. “Hi.”
“Hi,” he said, stroking her cheek. “We don’t have to get up yet.”
She shook her head. “No, we don’t. But I have a question.”
“Uh-oh,” he said, mostly joking. “What’s on your mind?”
“You haven’t mentioned a vision in a while. Probably ten days.” She pulled the covers up around her, snuggling in closer. “Are you having them still? Have they slowed? Stopped?”
“Slowed,” he admitted, and it was with a mixture of regret and relief. “Now I primarily have visions of us, actually. Which I enjoy. And I tell you about. I’m not seeing murders anymore.”
She nodded, clearly not all that surprised, given that he hadn’t said anything to her. “What does Ophelia say?”
He had been seeing Ophelia a few times a week, when she would come in to visit and teach him how to channel the power that he did have. Because it was still there, even if it had changed. “She says that the gift finds people for a purpose. There’s always a reason. And she thinks that my gift was given to me to save my life by bringing me to you.” He bit his lip, knowing that this was the right moment he had been waiting for. “I’ve never told you why I was in the Grand Canyon, on a mule. Yes, I was vacationing with a friend, but I was also there because I was searching. I was exhausted with my life. Bored. Pretending that I was happy. I thought that doing something daring would show me something about myself. I was reckless, telling the guide that I was an experienced rider when I wasn’t. I just wanted to do something different, and I always carried guilt, because I thought that acting so out of character like that and not thinking could have killed me.”
“So you became more conservative and buttoned-up afterward,” she concluded, nodding. “It makes sense. You’re not as much like that now, although you’ll always be more so than me, I guess.”
“You make me freer,” he agreed. “I just…I wasn’t at a good place in my life, and I think that, if Ophelia’s right, my gift did come to me to bring me to you. And when I needed it to cement us, it was there, in full force. Saving you. Saving me. Saving Melanie and all of us. Even Xander.” He winced, hating to even say the man’s name, despite the fact that he knew Xander was being treated and seemed to be improving. Those were wounds that wouldn’t heal anytime soon. “Now that I have you,” he continued, not wanting to think about Xander. “Maybe I don’t need the gift as much as I used to. I think it’ll always be there, in the wings. I can connect to it better now. I can reach for visions when I feel them in the distance. But it’s a …sleepier gift.”
Siobhan nodded, touching his cheek and kissing him softly. “I’m glad. I wouldn’t want you to have to go through that all the time. It’s a burden any way you cut it.”
“It brought me to you,” he said. “It’s never going to be a burden. But yes …romantic sayings aside, it’s a lot of responsibility.”
She chuckled, sitting up in bed, the sheet falling away to reveal her tanned, full breasts. He groaned and reached for her again, but she swatted away his hand, grinning at him. “Ah-ah. I want to go on a run this morning before we go visit your fancy restaurant. You up for it?”
“Fine,” he said, mock complaining. He loved doing anything with her, even if it meant getting out of their warm, sensual bed. “I’m getting up, I’m getting up.”
Rounding the bed as he put his feet on the ground, she pulled him to his feet, kissing the scar at his shoulder and then his lips. “Tonight, how about you and I go flying?” she murmured. “We’ll go spend the night in our tree, curled up together. What do you say?”
Happier than he could have ever imagined, he pulled her close and smiled into her eyes. “That will always get a yes from me.”
She kissed him once more, then sashayed her way to the bedroom, leaving him looking after her with a dopey grin on his face.
He was in love with and living with a woman who spent most of her nights flying across the dark sky in the form of a majestic golden dragon with a rich heritage and a clan of friends who were like family—family who had brought him in and shared their secrets with him just because Siobhan trusted him.
It was a world he could never have imagined existed and one that he never wanted to be without. He knew, in the back of his mind, that there was complication in a dragon clan member taking a human partner to mate with and produce with, but Siobhan told him not to worry about it. That it would be taken care of. And he trusted her.
Nothing could take Siobhan away from him. He wouldn’t let it. Even if it was lore that was hundreds of years old, their love was stronger.
BOOK FIVE
Prologue
Six Months Earlier
“You have the money?”
The man asking the question looked as though he had lived a hundred lifetimes already. His gray, patchy hair, hunched back, and lined face hinted at wisdom, but there was a glint in his eye that didn’t allow Ronan to completely trust the wizened medium. It had been a long path to get to the point where he was ready to meet with Josiah Webb, and now that he was here, standing at the base of a red rock mountain at the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs, without another soul in sight, the dark sky above them providing a cover for the secret meeting, he still wasn’t fully convinced that the man was here to help him.
And yet, Kean and Moira had already chosen human mates and their hearts were fully engaged. They were counting on him to find them the answer that would allow them to marry their true loves and begin their families. It wasn’t just Kean and Moira weighing on his mind either. Ronan knew that he was leading one of the last viable generations of the Dragon Clan, if they didn’t somehow find a way to breed outside of their own kind.
It was a task that he was up to tackling, but whether or not Josiah Webb was his answer, he wasn’t sure.
Ronan stepped further out of the shadows of the great rock towering above him, letting the dim light of the moon shine better on his face. He was rugged and youthful, in stark contrast to Josiah, and he wanted the man to remember that. Josiah’s talents lay in his ability to transcend the boundaries between this world and the next—not in combat or strength. Ronan was at the peak of his own strength, his body strong and fit. His shoulders were broad, his arms bulging, and his chest well-defined. His legs, underneath the dark denim, were rippling with strength as well, his thighs perfectly capable of crushing the ball weights that he used to keep his quadriceps defined. And that was just his human form. The jet-black dragon that he could become in the span of two heartbeats was deadly in its strength, speed, and fire breath.
“I said I’d have the money,” Ronan replied, towering over the hunched man and piercing him through with his blue gaze. “I’m a man of my word. But first, you have to demonstrate to me that you’re a man of yours. You tell me that you can allow me to speak to my ancestors for guidance in my task. I’ve flown out here from Boston to see you do it. I’m not handing over anything until you show me you can do what you’ve claimed.”
Josiah’s brow furrowed, and he shifted around on his flat feet. But he nodded once. “Fine, fine, fine. A demonstration, and then the money. I won’t perform the task itself until I have it. I’m no fool! What you want will sap what little strength I have.”
Ronan only nodded impatiently, indicating that the man should begin. He was carrying a quarter of a million dollars in cash in the bag slung over his shoulder, and if the task ahead of Josiah taxed him, then that was what Ronan was paying him so well for, and with Connolly Security money, no less.
Closing his eyes, Josiah began to murmur to himself, holding his withered arms out dramatically as his palms opened to the sky. With e
very mumbled word, Ronan became more suspicious, watching a man who was clearly putting on a show of connecting with the other side. In Ronan’s experience, true power required no show to go along with it.
“Get on with it,” Ronan said sharply, distrusting the man more by the second. “Show me what you can do, or I’m taking the money and leaving.”
Josiah frowned, peeking one eye open at Ronan. “Hush!”
Before Ronan could respond, an apparition appeared beside Josiah, its form shimmering and unsubstantial. The woman looked at him, a gentle smile on her lips, and Ronan’s heart thudded in his chest, slamming up against his rib cage almost painfully.
“Nana…” Ronan whispered, hardly able to believe the sight of his elegant, refined, and endlessly spunky grandmother, who had passed away when he was just a small boy. Members of the Dragon Clan never lived to an old age, and he had only just begun to know her when it was her time to leave the world. But he had loved her dearly, and it was his Nana who had told him—when he was just a child—what a responsibility he would have when he grew up to become the greatest Dragon Clan leader that had ever existed. She had helped him through his first transitions and made peppermint cookies with him at the holidays when his parents were so busy running the clan that they didn’t have time for such things.
The apparition waved to them, then disappeared, leaving Ronan with just Josiah and his own disappointment.
“Bring her back,” Ronan demanded. “I want to speak to her directly. You said you could do that, but she didn’t say anything.”
“Ah-ah,” Josiah said, holding up his hand and twitching a finger back and forth. “I said a demonstration. I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I didn’t have the power I claim, now, would I? You must learn to trust, Ronan.” He held up his hand, gnarled by arthritis. “The money, and then I will let you speak to whom you choose.”
Celtic Dragons Page 97
