The physical pain never had become real. She’d absorbed it, the same way she absorbed anyone else’s physical pain. But the emotional pain of living with a man who treated her that way had buried deep within her, and there had been no special power she had to absorb that pain and send it harmlessly back into the world. It had lived within her, festering, hurting, aching. And she hadn’t done anything about it, because part of her believed him when he’d told her what a terrible person she was—that she was a freak and a burden and unworthy of him. He had broken her down, day after day, and then, one night, when he’d had too much to drink, he’d begun to beat her, and she just hadn’t had the will to fight back against him anymore. She’d let him hit her again and again, because what did it matter? The physical pain wasn’t real, and maybe she deserved the emotional pain. Maybe if she just let him keep doing it, she would somehow be able to slip away.
That was when she had discovered that she was immortal—or, at the least, very close to it. He had beaten her black and blue and bloody, and she had felt herself slipping away. She had drifted, willing herself to leave her body, willing herself to escape forever. And she had. For a few peaceful moments, she had left the earth and Matthew and all of the horrors behind.
But only for a few moments. When he’d stopped beating her, leaving her for dead, her body had begun to heal itself. The internal bleeding had stopped. The concussion had faded. She had returned to consciousness, aware of him snoring on the couch, but too disappointed to move. All night she had lain there while the bruises faded and the soreness left her muscles and bones. Before sun up, she was whole again. Back from the dead. And still living with a monster.
Natasha had walked out of their house with nothing, and she had never looked back. She and her family had moved into a house together, and she had started trying to pick up the pieces of her life again.
Four years down the line, and she still wasn’t sure she’d found all the pieces. She didn’t date—at least not seriously. It was too overwhelming to contemplate getting serious with someone again. And she was still technically married, although she and Matthew hadn’t spoken in years. He had been so freaked out by her return from the dead that he wanted nothing to do with her, and she wanted nothing to do with him.
But she was better now. Better than she had ever been, and she was finding her own way. Maybe love was still out there for her, but she wasn’t sure she was ready to find it yet.
“You’re blushing.”
Natasha blinked, returning from the maze of her thoughts and looking across the table at Charlotte’s knowing face. “I am?”
“Mmhmm.” Charlotte nodded. “You look like you have someone on your mind.”
It was true. When she’d thought that she wasn’t sure if she was ready to find love, Ronan’s face had come to mind, and she had felt a pang of regret that they might be meeting when the timing was all wrong. That kiss had filled her thoughts, her guard let down as she sat with Charlotte, and for the first time, she relived the warmth of his lips pressed to hers.
“Oh my God, you do have someone on your mind,” Charlotte said. “Is it him? The man I’m helping you with?”
Natasha bit her lip, looking away, then looking back. “Maybe. It’s all wrong though. Really. It’s silly. It’s nothing. He kissed me. It was nice. I mean, it was just a thank you kiss. But still. I mean, it’s just—he’s great. But it’s nothing.”
Charlotte laughed. “Oh honey. It’s definitely something.”
“Yeah. It’s something.”
Chapter Nine
Ronan
“Wow, you look great,” Kean said, walking into the Connolly Security conference room where everyone else was already gathered, Ronan at the front. “What happened? Is everything fixed now?”
“That’s what we said,” Moira agreed. “We were just telling him—he looks like a new man.”
Eamon shook his head. “No. He looks like himself again. That’s all.”
“Thanks to me,” Siobhan pointed out, putting her feet up on the table and leaning back in her chair, hands behind her head. “You’re welcome, everyone. I’m only sorry it took me so long.”
Ronan waited for all their chatter to quiet, and then he cleared his throat, addressing them. “Thank you for the very many compliments, all of which serve to reinforce to me how apparently awful I have been looking over the past few weeks.”
“It’s more like the last two months,” Moira corrected him. “You really haven’t looked good.”
“It’s because his penis is cursed,” Siobhan told her. “By the way—Julian is fine, everyone. Normal vision. All things under control. Since you were all concerned.”
Ronan had already asked after Julian, and therefore was not surprised by Siobhan’s revelation, but he gave everyone another minute to express their relief that everything was as it should be. “Anyway,” he finally interjected. “Yes. I have been in a bad way for a while now, and I haven’t talked to any of you about it because I felt like it was my burden to bear alone. But things have changed today, in no small part due to Siobhan’s absolute stubbornness and dogmatism.”
Siobhan stood up, giving a bow. “Again, you’re welcome.”
“Oh sit down,” Kean said, throwing the napkin from his packed lunch at her before opening the Tupperware container and digging into the leftovers. “We want to hear from Ronan. What the hell is going on with this mission you’re on?”
Ronan gave them the rundown, starting with how he had tracked Josiah Webb down, made arrangements for the man to help him contact their ancestors, then negotiated payment and a meeting place in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He told them how he had been convinced by Josiah’s demonstration, then how it had all taken a turn for the worse. He told them about the feeling that had come over him moments before Josiah died, and that he had begun to feel badly almost immediately after returning home.
“Did you sleep with anyone after you came back?” Siobhan asked.
He had already begun compiling a list of his romantic encounters from the last six months, and he had to admit that they had been plentiful when he had returned home—all the way up until about two months ago, when he had started feeling so badly that he couldn’t function well. When he had started transitioning without being able to control it. “Yes…” he said, nodding. “I did. I was seeing a woman at the time. Casually. Elena and I spent two or three nights together every week after I first got back. That faded a bit, but then there was Jessica. She and I got together maybe four times altogether.” He shook his head, realizing that he didn’t need to provide that much information. “The point is …I’ve been active.”
“As usual,” Eamon noted.
“Hear, hear,” Moira agreed. “But apparently, you weren’t doing yourself any favors, however much fun you were having.”
Ronan winced. “Yeah. Apparently. According to Natasha, the curse worsens every time I …activate it. So it’s not that surprising that it got to the point where I couldn’t function or control my transitions. She’s taken care of that now. I feel almost like my normal self again. The problem is that I’m not cured—I’m just maintained.”
“How do we cure you?” Kean asked. “Does this woman know?”
“She’ll figure it out,” Ronan said confidently. “I trust her implicitly. But more than that—she knows a medium who will help us. Since I’ve been back from meeting with Josiah Webb, I’ve been trying to figure out other ways to do what we want to do—which is to allow for procreation with the human partners you’ve all chosen for yourself. It’s something I have to figure out if our clan is going to survive past the next three generations, and I’ve had a lot of meetings with a lot of different people. It’s only been for the past two months that I haven’t trusted myself to do much outside of the house. Before that, I flew to Alaska, where I met with a warlock who told me that he had made breakthroughs in spells that allowed for procreation between two different species. As it turned out, he was putting spells on different ani
mal species and mating them together to create hybrid creatures. All of those hybrid creatures died.”
Moira gasped, covering her mouth with both hands. “Oh my God. That’s horrific. Tell me you didn’t just let him keep doing that!”
Ronan shook his head. “Of course not. I informed the local authorities of the animal abuse, and they raided his home. What they made of what they found there …I don’t know.”
“God,” Kean said, shaking his head. “What a creep. I don’t think he’s our guy to work with.”
“And neither is the woman I met in San Diego,” Ronan added. “I talked with her about her studies of interspecies relationships in the wild. We had a long discussion about the impact on children produced if the parents are not of the same species, and then she informed me that she is currently trying to breed herself with a horse.”
Eamon nodded. “Saw that coming.”
“I have talked to fertility specialists who work specifically with supernatural species. I have talked to a number of warlocks or witches, none of whom have any idea about how to make our reproduction compatible with strictly human reproduction. And I’ve talked to other mediums, none of whom have been able to tell me anything useful or connect me with any of our ancestors. The past two months, I’ve mainly been doing a lot of reading, pacing, and thinking. But now, with Natasha’s help—and her friend—I think that we may be close to a breakthrough.”
“You sound hopeful for the first time in a long time,” Moira agreed. “And I think I speak for all of us when I say that, if you’re hopeful, so are we. What can we do?”
Ronan shook his head. “For now? Nothing. I felt like it was time for me to tell you what’s been going on, but what I need from all of you is for you to stay here and hold down the fort with the agency while I keep working on this. I know several people who want to propose by Christmas, and it’s my goal to be able to tell them they can …”
“Hell yeah,” Kean said, grinning. He was the one, out of all of them, who had been waiting the longest to be able to finally marry the love of his life and know that they could have children together. “Trust me, Ronan—we’re doing our part to try procreating. That is not a problem for us.”
“Or us,” Siobhan added, raising her hand. “We’re practicing every day.”
Moira and Eamon looked at each other, rolling their eyes and shaking their heads, but there was no doubt in Ronan’s mind that they were doing just as much practicing. All of his friends were madly in love, which was something that no generation of the Dragon Clan had ever been able to say before, and he wasn’t going to stop until he got them the answers they needed to make their happiness complete. Even if it meant fighting against curse after curse after curse.
“Well, practice all you want,” he told them. “But keep an eye on this place too, okay?”
“You sound like you’re leaving again,” Siobhan observed, frowning. “For how long this time?”
“I don’t know,” he told her honestly. “I have a feeling that I’m going to Ireland. I need to be back where all of this started—to see what magic waits there. To connect with the ancestors there. It’s a feeling I’ve had for a while, but I couldn’t trust myself to fly or be away for that long. Now, with Natasha, I think I can.”
Kean batted his eyes. “Natasha …ohhhh.”
“Funny,” Ronan said, rolling his own eyes. “She’s good at what she does. That’s all.”
All four of his friends laughed at the same time. “Yeah, that’s all,” they said, almost in unison as they stood up.
“You know that something is different when Ronan pretends not to be interested in a beautiful woman,” Siobhan observed, clapping Ronan on the shoulder on her way out. “Keep in touch this time, boss.”
“I will,” he promised her, taking a deep breath that he could feel move through his whole body, cleansing him from the inside out. “I will. Siobhan—thank you.”
She turned at the door, winking at him. “Anytime.”
Chapter Ten
Natasha
“Ireland?” Natasha asked, sure that she hadn’t heard Ronan’s response to her question correctly. She had asked him what he wanted the next step to be, now that Charlotte was on board, and he had said he wanted to go to Ireland.
That couldn’t be right.
But he nodded, back in her studio, looking healthy and whole. “Yes. I’ve been thinking for a while that the answers I need, I’ll find there. But I was so ill that I couldn’t go. I was trying to make do with research. But now, thanks to you and with you, we can go there. And Charlotte—she can come with us. I’ll pay her whatever her fee is. Up to two hundred fifty thousand dollars.”
Natasha almost choked on the sip of water she had taken. “What? Two hundred fifty thousand dollars? Are you crazy? That’s a quarter of a million dollars!”
“I know.”
“No, no, no,” Natasha said, shaking her head and putting her bottle of water down on the nearby table. “No, no, no. No. Definitely not.”
He seemed surprised by her response. “What are you talking about? I have to pay her. And you. I’m not asking for favors here, Natasha.”
“Fine,” she agreed. “But a reasonable price, Ronan. I don’t know who you’ve worked with on this before, but Charlotte has an hourly rate that she uses, and so do I. A quarter of a million dollars would buy my time for the next thirty years.”
“Then you’re selling yourself short,” he told her, walking over and placing his hands on her shoulders. “Because what you do is incredible.”
“I do what I do to help people,” she told him gently. “And, yes, I make a living. But I would never withhold services based on money, or try to rob people of their life’s savings to keep them alive.”
He smiled and squeezed her arms. “That makes you better than most medical professionals whom I’ve ever met. And a lot better than Josiah Webb, who acted like he was cutting me a deal by only charging me two hundred fifty thousand dollars.”
The thought just made Natasha angry, and she decided not to say anything, since she couldn’t say anything nice about the dead man. Luckily, it was difficult to stay angry with Ronan standing so close to her, his masculine scent teasing her into wanting to move closer. If she leaned into him, he would surely wrap his arms around her and hold her close, and then she could feel his broad chest, which she had felt beneath her hands already, pressed up against her body. The thought was more than enticing and soon distracted her from her frustration.
“Beautiful,” Ronan said quietly, reaching one hand up to touch her face, seeming as lost in the moment as she was. “Inside and out.” His thumb brushed across her bottom lip, and then he backed away from her, returning them to the business at hand, much to her disappointment. “So you’ll come with me to Ireland, won’t you? And Charlotte as well. I know this will work, Natasha.” He was passionate and strong, standing in front of her. “I feel it.”
There was no saying “no” to him, and anyway, she had always wanted to see Ireland. She had never been out of the country before, and the thought of walking with Ronan through rolling green hills, watching sheep wander across backroads, and staring out at the shimmering ocean from a seaside cliff …it didn’t get better than that.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I’m in. And I’m sure—well, I hope Charlotte will be too. She’s getting married.”
“Soon?”
“Next year.”
Ronan waived his hand. “Not a problem.” Then he crossed back over to her, scooped her up in his arms and spun her around. “God, it feels good to feel alive again. I didn’t even know how dead I was inside until you healed me this morning.”
As much as she didn’t want to discourage him, Natasha knew she had to keep him grounded. So even as she laughed, holding onto his shoulders to brace herself, she corrected him. “Ronan…you’re not healed. There’s still a curse on you, and it will come back—maybe even worse than the first time. We can’t get ahead of ourselves here.”
“But I have you,” he said, putting her down. “And you heal people.”
His faith in her, and his clear amazement, warmed Natasha deeply, and it was hard to force herself to argue with him. So she didn’t. “I will be there to heal you,” she agreed, unable to keep from smiling at him. “Of course I will. And I’ll figure out the curse—it’s just a matter of time.”
“You make me feel optimistic,” he told her. “There’s something about you, Natasha.” He was looking at her so intently, and then his hands came up to frame her face again and he was pulling her toward him. “I can’t help but think…that maybe you’re my mate.”
His lips were moving toward hers as he spoke, and she was leaning into him, too mesmerized by the possibility of another kiss to resist. Until he said the last word.
Natasha pulled back, her eyes wide. “Your what?”
It was obvious that Ronan immediately regretted what he’d said, and he backed off from her, putting his hands up in a surrendering gesture. “I’m sorry. I got way ahead of myself, and I know that was a really strange thing to say. I’m going to blame it on feeling like myself again after months of feeling like I was at death’s door, and just ask you to understand that I’m feeling a little…giddy.”
“Giddy,” she repeated slowly, her tone still skeptical. She liked Ronan a great deal, and she was definitely attracted to him. What girl wouldn’t be? But…mate? Who said something like that to a girl he had known for half of a day? And who called someone their mate? Was that how he would introduce her to people? As his mate?
Not that she was going to be his mate.
That was insanity.
“Natasha, I really didn’t mean anything by it,” he said, clearly reading the concern on her face. “I—well, if I’m being honest, what I meant is that I think you’re special. See, all of the other members of the Dragon Clan—they’ve been finding their mates. Their person who they’re supposed to be with forever. It hits them hard and fast, and it changes their lives, and I think that there must be some sort of fate component to it. I really believe that this is the Dragon Clan’s moment of change.”
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