by Selena Scott
Lucy lost her shit. With a war cry that would have made Xena proud, she scratched out at her kidnapper, catching him on the neck. Kicking her legs wildly, she beat her fists against him as hard as she could. After a few furious seconds she realized he hadn’t even broken stride. She felt like a toddler throwing a tantrum, dwarfed by his size and manner. She turned her face toward his chest. Well, let’s see if he could ignore this.
CHAPTER FOUR
Amos held Lucy a little further from his body as she kicked and punched and screamed. He couldn’t take her warm body writhing around against him. Her dress was even thinner than it had looked on the television screen and as she threw herself around, it was working its way up her thighs. He refused to look down.
The minute he locked her in her chambers, he was gonna have to take a private moment for himself.
She sagged for a second. He hoped she’d tired herself out. King Dalyer would not think this was cute.
Amos, on the other hand, definitely thought it was a little cute. Watching her try to get out of his hold was like watching a kitten try to fight a black bear. She was just so fragile and little. So delicate like a-
“Fuck! Did you just bite me?” Amos was caught completely by surprise and bobbled her, losing his grip.
Taking her opportunity, Lucy slid down his body, stomped his foot with her high heel, and took off running.
Amos pressed his hand to his chest, checking to see if she’d drawn blood. Damn. That had hurt! So why the fuck was he at half mast? Shaking his head at himself, he figured she had enough of a head start. She was about 200 feet away from him at this point. Coming up fast on the fortress doors.
He beat her there and lazily leaned his back on the gate. She pulled up short, realizing he had cut her off and looked around wildly for another exit.
“This is the only way out,” he said.
Her ice blue eyes snapped to his and he felt it like an electric shock straight to his groin.
“That’s what you’d say no matter if it were true or not,” she snapped.
He shrugged. Pretended that hearing the husk her voice had taken on from screaming didn’t affect him.
“Of course.”
“Soooo. In that case,” she said and turned to sprint in the other
direction.
She’d gotten approximately four steps before he was standing in her
path again. His feet planted and his arms crossed. She turned yet again but this time his arm darted out and gently looped her waist. She tried to scratch him again so he grabbed her by the wrists and whipped her arms up over her head. She tugged away from him and it drew her very full breasts up and almost out the top of her dress.
He dragged his eyes up to her parted lips. He licked his own, felt
himself pulling her a little closer. But when he looked up at her brilliant blue eyes, he saw fear in them. Mortal fear.
He sighed. “What if I promised I would never hurt you.”
She glared up at him, anger joining the fear in her eyes. “Stop lying
to me.”
“I’m not lying. I’m promising.”
She stopped tugging and looked up at him, thoroughly confused.
He thought of how important she was to the King. How much the royal line completely and utterly depended on her.
“What if I swore that I would never let harm come to you. That I’d die for you if it came to it.”
He felt the air change between them and knew that the rawest of the
fear was leaving her. It was replaced with racing thoughts, a desperation to understand what the hell was going on.
He continued on. “If you can accept that promise then I can start
explaining where you are why you’re here.”
“And you’ll let go of me?” she asked, her eyes big and gentle and, God, was she weepy? Shit. He really didn’t’t want to see her cry.
“I’ll let go of you,” he agreed.
“Ok. Then in that case, I believe you won’t hurt me. I accept your promise.”
He held on to her for another second. Just the briefest of moments. He didn’t want to let go of her. He wanted to touch her more. He wanted to see if the skin on her neck was as soft as the skin on her wrists. He wanted to lift her up again the way he’d carried her from the portal. With her pressed so firmly into him. Her beautiful face against his chest. He wanted to have a reason to keep on holding her. But he didn’t have a reason. She wasn’t his to touch or hold. She was the King Dalyer’s. From the moment the Oracle had tracked her down in the human realm, she had become King Dalyer’s most important possession.
Amos’s stomach curdled slightly at the thought. He settled for swiping his thumb across one of her wrists, just once. Committing the feeling to memory.
The second he loosened his grip she yanked herself away from him. Growling, he chased after her, tiring of the game.
“What the fuck, little hatchling.” He growled deep in his chest and snared her wrists again. “Quit doing that.”
She yanked at him. “Well, promising not to hurt me pretty much makes it a no brainer for me to keep trying to escape.” Her eyes sparked with an internal fire and he realized that she had never been close to crying before. She’d been playing him. And he’d let himself be played.
This was ridiculous. He was one of the fiercest warriors in the
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CHAPTER ONE
Mel pulled the thin nightgown away from her ribcage. The cotton stuck to her sweaty skin as she rolled to her side. On a hope and a prayer, she stuck her hand up against the screen of her bedside window. Not a breath of breeze out there. The air was as hot and heavy as an oven. And of course, today had been the day her box fan had decided to give up the good fight.
“You’re dead to me, fan.” She shot a dirty look at the worthless corpse of the box fan where she’d shoved it into the corner when she’d discovered it had gone kaput.
For a moment, she considered going to Ike’s bedroom to share his box fan with him, but the idea of sleeping so close to his sweaty little body was enough to keep her where she was. No point in making him any hotter than he already was. Besides, he ran hot anyways, he always had. Even as a baby, he’d been like a little furnace snuggled up to her.
Mel sighed and rolled over again, lifting her coppery red hair off the back of her neck. She let her mind wander to tomorrow. To the adventure that lay ahead of her and her son. She’d promised him that he would see the ocean. It was smack dab in the middle of summer break and so swelteringly hot in Vegas that Ike had literally fallen onto his over-dramatic eleven-year-old knees and begged his mother for a beach vacation.
Though they certainly didn’t have money laying around for whims like that, she had a little bit of dough in the rainy day fund and she wasn’t immune to the allure of the cool, salty breeze off the water. She loved the water, they both did. So Mel had called in a few of her vacation days, found a rather dubious-looking Airbnb, and had gone to the grocery store for plenty of PB&J and mac and cheese supplies. Pretty much all they could afford between gas and lodging.
It wasn’t the most glamorous vacation, and she wished she could give Ike something really memorable, like a cruise or a trip to Disneyland. But he wasn’t hard to please and had acted like she’d given him a trip to the moon when she tucked him in to bed that night and told him where they were going in the morning.
“Santa Barbara, baby!” he’d yelled, pumping one fist in the air and shaking his tiny hiney in his Ninja Turtle boxers. Melanie smiled into the dark as she remembered his reaction. Man, she loved her son. And she was so damn lucky that she got such a good boy.
Her eyes drifted closed and a wave of sleep dragged lazily over her. Not enough to put her under completely, but just enough to have her thoughts blurring together. Beach and swimming. Driving. Singing in the car. Seagulls fighting over a leftover sandwich on the beach. A kite di
pping through the salty wind off the water. Mountains in the rearview mirror. A car with a flat tire, a man leaning over the hood of a car on the side of the road…
Melanie resurfaced from sleep for a second and shifted in her bed, her short nightie pulling tight against her thighs. She went back under with another drowsy tug and for a second she thought he might really be there, the man she was dreaming about. The man she always dreamed about. Lying next to her on the bed, no shirt, messy, dark blonde hair. A laugh ghosting across his mouth, but his eyes, so green, so serious. And burning as they raked over her body. On fire. For her.
CHAPTER TWO
The Oracle resisted the urge to toss and turn. His body ached from laying still for so long, but if he moved, he ran the risk of aggravating his injuries and he was sick to death of aggravating his injuries. It had been months since the battle. As far as he was concerned, he should be healed by now. But here he was, still limping around.
Typically, the Oracle wasn’t super hard to please, but so far, he wasn’t impressed with the human realm. He much preferred the dragon realm with its clean air and infinite stars. And all the, you know, dragon shifters. Not that he’d been able to do much shifting lately. In his human form, O had a very slight limp from his injuries. In his dragon form, he was basically missing an entire, shredded wing. He found his dragon form completely demoralizing and painful. And he figured if he wasn’t going to be in his dragon form much anymore, then he might as well come to the human realm and be a human.
So here he was. He lay, sticky and hot, on scratchy motel sheets and watched an ancient ceiling fan weakly push dust around the room. Orange light from a street lamp lanced in between the shades and mixed with the dark motel room to create an eerie gray color. He was sick of motels. He was sick of food from vending machines. He was sick of being in pain. He was sick of being confused and one step behind.
He’d never once in his life had to work to activate his power. Visions, prophecies, information had all come to him as easy as a gentle stream. Sure, he’d had to work as a young man to hone and control his gift. But he’d never once tried to summon it up and been unsuccessful. But now. Well, now it was like his power slammed the door in his face every time he tried to walk into the room.
O pressed his eyes shut, blocking out the peeling wallpaper. He exhaled a frustrated breath. Warming his palms against one another, he laid them carefully over his eyes, blocking out the light. He drew in air, calmer now. He opened his eyes into the black of his palms and let his consciousness fall backward. Into color. Into time. Into the expansion and compression of space.
Into his power.
Where is he? The Oracle asked the question of the universe, of himself, of his power. Where is the man in my visions? The man who can challenge the king and end his cruel reign. Where is that man?
The scratchy sheets fell away. The heat of the summer fell away. O was weightless. Mountains flew past his mind’s eye. Snow. An evergreen tree. The Oracle saw an overlook. A cliff. Then he was standing on it. He was walking forward. The air was crisp and cool. An eagle dove through the air, but the Oracle lost sight of it in the bright sun. O felt someone at his shoulder. The man. The one he’d been hunting for. O turned to his left.
Pain shot up his side like a flame. O cried out in pain as he curled into himself on the motel bed. The vision was gone. Dried up like water on a hot frying pan. Cut short by his pain. O ran his hand over the knotted muscles and scarred skin on the left side of his body. He couldn’t see through the pain. He couldn’t use his power to lead him where he needed to go or answer his questions.
He knew that the man he was searching for was somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. He’d gotten enough visual clues from his visions to narrow it down to there. But that was as far as he’d ever been able to get. So, that was why he was in a crappy motel off of I-15. He was headed west to the Rockies. Where he was going to… search for him. The good old fashioned way. With his eyes.
O let out a humorless chuckle and stretched out his leg.
He’d never felt so helpless in his life. He supposed this was how normal people felt every day of their lives. Completely unsure of what was going to happen next. Of course, his powers were working just fine in regards to everything else. It was just in this, the most important thing to the fate of the entire dragon realm, that he was powerless. Searching for the man in the visions without his powers made O feel utterly blind. Like he was constantly stepping into complete darkness.
He could feel his tension and aggravation rising. It wasn’t the way out of this. If he got worked up, he’d only get more tense and if he got tense, he’d be in pain. He needed to calm down.
A small, cockeyed grin worked its way over his face, making him look much more like the man he’d been before he’d gotten so injured. There was only one surefire way to calm himself down.
Her.
Call him a peeping tom, call him desperate, or pathetic. He didn’t give a flying fuck. O settled his hands behind his head and leaned back into his power.
This was the only thing his power let him fully do. For some reason, his pain never interrupted him when he was trying to see the redhead.
Out of the blue he’d had a dream about her a few months ago. Some human woman whom he’d never heard of or seen before. But she’d called to him. Called him out of a hard time in the dream. And ever since, he’d liked keeping tabs on her. He was discreet, he liked to think. He didn’t want to perv on her. If he checked in on her when she was changing or showering he skipped away immediately. Or almost immediately. He was a man, after all. But mostly he just liked watching her live her life. She had a way about her. Not bossy, exactly. But in charge. She was competent. Commanding. Sure of her next move at all times.
Colors flew past the Oracle in a familiar rushing tunnel until his mind’s eye landed on the redhead’s face. Her eyes were open. They were the clear, bottomless brown of a glass of good whiskey. And they shot through him the way they always did. She rustled, obviously aggravated, in her bed. A flush rose over her skin, glowing with a light sheen of sweat. She pressed her hand against the screen of her window and fell back, frustrated, on her bed. She threw her hands up in the air.
“You’re dead to me, fan,” she muttered and threw a dark look into the corner of her room.
O could feel himself grinning into the dark of his own room. There was something about the menacing look on her delicate little face that was just so dang cute. Though delicate wasn’t exactly the right word. She was more defined than delicate. Nothing on her face flowed into the other. Her eyes were big and lined with dark lashes, her coppery eyebrows sitting atop them like slashes. Her nose, just slightly tipped to one side, seemed almost to have been from someone else’s face altogether. Like she was just borrowing it for a while.
And her mouth. Good sweet holy baby god in a basket down the river, somebody save him from that mouth. It was abrupt and unruly. Smiling as often as it was snarling. But that wasn’t what caught the eye. It was the plump fullness, the natural god-given pout that had a man sweating. There was just so much mouth there to kiss. Or nip at.
In short, she was absolutely gorgeous. And unique. Completely unlike any woman the Oracle had ever seen. And she kinda captivated him. And calmed him down. And made him smile.
He watched as her eyes tracked around in the dark, lost in her own thoughts. Something brought a smile to her face. Then something darkened a worry line between her brows. But that, too, was smoothed away as sleep seemed to blanket over her.
O found himself growing calmer and calmer as he watched her drift away. His mind’s eye shifted so that he was looking at her from the side. Almost as if he were lying in bed next to her. He didn’t let his mind dwell on that for too long because he knew that it would never happen.
He came to the human realm to find the mysterious man who could potentially help them overthrow the king. His powers were running on empty and he didn’t have the time or the energy to go searching all over god k
nows where to find the redhead.
But he could pretend, just for a second, that he was a regular man. One who wasn’t in constant pain. One who never imagined something like an oracle could even exist. A man who just got to lay next to a beautiful, unique, copper-haired woman on a hot summer night.
A smile crept over his face as he watched her breathe. Her hair fanned out over her pillow and her clingy nightie left very little to the imagination.
There was nothing irregular about her body. She was quite simply stunning in that regard. She really put her clothes to work, in a manner of speaking. Her shirts always strained to accommodate the full, soft curves of her chest. And he didn’t even want to get started on her ass. Her ass was a work of art. A national monument. A love letter to a higher power. Her round peach of an ass was proof that life had meaning.
The sheet lightly obscured her form in the dim blue light of her bedroom and O was almost grateful for that. A man could really get lost in her if given half the chance.
The redhead shifted in her sleep, and gently, like a fawn blinking into the sunlight, her eyes came open. And she looked at him.
O froze. He lay in his motel room, completely alone, of course. But he was also looking directly into her eyes. And she was looking back. Seeing him. The way he couldn’t remember ever being seen before.
CHAPTER THREE
“Hello from the other siiiiiiiiiiiide!” Mel belted out, punctuating her questionable vocal runs with hearty slaps on the steering wheel. She sang along with Adele because she loved it, because it was deeply cathartic, and because it made Ike smile. And let’s face it. Mel would do just about anything to make Ike smile. “I must have called a thousand tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimes!”
“Good lord, Mom!” Ike yelled over the din, plugging his ears. But he couldn’t stifle the grin that spread over his face. He was barreling through the desert with the windows down, a cold Coke, and his bare feet up on the dashboard. What could be better than that? Plus, his mom was happy. Really happy, not just pretend-for-the-kid happy. And there was nothing better than when Mom was happy.
