Instead, the man she stood before had a boyish smile on his face that warmed in her presence. He looked inviting and like laughter was always waiting on the edge of his lips. Living with a man like Wes in your life would mean to know laughter and love on a daily basis, she thought. He would be the kind of guy to nuzzle your neck while you worked, maybe even write silly notes back and forth. She wanted to close the space between them and enclose herself in his arms for the day.
But, Dakota had responsibilities. She had a future that she had worked hard for so far. She’d sacrificed so much of her younger years for work so that she wouldn’t end up like her parents, barely making ends meet in jobs that meant nothing to them. Not even a dragon man was going to screw that up for her.
“Would you mind if I took you out to lunch before I brought you back to campus? It is the least that I can do for you. We can go somewhere no one will recognize me, if that makes you happy.”
She shouldn’t, she told herself. She really shouldn’t. But, her lips parted and the words that came out did not agree with logic. “I would like that, I think.”
He shot up from his seat, his grin taking over his face. A dimple sat neatly on each side of his smile. It made Dakota swallow hard.
“But, I need something a little more covering than a men’s tee shirt.”
His eyes raked over her naked legs and she felt warm. How could he look at her and make her feel such things? How could he look at her like she was the only thing he ever wanted in life? She fidgeted under his gaze, making him propel into motion.
“I might have something a bit smaller left around here. Female dragons are rare, but I have a female cousin and she comes here from time to time to escape her own family. They’re over protective of her and it drives her a bit crazy.”
Wes returned with a pair of plain, black leggings and a long t-shirt that promoted a soccer – no, football team that she didn’t recognize. She wasn’t about to argue. She moved to pull on the leggings when she realized that she no longer had underwear. She glanced at the scrap of fabric on the floor that had been her thong and frowned.
He followed her gaze and laughed. He appeared before her, his finger gently placed under her chin so that she had to look up at him. “I like it this way. It makes it easier for me to smell you.” His lips fell upon hers.
Her lips parted to let him in. His tongue delved inside of her mouth and she nibbled at it, flicking it with her own tongue. He pulled back, a laugh on his lips. Her head was light as she looked up at him. She clung to his thick arms to keep from falling over.
“I would prefer you wear that little number from last night without underwear, but I think you would attract too much attention in that. You aren’t looking to be the center of attention today, as far as I understand.”
She most certainly was not. And, she most certainly was not going to wear that red dress again. She thought back to the night before and the mistake she made that nearly hurt her. She had been lucky that this man was there, that he had the presence of mind to save her from a dangerous situation.
That’s what she felt. It had to be. She was grateful to him for all he did the night before. That was why she couldn’t stop looking at his dimples or sneaking peeks at his ass. It was what made her feel so safe in his arms.
Right?
She shook her head and shoved a foot into the leggings. She would go to lunch with Wesley and then she would walk back to campus. She felt bad about the clothing that she was wearing, but she had no intention of ever seeing him again. She couldn’t afford it.
Chapter Twelve
Wes grabbed the keys to his truck, his mind running at approximately a million thoughts per second. The most pressing thought flashed like a neon sign every time he turned to look at Dakota. Her dark hair fell like a curtain over her face as she knelt to put on her shoes. With a practiced toss of her head, the length of it fell over her shoulder to reveal a solemn gaze flecked with sparkling green.
It threw him for a loop every time. It made the neon sign in his mind flash, the image of his beast pointing to it with his tail beneath it.
Tell her. Tell this woman that she is your one and only mate. You may never have this chance again.
But, it wasn’t right. She had her own life. He couldn’t force his life, his love on her. She had to make that choice on her own. The best that he could do at the moment was continue to take up her time. He would take her out to lunch, his beast insistent that she be fed before he left her presence. Over lunch, he hoped that they could talk. He wanted to know more about her. He hoped that she would love what she saw in him.
The ride out of the territory was quiet. She was pressed against the far side of the truck cab as though they hadn’t made love only an hour ago. He could see it in the way that she walked, the way that her knees still wobbled slightly. But, she has forgotten it and pushed herself as far from him as she could get. It hurt.
“What are you studying here in the city?” He broke the silence.
“Art history,” was all she said in response.
“What do you plan on doing with a degree like that?” Wes had no idea what people did with degrees. He learned to use his hands long ago to craft things when men with degrees sat behind heavy wooden desks that he’d made. The world had changed without him on the outside of the territory. Degrees had become a lot more important than they once were.
Dakota didn’t say anything for a long moment. Wes wondered if she would speak to him at all for the rest of the ride, or through lunch even. When she finally did speak, it surprised him.
“I want to run an art museum,” she said. “I love the stories behind why things were made. I want to help preserve those stories and myths. I want to surround myself with them every day of my life. And, maybe, I want to travel the world. I got lucky with the study abroad program. Wales is full of art and architecture. Its stories are crazy.”
He nodded. “I cannot argue with you on that. I know of a good many of the stories myself. When I was a child and my grandfather could still stand my presence, because older dragons do not care for the presence of other dragons in their territory if they are not just bairns, he told me the tales of our kind.
“He told me of the two dragons that shook Wales. They fought, one red and the other white. No one knows why they tore at each other day and night, but a Welsh king sought to put an end to it. He built a grand castle over the two warring dragons. For a while, it contained them. After a long time, the king and his descendants forgot that there even were dragons under his keep.
“Then, their war became so great that it shook all of the stones of the castle loose. The king’s men rebuilt it, but the same thing happened over night. Again, they put the stones back in their places and went about their business.
“Finally, when it happened every night and the king could no longer stand it, he asked a wise man for advice. There was a rumor that the sacrifice of a young man would finally end the dragon’s battle. So, he went about finding one such young man. Oh boy, what a young man did they find. Turns out that the boy they dragged to the cursed keep turned out to be a young Merlin. You can probably guess that Merlin set those fools right.
“’Let those idiots out of your castle and they’ll stop breaking it’ Merlin told the king. At first, the king thought that the kid was trying to get out of being a sacrifice. I would, too, if they tried to sacrifice me. But, turns out that Merlin was right. They let the castle fall over night and the next night the dragons emerged from the rubble. The king stood on the sideline while he watched them fight. After a long night, the red dragon finally struck down the white dragon.
“That was when the king of Wales decided to adopt the red dragon as his symbol.”
Dakota didn’t say anything, but a glance out of the corner of his eye said that he had captured her attention. He smiled, feeling joy swirl inside of him for the first time since he was a child, and continued.
“Me thinks that the fight was generations of dragons such
as myself at war with one another. They were probably both men in the king’s service and when they crossed one another, their fight would end in the castle’s wreck. It makes you wonder what clued Merlin in on it.”
“That’s…” he watched Dakota search for the right words for a moment. “That’s insane. Is that the story of Dinas Emrys?”
Wes nodded. “That very same castle is somewhere in the Snowdonia territory. Well, the ruin of it is anyway.” The memory of the old story his grandfather had once told him made him wonder, for the first time, if his own tower was part of the castle in the tale.
“I read that story on the internet, but I think I like the way that you tell it a lot better.” She sat back in her seat, more relaxed than she had been in the past half hour. “What other stories do you know?”
He mulled over the tales in his head, but settled on something more recent. “I have an uncle. He’s a great uncle, I do believe. It’s hard to tell with dragons. He is a bit of an eccentric old man at this point. When his… well, let’s just say that over time he developed an odd quirk.
“Have you ever heard of the dragon hoard myth?”
Dakota nodded, one brow raised in question. He smiled at the sight of that thin brow and how inquisitive it made her look. He pushed back the urge to kiss her forehead and returned to his story.
“It’s true. We are hoarders by nature. Not that you’d ever see it on one of those trashy television shows. At least, I hope no one ever does. You see, Uncle Elgar has taken it upon himself to collect every chalice he has ever laid eyes on. I took it upon myself to craft him a few and leave them around my dad’s house just to drive him mad. He would never steal from the Clan’s leader and knowing that there are chalices just out of his reach makes his eye twitch every so often.”
Wesley saw the moment that his status dawned on her face. Her eyes grew wide and her spine straightened with surprise. He was no prince by any means. He would only take his father’s position if the rest of the clan saw him as honorable. It was a long-winded thing to explain to a woman that might run from his life in the very next breath so he kept it to himself for the time being.
Dakota finally regained her composure after releasing a small breath. “That’s downright evil of you.”
“Oh, Uncle Elgar deserves it. He’s a cantankerous old bastard with no regard for others. As long as it does not tarnish his Honor, Elgar does as he wishes. Imagine the old man that pops your ball just because it landed in his yard is a dragon. That’s Elgar.
“He seems to think that if he can collect every chalice in existence that he’ll come across the Holy Grail itself at some point. You should see the room in his house. It’s straight out of a children’s story book. As a child, I seriously thought that I would accidentally hit the wrong shelf and drown under a wave of the metal chalices.”
“Why does he want the Holy Grail? Don’t dragons live a long time as it is?”
Wes’s lips pressed together. He nodded. He could lie to Dakota, but he didn’t want to start their relationship that way. “His mate passed away a long time ago. Losing her broke his heart. Finding the Holy Grail gives him something to go on for. He thinks that if he can ever find it then he can have his mate back.”
“That’s… sad.” Dakota’s gaze moved out the window to the passing scenery. “He didn’t try to find another mate?”
“It doesn’t work that way,” Wes said, his voice feeling breathy. His heart beat a little unsteadily inside of his chest as he himself faced the truth of what he was about to say. “We are given one soul mate in this life. That’s it.”
A long moment of silence permeated the truck. Only the sound of the rumbling engine kept Wes’s thoughts company. He was going to become like Uncle Elgar someday, he worried. Dakota was going to go on with her human life and he was going to be left alone. He wondered what he would collect in her stead. Maybe old artefacts, ancient art that would make her come hunting for them.
“I take it that you haven’t found your mate yet. How do the younger dragons even do that if they’re restricted to the territory after the Occurrence?”
He didn’t answer her first statement. It was better left alone. “We are allowed one night a month to go into the towns around the territory. In human form, of course. The government has rather begrudgingly agreed upon it as long as we bind ourselves to the human form. It’s a show of good faith, rather than a way to contain us. A simple band of silver helps push the beast inside of us back while we spend a night lying with human women.”
“Last night was that night?”
He shook his head. “No. I shouldn’t have been out of the territory last night.”
She finally pulled her gaze from the scenery to look at him. Her serious eyes studied his face. He tried to keep it under control. She didn’t need to see the fire that he felt for her. The fear that gripped him when he thought about a life without her.
“You illegally left your territory? What made you risk something like that?”
“A man’s foolish hormones,” he said in response. What else could he tell her? Under her gaze, he wondered if maybe she could see a bit of the truth. “I don’t normally partake in the excursions. I always thought that it would be difficult to find a mate in a single night and I didn’t want to torture myself with the hopes that it would magically happen.”
“When I imagine my future, I see myself as the stereotypical woman with a bunch of cats. I don’t ever see a man in my future.”
Wes looked to her, feeling sadness overtake him. He studied the profile of her face, from the curve of her lips to the strong line of her nose. The woman beside him expected a life of loneliness? He reminded himself that he had expected much the same for himself. If he could not win her love, it was the very future they were both doomed to.
“What if you were to fall in love?” Wes asked, carefully keeping his eyes trained on the road. He didn’t want her to see the hurt and the bevy of other emotions that were probably swirling through his eyes. “What would your future be like then?”
Dakota pulled her gaze away from him. She looked down at her hands in her lap. He could smell his scent mingling with hers, reminding him of how they had made love earlier. It had been easy to fall into one another. She lit his skin on fire with her touch. He hoped that he had done much the same with hers. From the way that they’d burned together, he guessed that he very much had done so.
“It won’t happen,” Dakota said through a tight throat. “I doubt I have the emotional capability to maintain a relationship.”
They didn’t say anything else until they pulled up to the restaurant, Dakota squirming in her seat once she realized they were on the opposite side of the road than she was used to being. The restaurant in question was in the city proper, but in a neighborhood that Wes knew to be on the opposite end of the city from the campus. He was playing it safe as he did not want to further damage her reputation. She reached for the door handle and cracked the door open, but Wes didn’t move.
He sat in his seat for a long moment, running his fingers along the cracks in his steering wheel, wondering if he should tell her the truth. The kind of truth that might weigh too heavily on her shoulders. She had a life of her own, dreams. The truth of what they were could sway her decision toward something that would, eventually, make her very unhappy.
His mate was going to leave him after this. He was going to have to stand and watch her leave. The knowledge of that made him want to grab her and run right back to the tower in his territory. He wanted to lock her up and throw her back down on his bed. He wanted to make sure that she knew she was his and his alone.
The rush of possessiveness that consumed him was new and he didn’t know how to handle it. He didn’t know how to keep from doing those things, the things he knew would ruin his relationship in the long run. His mate would be no prisoner. That would become poisonous very quickly
She would leave. That was all there was to it, he told himself. Dakota would go on to live the li
fe she thought would make her happy. He could do his best to try to win her over, but he could not force her into anything she did not want.
***
They sat at a table in the front window of the restaurant. Dakota leaned forward, putting her head in her hands, and watched the people pass outside. None of them had any idea that there was a dragon shifter sitting on the other side of the glass. Now that she knew, stealing a glance at him while she thought, it seemed all too obvious.
Wesley was beautiful in the way that no ordinary man could be. The planes of his face were neat and smooth, his fingers long and nimble. He looked up from his menu and she felt her cheeks warm.
“Got caught staring,” Wesley teased. “Don’t deny it.”
She shrugged, a small smile on her lips. What could she say in response? Could she say she was amazed no one had found him out yet? Or, could she say that she felt bland sitting beside him? Both were certainly true. Instead, her eyes fell on the silver band around his arm. She vaguely remembered it from the night before, but he hadn’t worn it this morning.
“What is that? I mean, does it have any special meaning, or do you just like shiny things?”
He grimaced and she felt awful for her words. “The band is part of an agreement. Just between you and me, I’m not supposed to be outside of my territory right now. The silver in the band blocks the magic that is my beast. With this on, I’m unable to change forms.”
“Couldn’t you just take it off? That seems really silly.”
Wesley smiled, showing even, white teeth and a dimple on the left side of his face. The sight of it warmed Dakota in places that made her uncomfortable while she sat in a public place. Had she seen that dimple earlier? If she had, why hadn’t she kissed it?
“Think of it as a sign of good faith more than anything else. The governments asked us to wear them, not quite willing to ask us to do anything more permanent than that. I’ve heard that some dragon shifters will get silver implants just so that they can be part of everyday society.”
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