It seemed he’d filled the empty space with fights since he’d been gone. The dragon shifter thumbed his lower lip, a wide smile growing across his face. Cole approached, marveling at how broad the young dragon had grown. Asher’s arms were pure, corded muscle now.
Cole held Asher back by his shoulders and searched the young man’s face. “What are you doing back here?”
Asher waved the question off with an excuse of being in the area. It was Sybil’s presence that told Cole otherwise. Asher wasn’t just passing through. He’d been summoned. But for what reason? Cole was making sure that what was beneath the lake stayed trapped. He was doing his job just as he promised.
So why were these people standing on his porch?
He looked to the water behind them. It wasn’t time. The spell couldn’t be breaking yet. He had years. They all had years. There was time for the others to live their lives.
The thought dragged Cole’s attention back to Jude’s cabin. His own life was already bought and sold, dedicated to protecting what lay beneath the waters. He wished he had more of it to give, though. He would have gladly spent it with the showy woman living next door.
“Is it that time already?” he whispered, eyes still on Jude’s cabin.
Asher waved him off, but it was Sybil who spoke.
“I see change in our future, for better or worse. It will be best if we gather everyone again.”
Cole blew a breath out through his nose. It smoked, tendrils of ash rising into the air. He shook his head. He’d done everything right. The spell wasn’t breaking. No one had disturbed it!
“I’m getting old,” Sybil reminded him.
“Maybe you should stop shortening your life with those cancer sticks then,” he snapped. The spell on the lake was there because of Sybil.
No one knew what would happen when she died. Cole ran his hand through his hair. He should have spent the past ten years yanking the cigarettes from her grasp. They would have had more time.
Asher clapped his hand onto Cole’s shoulder. “It’s alright. It’s time that you let us help.”
Cole shook his head as he shrugged away from Asher’s touch. “I didn’t do this so you could come back and take over. This was never your duty. From the beginning, it was my burden to bear.”
Asher threw his hands into the air, but before he could shout at Cole, Cole nodded for them to go inside. Jude was waiting for him to come back with some mayonnaise. It was possible that she was listening. He wouldn’t let her get sucked into this as well.
Once the door shut behind them, Asher spun on Cole. The young shifter didn’t get a chance to speak. Cole had him by the throat. He wanted to throw Asher out and tell him to go back into the world. It wasn’t time.
Cole refused to believe it.
Cole didn’t get a chance to throw Asher out. The young shifter quickly broke Cole’s grasp on him and darted out of reach. The way Asher’s feet parted, and his knees bent said that he had plenty of experience fighting.
“You don’t watch a lot of television,” Asher guessed.
Cole’s brows furrowed. “What does that have to do with anything?”
Sybil cackled. She’d found the bourbon and was drinking it straight from the bottle. After a short grimace, she gestured to Asher. “He’s gotten into MMA. His face is all over pay-per-view TV.”
That was the flashiest thing Cole had ever heard of. He also thought of it as cheating. Asher was easily stronger than any human in the match. It would be an easy win unless the other fighter was a shifter.
Cole sighed. “Don’t tell me. Most of the fighters are shifters. Would explain why they fight so damn much.”
Asher grinned, seemingly proud of himself. Cole imagined Asher grinning at Jude like that and felt a growl creeping up his throat. He wasn’t going to let Asher anywhere near Jude. He told himself it was because they’d form a super couple, but he knew it was his beast’s anger that wanted to keep Asher away from Jude.
The beast wanted her. The golden dragon shifter belonged to him.
Cole’s life had been simple. Get up, make sure no one reached the southeastern shore of the lake, and take some fools out to fish. That was it.
Now, he had a metallic dragon snooping around and making his cock dance. He had an old friend in his cabin and a witch telling him that their time was almost up.
“Good luck finding Heath,” Cole mumbled.
Sybil took another swig of bourbon, coughed, and nodded.
Of them all, Heath had suffered the most. He’d vanished long before anyone could decide what to do. While Cole could have blamed Heath, he would never know the kind of pain his clanmate had suffered. He wasn’t angry at his friend for leaving him here. Cole knew this was his burden, anyway.
“One way or another, we’ll find him,” Asher said.
“No,” Cole demanded. “We leave him out of this. He doesn’t have to come back and fight.”
“But we need all the help we can get! Unless you don’t remember how we got our asses handed to us the last time. The monster trapped in that lake won’t go easy on us if he escapes. I imagine he’ll have a score to settle.”
Cole let a breath out through his nose. “He’ll be weak. Ten years is a long time. We can take him on our own.”
Asher growled, but didn’t argue further. Cole had the feeling that Asher hadn’t given up, but instead was waiting to win the battle another day.
With Asher inside, Cole spent the night on his porch. He didn’t want to see Asher, not when his friend’s face reminded him that time was almost up. Cole stared out at the lake, reflecting the sliver of moon in the sky above. Beneath those waters was the reason they’d all scattered to the wind. It was the reason Jude had come here in the first place.
He looked to her cabin. The lights were off. He wished there was a sign of life so he could go over and make useless small talk. He craved a distraction, and Jude was the best distraction he’d met so far. Everything about her claimed his attention. She scrambled his mind and left him hungry for more.
Cole didn’t know what it was like to have a mate. Only one of his clan had ever known and it had ended in pain for him. If what Sybil was saying was right, then Cole didn’t want to take the chance. Love wasn’t worth the pain that would follow. He refused to ruin another life.
Rolling his shoulders, he turned his attention to the sky. The beast slowly unfurled from his form. He stretched his wings and beat them against the air. The water before him rippled with waves. Unable to go anywhere, he launched himself into the sky. Under the veil of night, it was the only place where he could be free.
The wind caressed the undersides of his wings. He could barely feel it along his body. It’d been a decade since he felt the wind in his scales. Ten years since the worst days of his life.
And now there was a chance it could get worse. Right when a smoking hot female dragon turned up on his doorstep. He should have been worried about his brethren, about how Sybil was slowly dragging them all back to die at their leader’s hands.
He was more worried about the firecracker next door. Cole didn’t want to see Jude pulled into this. If only he could get her to leave before the spell broke, then maybe she would survive. He was already afraid that she could hear the water’s call. The thought of losing her filled him with dread. He barely knew Jude, and yet his beast would burn everything if anything happened to her.
Which was why he needed to keep his distance. As long as he kept space between them, she would leave. She wouldn’t stubbornly stay and help them, putting herself in danger. He had to make sure she had no reason to stay in Michigan. His beast howled with loneliness, so much sharper than it had been when he revealed himself to the local pack, but he knew it was the only way to save Jude.
Silly, stubborn Jude.
If this was to be the end of Cole and his clan, he wouldn’t let it take her, too.
7
Jude woke that morning, grasping for the sheets as the memory of a particularly sexy dr
eam rippled over her. Pleasure pooled between her legs and made her toes curl. A name reached her lips, but she swallowed it back.
She swallowed all thoughts and feelings she had, telling herself that she couldn’t indulge. This wasn’t the time or the place. She knew she might never find the right time or place. Her life would forever be moving from one town to the next.
Her beast growled. She could almost feel the creature sinking its claws into the ground. Images of the sprawling lake filled her mind. This was the kind of place her beast wanted to settle down in. This was the kind of place she could call home.
And, maybe, if her life was any different, she might have tried. But Jude was a metallic dragon. Servant to her family while being an outcast, she was on a tether that had her doing whatever Jasper wanted. If he wanted her to offer an olive branch to other dragon clans, then she would be hopping from state to state with a whole olive tree.
Jude threw herself into her research. She followed the names attached to the photo she’d found. With today’s social media presence, she found hundreds of people with the same name. The only one that astonished her was an MMA fighter. After several glances back and forth, she finally pulled up the two photos and placed them side by side.
They were, in fact, the same man.
Why was a dragon shifter from Michigan fighting in official matches? Her curiosity had her scrubbing through Asher Knuden’s history. It travelled back through fights, messy public break-ups, and all the way back to Michigan. It was there that the story stopped, as if Asher had been born out of thin air the moment he stepped out of Michigan.
Jude knew that wasn’t the case. Once upon a time, Asher Knuden had been Cole’s friend and co-worker. They both had been in their teens at the time. Cole looked on the cusp of manhood, probably eighteen or nineteen. Asher, on the other hand, looked years younger.
She leaned back and stared at the photos. Both men had aged well in the past ten years, but her gaze was drawn back to Cole time and time again. The easy smile from the old photo was not one she’d seen on the man since they’d met. Jude knew she could be a bit arrogant at times, and that came off as abrasive, but she didn’t think she was that bad to be around.
There had to be something else weighing on this man’s mind. Absentmindedly, she reached out and ran her thumb along the old photo of Cole. Her beast wanted to see that smile again. The damn creature was making all sorts of demands Jude couldn’t fulfil. She couldn’t make Cole smile any more than she could claim the land around her.
This wasn’t her home, no matter what the beast was trying to tell her.
The creature growled in response. It wanted Jude to listen, but Jude slapped the creature’s voice away. Instead of worrying about her dragon, she decided to get dressed. She didn’t want to take the chance that she’d get caught in her bathrobe again.
Not that her choice of clothing was much better. She tugged on a pair of cut-off denim shorts and a strappy tank-top that took her approximately four minutes to figure out how to get into. A gold chain around her neck held a chunk of quartz that she toyed with as she stepped outside.
Her stomach flipped when she saw who was standing on Cole’s porch. The MMA fighter leaned against a pole, drinking from a dark brown bottle. She would have wondered who would drink beer before lunch, but she was related to Ryker Drake. There was not a day that man had turned away beer or cake.
Asher saw her, paused, and then raised his beer bottle in greeting. The door behind him swung open as she approached. Cole appeared. In the shade of his porch, his face was unreadable. Her heart thumped an uneasy rhythm. She chalked it up to meeting a minor celebrity, but her gaze was still locked onto Cole.
There was something about him that drew her in. He was a magnet and she was the lodestone. No matter how hard she fought to ignore him, always her attention turned back to him. Which was kind of frustrating considering she was stuck next to him for the next few weeks and he’d shown no interest in her at all.
Not even a hint. The man could have flat out told her that instead of disappearing the night before. That would have been kinder than leaving her the way he did.
Feeling a knife in her chest, Jude turned a bright smile to Asher. The broad-shouldered man with scars on his cheek and arms grinned back. He pushed off the porch post and was about to saunter toward her when Cole caught the man by the back of his neck.
“She’s metallic. You touch her and a king’s army will raze us to the ground.”
Her stomach slammed into the ground below. “That’s not…”
Before she could finish what she was saying, Asher shrugged off his friend’s grasp, descended the steps, and held out his hand to Jude. She looked at the offered hand, up to Asher, and then to Cole. For some reason, Cole’s response meant more to her than the fighter’s attempt at flirting.
“You sure grew up well,” she told Asher once she gave up on trying to read Cole.
Asher’s eyebrows shot toward the sky. A slow smirk began to pull at the corners of his mouth. “Well, aren’t you the sneaky little fox.”
She shook her head. “Not a fox. A dragon. Gold dragon.”
This time, Asher’s eyes widened. His brows peaked even further, too. “Gold dragon? Like the court in Colorado?”
Jude nodded, even though she’d never really thought of herself as part of the court. She’d been born there, but that was where her connection ended. Colorado was less her home than this lake shore.
“Careful what you say around that one,” Cole called out.
He had claimed one of the porch chairs. His attention was on the water, his profile lit by the sun. A scar crossed the bridge of his nose. She began to notice other, silvery scars on his face. They were a map of history, Cole’s history. The very one she was trying to dig her fingers into.
For a moment, she felt bad. She felt like she was trying to peer into a private room. But the sound of the water against the rocks, barely hiding the beckoning whispers, kept her where she was. She couldn’t tell Jasper she’d given up. Not until she knew why the water was calling to her.
Jude figured it had something to do with Cole’s attitude, why he wanted everyone to stay far away from this shore. His history hid something, and she thought he would give his life to keep it a secret. Cold slithered through her veins. The idea physically hurt, an ice-cold sensation searing her heart.
She wasn’t going to let this man sacrifice himself. She was a gold dragon. Whatever was going on here, she could help. She would make sure that Cole survived whatever had tried to kill him before.
“She can’t be that bad,” Asher said while giving Jude a wink.
He was cute. Her heart should have fluttered. Instead, the cold feeling lingered. It dug needles into her heart the same way her dragon dug its claws into the soil. She’d been here all of a day and she could feel her life rearranging itself. She no longer felt like a comet hurtling through the world, never staying.
She felt a calling.
“Since I’m in town for a while, what do you say to maybe having a drink together?” Asher had a smirk on the corner of his lips, like he was confident there was no way she would say no. “If you’re looking for a story, I could tell you about some of my past fights. You’d be surprised how many fighters are shifters trying to make a few bucks…”
“That’s not quite the story I’m looking for,” Jude cut him off.
She looked back at Cole, who shrugged as if to say I told you. She wondered what Cole had to say about her when she wasn’t around. Asher probably flirted the way he did because of how many times Jude had flashed her goods at Cole. Her neighbor probably told his friend that she would be an easy catch.
That wasn’t it, though. Jude wasn’t looking for just any dragon. Her beast wanted Cole.
She had to turn away from them both. Clearly, her beast wasn’t going to get what it wanted. There was no land for it, no lover to ease the ache. No one wanted her. She would have to deal with that truth for the rest of her life
. No matter how much it hurt.
But her body wouldn’t move. She faced the water, painfully aware of Cole at her back. She could feel him moving toward her. For a moment, she thought he would touch her. She thought he would turn her back, maybe invite her inside.
He appeared beside her, hands in his pockets and gaze on the water. He said nothing, each second straining her heart as she hoped for something more. An invitation. An explanation. Yet, Cole gave nothing.
She hung her head. “If you tell me what I need to know, I’ll be out of your hair. You know where to find me when you’re ready.”
Watching Jude trudge back to her cabin tore a hole in Cole’s heart. He wasn’t sure he had one until that moment. He thought all hope for affection had been dashed ten years ago when his life had been wrecked, but this gold dragon woman ripped him up in ways he’d never imagined.
Gone was her hip-cocked attitude. It was as if a gray cloud had come to hover over her head. He couldn’t figure out what it was that summoned the cloud. Glancing back at Asher revealed nothing. His clanmate had done nothing wrong. Not as far as Cole could tell.
Asher shrugged and turned back toward the cabin, completely unaffected by the exchange. Cole growled and ran his hands over his face. A week ago, his only concern had been dumb kids on the waterfall. Now, he had a woman’s emotions to handle and clanmates to keep alive.
Cole wasn’t sure how he was going to survive this.
What he did know was that he needed to make things right with Jude somehow. While telling her what she wanted to know didn’t seem like the right option, he wondered if that was maybe because he feared the story. It wasn’t like speaking it aloud would break the spell over the lake. He wasn’t going to summon Alistair.
Cole charged ahead, reaching Jude’s door before he could force himself to turn around. His heart lodged itself in his throat. He reached to knock, but his hand hovered in the air. Before he could knock, the door swung in. She’d left it not only unlocked, but open.
Cole Page 4
