Burn: Dragon Shifter Romance

by Ava Frost

  The realization made him uncomfortable. He knew that she would be disgusted and frightened if she knew he was having a hard time not glancing at her lips, her chest, and the dip of her waist. The knowledge that she would hate him for thinking of her that way made him hate himself, and make a silent vow to remember her as the child she used to be.

  After dinner, Karen and Christopher washed the dishes together, just like they had when Karen was a kid. Garret stood by, shooting the breeze with Christopher. He tried to regain a sense of normalcy despite the unsettling presence of Christopher’s unexpectedly hot daughter, and he managed to achieve it somewhat by directing the conversation to their work. Both men worked in real estate. Not the most thrilling of jobs, but they were both fairly successful at their work and they had a friendly rivalry between them that kept them both performing at their best. Fixing up Christopher’s historical home was a project they’d both been talking about for a long time, Christopher just for the purely practical purposes of having a well maintained home to live in, and Garret due to a love of old houses and desire to learn renovation skills that might come in handy in his job.

  With the washing up done, they moved into the darkened and cozy living room to watch a movie, an idea proffered by Karen. Garret angled for a seat on the opposite side of Christopher, but Karen seemed to make a concerted effort to sit next to him. It doesn’t mean anything, he told himself, leaning away from the woman subtly. As the movie wore on, however, he relaxed in his seat on the couch. A bolt of adrenaline rushed through him when her thigh brushed against his as she crossed her shapely legs. Against his better judgment, he took his eyes from the screen and looked over at her profile from the corner of his eyes. A feeling of warmth washed over him. Despite the unsettling lustful thoughts that kept intruding upon his mind, he was happy that she was home. She was a ray of sunshine in her father’s life and Garret had been becoming bored with Christopher’s occasional bouts of depression. It was hard on the man, having been so close with his daughter all her life, suddenly to be living alone. Garret had become like his surrogate brother, spending a lot of time at the house to keep him company. He was happy, for his friend’s sake, that Karen was back where she belonged.

  But it was hard to keep his mind on that wholesome appreciation of familial reunion when his gaze drifted down her gently upturned nose to her plump lips, uncharacteristically painted with a dark red lipstick. She’d never been one for makeup before she left. An intense moment came on the movie and he saw her lips part slightly and had to look away, shifting slightly in his seat.

  Karen found it impossible to focus on the movie. It felt like there was an electrical charge between her and Garret, but she told herself that she was imagining things. She told herself that she was projecting her wishful thinking onto him, and that there was no way he was as troubled as she was. When she crossed her legs, she purposefully brushed her thigh against his, hoping to relieve some of the intense tension she felt. Of course, it didn’t help at all. She thought that she could sense him watching her, and her fingertips tingled with the desire to touch him again. She had visions of straddling his lap and brushing her hands across his rough cheeks as she kissed him. Her lips parted and she sighed silently, shifting in her seat.

  She spent most of the rest of the movie trying not to squirm as she wondered how difficult it would be to seduce her dad’s best friend. She tried to remind herself that she was also sitting right next to her father, and to get a hold of herself. It was a struggle.

  Chapter 2

  After that first night, Karen didn’t see Garret again for a few days. Her dad had taken a day off of work to make sure she got settled and everything, but after that, everything seemed to go back to normal around her. She found herself alone in the house, despite spending what felt like a lot of time driving all over town trying to figure out how to get a job at the nearby middle school. She had gone to college to become an English teacher, and it was her dream to teach middle schoolers, knowing how hard that age can be, especially for girls. Her own middle school English teacher had been such a positive force in her life, and now she wanted to pay that forward. But she had no idea how to go about breaking into the teaching world with no real experience.

  After a while she was beginning to feel a bit stir crazy at home. She rearranged her bedroom furniture. She glanced at apartment listing nearby. But with no income, she wasn’t sure when she would be able to get her own place so she was just looking to pass the time, really, while she waited to hear from the school.

  When she got a call from one of her old dorm mates, she breathed a sigh of relief from the gloom of the empty house.

  “Olivia!” She answered the phone excitedly. “What’s up?”

  She heard her friend’s comforting laugh. “I’m good, I’m good. Just wondering where you’ve been. I knew I’d hear from you less when you moved back to New Jersey, but I didn’t think you’d fall off the face of the planet?”

  “Ah. I’m sorry. I don’t know.” Karen got up and started pacing around her room. “I’ve been busy I guess. Just getting settled. Trying to get a job at the middle school I went to. It seems like they might not need me though. I kind of have my hopes up but I don’t know. It’s dumb. I think I might be a little depressed.” She chuckled softly, a little self-conscious.

  “Well honey, I mean I haven’t even started looking for work yet. You are entitled to relax a little this summer. It’s no big deal, really.”

  “Yeah. I know.” She answered quietly.

  “Have you met up with any old friends or anything yet? I will put aside my jealousy for your sake.”

  Karen laughed. “No, not yet. I’ve just been hanging around at home. It’s weird to be back.”

  While Karen was on the phone with Olivia, Garret had arrived to take down some measurements in the bathroom upstairs before heading to the home improvement store. He saw that the car was in the driveway, so he knew Karen was home, but he ignored the illicit thrill that the realization that he would be alone in the house with her caused. He made up his mind to avoid her, on the pretense of being unobtrusive. He climbed the stairs, not meaning to be sneaky really, but not trying to make much noise either.

  “Yeah, no, I don’t know where everyone is these days. And honestly, I don’t even know if I really want to reconnect with high school people. I didn’t really have close friends.” Karen said.

  Garret heard her through the wall, and quickly realized that she was on the phone. He wasn’t trying to eavesdrop, but he could hear her plainly and when she said his name his ears pricked up.

  “Garret? Yeah, I saw him. He was here when I got home. He and my dad are doing some renovations on the house, I guess.”

  Garret heard her laugh. “Shut up. But yeah. You have no idea. Dude, so I walked upstairs and there he was in like, these jeans and a t-shirt that left little to the imagination. He has the kind of job where he’s usually wearing like…business casual. Blazers and button-ups, you know?” She laughed again. “Oh yeah. He can rock a blazer. But it was kind of shocking to see him dressed so casually, to be honest. He’s started to go gray since I’ve been away. Just a little bit at his temples. I thought it was impossible for him to be sexier than he was already. I was wrong. So wrong.”

  Garret had completely forgotten the tape measure in his hand. He was staring at the wall through which he was hearing half of this conversation, his thoughts racing.

  “We watched a movie after dinner and I was sitting right next to him and it was so hard to concentrate. I was literally sitting there between my dad and my dad’s best friend squirming in my seat thinking about how I wanted to climb Garret like a tree. I haven’t been so sexually frustrated since the summer of my 17th birthday. Which was also his fault. It’s so embarrassing! I felt like that awkward, besotted teenager again. So much for maturing in college.”

  A short silence followed.

  “No way, girl. He thinks of me like a niece. He’d be horrified if he knew. I would be total
ly humiliated if I tried anything and he didn’t reciprocate. It would probably ruin his friendship with my dad too, and God knows dad needs it.”

  Her voice had grown softer, and Garret realized he was straining to hear her. He straightened up, determined not to actually make an effort to spy on a private conversation. Overhearing something was different from intentionally listening, he reasoned. His mouth had gone dry, and he stood there, barely breathing. If she heard him knocking around in there, she’d know that he had heard her. That was not a conversation he was up to having right then. He was still reeling so much that he actually felt physically off balance. He braced his hands on the sides of the sink and tried to gather his wits.

  Karen…was attracted to him? It seemed impossible. He felt ancient next to her, all nubile and vital. He was an old man in comparison. He was technically younger than her father, true, but the use of the word “technically” in that assessment spoke volumes. She’d mentioned the summer of her seventeenth birthday. He remembered that summer too. It was the summer of the white bikini. He shook his head, he’d hated himself for looking at the time, and the thought that she’d been, in her own words, “sexually frustrated” at that time was a shock. That had been the summer when she was just starting to come out of the awkward phase of maturing, those years between 13 and 17 where no one was quite sure if they should treat her like a child or like a young woman and she didn’t seem to know either. That summer, her waist had dipped in and her legs started to look less like long, delicate sticks. Her face had lost most of its childlike plumpness. That summer she’d traipsed around in a white bikini, apparently oblivious to the fact that she no longer had a child’s body and that she was turning heads at the pool.

  He’d noticed. But it had been easier to put those thoughts aside then. Whether or not she was looking more like an adult, it was still easy for anyone to see that she was not one. He’d averted his gaze, and funneled his inappropriate flashes of thought into protectiveness as he’d glared at the adult men ogling her behind her back.

  Now he was the one ogling. He felt ashamed of his attraction to the young woman. How stereotypical, he thought, for him to want to bang a girl young enough to be his daughter. Was he really such a cliché?

  Half of him wanted to flee the scene. He felt an itch in his legs, the fight or flight response, wanting to get out of here before she realized that he’d been there. Countering this impulse, however, was the unfortunate but irresistible urge to stride into her room, take her in his arms, and kiss her on the mouth. Caught in the middle, he stood there motionless, waiting.

  He heard her open her bedroom door and his breath caught in his throat, but she went the opposite way, heading down the stairs. He felt foolish, hiding in the unfinished bathroom, his forgotten tape measure in hand. He lifted his chin and decided to be the man, the adult, in the situation and strode out with newfound confidence.

  Karen was bounding back up the stairs as he came down, and she froze, her eyes going wide, looking for all the world like a rabbit caught in a trap. Garret froze as well and for a few seconds they were suspended there, both of them knowing what had been exposed between them.

  “Hey.” She said simply. “How….long have you been here?”

  Garret gulped and hesitated, which was the only answer she needed. He’d heard everything. He knew. Garret watched as a vibrant blush bloomed over her cheeks. It was beautiful, the way her skin lit up, even though he felt bad for causing her the intense discomfort she was plainly feeling. He wanted to assure her that he wasn’t horrified, as she’d told her friend she thought he would be. But what could he say? He could hardly tell her the truth; that her confession had lit a fire of lust in him that had not been lit for years. He could hardly tell her that he had to ball his hands up into fists to prevent himself from reaching out to touch her cheek at that very moment.

  “I was just taking some measurements for the new cabinets in the bathroom.” He said dumbly.

  Karen brushed past him and ran to her room. He turned to watch her disappear beyond the corner and heard her slam her bedroom door. He winced. The moment was gone. In the time it took him to descend the rest of the stairs and go out to his car, he had decided that the best thing to do was to pretend this never happened. Never bring it up to her or to anyone else. He would made a concerted effort to push away all the thoughts that had been bubbling up to the surface of his mind since she had come back from university.

  Chapter 3

  The heat pressed down on them like a physical weight on their shoulders. The sun was so bright, glinting off the top of the grill where burgers were sizzling away. Karen was sitting in the shade of the large umbrella in the middle of the table, staring into her phone to give her an excuse to continue to avoid eye contact with Garret. Garret was standing next to the grill, watching Christopher. As she scrolled through her feeds, her mind was elsewhere. Ever since that day when he’d overheard her phone call with Olivia, she and Garret had been pretending nothing was different. Garret came over every so often to work on the bathroom and visit with her dad, but now he hardly acknowledged her presence. She worried about her dad noticing the coldness between them and asking what was up. Her heart dropped at the thought that, maybe, Garret had already told her dad what had happened. She imagined them talking about how ridiculous she was, how inappropriate, how embarrassing. She felt her face flush and she looked up at them surreptitiously.

  Garret was watching her, his warm brown eyes turned on her with an inscrutable expression. They made eye contact momentarily then both looked away.

  No, she didn’t think he’d told her dad.

  “Hey Karen,” her dad called over his shoulder. “Can you get the hamburger buns out of the pantry and get the condiments out? They should all be in the door of the fridge I think.”

  Karen hopped up and retreated into the coolness of the air conditioning. She rifled through the pantry but couldn’t find the buns, even after shifting around all the stacks of unused canned vegetables and half eaten boxes of cereal. She pursed her lips and stuck her head out the back door.

  “Dad, I can’t find the buns.”

  He looked up, looking confused, and took her place to search while she returned to her seat. She pulled out her phone again, determined to ignore the fact that she could feel Garret’s eyes on her. When she watched him out of her peripheral vision as he came and sat down next to her, her heart pounded in her chest.

  “Karen.” He said. His voice was low and deep and so gentle that she was forced to look up at him. In the bright sunlight she could see the light dusting of freckles over the bridge of his tanned nose. “I think we need to talk. Soon.”

  She opened her mouth to tell him that no, they didn’t. But her dad opened the back door and came to stand in the door frame.

  “You guys, I fucked up. I think I left a bag of groceries at the store because there’s no potato salad or ketchup either. I’m gonna have to run back to the store real quick. Garret, can you watch the grill?”

  Karen watched a grin spread over Garret’s handsome features and he laughed. “Way to go. Yeah, I’ll keep an eye on the burgers.” He seemed so completely unbothered, all the while Karen was beside herself at the prospect of being left alone with him again.

  She watched her dad leave, her eyes staying fixed on the closed door. Garret stood up and crossed to the grill, lifting the lid to peek at the food.

  “I’m really sorry.” He said over his shoulder. “If I had known that you were home, I would have knocked or announced myself or something. I didn’t mean to eavesdrop. I wasn’t...you know... sneaking around or anything.”

  “I know. It’s not your fault.” She said. His back was still to her but she was looking up at him. The silence that spread between them was so profoundly uncomfortable that even the sound of the cicadas in the trees seemed to get quieter. Insect rubberneckers tuning in to the drama.

  When he did turn around, he was smiling. Karen’s face was blank. Was he laughing at her? He c
ame and sat down next to her, causing her to recoil a bit.

  “I’m kind of flattered, really. After giving it a lot of thought.” He chuckled.

  Karen groaned and covered her face with her hands, leaning her elbows on the table.

  “Are you embarrassed?” He asked, still chuckling.

  “What do you think?” She asked through her fingers. She sighed and straightened up, lifting her face to look at him. Despite her shame, she tilted her chin up with a confidence she did not feel. “You were never supposed to hear any of that. I never planned to…act on it. I know it’s inappropriate. I know you think of me as a niece. That’s fine. It was just a crush, you know. A childish thing. I was just shitting around with my friend. It didn’t mean anything.”