"Very little," she said finally. "I have only heard of them. I thought the villagers saying they had seen one must be mistaken. This far east, there are only the little drakes."
"Most times, that is true."
Over Embarr's back, she could see his face, could see the expression there in the last of the light. It was grave and attentive, though there was nothing in it that seemed to say she should be afraid. Mairead took the brush from her saddlebags, and then began working over her mount's short hair, brushing sweat and dirt from his coat.
"And other times?"
"Other times, perhaps, even dragons seek new sights."
Her gaze flicked from Embarr's coat to Fintan's face. His eyes met hers, but his expression did not change. Mairead tossed the brush she had held back into its bag, and went to kindle the fire. Neither of them spoke as she laid it, as it crackled to life under her hands. Only when the bed rolls were laid out, separated by the flame between them for the first time since the night of their meeting, did Mairead look at him once more. The firelight made strange shadows on his face.
"What am I to believe?"
"That I will not harm you." His answer was immediate. "That I never meant to do so."
"Did you think a lie was not harm?"
"I wished to know who it was that thought to challenge me," he said. "I had not expected you. When I met you, I was drawn to you, to your beauty." He smiled. "To your fire."
It was not an admission, but it was confession enough. If he indeed was the dragon, then it was she who had thought to challenge him, and she took a breath and let it out slowly, uncertain if it was anger or fear that twisted in her stomach. Perhaps it was both.
"Did you think to tell me?"
"I would have, before we reached the Wyndwae."
She began unbraiding her hair with sharp, frustrated motions, raking her fingers through it to loosen the worst of the tangles. She saw his eyes on it, and laughter bubbled unbidden in her throat.
"You are a dragon, then, so transfixed by gold."
"I admit that it is some of what drew me."
Mairead took off her boots, then settled a little more comfortably in her blankets. Her thoughts were spinning, chasing each other round and round. Questions. Condemnations. She should tell him she did not wish to see his face ever again, then pack up her things and leave. But she did not. She remained there, sitting in the warmth of the fire.
"I did not know dragons could take human shape."
"It is a well-kept secret," he said. "If humans knew, they would not rest. They let themselves be eaten up with fear. They would turn on each other, attempting to hunt us down. We are, after all, monsters."
Mairead drew a breath in sharply.
"Was that meant as accusation?"
Fintan shook his head. "No," he said, and there was honesty in his voice. "I asked you what you sought in the Wyndwae, and you said you wished to know if there was a dragon there. You said you would not hunt one that did no harm."
"No," Mairead said. "I would not."
"Then you are not the human that our kind fear. Dragons are not all the greedy things told of in your stories. Many of us simply wish to live, to be alone in our mountains. Others desire to travel. We are wiser creatures than the basilisk and the manticore. And if we eat your livestock occasionally, do you not do the same?"
"We raised it. Or paid for it."
"And in the cases in which I have taken a sheep, or a cow, I too have paid for it." He smiled across the fire at her. "As I said. We are intelligent creatures. That some of my kind choose to behave as though they are not should not have bearing on all. Certainly there are humans who fail to behave in an intelligent manner."
Unwilling, Mairead was finding herself won over, and she smiled. That much was true. She had seen it herself in every town she rode through, every inn she bought rooms in.
"I will give you that point," she said.
"I wish you to know," Fintan said, "that I have not been toying with you. I am quite fond of you, and I the nights we have shared together have indeed been blessed, whatever your church may think of them."
It was the answer to the question she had not yet managed to ask him. And yet, what would a dragon wish with a human? She slew monsters. He was, by the estimation of her own kind, just such a creature. In human form, he was vulnerable. Her dagger could be in his throat in the space of a heartbeat, if she wished it to be.
She did not wish it.
“Where is it we go from here, then?”
“That depends, I think, on you.”
For a moment she sat in silence, thinking on it, and then she nodded, and she stood. This time, it was her turn to move bootless around the fire, to stand before him. When he tipped his head down to meet her gaze, she tipped her own up and kissed him, hard as he had kissed her that first night. Her fingers tangled in his hair and drew him down nearer.
When they pulled apart for air, he smiled at her. “A decision I offer my most definite approval for,” he said, low and warm.
She remembered thinking before that Lyndoun had all of the danger and none of the beauty. And yet here before her stood a man who was beauty and danger in one. Perhaps he was not the only such thing in the world. Perhaps she would make it a mission to find out, and if luck smiled on her, she would do it with Fintan at her side.
THE END
Loved by Two Bears
Bear Shifter Menage Romance
Loved by Two Bears
Chapter One
Jenna woke to the sound of something moving at the edges of her camp. For a long moment, she lay still in her sleeping bag, breathing in and out with deliberate slowness, listening to the noise beyond the canvas walls.
The snuffling was not a noise she knew from experience, but she had heard it in recordings often enough. This deep in bear country, it wasn’t a surprise. Jenna wasn’t particularly worried. Her food was all properly packed, her little camp circled with a portable electric fence. Without the smell of food to tempt him, it was unlikely the bear would brave the enclosure, not this close to the feeding grounds along the Pacific coast. There were easier ways to get a meal. Still, Jenna reached for the bear spray tucked into a pocket of her hiking pack. Better safe than sorry.
She’d come to Katmai to celebrate the completion of her Masters in Natural Resources, taking some time out in the Alaskan wilderness before she headed to her first assignment down in Iowa. She’d always been more at home out in the middle of nowhere than sharing space with other people. Here in Katmai, where the crowds that came to watch the bears during the salmon run were dispersing with the change of seasons, she had wide stretches of mountain and forest all to herself and the wildlife. Most visitors didn’t hike out into the backcountry.
The bear was still pacing her perimeter fence. Jenna hadn’t expected him to linger so long. She curled her fingers a little tighter around the bear spray and flicked the safety off. Still wasn’t likely he’d try to come through the fence, but if he did she didn’t fancy her chances of scaring him off without chemical assistance. You didn’t try to move a grizzly. Her heart beat a little faster behind her ribs, but she kept her breathing slow and even, quiet. The sound of the movement in the underbrush was circling around toward her back, and she sat up tense and straight in her sleeping bag, wondering for a moment if it had been such a good idea to go camping in the backcountry of a park with North America’s largest brown bear population without a partner.
But the sounds of the bear were moving away. She heard them receding slowly into the distance, and then it was quiet again, just the little noises of night in the national park lingering in her ears. Jenna took a breath and let it out again in a rush of relief that became a laugh.
It would have really sucked to be bear food before she ever got to wear her ranger’s uniform.
Chapter Two
There was something about waking in a tent that was, Jenna thought, incredibly refreshing. Or maybe it was just something about waking without an ala
rm clock blaring in your ear and forty minutes to throw yourself together and leave for your next field work assignment. She stretched slowly in the honeyed early morning sunlight slanting through the screen at the tent’s rounded peak, and enjoyed the sounds of the birds calling a wakeup to each other. It was only some minutes later that she reluctantly dragged herself from her sleeping bag to dress and boil water for breakfast.
Jenna Mayfair was not a small woman. She supposed some might have called her big-boned. At 5’9” she couldn’t be described as anything but tall, and she certainly didn’t have the kind of slim-hipped build people called athletic, though her curvaceous frame was solid with muscle from long years of working outdoors. Hers was a body built for physicality, in whatever form that took.
She pulled the tie from the braid that she usually slept in, dragging her heavy fall of brunette hair back into a tail and then curling it around itself, clipping the bun into place. Then she pulled on her jeans and t-shirt, caught up her jacket from where it was slung over her pack. Her heavy-soled hiking boots waited by the door of the tent.
Outside, the weather was a little chilly, clouds rolling in from the west with the promise of later dumping the water they’d picked up over the ocean. The breeze smelled faintly of salt. Jenna made a mental note to bring her rain gear along on the hike as she lit the camp stove, starting up the water that would make oatmeal and coffee.
When breakfast was done, she cleaned up, dumping the water used to scrub food from her bowl well beyond the perimeter of her camp. Then she went back into the tent to pack her day bag for a hike. Most of the supplies she’d need were already there: sunscreen, water bottle, compass, and map. She stuffed her rain gear in as well, and a few granola bars and some dried fruit in an odor proof bag.
Jenna hiked north, the great snowy bulk of the mountains on her left, and on her right—often invisible beyond the trees—the rugged stretch of the Pacific coast. She had no particular destination in mind, only the enjoyment of the land she moved through. As she walked, she hummed to herself, occasionally letting the noise become a song, partly to alert any nearby bears to her coming, and partly because she enjoyed it. There was no one around to hear her rather terrible attempts, and she took full advantage of the situation.
The sound of footsteps and human voices approaching as she started up the ridge of a hill was a surprise, and Jenna quickly stopped singing, choosing instead to whistle as she hiked. It was a fairly easy incline, and in a matter of moments she was standing at the top of the hill, looking down at two men who were coming up the other side. They were chatting easily, if a bit loudly, neither of them wearing packs. Both of them, despite the chill, were wearing t-shirts under unbuttoned flannel.
“Hey there,” the taller man said as they crested the hill, his voice deeper than she would have expected, with a bass rumble that seemed to vibrate under her skin. “Didn’t figure on meeting anyone out this far.”
He smiled, teeth white against sun-browned skin and a neatly trimmed beard. Standing on ground even with Jenna’s own, he had probably six inches on her, and he was built big—broad shoulders, heavy arms. It wasn’t often Jenna met a man so much bigger than she was, and she felt a little rush of heat at the thought of just how easily he’d be able to put her where he wanted her.
“Neither did I,” she said, answering him. “But I’m not entirely adverse to company.”
Not if company looked like him.
“Arthur,” he said, offering a hand that swallowed hers up when she took it.
“Jenna Mayfair.”
She turned her gaze to the other man, who still hadn’t spoken. He was maybe a couple of inches shorter than Arthur, leaner, but still muscled, regarding her from under a fall of tawny hair with a gaze that seemed to see right down to her bones. For a moment she found herself caught in brown eyes, and then she gave herself a little internal shake and offered her hand.
He took it, his own hand warm, fingers calloused.
“Barrett,” he said by way of introduction. “Nice to meet you.”
Chapter Three
By unspoken mutual agreement, they found themselves pausing there on the hilltop, settling down on a reasonably flat spot to break from their hiking. Jenna set her pack down beside her, pulling a granola bar from the bag inside. Arthur and Barrett waved away her offer to share the rest of her food.
“So, Jenna,” Arthur said when they were all settled. “What brings you to Katmai?”
“Celebrating,” Jenna said. “Just got my Masters in Natural Resources, and I’ve already got a job lined up at Palisades-Kepler in Iowa, so I’m taking a couple weeks to enjoy myself.”
“Congratulations.” There was that grin again, a glance exchanged with Barrett. “You chose a good place to treat yourself.”
Jenna swallowed a bite of granola bar and leaned back against one arm, legs stretched out in front of her. “How long have you two been up here?”
“Oh, we come up here as often as we can. Been out here about a month this time.”
“I guess that explains what you’re doing hiking without a day pack?”
Arthur’s lips curled up in response to her raised eyebrow. “Probably not the best backcountry etiquette, now you mention it, but our camp’s just about a mile that way.” He tipped his head north, back the way they’d come. “And sometimes I want to go places without the camera. Just enjoy it for what it is.”
Jenna wasn’t sure that explained it, but she let the explanation go in favor of a different question. “You’re a photographer?”
He nodded. “It’s what I come up here to do. Barrett just tags along because he’s antisocial.”
His smirk made the teasing obvious. The dark look Barrett gave him was ruined by the barest upward twitch at the corner of his mouth.
“It’s not so much that,” Barrett said, with a conspiratorial wink that looked a lot like flirting to Jenna, “as it is that it’s impossible to get a word in edgewise around Art.”
It was Arthur’s turn to glare. He did it much more convincingly. Jenna laughed.
“So what do you come up here for, Barrett?”
Intent brown eyes settled back on her face.
“I’m a writer. I come up here for inspiration.” He grinned, shooting a look at the other man from the corner of his eye before he looked back at her, smile widening lazily. “Art relentlessly quashes it.”
Arthur reached over and slapped him lightly across the back of the head, and a minute later they were rolling around in the grass, laughing. Jenna rolled her eyes skyward. Men.
They did look good like that, though, muscles rippling under their shirts as they wrestled. She leaned back on her hands and watched them. Barrett, unsurprisingly, seemed to be having a bit of a rougher time than Arthur was, and in a few minutes he was pinned against the ground, panting. For a moment, they lingered there, staring at each other, still huffing out occasional breaths of laughter, and then Arthur rolled off and sat back down. His expression was smug.
“Never going to win, Barrett,” he said as his companion scrambled upright. “I keep telling you that.”
Barrett grinned at Jenna. “He’ll get old and slow first. I’ll have the upper hand one of these days.”
“Watch yourself,” Arthur growled. “Or you won’t live to see me get old and slow.”
“You see?” Barrett said. “He’s a tyrant.”
Arthur gave him a narrow-eyed look, but he was already sliding across the grass to sit nearer to Jenna, close enough that she could feel the warmth from his body.
“If you think she’s going to hide you, I think you’re mistaken.”
The sidelong look Barrett gave her then was definitely flirting.
“Not at all,” he told Arthur. “She’s just better looking than you are.” Another grin directed her way. “And she smells nicer.”
“Flattery,” Jenna said, “will get you everywhere.”
Arthur just stared at Barrett until he laughed—a low, surprisingly husky sound
—and dipped his head, looking up through his eyelashes, one hand rubbing at the back of his neck. Typical country boy, Jenna thought, hiding a smile of her own. They all did that, she’d discovered, no matter which state they were from.
“So if I flatter you,” Arthur said, turning his gaze from Barrett to Jenna. “Will you let me sit beside you too?”
Somewhere, there had been a shift in the mood. It had happened, imperceptibly, between this moment and the last, and Jenna could feel the change like static charge in the space between them.
She smiled. “The more the merrier.”
Chapter Four
“You are,” Arthur said as he settled down on her other side, “a very beautiful woman.”
Jenna crossed her legs beneath her and looked expectantly at him. “Go on…”
"And you do smell good," Barrett said, his voice closer than it had been. "Really good."
She turned and looked at him, still grinning. "You used that one already."
"He reused what I said about you being beautiful and you let him do it."
"He changed the wording enough. You said I'm better looking than Arthur. He didn't compare me to anyone."
Barrett was quiet a moment, thoughtful.
"I think you have the best legs I've ever seen," Arthur said, shifting a little nearer.
Jenna turned her head to look at him, her smile widening.
"What is this? Compliment Jenna from every side time?"
"That's exactly what it is," Barrett said behind her, and she could hear the pleased amusement in his voice this time. "Especially if flattery will get us where we want to go."
She turned and found him sitting near enough that the heat from his body radiated against her side, his arm almost touching hers.
"And where is that?" she asked, knowing already where it was and more than on board with the situation.
ALIEN ROMANCE: Captivated by the Alien Lord (Alien Invasion Abduction SciFi Romance) (Kahara Lords Book 7) Page 6
