by Olivia Arran
Feeling more than a little off balance, I resigned myself to forcing the foul looking mixture down and gritted my teeth. Grabbing the cup, I swallowed a mouthful. Smooth warmth slid down my throat as flavors exploded on my tongue. Sweet and sharp and delicate, I could detect notes of blackberry and mint. I took another sip, this time taking my time.
Approval shone in her eyes. “You’ll do,” she declared, jumping to her feet.
“I’ll do what?”
“Let me grab a couple of things and then we can go,” she continued as if I hadn’t spoken, dashing across the room in a flurry that sent her skirts flying. Drawers banged as she wrenched them open, her fingers searching through and discarding items left, right, and center. The odd thing made it into the bag she’d grabbed off the counter, but not one thing was something she could wear. Spinning around, she hefted the bag onto her shoulder and gave me a big grin.
“Are you forgetting something?” I hadn’t moved, hadn’t had time to.
“Oh, yes!” She tugged open another drawer and pulled out a passport, brandishing it in the air like a weapon.
“Clothes?”
Wordlessly she pointed at the floor, to the right of my chair.
Leaning over, I spied a small suitcase, bulging at the seams. The zipper wasn’t pulled closed, and midnight blue lace spilled out of the small opening. As though driven by an unseen force, I hooked a finger through the lace and tugged. The tiniest pair of panties dangled from my hand, two scraps of lace held together by a thin line of elastic. I swallowed hard, unable to peel my eyes away.
Then they were gone; snatched away and shoved back into the case, the zipper closing with a definitive crunch.
The spell broken, I glanced up at her, expecting her cheeks to be pink, but she met my eyes without a hint of embarrassment. I cleared my throat, gesturing at the case. “You were planning on going somewhere?”
“Call it a hunch,” she replied.
The scrap of blue lace was seared into my mind, visions of her sliding the lace up over soft curves playing on a constant loop. Or sliding it off … now that was a better idea. I blinked, forcing the image out of my head. “With a man?” My voice was a deep, throaty growl, one I studiously ignored. Where the fuck did that come from?
Her eyes widened with feigned innocence. “Why would I only wear pretty things for a man?”
It took every ounce of discipline I possessed not to let my eyes flick down her body, searching for a hint of lace. Sweet fucking hell, she’s trying to kill me. Lurching to my feet, I scooped up the case and gestured toward the door, not trusting myself to speak.
A faint smile playing at her lips, she brushed past me on her way to the door.
The faint musk of her arousal perfumed the air, dragging an immediate visceral response from my body.
Fuck trying to kill me, she was going to succeed.
Chapter Four
Trent
Her silence was unnerving. Not to mention the way she had worried her bottom lip the entire time walking to the train station, her blunt, white teeth dragging the plump skin back and forth with monotonous determination.
But she was here; she’d agreed to come with me.
I should be happy, right?
All I had to do was deliver her back to her brother, then my debt would be paid and my clan would be free to forge their own path once more. And I would be free to seek my own path and start the search for my mate, something that had been put on hold for the last two years.
What her brother had planned for her was none of my damn business.
She is ours to protect … my dragon whispered in my head.
No, she’s not, and you’d better get your big scaly head around that idea, I sent back. But his words lingered, tugging at something deep inside. Regret? I dismissed the idea. The only regret I had was getting involved with the Jewelcrest clan in the first place.
Clearing a path through the thick crowd, I escorted her to the correct platform. Glancing at the screen, I saw that we had another eight minutes before the train was due.
She stood next to me, her fingers curled tight around the strap of her bag, her eyes shadowed in deep thought as she stared out across the sea of people, seeing nothing.
A tightness pinched my chest at the look in her eyes. Clearing my throat to get her attention, I rocked back on my heels, shoving my hands in my pockets to stop myself from reaching out across the small space between us. “Why haven’t you gone back? I mean, before now? Jewelcrest is your home.”
She glanced at me. “My home is here,” she murmured, then her eyes flicked back to the crowd.
Silence weighed heavy between us, thick and frustrating.
It shouldn’t matter; how she felt shouldn’t matter to me.
But it does.
I opened my mouth, a plan to coax the truth out of her poised on the tip of my tongue, when she began speaking, her voice barely above a whisper.
“I was only eight years old when I first heard the voices. They were soft back then, whispers and snippets that I could easily dismiss as being daydreams. I thought everyone heard them, at one point I thought it might be my dragon, that she was finally talking to me.” She laughed, a hollow sound. “But I realized soon enough that dragons only had one voice, and I could hear many.”
I stayed silent, willing her to continue.
“I didn’t tell anyone, of course. What would I have said? I hear voices? I’d have been laughed at, or locked up and labelled insane. It wasn’t until I was twelve that the voices grew louder, and I couldn’t turn them off anymore. They spoke to me every day, whispering everyone’s secrets in my ears.” She turned to me, her eyes wide and bright as she remembered. “I didn’t want to know their darkest secrets, or their deepest desires. No one should know the depravity of another person’s inner thoughts, the dark and twisted musings that—unless the person is a monster— would never be acted upon. But I did. I knew.” Her voice broke on the last word, a strangled echo of the child she had once been and the horrors she had heard.
I moved toward her, acting on instinct, but she threw up a hand to stop me.
“You need to hear this, to know what I am.”
“I know what you are—”
“Do you? What did my brother tell you? That I’d lost my mind? Did he tell you about the day I left?”
I froze, held in place by the look of torture in her eyes.
“I was sixteen. I’d hidden my true nature from my clan for eight years, weathering their pitying stares and enduring their spiteful whispers insisting that I was a defect. A shifter without a beast; I was powerless. Bastian had just risen to lead the clan, honoring our parents’ memories with his power and strength. And what was I doing? I was a sham, a failure, an outcast.” Her words punctuated the air with streaks of bitterness and self-loathing.
“Your dragon has never spoken to you?”
“My dragon, if I ever had one, turned her back on me a long time ago. When I needed her, she wasn’t there.”
“Astrid—”
“That day, on my sixteenth birthday, the voices roared, refusing to be silenced or unheard. We’d gathered in the square for my brother’s ceremony and I remember falling to my knees. I remember everyone’s faces as I let the voices out, screamed their secrets to the sky. For the first time in my life people were scared of me. Terrified. Then they’d screamed back, shouting and telling me to shut up, to be quiet. But I couldn’t, it hurt, the voices were too big, there were too many to be silenced.”
“What did they do, Astrid?” my voice was a low growl, my hands curling into fists at my sides. Her words painted a picture in my head of a young girl with sleek dark hair, on her knees in the dirt, screaming and crying as a crowd closed in around her.
“I told them to be quiet.” She said it simply, a small smile lifting her lips. As though it were the obvious answer.
I waited for her to carry on, but she remained silent. Then it hit me, what she had done. “And they were silent?”<
br />
She nodded, a single tilt of her head.
Fuck. She had willed an entire clan to fall silent. And they had.
“The fear in their eyes as they looked at me, unable to speak,” she murmured. “I could still hear them screaming at me, the voices in my head raging and hitting out, so I ran. It hasn’t happened again since that day,” she shrugged, “but I haven’t really tried.”
“So, you ran,” I echoed, the pain of what she’d had to endure, so young and all alone, hitting me square in the chest and stealing my breath. They should have understood, should have celebrated her power, not turned on her in disgust. “Why London?”
“I traveled all over Europe; Berlin, Paris, Prague, Rome, but London appealed to me. Here I could lose myself, I could be me. Also, the voices weren’t as loud, humans aren’t as noisy.”
“They aren’t?”
She shrugged, adjusting the strap of her bag on her shoulder. “I think it’s the power level. The greater the power, the louder the voice. Add to that the fact that the humans in London don’t think much beyond their own personal quandaries, such as what’s for dinner or did my spouse really cheat on me, and I can tune it out.”
I sorted through the information, trying to figure out what to do with it. This was the perfect opportunity to come clean, to tell her everything I’d been holding back. Then she’d—
Wait a minute…
My eyes narrowed, a sick feeling rolling over me. “Are you reading me?”
Chapter Five
Astrid
His eyes hadn’t judged me until this moment right now. “Maybe,” I shot back, for some reason not wanting to admit that when it came to him, my powers had failed me.
He grunted, straightening up and rolling his powerful shoulders back. “Well, it’s rude.”
I sidestepped so I was standing directly in front of him. All around us people flowed, the chatter of their thoughts blending into a low hum. “Hey! It’s not like I can switch it on and off! Don’t you think I would if I could?” I nearly reached out and shoved him, his words still stinging.
His mouth turned down in a grimace. “Sorry. I don’t like the idea of someone being inside my head.”
I couldn’t blame him; I wouldn’t like it either. “I’m not inside your head, numbskull. I can only read surface thoughts—things you’re actively thinking about. And I have to actually bother to listen.” Otherwise it was just a buzz in the background. By the time I’d turned seventeen I’d learned to adjust the volume inside my head. I couldn’t mute it, but it was like having the TV turned down to half volume.
He leaned back against the wall and folded his arms across his chest. Cotton strained and muscles bunched alarmingly.
I swallowed the saliva that pooled in my mouth.
He tilted his head. “So, if I think of something different, you wouldn’t be able to read something that I didn’t want you to know?”
“No,” I bit out. He was like all the others, closing me out because he didn’t trust me not to pry. But what was he hiding? Normally I wouldn’t push, wouldn’t try to dig, but this was personal dammit! The guy was intent on dragging me back to the States, and from the look in his eyes, he didn’t give two hoots whether I wanted to go, or not.
I was torn. A part of me wanted to slip away, and run as fast as I could. The other part was worried about my brother. What if he really did miss me? Needed me? He was the only family I had left.
And then there was Trent. Big, bad, gorgeous, and complicated. Was I attracted to him because I couldn’t read him?
No … we like him because he’d be a strong and capable mate for us.
I nearly fell over in shock at the feminine purr that vibrated through my mind. Dragon!
Silence met my cry.
“Astrid?” Warm brown eyes stared into mine as he leaned down to peer at me, concerned lines etched into his face.
Shaking off the sudden sense of loss—I’d made it this far without my dragon, why miss her now?—I steeled myself and reached out. My hand slid up his arm, fingers hooking under the cuff of his T-shirt.
My knees threatened to buckle as the world around me dropped away, my senses dulling as peaceful silence cocooned me.
Firm hands gripped my shoulders, holding me up.
The last time we had touched, visions had shattered my control. But not this time. I couldn’t hear anything, no voices, no hum of whispered thoughts—nothing. There was only my own voice inside my head.
My vision swam and I blinked furiously, wanting to bask in the first glimpse of peace I’d felt since childhood. I wouldn’t cry, and I certainly wasn’t going to fall to my knees and kiss the ground he walked on.
No matter how much I wanted to.
Nope.
I tightened my hold, sliding my hand around his arm and molding myself to his side.
Stiffening, he let out a grunt of surprise. But he didn’t move away. He considered me, golden flames flickering in deep pools of brown.
I tried to decipher the emotions flashing through his eyes, but came away with nothing.
I had absolutely no idea what he was thinking.
And I loved it.
Eventually he nodded, tugging me toward the train that had coasted into our platform.
“Where you go, I go,” I whispered in my softest voice, my hand moving down his arm until it rested in his.
I was positive he hadn’t heard me. We jumped onto the train, staking out a wall in the crowd.
But then his fingers linked with mine in a gentle squeeze and my heart skipped.
Chapter Six
Trent
Her hand felt small in mine, her fingers curling around and clinging on tight as we rocked back and forth with the sway of the carriage. She hadn’t spoken since we’d gotten on the train—something I was starting to realize was out of character for her—and a small smile played on her lips.
It was the smile that had me on edge. That and the caress of her skin sliding against mine through my shirt as she braced herself from falling while the train wound its way along the tracks.
The doors slid open, a robotic monotone announcing the stop. People went, more came, we stood still, separate from them. They didn’t matter.
My dragon slid under my skin, pressing against her hand in an effort to be petted, seeking her attention.
Her lips parted in a silent gasp as her fingers curled into the soft fabric, short nails scratching at my skin.
I locked my legs in place, willing my feet to obey my command, but my body swayed forward with a mind of its own. I braced my hand against the wall, just behind her head.
Her eyes widened, a puff of breath escaping and grazing across my cheek as I leaned down.
My eyes traveled across her face. I could see the raw need in her eyes, along with a hint of hesitation and a whole lot of recklessness.
I lowered my gaze, sweeping it down her throat, following the naked flesh to where her breasts swelled above the stretchy cotton.
We still hadn’t spoken, the silence between us thick with unasked questions.
But she already knows the answers, I reminded myself. There were no secrets; she knew why I was here, what I was taking her home for—she would have read it from my mind. The weight of deceiving her lifted from my already overburdened conscience.
Which meant she wanted me, even knowing the part I played.
Taste…
For once I was in agreement with my dragon; just a little taste before I had to let her go.
The doors swished open behind me as I lowered my head.
Her hand tightened in mine, her head tilting back.
“…Disembark for Heathrow…”
The doors beeped their final warning.
Shit! Grabbing her bag, I lurched forward and slammed a hand between the closing metal doors, wedging them open.
“Our stop,” I stated, trying to ignore the surprised look on her face.
Cool filtered air filled my lungs as I tried to shake o
ff the crushing sense of disappointment. What the fuck was I doing? I had no right to touch her, let alone kiss her.
Half dragging, half frog marching her, we made our way over to the check-in counter. Five minutes later, and a hell of a lot of scowling and cursing, we had our boarding passes and were making our way through customs.
When the security guard waved us forward, I gave her a gentle push, unwinding my fingers from hers. She stiffened, then her shoulders hunched forward, tension radiating from her as she walked through the detector.
The second I was through, she re-attached herself to my side, relief pouring off her in waves that you didn’t have to be a shifter to notice.
“Honeymoon?”
I grabbed our bag, turning to the security guard that had just spoken. The woman finished running a wand over the last of our bags, passing it to me with a wistful look on her face.
“Yes,” Astrid replied, pressing herself even closer and hooking an arm around my waist.
“Congratulations! I can always tell when a couple are in love, like real love, if you know what I mean? You two have that connection.” She lowered her voice, continuing as though I couldn’t hear her, “And sweetie, I’d agree to do dirty laundry for that man any day of the week!” She winked, giving me an appreciative smile.
Words escaped me as the two women exchanged knowing glances, in complete agreement, despite being strangers.
Astrid ran her fingers down my chest in a gesture that screamed possessiveness. “The best part about laundry is retrieving the clothes that need washing…”
A peal of laughter erupted from the security guard. “Or better yet, no clothes, then no washing.”
“Exactly.” Her hand snaked down my back and over my ass. Then she squeezed.
I grabbed her hand. “Okay. Enough of that, honey. We’d better get going or we’ll miss our flight.” I marched her away from the beaming security guard.
She smiled at me, all sweetness and light. Like she hadn’t been groping me in the middle of customs.
