Dragons For Hire: A Dragon Shifter Romance

by Sadie Sears

  She hadn’t done it on purpose. She was just that smart. I couldn’t really blame her for being intelligent, though I couldn’t help but hate it.

  How had I let this happen? I was an experienced outdoorswoman. I’d hiked in far worse conditions the world over. I figured I could handle a few miles of rugged North American woods. I’d really been looking forward to it.

  With nothing better to do as I waited, besides berate myself and criticize the life choices that had brought me to this point, I thought about Jessica being right and wiped my goggles off to look around.

  I hated it when Jessica was right. Ugh. The only way to save my pride at this point would be to make it out of here and never let on that I’d been lost and scared.

  After a few minutes, I managed to psych myself up and stagger to my feet. My ankle wasn’t broken; that would’ve been excruciating pain. Probably would’ve damn near knocked me out. I’d seen hikers break ankles and legs on the trail. That was screaming pain, not moaning pain.

  Slumping against a snow-covered tree, I had to wipe my goggles again, then held my phone high in the air again. The chill was somehow worse up out of the snow. How was that possible?

  I knew how it was possible. Being tucked down in the snow against the tree had sheltered me from this relentless wind. It whistled through the trees, mocking me with its icy song.

  But my phone still had zero service. It didn’t even have the empty bar symbol. It literally said no service in teeny-tiny letters. “Thanks,” I muttered. “Helpful.”

  “Damn it!” I yelled when I tried to put weight on my bum ankle. “Why am I so stupid?”

  The surrounding forest didn’t answer, though something rattled in a tree nearby. Some sort of bird or small mammal that didn’t mind the cold somehow.

  Gritting my teeth, I pushed forward to the next tree. Why hadn’t I brought my emergency GPS tracker? I’d left it in the damn truck.

  Stopping to wipe the snow off of my goggles again, I rested for a moment and thought about going back the way I’d come. But that wasn’t the best idea, either. Going back the way I thought I came was how I’d hurt my ankle to begin with.

  The falling snow had completely obscured the ground. I had no idea where the trail had disappeared to in such a short time. The woods were nothing but a blanket of snow, and more snow, and a thick wall of white in every direction with trees poking out of it.

  Hopelessness washed over me. Was I really going to be defeated by a trail in North America? A few miles from a city?

  No. Absolutely not. I wouldn’t give up. “Help!” I screamed again. Someone would come. Someone would rescue me.

  Damn the wind, though. I was fairly sure it was getting faster and colder. I kept hobbling from tree to tree, trying to go the way I thought I’d come from with one slow, deliberate, and careful step at a time, which wasn’t easy with a limp.

  Shivering, I kept on. God, my parents were going to freak when they found out I got myself lost in the forest so close to civilization. Cold like this zapped phone batteries in a hurry. I turned it off, then stuffed my useless cell phone down in my bag to carry on.

  I stopped and looked around, noticing windblown snow on the mountain crest. In front of my terrified eyes, a huge, heavy sheet of snow slid down and broke apart as it hit the trees. And then a big, booming, whomping sound erupted underneath me.

  “No,” I muttered. I clutched the tree and looked down as a crack appeared in the snow. “No,” I cried as I turned. I moved as fast as I could, hobble-running and using the trees to help propel me forward.

  I knew it was futile, but I had to try. I made it only a few yards when the snow under my feet shifted as a sheet of ice underneath it broke. I fell backward almost gracefully as my feet went forward faster than my body. I tried to stay as upright as I could as I maneuvered between trees.

  Forcing myself to have even breathing, I prepared to deploy my airbag from my backpack. I’d trained for this and knew exactly what to do. Just because I hadn’t experienced it firsthand didn’t mean an avalanche was going to end me.

  I looked up when I heard beating wings over the sound of the rushing snow, and my heart clenched in my chest. Holy shit. It was a dragon.

  And I recognized him.

  It had been a lot of years since I’d seen Vince, but once I’d seen a full-sized dragon, I didn’t think I could’ve forgotten what he looked like. But at the same time, it had been nine years and I was sliding down a mountainside in an avalanche in the middle of a snowstorm. I wasn’t going to swear it was Vince. Before I could decide if it was him or not, I lost control of my descent.

  The top part of my body tumbled forward, sending me head over ass down the mountain. And all my training had gone to shit the moment I saw the dragon. If it weren’t for him, I would’ve deployed my airbag and saved myself.

  The snow was about to completely cover me up when enormous claws snatched me from my fall. I grunted as the wind knocked out of me. The dragon’s big claws stopped me from falling and lifted me into the air, but that meant all my weight hung from my midsection. It chased all the air from my lungs.

  Gripping his legs, I repositioned myself, so I was more sitting in his claws and clinging to his legs than being held by my stomach. I tried to look around and watch where we were headed, but the snowstorm was a total white-out.

  I should’ve been terrified. Instead, I was thrilled as we flew through the air. The cold barely bothered me as my adrenaline spiked.

  We stayed fairly low to the ground. Sometimes I saw it below my feet or spotted trees flying past us on either side. I got a glimpse of the dragon sending out his air power to clear space in front of us and realized he was struggling to see as much as I was.

  I looked up and realized that as fast as he flapped his gigantic wings, propelling him forward and dislodging the snow, more piled up on them. He was struggling through the incredibly thick snowfall.

  We broke through two trees, and either we flew off of a cliff or we were much higher in the air than I thought because suddenly I was able to spot a small log house way below us on the ground.

  But then the snow blew into our immediate vicinity again and hid my view of the cabin. I didn’t get a glimpse of it again until the dragon set me gently down in the snow right in front of the porch. Unfortunately, I’d forgotten about my ankle in all the excitement and put my weight right down on it. Wincing, I stumbled backward into the snow.

  The dragon landed beside me and shifted quickly before picking me up again in his human form and striding onto the porch with me wrapped up in his arms as I tried to wipe the snow off of my goggles. Frustrated, I yanked them off and looked up at him.

  The glare of the invisible sun off the snow lit him up from behind, making him look like a deity. And I could barely believe my eyes. Vincent Orlando, the dragon shifter I’d been in love with all through college, stood right in front of me, looking like an angel.

  A totally, utterly, beautifully naked angel.

  I must’ve died in the avalanche and gone to heaven, where I was being rewarded with the hottest man I’d ever known.

  “Come on,” he said as he ushered me inside the cabin. “We gotta get out of this wind.”

  Vince put his arm under my shoulders and as he walked me in, I was thrown straight back to the last time I saw him.

  If I’d known it would’ve been the last time… so many things I would’ve done differently. But this man had chosen to take a big payoff instead of loving me. My parents hadn’t wanted us together. Both were conservative, to the nth degree. They’d disapproved of me dating a dragon and had tried a million different ways to get me to break up with him.

  Finally, desperate that I was not with a shifter, Mom had offered him a substantial sum of money to leave me. It wasn’t so much that they were prejudiced against dragons, but all things other. They would’ve been just as mortified with any shifter, or a witch, anything but a human. A rich human, one that would give them social leverage.

 
But he’d accepted the money. He’d left and left me with my heart in a million pieces. They’d been relieved and thrown themselves into making me happy, spoiling me, and of course trying to find me a suitable match that wouldn’t result in bad press. My parents frequently made the social pages of the Boston papers and lived in fear of derogatory stories.

  I’d tried dating since then, the men they’d suggested, men I met on my travels, whatever. I didn’t care. Since Vince, I had no type. I’d tried my damndest to find someone that would fill the hole that he’d left in my heart.

  Nobody ever had. And now, here I was stranded in the mountains in Vermont, with the very man who had left a gaping void in my love life.

  Welcome to Spruce.

  2

  Vince

  My heart raced a thousand miles a minute. Damini sat right in front of me, like some sort of dream. It was just as Sophie had predicted a few months ago. I’d only needed to be patient and she would come back into my life. Honestly, I hadn’t been sure at the time if I’d be ready for it, but looking at her now, it was almost as if she’d never left.

  All morning, my dragon had begged to fly. I hated the cold and knew the snowstorm would get worse, so I’d resisted. My dragon wasn’t having it though, and the pressure under my skin grew so intense that I’d had no choice. It was either get out and fly, or rip through Sophie’s old house when my dragon ripped through my skin on his own. He was damned determined.

  Well. Now I knew why. He had to have sensed that she’d been nearby.

  I dressed quickly from the bag I’d hooked around my neck. She sat on the couch in front of the fireplace, arms wrapped around herself, watching me with wary eyes. As soon as I was decent, I knelt down in front of her, my bag beside me, and dug out the first aid kit. I pulled out the small pen flashlight.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, pulling away from my hands. The look on her face wasn’t anything like I would’ve hoped. It was deeply distrustful. Great.

  Oh, yeah. I hadn’t said a word to her yet. “I’m checking you for a concussion.”

  “I didn’t hit my head, Vince. I’m just confused, I think.”

  “About what?” I asked, shining the flashlight into her eyes one at a time.

  She paused while I finished checking her. “I don’t know. I just, well, I’m not entirely sure how I ended up in that position to begin with. I was hiking, and—”

  “In this storm?” I gaped at her. Why would anyone think it was a good idea to go out in that weather? Never mind the cold and it being a strange location to her. What in the hell was she doing here, anyway?

  Her eyes narrowed, and I shut my mouth. “I actually do this stuff a lot and didn’t think it would be any worse than the other times. But then, I lost the trail. I turned back, but the snow was falling so hard that I couldn’t retrace my steps and didn’t know which way I’d come from.”

  “Let me guess. No signal on your phone?” I fought back a grin when she rolled her eyes.

  “Isn’t that how it always goes?” She huffed and shook her head. “And the one thing I ended up needing, I left on the dashboard of my truck back on the road: my freaking emergency GPS device.”

  Her big brown eyes glanced up and met mine and I struggled for a moment to get my voice back. “Yeah, there’s a reason that’s a standard rescue plot device. I see it a lot in some of the books I read, and it happens in real life more than you’d think. You’re damn lucky I was nearby.”

  She eyed me suspiciously. “Why are you here, Vince? How are you here?”

  Evading her question, because I didn’t know the answer, mainly, I put the flashlight away and stuffed the kit back into my bag, then set about making a fire in the fireplace. It was freezing in the cabin, as evidenced by our foggy, visible breaths. A small stack of firewood remained from whenever the last person who had been in the cabin used it. It might’ve even been me. We were damn lucky she’d been near here, and I’d been able to find my way.

  Damini folded her arms across her middle, shivering. Suddenly, I found myself jealous of Sam and Dom. If I were a fire dragon, I could just breathe the fireplace to life, or cuddle up beside her and instantly warm her. My body ran warmer than normal as it was, but not fire dragon warm. Not enough to warm her up. Shit, if it got much colder, I’d have a hard time warming up.

  A box of matches sat on top of the mantle, and I grabbed them. There weren’t many left in there, but there were enough to get started, and they were blessedly dry. I used them to light some old newspapers, then used the newspaper to get the wood burning. It took a minute, but finally, the wood flakes in the bottom of the fireplace caught, and soon the logs were well on their way to warming the room. I turned toward her, running my hands through my hair nervously.

  “Do you mean here as in right here after I just saved you? Or here as in this area in general?”

  She threw her hands up in exasperation. “How about all of the above?”

  I grinned cheekily. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.” I couldn’t believe I was standing in front of Damini, smiling at her. Flirting.

  Damini huffed and crossed her arms again. I took a seat on the other end of the couch and the silence settled over us. Only the crackling of the fire lent any relief. Finally, I waved my hand in a broad gesture.

  “This cabin belongs to a friend,” I explained. “He’s a local dragon elder. My clan and I use it on occasion as sort of a pit stop when we take flights out this way.”

  “So, it’s not just some random stranger’s house that might come back and kill us in the middle of the night for trespassing?” Damini leaned toward the fire and glanced in my direction.

  I couldn’t help but laugh. “You’ve seen too many movies. I’m glad we were able to make it here, though. Even I couldn’t save us out in that.”

  Her laughter chimed in with mine, and whatever tension had been building in the room shattered for a few minutes. It was unbelievable how different I felt with her right there in front of me. I’d done well, I’d thought, to keep going on with life as I had been, pretending like nothing was wrong. Sam, Leath, and even Cameron had all acted like their lives were over at the smallest of rejections, but I’d kept churning along.

  I had no idea just how miserable I’d really been until she came back and, as of maybe thirty minutes ago, made me feel alive again. It may have been inappropriate at this point, but I wanted to grab her and kiss her and make sure she stayed this time. Outside, the wind howled angrily around the cabin, the world solid white beyond the safety of the windows.

  “How did you find this place?” Damini asked. She tugged her gloves off and set them on top of her backpack beside the couch. “I could barely see an inch in front of my nose out there.”

  That was a great question. My abilities only helped so far, and snow as dense as the storm that raged outside got heavy quickly. Between battling that and the rushing wind, it hadn’t looked so good for me. I felt useless, though I knew my powers were still maturing. I was the only one left in the clan that hadn’t reached my centennial birthday yet.

  It was entirely by coincidence far more than my own skill that we’d found the cabin through that mess. I’d gone in this direction, praying I had it right. Maybe it was instinct, but it wasn’t skill. I wasn’t about to tell her that.

  “I knew it was out here and that it was close to where I’d found you,” I replied nonchalantly.

  She eyed me suspiciously. “Uh-huh.”

  Damini pulled her beanie off and dropped it down with her gloves and goggles, which were the first things she’d ripped off. Her dark, wavy brown hair spilled out over her shoulders and the tangy scent of apples washed over me. Suddenly, I was back in North Carolina, Damini writhing beneath me, her moans filling the room, the world was perfect, the future was ours—

  “Vince?”

  I blinked. Damini sat in front of me, watching me worriedly. I shook my head.

  “Sorry.” I rubbed my hands together to keep them out of Dami
ni’s silky locks. “It’s just strange, you know?”

  In my periphery, I saw her nod. “Yeah, I know. You look exactly the same as you did back then.”

  “And you’ve only grown more beautiful,” I replied. While I hadn’t meant to say that out loud, I absolutely meant it.

  Her cheeks flushed, and she looked away. I stood, needing to do something, to stay busy, and headed toward the back. Mitias kept a generator in a small room off the back of the cabin. If I could get that started, we could at least have some light. The big machine gave me some trouble at first. It was an older pull-start generator that wouldn’t catch right away. I banged the top with my fist one good time, pulled again, and it caught and rumbled to life. “Ha!”

  Who said violence against technology never solved anything?

  And then it puttered out again. “Damn it,” I muttered.

  I circled the generator to find the gas gauge. It was sitting on empty. Okay, well, that was an easy fix. Two gas cans sat against the wall nearby. I grabbed one, but it was too light, so I checked the other. They were both empty.

  Well, a lit fireplace and candlelight were romantic, right? I’d have to make a note to get those refilled as soon as possible. There was no telling when the cabin would be needed again.

  Stepping back into the kitchen, I searched until I found the long matches in one of the drawers. I grabbed the box and went around lighting the few candles I could find, as well as the oil lamps on the mantle and the tables. It was starting to look like a properly romantic setting. If we could clear the air, that was.

  That would be the real trick.

  It had hurt more than I was willing to admit when she’d left. Not even just her, but the way her family had played it. I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to bring up the past, to find out if she was still under her family’s thumb. Her mother had told me that they didn’t want me around her, then they’d left, and she went with them. No apology, no phone call.