Dragon's Pride: BBW Paranormal Dragon Romance (7 page)

Her hands at her heart, she took a step back. I knew she was trying to decide if she could believe what she had just seen. It was difficult for humans to take in, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had just walked away. Disappointed… maybe heartbroken… but not surprised.

Finally, looking at me timidly, she nodded.

“And it might not be such a bad idea for us to go see my parents.”

Kale

Either Cerul was crazy, or I was. The more I thought about it, the more I leaned towards it being me. Anyone could joke around about having supernatural powers. At least he was sane enough not to pretend he could actually use them.

Me, though? I had actually seen the man breathe fire – just like dragons were supposed to do. I had thought I’d seen it, at least, and it was a pretty damn convincing sight. Every time I doubted it, I just glanced up to the ceiling and looked at the mark the blaze had left there. Even with the evidence, I had to be crazy to think it was true.

My plan of taking him to his parents had backfired. They wouldn’t be the concerned adults I had imagined when I’d suggested it. I doubted they were going to get him the help I’d thought he needed.

If I was to believe what I’d seen, we were heading straight into a dragons’ lair. And these weren’t going to be friendly dragons.

The drive here had done nothing to calm my nerves. Even seeing Cerul leave his house gave me no happiness. Staring up at a tiny window now, I tried to settle my heartbeat.

“It’s okay,” Cerul said. “I used to sneak in through this window all the time. It’s the only one that’s not alarmed.”

“This is a little different. You said your parents never wanted to speak to you again.”

“I was going to wait until my mother’s next birthday. With all the attention on her, it’s the one time in a year that she’s guaranteed to be in a good mood. I can’t wait that long, though. I need to talk to her now. If I see her in person, maybe I can convince her to give me my abilities back.”

I looked at the window, wondering if I’d even fit through it. “Give me a boost,” I said, hoping I’d come across less shaky than I felt.

He hooked his hands together and I stepped into them. My pussy clenched, remembering the other things he’d done with those hands just a few hours before. Why couldn’t we be back in his bed now? Why did we have to be on this suicide mission to his parents’ home?

With his help, I managed to get onto the windowsill. The glass opened outwards with a creak and I stumbled, off balance. I shouldn’t look down. If I could just get inside, I’d be fine. All I had to do was jump down…

“Go, Kale!”

Closing my eyes, I made the leap. “Ow!” I came down hard, but nothing broke the way I’d almost feared. I was inside the mansion, some kind of hallway from the looks of it. A moment later Cerul was there behind me, smiling as if this was an everyday occurrence.

“Never would’ve pegged you for being scared of heights,” he said.

“I’m not!” I covered my eyes again, still slightly dizzy.

“Okay, veggie girl.” His arm circled around my back, comforting me – even if I didn’t need it. “We’re going to go through to my parents’ bedroom. You just follow me, okay? You’re here for moral support. I don’t actually want them to see you.”

Moral support? As in, I had basically come here for nothing? Yeah, that was exactly what I wanted to hear. If these people had hurt my man, I wanted to mess them up. I tried not to grumble as I followed Cerul through the winding halls.

It was hard to stay angry as we walked. I kept stopping to gawk at my surroundings. This place was like an art museum. The walls were covered floor to ceiling in paintings that even I could tell were famous. All of the signatures were names that sounded vaguely familiar, and I had never been interested in art. Chandeliers hung every few feet, diamonds gleaming with bright light in the middle. The hallway went on as far as my eye could see, and I knew that this was only a fraction of the mansion’s actual size.

Cerul had told me his family was well-off, but this was something else. What was it he’d said about his aunt? That she had unlimited money? I supposed this was what someone might do with unlimited funds. Hard to believe a man from this family could be as crazy as Cerul was. I paused and reminded myself that I couldn’t be sure anymore. That maybe he really was a dragon.

When we reached the end of the hall, I glanced at Cerul. Surely we had to be near the master bedroom by now. Shaking his head, he pointed a finger at a staircase. “We have to take the skywalk,” he said. “It’s in the next wing over.”

The next wing. Wing! I followed, wondering yet again what I had gotten myself into. This was not what I signed up for when I accepted the personal trainer position!

After walking across a skywalk with walls so crystal clear that it felt like we were flying through the night sky, we descended another staircase. “We’re close now,” Cerul told me. “You stay here.”

“But I want to be with you.” As scared as I was, I didn’t want to let him go alone. If this was difficult for me, it had to be a million times harder for him.

“You can watch. If they start to notice you, though, you have to run.”

I nodded. I supposed that was fair.

The long hall decorated with art ended in a doorway. I ducked off to the side while Cerul proceeded to the end and knocked on the door. When it opened, a woman’s voice came from inside, reedy and clear. “Who’s there?”

A man stood at the door, an older version of Cerul. A version who could have been looking at a ghost. “It’s your son,” he said.

“Son? I have no son.” The woman’s footsteps clacked toward the door. Even inside her own bedroom, she was wearing heels. When she appeared, her face was as cold as her attitude. “Whoever it is, please tell him to leave.”

“Arabella doesn’t want to see you,” Cerul’s father said.

Seeing the three of them made me feel like calling my own parents and giving them a hug. All my brothers could use a bit more gratitude. They might have picked on me when we were kids, but they’d never denied my existence. No wonder Cerul acted the way he did.

Arabella disappeared into the bedroom, and Cerul pushed his way past his dad. I tiptoed forward and peeked into the room, not wanting to miss anything that happened. If Cerul happened to need me, I wanted to be there to back him up. “It’s time we discussed this face to face,” he said. “I’ve had enough of not being able to shift. You need to give me back my powers. Tonight.”

Finally acknowledging him, his mother put her fingers in his chest and shoved him back. “And why would I do that for a little boy who’s proven he can’t be trusted?” she asked. “Not just dating a human, but telling her what you were, too?”

“We have cousins who have married humans. Meridian. Ecliptic.”

“And that doesn’t please me, either,” the dragon woman hissed. Her husband cowered to one side, staying out of the way. “They’re not in my good books. They weren’t invited to my birthday party. And if I had the chance to strip their powers, I would!”

“You know how disgusting it is to want us to only reproduce with each other? There’s only one dragon clan in the country!”

“That’s how the royalty live. That’s the way it’s always been. You made your choice. You took the jewels, and you weren’t supposed to ever come back here.”

“You never gave me a choice! All I’m asking for are the abilities that I was born with. When I have them back, I’ll never speak to any member of this family again. Trust me, I’ll be glad of it.”

Cerul’s mother jabbed him again with one of her talon-like nails. “I’ll never do it. If you want to mate with the humans, you should act like one too.”

“Don’t you have the slightest pity for your son?” Cerul asked, his voice filled with pain. “Can’t you imagine not being able to shift?”

Arabella flipped back her hair. “You should go away now. You’re beginning to bore me.”

My lover took in a gasping sigh. And then – his great mistake – he glanced back at me.

“Who is that?” Arabella asked, following his line of vision with rapid comprehension. She advanced on me like a predator spotting prey. “What is that?”

“No one,” Cerul said. “Leave her alone, Mother, please.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t dream of it.” She extended a hand to me. Trembling, I emerged from behind the door frame. This woman was even scarier from up close. She looked more like a witch than like a dragon, and every part of me was screaming to get away from her.

As much as I was evaluating her, she was also taking stock of me. And she seemed to be able to pinpoint me immediately. “So this is who you’re dating now, is it?” she asked her son. “One human wasn’t enough? You had to go back and make the same mistake all over again? I thought the first one broke your little heart too badly for that to ever happen.”

“This one isn’t like Deedee,” Cerul said stiffly.

“She’s not different,” his mother snapped. “They’re never different. All of them are exactly the same. They want our money, or else they want to slay us. I swear I don’t know how any child of mine can think something else. That isn’t the way I raised you!”

I opened my mouth, but without any words to say, I closed it. Protesting would have gotten me nowhere, and I knew I didn’t want to be victim to the dragon woman’s wrath.

“All I want is my powers,” Cerul said again. “I just want to shift.”

His mother raked one nail across my cheek. “She’s not as pretty as the last one. Must be a good fuck if you’re serious about her.”

“She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, and I’m very serious about her,” Cerul growled. After yanking Arabella’s arm away from me, he grabbed mine. “Let’s go, Kale. I’ll live without shifting. Better to live as a human than to be like her.”

My feet moving only grudgingly, my mind in a daze, I followed him back out to the hall. Silence hung heavily over us. I couldn’t begin to think about what could be going through his mind right now. I couldn’t imagine how anyone would feel after being treated like that by his own mother.

Even after we got in the car, Cerul refused to speak. He never exactly looked cheery, but now his expression was darker than I’d ever seen it. After being told he wouldn’t be able to shift ever again, I couldn’t blame him. I still didn’t really understand this whole “dragon” thing, but after seeing his whole family discuss it, I knew it was real. And being able to shift was clearly important to him.

Despite everything, his comment about me made me feel a little bit warm inside. The most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. And he was very serious about me. Did he mean those things, or was he just saying them out of anger? I tried not to think about it, tried not to hope.

Cerul had just turned the key in the ignition when a sound made us both look up. In the heavy quiet of the night, the footsteps thumping outside were impossible to ignore. It wasn’t the clacking of heels, but the wallop of a man’s solid weight hitting the ground.

It wasn’t Arabella running after us, but her husband.

Cerul turned the car on. He rolled down the window, looking ready to drive away at any moment. “What is it?” he asked coldly. “Receiving my fate from my mother wasn’t bad enough? You’ve come to rub salt into my wounds, too?”

“No,” the man gasped. He twitched a little as he spoke, clearly nervous. I suspected he didn’t get to do much talking when Arabella was around, and perhaps not even when she wasn’t.

“Cerul, let him speak,” I said gently. “What is it, sir?”

He nodded to me. “This one is respectful. I like her, even for a human.”

“I don’t require your approval anymore, Father! What do you want?”

“It’s about the spell that your mother used.”

“Do you know it?”

Cerul’s excitement was clear, but the shake of his father’s head killed it – for a moment. “No. I don’t know the spell, but I can tell you this much. You don’t need it.”

Stepping out of the car, Cerul took his father by the collar and shook him violently. “What are you saying, old man? I’ve read all the dragon lore I can get my hands on. I would know if I didn’t need the spell.”

The other man trembled and took a step away. He looked fearful, afraid of his own son. “There is lore,” he rasped. “Very little-known. You won’t find it in any books.”