The Billionaire Dragon Shifter's Mate: BBW Paranormal Dragon Shifter Romance (6 page)

She couldn’t figure out why it was her, but as Gus introduced her to one person after another—always proudly, always holding on firmly to her hand—she couldn’t deny that he meant it.

No one, seeing her in her clean but still geared-for-a-road-trip clothes, seemed to think there was anything strange about Gus choosing her. Not one person made even the most veiled remark about how Gus could have had someone prettier, or skinnier, or richer, or more interesting.

The whole town took one look at Gus holding her hand and seemed to decide just as quickly as Gus himself had that they belonged together. Cara didn’t know how to react to any of it, but it was nice. Really nice. Fairy tale nice.

She didn’t have to go to Monaco to feel like a princess, apparently. Gray’s Hollow was already giving her as much of that as she could handle.

She wondered if Gus would mind her trying on that tiara she’d glimpsed the day before in the treasure room.

They’d barely stepped outside the electronics store, Cara’s shiny new phone in hand, when a woman hurried up. She was a couple of inches shorter than Cara with equally soft curves, though hers were firmly contained in a pantsuit. She had dark red hair caught up in a bun and wore sunglasses against the bright morning.

“Mayor,” she said sternly.

Gus squeezed Cara’s hand and, for the first time in the parade of interruptions and introductions that had been their morning, he sighed. “Cara, Deputy Mayor Hannah Cole. I did mention that work would find me, didn’t I? Deputy Mayor, Cara Linley.”

Cara couldn’t see Hannah’s eyes behind her sunglasses, but her smile seemed warm, and her voice was genuinely apologetic as she said, “I’m so sorry, Miss Linley, I just have to steal the mayor—it’s the state Board of Ed, Gus, and the school board is trying to punt everything to you again.”

Gus sighed once more and turned to Cara with an equally apologetic look.

Cara smiled and shook her head. “It’s fine, go. I’ll just—head back to the house.”

No way was she staying in town to be interrogated
without
Gus.

Gus reached for his keys, ready to offer them to her, but Cara waved them away. “I’ve spent enough time driving lately. It’ll be nice to go somewhere I can walk to.”

Gus gave her a warm, startled smile at that, and leaned in to kiss her softly.

“There’s a trail, if you don’t want to walk on the road,” he said, pointing to the end of the next cross street. “There’s a sign for the turn-off to the mayor’s house, you can’t miss it.”

Cara nodded, and Gus gave her one more kiss, leaning in to whisper, “I’ll be home as soon as I can, sweetheart.”

Cara bit her lip against the giddy warmth she felt at that, and only whispered back, “I’ll be waiting for you, honey.”

Gus grinned as he straightened up, and then he turned to Hannah and said dutifully, “Lead on, Deputy.”

Cara headed away down the street Gus had indicated, and though she felt plenty of looks directed her way, none of them seemed unkind, and no one pressed her. She’d nearly reached the trail when she heard someone running up behind her. She turned to see a teenaged boy, brandishing a colorful bouquet of flowers. They weren’t roses, but a riot of brightly colored lilies and orchids, rare and exotic hothouse flowers.

“Mrs. M says, welcome to Gray’s Hollow, miss,” the boy recited shyly, holding them out to her like an offering.

Cara resisted the urge to curtsey as she took them.

“Thank you,” she said. Gus had said something about people giving the mayor presents—did that extend to the mayor’s…

Her brain went a little blank at the thought of people in town already regarding her as the mayor’s—Gus’s—wife, and yet it seemed they almost did. She pushed the thought away and sniffed at the gorgeous flowers as she started down the well-tended trail, which climbed the slope up toward Gus’s house in a series of gentle switchbacks. She’d turned twice when she heard a familiar friendly bark, and Mouse popped out of the trees.

“Why hello,” Cara said, and she did try out a curtsey on Mouse.

He danced cheerfully in front of her, darting in to be petted when she reached out a hand. After a moment he settled in at her side, and Cara laughed.

“Are you here to make sure I don’t get lost?” she asked.

Then she realized—if Mouse had come to guide her safely up to the house, it was probably because Ilie was doing the same thing, somewhere out of sight, the same way Ilie had seen her fall and found her phone for her. As she neared the next turn up the trail, Cara looked around, trying to spot the shape of someone nearby in the trees.

“Ilie?” She called as she rounded the next turn. The path went straight up here—there was a flight of stairs, with a railing, and what looked like a larger, flatter clearing at the top. Cara took a deep breath and started up them, still looking around.

“Ilie?” she tried again. “If you can hear me, I’d love to see you. Gus said he’s excited for us to meet.”

Mouse had been keeping pace, right beside her, as they climbed the stairs, but a few seconds after she finished speaking he began to bark and went tearing off to the top. It was hard to hear over the barking, but she thought she heard something up above—something
big
, something that stirred the branches of the trees.

Cara ran, too.

She froze at the top of the stairs, clutching the railing and her flowers like they would protect her.

There was a thing, an impossible thing, in the clearing there.
Wings
, she thought first, and then she thought,
dragon
.

Just like in stories, just like in pictures, except that this dragon was undeniably real. He loomed over her, inky black with a blue sheen where the light touched, with silvery-gray eyes. His head, at the end of a long, sinuous neck, was held level with hers, and his wings were held half-open.

Mouse was still barking. Cara tore her gaze away from the dragon and saw that Mouse was dancing around in front of him, barking and wagging his tail, exactly as if he expected to be petted.

She suddenly remembered Gus saying,
Ilie is different,
and
Ilie is more a Dragomir than any of us
.

“Dragomir,” she repeated, finally getting it. She took a shaky step forward and then another.

The dragon dropped his gaze, ducking his massive head down to nudge affectionately at Mouse. The dog promptly rolled over, wriggling around on his back and still wagging his tail. The dragon obligingly rubbed his belly.

No, not
the dragon
. Ilie.

“Ilie,” Cara said out loud, and the dragon looked at her again. “It’s you, isn’t it? Gus is your brother. You’re Ilie.”

I am
. The dragon’s mouth didn’t move, and the voice sounded human—serious and careful, but human. She heard it perfectly clearly and she knew she wasn’t really hearing it at all.

Cara laughed, from a combination of nerves and sheer delighted fascination.

You wanted adventure
, she thought.
You thought you felt like a princess from a fairy tale.

Gus’s brother was a
dragon
. Which probably meant that Gus himself…

Cara heard a roar, far away but coming closer, and Ilie spread his wings wide as she turned to look. She heard his voice, anxious and confused.
Gus? She said—

The roar sounded again, so close she covered her ears, and she heard a voice that was unmistakably Gus, but furious as she couldn’t have imagined him.
Get away from her!

She heard the beat of great wings, and then a silver-gray dragon, even bigger than Ilie, was dropping into the clearing like a hawk diving at its prey. The dragon’s claws were extended, his mouth open to show enormous teeth. He was throwing himself straight at Ilie, who was backing away, trying to make himself small, crying out in Cara’s mind,
Gus, please!

Cara didn’t think. She threw herself in front of Ilie, spreading her arms wide as if she could shield someone the size of an RV with just her body.

Gus’s dive turned to an awkward tumble at the last second as he reversed direction to avoid hitting her. He came so close she could see every individual tooth and his gray eyes, wide with fury giving way to horror. He hit the ground so hard that it shook, and Cara stumbled back against Ilie as Gus righted himself. There was a frozen second where no one moved, and Cara could hear herself and two dragons breathing, and Mouse whining near her feet where he was cowering against Ilie’s body.

Then Gus roared again, and under and over the deafening sound she could hear him saying,
She’s mine! Don’t touch her!

Cara flushed with fury and threw the only thing she had in hand—the bouquet of flowers, which hit Gus and shattered against his dragon snout into a hundred bits of bright orange and pink and green. “She’s right here! And how dare you attack Ilie when he was just talking to me!”

Gus reared back, looking down at her like he was shocked that she’d dared to argue with him, and Cara couldn’t take it anymore. She turned away from both of them and ran up the trail as fast as her legs could carry her, and Mouse ran by her side, his usual happy barking silenced.

From behind her she heard the sound of enormous wings. She tore off the trail into the trees and ran blindly into the woods where nothing as big as a dragon could follow. Her headlong flight seemed to go on and on, but she knew she hadn’t gone very far when she had to stop, gasping for breath and clutching a tree to stay upright.

What had just happened? How had she gone so fast from feeling like a princess down in the town, thinking about marrying a man she’d just met, to meeting a
dragon
to throwing herself between
two
dragons? And one of them was
Gus
? She felt tears stinging her eyes as she struggled to catch her breath.

Mouse came to lean against her leg, whining softly again. Cara dropped down to her knees to hug him. He’d been scared, too, but he’d stayed beside her.

Cara?

Cara jumped to her feet, but Gus was nowhere in sight. His voice sounded soft and hesitant, apologetic.

I’m so sorry
, he said gently.
Will you come and talk to me?

Cara looked around—and up—but didn’t see a sign of either the Gus she knew or the huge gray dragon. She thought about telling him to leave her alone, but she wanted to understand what had happened. And, she realized, she had no idea where she was.

“Where?”

Mouse will bring you
, Gus told her.

Cara looked down. Mouse’s ears pricked forward, his tail coming up from its fearful tuck. He looked up at her and then started picking his way through the trees. It wasn’t his joyful race toward Ilie, but he wasn’t hesitating, either.

“I’m coming,” Cara said. “And you’d better be ready to explain some things.”

Anything you want
, Gus promised, and then Mouse barked and darted ahead of her a little way. Cara realized they were coming up to another clearing.

For a moment she thought Gus was there already, sitting with his wings spread in the middle of the open space. But as she came closer she realized that this gray dragon was made of stone. She walked over to it, barely noticing when Mouse trotted away.

It wasn’t only a stone dragon—there was a sculpture of a woman perched on the dragon’s foreleg, sheltered under his wing. The carving was beautifully detailed, life-sized. Cara felt she was looking right into a person’s face, a woman maybe twenty years older than herself, and she could recognize the woman’s resemblance to Gus.

Was this his mother? And the dragon—his father?

She heard wings, and saw Gus land at the edge of the clearing. She stayed where she was, under the stone dragon’s wing, and watched him walk closer.

He was a little awkward on the ground, his wings and tail bobbing, his head held low. She had no doubt he could have covered the distance in a single leap, one flap of his wings, but he walked slowly to her, giving her time to study the softly shiny gray of his scales. She could see a fine, glittery line of gold around the base of his neck that seemed to be the same chains she’d seen around his neck in human shape; there was a tracing of gold around his foreleg too.

Of course he loved shiny things. Of course he
hoarded
them. Gus was a
dragon.

When he’d reached her he curled down small—well, as small as he could. He brought his head down low enough to look her in the eyes.

I want to thank you, first
, he said.
For stopping me from hurting Ilie. I never would have forgiven myself
.

It wasn’t what she’d expected him to say. “Oh. Well. Anyone would—”

No,
he said.
Anyone would run the hell away from two full-grown dragons. Anyone would scream and hide from the monsters in front of her. Anyone would assume one dragon could hold his own against another and get herself out of the way. You were incredibly brave.