15. Maya

15

Maya

“I refuse to put you in any danger.” His voice was a danger of its own. Cool, dark waters she wanted to sink into.

“Such as?” she prompted him.

“When you ran, I chased you. I brought all the force of the clan to bear on you—a lone woman, fleeing with her child in the night.” Regret clouded his eyes. “I meant to offer you protection.”

“You had a hell of a way of showing it.”

“I had rejected the bond between us for over half a year. I thought you were satisfied with the life you kept so carefully separate from your work. That all I could offer you was the destruction of your happiness, your relationship, and the safety of a world without my magic in it.” He raised a hand as she started to speak. “The moment I knew how mistaken I’d been, it was as though…”

“A dam burst?”

He gave a crooked smile. “You were not happy. Whoever Tomás’s father was, he’d left you unacceptably unprepared for dealing with a baby dragon. And he’d let you walk into another dragon’s lair with your child.”

Her chest hurt with the truth she still hadn’t told him.

“He abandoned you. Everything I thought you had, everything I thought was already provided to you—I was wrong. You were alone.”

He was wrong. Tomás’s father hadn’t abandoned them.

He hadn’t even known Tomás existed.

She wet her lips. “Tomás stole your watch. You saw him.”

“I saw the tip of a tail lashing with excitement under that blanket you threw over him, and I heard a telepathic cackle of victory as he made off with his new treasure.” His lips quirked, his smile more fond than crooked but his eyes still deep in regret. “I told you to stay where you were, because I was an over-important ass who never questioned that you would obey me. I intended to clear the floor of anyone who didn’t already know about shifters and might see Tomás. And when I came back, you were gone.”

“You didn’t let that stop you.”

“No. I followed you until I knew you were safe here.”

“You didn’t seem too concerned with my safety when you were facing off against Apollo.”

“I let my anger turn me into someone I did not want to be. Someone I have spent my life learning I must be. The head of the Blackburn clan. Powerful, imperious, and possessive. Because of course, I was wrong. You weren’t in need of protection. You’d fled straight to the arms of another dragon; possibly the same dragon who had sent you as a lure into my territory in the first place.”

“ Apollo ? You thought we—”

“I was half mad from loving you and not having you. And that is no excuse.”

Her world had crumbled around her that night. And now it was falling apart again.

Or rebuilding itself into something new.

She swallowed. “And when you figured out that Apollo wasn’t involved with me?”

“I let you go.”

“You knew his magic would keep me protected.” She nodded. It all made sense.

Miserable, horrible sense.

“If I had only spoken sooner—” he said at the same time as she forced out, “We could both have been so much happier if we’d just talked to one another.”

“Is it too late?” His voice was nothing like she’d ever heard it. Tentative. Hoping. “I only want you to be happy, Maya.”

Happy. She was happy in Hideaway Cove, wasn’t she? With her friends. Her life.

And all the time she spent not thinking about everything she’d left behind.

“If you want me to be happy, then why do you keep pushing me away? You act like you’re convinced that just being around you will hurt me.”

“Because it will.”

Frustration exploded out of her. “What does that mean? I might not have seen everything you kept secret from me but I do know you , Corin Blackburn. You’re an arrogant asshole but you don’t hate yourself. And you’d have to hate yourself, to think that you—it’s something to do with your magic, isn’t it?”

The words came out before the thought finished forming in her head. Of course.

“You know I’m not secretly carrying on with another dragon, so that isn’t what’s keeping you away. I know about shifters, so you can’t say you’re keeping me in the dark for my own good, in case I lose my mind at discovering magic is real—”

“I would never think that,” Corin interrupted.

She interrupted right back. “And you knew we were fated mates. Which meant you must have guessed I was as attracted to you as you were to me. And you were attracted to me.” Something in her chest opened like a flower, like she was only really breathing for the first time. “It’s not me. It’s not another dragon. It’s not the existence of magic in the abstract, it’s—”

“My magic.” His voice was solemn, but his eyes shone with respect. “Correct as ever, Miss Flores.”

“You were going to tell me yesterday.”

“You didn’t want to hear it. I could understand why.” He gave a sad half-smile.

“I want to hear it now.”

“Very well.” He folded his hands, strangely formal despite his torn clothes and the backdrop of the tiny beach. “All Blackburns have the same magic. We call it the duskfire.”

Maya remembered the dusky wings that had burst from his shoulders. “It looks like shadows.”

“Like the last of the sun’s light has left the world, and there is only darkness left.” He didn’t smile; his cheeks tightened, his jaw rigid. “Like a fire, it destroys, but unlike normal flame, it does not burn. It reveals old wounds. If you ever broke your arm, or cut yourself, and the duskfire touches where that injury once was—it will come back. Every hurt you ever endured, all at once.”

His lip peeled back over his teeth. “It affects objects, too, not only people. Anything that has been mended will be broken again. You’re familiar with the concept of the Ship of Theseus?”

“Oh, that’s—if you replace every part of a thing with a new part, is it still the same thing?”

“You can replace every splintered board and broken window of a house with new ones, and the duskfire will recall the broken husk it was before.”

Maya blinked. “The Dans—whenever a new insurance claim came in, it so often seemed to be the same damage, to the same poor restaurant or gym…”

He nodded. “And that is not all. We feed misery and pain back into the world, and we feed on it ourselves. Other dragons risk being seen if they fly around in their dragon forms—we can hide in our duskfire shadows, drawing on the misery that seeps through the world beneath our wings to allow us to pass invisibly, faster than the wind, on our way to destroy what others have taken pains to mend. We revel in it.”

She stared at him, horrified. “No, you don’t.”

“Why wouldn’t we? It is our power. The magic we wield, that makes us who we are.”

“It makes you miserable.”

He shrugged.

“And … you didn’t want me to know about it?”

“I cannot think of making you mine without my magic wrenching free of my control. You are my mate. The greatest honor I could know, the greatest honor I could ever offer you, is to claim you as my mate. But if I do—”

He stood suddenly, marching to the far end of the little beach.

“Easier if I show you,” he said bitterly.

Maya stood, slowly.

Their eyes met across the sand.

“If I think of claiming you as a dragon is meant to claim his mate, this is what happens.”

Huge shadowy wings unfurled from his shoulders, as though the night was tearing through the sunlit day. There was something leathery and webbed about them, like his dragon’s wings, but mostly they were darkness—deep, cold, and endless.

And surrounding the shadows were strange, jagged flashes of vivid green light.

“Duskfire.” He sounded defeated. “I can’t let it touch you, Maya.”

She imagined it. All the times she’d ever been injured. The broken leg from when she was in grade school. Too many grazed knees to count. Bruises and cuts and burns.

The one time she’d jabbed herself with a stapler at work, Corin had turned white and avoided her for the rest of the day.

“Even if I’d never hurt myself badly, it wouldn’t matter,” she said slowly. “Because all the injuries come back at once. Death by a thousand paper-cuts.”

He flinched.

“Metaphorically speaking,” she said quickly.

“Or not.” His shoulders sagged. He furled his wings. They tucked behind his back and disappeared, as though they never existed. “I could never make you mine. So I chose not to have you at all.”

“And for me not to have you.” She waited until he met her eye. “That’s not very fair, Corin.”

“I know.”

“And—you can’t claim me. But does it have to be all or nothing?”

The focus of his attention sharpened.

Her pulse sped up. “You said you want me to be happy. Does it have to be magic? Does it have to be about the mate bond? Can’t it just be us?” She licked her lips. “Would you kiss me again, if it made me happy?”

She couldn’t breathe as she waited for him to reply. Shadows gathered at his shoulders—the dangerous magic he was so afraid would hurt her—and she saw the effort it took him to banish them.

But he did. And a new determination flared in his gaze as his magic vanished.

“Close your eyes,” he told her.

They’d already determined he shouldn’t rely on her jumping to obey him—but just this time, she did.

She closed her eyes. Her eyelashes fluttered on her cheeks, because she wanted to open them again, but she forced them to stay shut.

The first thing she felt was Corin’s breath on her skin. Then he kissed her.

His lips were soft. He was a man of so many uncompromising angles, but his lips were soft, and his hands coming up to hold her were gentle and loving. She opened her mouth and his tongue slipped through her lips, possessive and taking.

How far did he want to take? How much would she let him have?

Everything , her heart told her.

He lay her down on the picnic rug, every touch somehow reverent. His hands were cold, but she held them in hers, warming them with her own touch. Her kisses. Her body.

“Let me explore you,” he whispered, the words rough in his mouth. “Please.”

She let him.

He touched her as though he had catalogued every place on her body he wanted to caress, and was determined to check them all off from A to Z. Her eyelids. Her neck. The ticklish spot behind her ear, and a line down her throat that wouldn’t have felt like anything except her skin was still humming from being tickled.

“How long have you been saving up all the places you want to kiss me?” she asked him, gasping.

“Do you need to ask?”

The whole time he’d known her. The same way she’d spent every long day trying to corral her own imagination from focusing on anything except what she wanted to do with him.

It was a wonder either of them had gotten any work done.

And now the desire that had dug its elbow into her whenever she caught herself staring at him at his desk, or looming over her at hers, was in full swing. Heat blossomed inside her. He asked—politely! Politely!— if he could take off her shirt, and she almost groaned with impatience.

His hands on her breasts made her moan. His fingers teasing her nipples, his palms moving to embrace each heavy weight.

Oh, shit.

“You don’t have to—” She tried to tug her shirt back down, but her shirt was off .

“What’s wrong?” Corin’s voice was luscious, a low hum she could practically feel against her skin.

“I haven’t—I mean, I haven’t had a lot of free time for working out, or…”

She gestured, helplessly and embarrassed, at everything there was no way he would have included in his mental catalogue of her features. The stretch marks. The loose plumpness of her belly.

Above her, Corin’s gaze darkened. “You cannot possibly think I—you’re beautiful, Maya. In every way. Every part of you.”

“You haven’t seen every part of me,” she pointed out sharply.

“Give me time.” Smiling wickedly, he kissed his way down her stomach, sliding her leggings over the hips she’d always firmly called wide but now, something in the way Corin looked at them made her think … generous.

Maybe lush?

Definitely grabable.

Especially when he grabbed them.

He slipped his fingers between her legs, and a whole new vocabulary opened up for her.

“Corin—”

He paused, knuckle-deep inside her, and she squirmed.

“I don’t want your fingers this time.”

“Maya—”

“ Please. ” Despite what she’d just said, she flexed against him, begging more sensation from the delicious pressure inside her. But she wanted more than that. If she couldn’t touch Corin, she could at least have this, surely? “I’m on birth control, you don’t have to worry—”

“That isn’t what worries me,” he growled. His eyes darkened.

“I want you,” she whispered. “Just you. That’s what this is. Fuck your magic, I want you. ”

With a groan, he pulled away and resettled himself over her. She bit her lips on a sigh as he removed his fingers, but her breath caught as he positioned himself between her legs.

He was huge and heavy over her, hair falling over his forehead, eyes dark with a fully human lust. Oh god. They were really going to do this.

In all her dreams, they’d never been on a picnic blanket.

But none of her dreams had been like this.

It would have taken longer to get his pants off if there had been more of his pants to take off. There was a reason she’d tried so hard not to look. Fabric practically disintegrated at her touch. She reached down for his cock and wrapped her fingers around it. “Do you have any idea how often I daydreamed about this?”

His eyes darkened and his cock twitched in her hand, thick and heavy. “I should write you up.”

“On your desk, or mine?”

He swore and let his forehead fall against hers. “Don’t torture me any more.”

“You don’t think I should make you pay for all those months you kept the truth from me?” She stroked him, her thumb making slow circles.

“No. Yes. Which one means you’ll stay with me?”

She laughed without meaning to, joy buoying her up, and guided him to her entrance.

He pushed inside her.

Her breath stopped. Words stopped. Her mind stopped, her heart stopped mid-leap, every part of her still and focused on the sensation of Corin entering her.

“Remember to breathe,” Corin whispered in her ear, as though he was reminding himself, as well. And then they were moving together, the whole world narrowed down to their two bodies, to a lovemaking so slow and intense it was like nothing she’d ever imagined.

When she climaxed, it built in slow waves, over and over, each one surely the last until the next one came, stronger and all-consuming. And it was Corin, all him, buried deep inside her as he whispered half-words, half-groans in her hair, coaxing her through pleasure that would have sent her flying apart if he wasn’t there to keep her whole.

But that wasn’t enough for her. She reached for him, burying her hands in his hair and pulling his lips to hers. “Now you,” she whispered into his mouth. “I want you. I want this. I’ve wanted it for so long. Please—”

She pushed up against him, angling her hips to take him in, and he groaned and thrust deep into her.

“Oh god, Maya,” he whispered into her hair. “You don’t know how long I’ve dreamed about this.”

She pulled his head around to kiss him. “Yes, I do.”

“Of course you do.” He groaned. “I could barely look at you, the first time we met. It was torture.”

“ Months of torture.”

“A year. More. Seeing you every day, hearing your voice, smelling you, imagining what you tasted like—imagining what you would sound like—”

He gripped her hip, lifting her to drive himself more deeply inside with each thrust. She’d thought she was done, but her breath turned ragged as her body informed her that, just maybe…

“Hm?” Corin stared down at her, his gaze speculative. A knowing smile stretched across his face and he thrust into her again, watching for her reaction as he pulled out so, so slowly.

And entered her again, playing with speed and roughness until he coaxed another gasping orgasm out of her, and only then did he half-laugh, half-groan, and come inside her.

“You’re relentless,” he told her, rolling over and carrying her with him.

“Whose fault is that?”

He kissed her neck. “I am more than willing to take the blame, so long as I can also provide the remedy.”

For a few minutes, she let herself lie quietly by his side. She still hadn’t caught her breath. She wasn’t sure she ever would again. Or, if she did, it would just mean her body was recovered enough to jump on him again.

She had sand in her toes and dune-grass in her hair and nothing she’d ever done had felt that good before.

She pushed herself up on one elbow to look at him, even though her body wanted nothing more than to collapse in happy exhaustion against his chest. “Why haven’t we been doing that all along?”

Corin’s chest stopped moving for a moment. When he breathed again—well. She’d broken the magical post-coital moment, but what was new?

“Because I thought it wouldn’t be enough for me.”

“I mean, I’m sure we can add that to the schedule as many times as we want to…”

“Not this.” He cupped her face in one big hand. “There is more to being a dragon’s mate than sex, and that part of me will not be sated until I claim you as my own.” His eyes flared with dragonfire and he tensed. “Which I can never do.”

“Right.” His magic. His duskfire. There had to be a trick to it that would let them be together without danger—surely other dragons in his clan got married without cursing each other. “When you say claim… ”

“There is a ritual. It involves my hoard, and my magic.” His touch lightened. “I swore I would never hurt you. I will not break that promise.”

She frowned. “Why—”

“Why is my magic so cruel?” His mouth twisted. “Why do dragons hunt out gold? Why do we make enemies, and feud, and waste our lives stealing from and fighting one another? Because we are dragons. Power is all that is important to us.”

She opened her mouth to protest that couldn’t be true, that Apollo wasn’t a power-hungry dragon—then closed it. Apollo was the guardian of their entire town. That was power, wasn’t it?

Just not a power so great and destructive it only brought misery to those who wielded it.

Corin seemed about to say something else when his gaze flicked away. “Someone’s calling us.”

“I can’t hear them?”

“Telepathically.” He frowned. “It doesn’t sound urgent; Tomás is almost ready for his nap.”

“That is urgent, actually.” How could she have lost track of time so badly?

“We haven’t talked through everything we needed to.”

Her heart sank.

No. They hadn’t. Despite everything, they had avoided the one topic they really should have focused on from the start: Tomás’s missing father, and how he might be the dragon shifter who’d apparently been snooping around the town. But not actually inside the town—Apollo and Felicity hadn’t noticed any strangers other than the people Corin brought with him.

Corin seemed to read her mind. “If the dragon the children were talking about is real, he’s made no direct move yet,” he said gently. “And you are surrounded by friends here. Whatever happens, they are on your side. And so am I.” He hesitated. “If it would help—give me a name. I can at least find out his current location. Then you would know for sure whether it is him or not.”

She looked away. “I can’t.”

“I won’t—” He broke off. “I understand.”

No, he didn’t, because she hadn’t told him! Exasperated, she turned back to him.

He’d already shifted into dragon form.

She stared up at him, eyes wide.

His dragon form was magnificent. If his duskfire wings were ghostly, this was his power in vibrant life—gleaming black scales, the hints of brilliant green-like flashes of unearthly lightning.

He flew her back into town, landing in front of Jacqueline and Arlo’s house. But he didn’t stay. He had work to do. But he would see her in the morning.

Her mouth said yes before her brain got a thought in edge-wise.

Tomás was full of excitement from his morning with the seal shifter kids. He hummed and cackled to himself as Maya did her best to keep on top of the chores that somehow multiplied when she wasn’t looking. At one point he shifted into his dragon form and wiggled around the floor on his tummy, wings wrapped tight to his back.

Maya laughed. “Are you being a seal, little love?”

“Arf! Arf!” Tomás wriggled enthusiastically, then exploded into her arms in a burst of flame-colored wings.

She hugged him tightly. “I’m glad you had fun.”

“Arf!” He wriggled again, transforming into a human toddler in a shower of gentle sparks. Maya closed her eyes as he snuggled against her, his chubby cheek resting on her shoulder, one hand stroking her cheek. “Mama.”

“Sleepy?”

“Mama mama mama…”

She made a bottle and padded up the stairs with him alternating between drinking it and petting her face. It was the sort of sweetness that kept surprising her in her new life: adorable, filling her heart and her soul with happiness, but also involving little toddler fingers poking up her nose.

“Hoo!” he said, and grumbled wordlessly to himself.

Tomás fell asleep clinging to the necklace Corin said came from Troy. Her little dragon. There was so much she had to learn about him.

But maybe she wasn’t doing a terrible job, after all.

Maya went to bed that night bracing herself for another day of interrogation.

Instead, she was woken ten minutes later by a screaming toddler.

Tomás was enraged. By what, she didn’t know. He wasn’t hungry. He wasn’t sore. He didn’t need a fresh diaper or his binky or a book or a song. Even laying out his treasures didn’t soothe him for more than a minute. He would relax in her arms until she could almost convince herself he was asleep, then jerk back into total wakefulness with a roar of outrage.

Desperate, she found herself sneakily googling sleep regression. It was pointless. There was a sleep regression for every week of a baby’s life up to age eighteen when presumably you booted them out to college and it became someone else’s problem. And none of the sites had any advice about dragon babies.

“Pone!” Tomás wailed, clutching at her mobile. “Pone! Pone!”

Did giving him her phone make her a bad mom? Did it mean her phone would be part of his hoard and she would never get it back? Would that be a bad thing? Her phone used to be her life, but these days it was mostly a way for her to read guilt-inducing parenting advice. And call the only other humans in town. Her shifter neighbors were lovely, but they were still coming around to the fact that some people couldn’t magically telephone people using telepathy, and—

Oh. Tomás had the phone now anyway, so—

CRASH!

“Waaaaah!”

And now the floor had her phone.

Yayyyy.

She bundled Tomás onto one hip and clumsily kneeled to pick up the phone as he wailed into her shoulder. The screen was cracked, and she really wasn’t in a mood to discover that it wouldn’t turn on, so she didn’t even try.

“Come on, baby. Let’s go try another snack, okay?”

Her brain flailed at ideas as she made her way to the kitchen. She used to calm him down by bouncing on an exercise ball. Where was it now? Had it come with her to Hideaway Cove? Or was it in the boxes of stuff her mom had arranged to be shipped to her after she moved here? All those boxes she was going to unpack next weekend. One day, next weekend would come, and then maybe she would find her favorite pair of jeans again, too. Except they probably wouldn’t fit.

Better to never unpack anything. Yes. That sounded like a better idea.

“Awawa,” Tomás grumbled. “Hoo! Hoo!”

He puffed his cheeks out like a chipmunk and blew a raspberry at the fridge, then yelled at it.

“What are you doing ?” Maya asked, exhausted.

“Hoo!”

“Do you want to be an owl? Is that it?” She scrabbled a bottle of milk out of the fridge. Tomás growled at it. She put it back in. Tomás started hooting again.

Okay. This was her life now.

That was fine.

She hooted back at him, and he stared at her like she’d just transformed into a dragon. I bet that would make some things easier , she thought with a familiar pang. But Tomás wasn’t screaming, which meant she had approximately oh-point-six seconds to think of something, anything to keep distracting him with so he would forget he was grumpy long enough to fall asleep…

Too late.

Time passed. Or maybe not. Maybe she was trapped in a timeless void, fated to be hooted and cried at by an angry toddler until the sun exploded.

She was half-asleep on the rocker in Tomás’s room—Tomás still switching between chewing on his hands and hooting—when someone knocked on the door.

Oh god.

Tension ratcheted up her spine. Shifters were psychic. What if Tomás had been screaming telepathically this whole time? What if he’d woken up the whole street? What if—

She opened the front door. Sunlight streamed inside. It’s morning already? she thought, dazed, and looked up into Corin Blackburn’s chilly face.