Chapter 4
“No, I haven’t mated her. I wouldn’t do that until we know what’s going on,” Aeran informed his brother stiffly after letting Rhys into his sitting room and seeing the way his brother looked about the otherwise empty room before sniffing the air. “She’s in the bathroom taking a shower.”
Rhys listened for the sound of the water running before nodding tersely. “I…wish to apologize. For my behavior earlier.” His gaze didn’t quite meet Aeran’s.
Aeran flexed his back and shoulders. “Already healed.”
“Nevertheless, I shouldn’t have attacked you in that way. I—Deryk seems to be of the opinion that Cristina is indeed mate to both of us.”
That was what Aeran had been afraid of. Even though a part of him had already known it was the truth. Rhys’s possessive behavior was too like his own for it to be anything else.
He sat down abruptly. “How the hell is that even supposed to work? We take her to our beds on alternate nights?” The thought of that made Aeran feel ill. Now that he had found her, he didn’t want to be parted from Cristina for even a second, let alone allow her to go to Rhys’s bed on alternate nights.
“Deryk says no.” Rhys still wouldn’t look at him. “For the mating, at least, we would both have to be present and inside Cristina at the same time when we give her the mating bite on the back of her neck—”
“No!” Aeran stood up again, too restless to remain seated. “For fuck’s sake… She’s human. Taking the two of us at the same time would probably kill her!” Every instinct in his body protested against hurting Cristina. Ever. “I’ll step back, let you have her, rather than ever risk hurting her.” He had no choice if he cared for Cristina at all. And he already cared for her too much to ever allow any harm to come to her. From him or anyone else.
Rhys did look at him now, respect in his eyes rather than animosity. “You’ll die if you don’t mate now that you’ve found her.”
Aeran sighed heavily. The euphoria he’d felt earlier at finally finding his mate, had turned to dust in his mouth now that he knew it was indeed possible for her to be Rhys’s mate too. “Then I’d rather die than hurt Cristina.”
Rhys’s frown was pained. “That isn’t going to happen.”
Aeran gave a humorless laugh. “I don’t think I asked or need your permission to decide what to do with my own life.”
“Actually, you do.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
His brother shrugged. “As you know, Deryk has been compiling a history of the Russian dragons, along with our own. Making comparisons between the born Russian dragons and the made Pendragon ones.”
The Pendragon brothers had all been born on the invisible island of Annwn, off the coast of Wales, where the Welsh Underworld resided. Their mothers had all been Welsh goddesses and their father human. At the age of thirty-five, the brothers had come into their dragon shifter powers and left Annwn in order to aid and fight for their brother, the King Arthur of legend.
“The three Russian dragons that mated were originally two men who were later joined by a female,” Rhys continued his explanation. “They were locked into a ménage à trois that would have killed all of them if the bond was ever broken.”
Aeran shook his head. “We haven’t started the mating yet. There’s been no exchange of bodily fluids.” Even a kiss, the giving of dragon shifter’s aphrodisiac in his saliva, could begin the mating. Much as Aeran might have wanted to kiss Cristina these past few hours, he hadn’t done so. And he hadn’t allowed Rhys close enough to kiss her either.
“Apparently, it doesn’t work the same way in a ménage à trois.” Rhys grimaced. “Simply finding the third in the mating starts the process. It’s unstoppable, Aeran. Deryk believes if we don’t complete the mating, claim Cristina together, then all three of us are going to die in three weeks.”
It was a quirk in the Pendragon dragons’ mating, ordained by their Welsh goddess mothers. Once the female mate had taken some of the mating aphrodisiac into her body, present in the dragon shifter’s saliva or semen, they then had three weeks to complete the mating with the claiming bite to the nape, making an exchange of blood and saliva, or they would both die.
At least that was how it had worked for Aeran’s six brothers.
There had been a slight difference in Dylan’s mating to Holly, when he had actually plummeted from the sky merely flying above the hospital where his mate was working.
Yet another anomaly had appeared when Grigor’s mate left the castle, and him, to return to her former life after the mating had been completed. Grigor had gone into a deep Dragon Sleep, which he had woken from only when Gayle returned to him.
But this, there being two dragon shifters and one female, and the mating beginning without their mate taking some of the dragon aphrodisiac into her body, was something none of them could have expected.
Aeran ran his hand wearily over his eyes. “Even if that’s true, how are the two of us supposed to share a mate? We don’t even like each other.”
His brother scowled. “I like you just fine. You just irritate the hell out of me.”
“Ditto.”
Rhys gave one of his rare smiles. “Our mate is something else, though, hm?”
“She’s many things, all of them good,” he agreed. Cristina was beautiful, strong, and brave, and eminently suitable as a dragon shifter’s mate. Except in this case, she would become the mate of two dragon shifters.
Rhys’s scowl returned. “Did you persuade her into wearing something less revealing?”
He gave a knowing smile. He agreed with Rhys that the thin camisole top and skimpy shorts, while sexy as hell, really weren’t suitable for Cristina to wear in the presence of other men. “She has one of my clean T-shirts and some sweats, both of which are going to be far too big for her,” he acknowledged ruefully.
Rhys scowled. “Anything is better than what she was wearing earlier. I disliked intensely having Grigor and Deryk seeing Cristina in so few clothes, even though they’re both very happily mated.”
“Me too,” Aeran acknowledged wryly. “But I can’t believe you threatened to spank her.” He gave a shake of his head.
Rhys grinned. “She wants me to spank her. I could smell her arousal just thinking about it. She was so wet, her juices were soaking through those shorts.”
Aeran had detected her arousal too.
And his twenty-first-century man had been shocked by it?
Not particularly. Whatever their mate wanted, he was willing to give it to her, and if Cristina wanted to be spanked, then Aeran would happily give her that too. He had a feeling he might enjoy seeing Cristina’s bottom cheeks reddened from half a dozen well-placed slaps. Before fucking her silly, of course.
He sobered. “Are we going to be able to do this, Rhys?”
His brother nodded. “We have no choice when the alternative is death. For all of us. We’ll make it work, Aeran. We have to,” he added fiercely.
He voiced another of his concerns. “What are we going to do about her connection to Fescaru?”
A nerve twitched in Rhys’s tightly clenched cheek. “She’s ours now. Besides, after sixteen hundred years of life, neither of us is exactly an innocent.”
Aeran snorted. “It’s been a while.”
Rhys eyes him curiously. “How long is a while?”
“Fifty years or so. You?”
Rhys shrugged. “A couple of centuries.”
“A couple of…! Jesus, Rhys, how the hell did you manage that?”
“It wasn’t difficult. Unless you haven’t noticed, I’ve been a grouch for the same amount of time,” Rhys mocked himself. “I was getting close to the edge,” he admitted quietly. “Finitely balanced on making that final shift into dragon. I thought it best to keep myself away if I did that final shift so that I didn’t hurt anyone before you could all hunt me down and kill me.”
The knowledge of that possible final shift was something else the dragon shifter Pendragon brothers had been living with all this time. If they didn’t find their mate in time, they would go completely feral, shift into dragon, and remain that way as they forged a path of death and destruction before their brothers were able to find and destroy them. At the same time possibly revealing the dragons’ existence to humans.
It was another reason why he and Aeran had to work together now they knew Cristina was mate to both of them. The alternative was death for them all.
Before he met Cristina, Rhys hadn’t particularly minded the thought of dying, once he realized he was teetering on the edge of shifting and remaining dragon. He had welcomed it. But having met his mate, breathed in Cristina’s unique scent, and recognized her as being his, all that had changed. Rhys now wanted to live. To mate. To spend the rest of his long life in service to Cristina’s happiness and pleasure.
“You should have told us.” Aeran frowned. “We all just thought you were a grumpy bastard.”
“More of a grumpy bastard?” Rhys said dryly.
“Well…yes.” His brother grimaced. “Thank God we’ve found Cristina in time.”
“Which suite of rooms shall we use?” Rhys prompted on a more practical note. “Yours or mine?”
“Your suite reminds me of a monk’s cell.”
“Possibly because I’ve lived like a monk for the past two centuries. Besides, I was never in there.”
“This suite, then.”
“I believe Cristina would prefer it.” Rhys had been alone so long, it was going to take him a while to adapt to the thought of always putting his mate’s needs above his own. Aeran’s too, apparently. “We might just manage to do this between the two of us.”
“Let’s hope so.” Aeran nodded.
Rhys chuckled. “You can be the reasonable one, and I’ll be the disciplinarian.”
“I’d like to spank her too occasionally.”
The two men fell into a reflective muse for several minutes before Aeran roused himself to speak again. “When I mentioned Fescaru just now, I wasn’t referring to Cristina’s previous relationship with him. I meant she isn’t going to be happy about the fact we were both in full knowledge of and instrumental in the man’s capture and death.”
Rhys grimaced. “We didn’t kill him, merely provided Nikolai Volkov with the information of where to find him. After what Fescaru almost did to Gayle, he deserved whatever the Russian decided to do with him.”
Aeran winced. “I’m not sure Cristina will see it that way. Talking of which…” He glanced toward the closed bathroom door behind which the shower could still be heard running. “She’s been in there a hell of a long time.”
The two men looked at each other, both seeming to come to the same conclusion at the same time as they rushed toward the adjoining bathroom.
The water was still running in the huge walk-in shower cubicle, the steam fogging up the room, the glass doors of the shower cubicle, and the mirrored walls. But even so, it was obvious to both men that the room itself was empty.
The small, open window beside the sink vanity showed the reason why it was.
Cristina had escaped out the window.
Rhys sniffed the air before moving closer to that open window. “She hurt herself climbing out.” He ran his fingers along the edge of the frame, lifting them to show fresh blood on his fingertips.
Blood that would make tracking Cristina so much easier than merely following her scent.
After which Rhys was definitely going to administer that first spanking, as a warning to Cristina never to try to leave them ever again.
It was too cold and dark for Cristina to any longer believe that she had been caught up in a weird nightmare the past couple of hours. She hated being cold, would never have willingly dreamed of walking down a steep rock-strewn mountain that was cutting and abrading the soles of her feet. There was also a chill wind whipping about her face and body.
None of which was helped by the fact she couldn’t seem to stop crying. For her father. For herself. For whatever this situation was.
Nor was there any denying the fact that she was on a rugged mountain—that Rhys and Aeran claimed was in North Wales—with no lights visible as a sign of there being any habitation nearby. Which only made her cry harder.
At least it was a moonless night. The white T-shirt and gray sweats Aeran had given her to wear, and which were far too big for her—the T-shirt reached almost down to her knees, and she had rolled up the bottom of the legs of the sweats, only keeping the sweats up at all by having pulled the tie tight and fastening it about her waist—would have been far too easy to spot otherwise. Because she knew, without a single doubt, that Aeran and Rhys would try to track her down the moment they realized she was no longer in the bathroom.
If she could just get to a road. Any road. She would have a better surface for walking, and the road had to lead somewhere, right? Of course it did—
Cristina let out a scream as there was a sudden rush of air that whipped her hair even more wildly about her face, followed by the appearance of two huge—two huge—
What the hell were these things?
They looked like—like—
Twenty-foot-tall dragons!
“You’ve been naughty, little girl.” The paler of the two’s voice reverberated in the darkness.
“Very much so.” The second one’s voice was just as deep.
Talking twenty-foot-tall dragons.
“You hurt yourself escaping out the window,” the first dragon rebuked.
“Where are you injured, mate?” The second dragon added its disapproval.
“It’s just a scrape on my knee.” Cristina was so shocked by this whole situation, she found herself answering them.
The first dragon sniffed the air. “You’re still bleeding.”
“You have also been crying,” the second dragon admonished.
“Well, of course I’ve been crying,” she snapped. “This might all seem normal to you, but it’s fucking weird to me.”
“Watch your language,” the darker dragon growled.
“Show respect,” the other one snapped.
Cristina knew instinctively that the paler dragon was Rhys; it had called her “little girl,” after all, and demanded “respect,” just like he did. Which meant the slightly darker one was Aeran?
Confirming that Rhys had been sniffing the air at her father’s apartment.
Because he could smell her. At least, his dragon could.
Rhys’s eyes were the color of aquamarine.
And Aeran’s were a deeper shade of amethyst.
And before her stood two dragons, one with luminous aquamarine eyes and one a bright amethyst.
Was this the reason for all the Pendragon brothers having different-colored eyes? Because they were the color of their dragon?
What the hell am I doing?
Who gave a shit what the brothers’ strange eye color had to do with anything when there were two bloody great dragons standing in front of her?
Dragons!
Dragons didn’t exist, for God’s sake. They were a myth. Legend. Stories made up to scare the peasants and nobles alike during medieval times.
The same time period that Aeran and Rhys claimed they had been born.
“Time to go home for your spanking,” the Rhys dragon growled.
“We’re both looking forward to it,” the Aeran dragon added with obvious relish.
“Maybe then you’ll think twice about running away from us in future and putting yourself in danger,” Rhys rumbled.
Putting herself in danger? The only danger Cristina was aware of right now came from these two…two…two men who could shift into dragons.
She eyed them warily. “Are the two of you friends again now?”
“We’re your mates. Your happiness is all that matters to us,” the Rhys dragon stated firmly.
Cristina shook her head. “I don’t even want to know what that means. But what would make me really happy is for you to let me leave here so I can go back to London and forget any of this ever happened.”
“We will allow you many things, mate, but you will not leave us,” the Rhys dragon snapped.
“Never that,” Aeran confirmed.
Cristina swallowed hard. Was she really standing here, halfway down a Welsh mountain, her feet sore and bleeding, her knee aching, wearing men’s clothing that was far too big for her, and having a conversation with two huge dragons?
Not just any dragons, but ones that could shift into the devastatingly attractive Aeran and Rhys Pendragon?
The spanking comment seemed to confirm that was exactly who she was talking to.