Chapter 6
A knock roused Mack from sleep. He groaned and stretched, then wrapped his arms around the sweet female snuggled close against his side. He wondered if he’d imagined the knock, but then it sounded again, more insistently this time.
“Miracle? Are you dead? You missed breakfast,” a female called loudly through the door.
“Would you quiet down? It’s freaking eight a.m.,” another female said.
“It’s only early if you’re hungover, which I’m not,” the first female replied.
“Oh gosh, are they fighting outside my room?” Miracle asked, punctuating her question with a yawn. She blinked beautiful eyes at him, one amber and one green. He hadn’t noticed her eye color the night before, but then again he’d been consumed with seeing how many times he could make her scream his name.
“I think so. Friends of yours?”
“We met at the airport. They’re sweet, but their timing is terrible.” She slid from the bed, stretched with a squeak and walked to the bathroom to grab a robe from a hook behind the door. She slid it on and winked. “Cover up your bits. I don’t want them to get a glimpse of your goodies.”
He chuckled and tugged up the sheet to cover himself. She opened the door, but positioned herself so that the females outside couldn’t come in or see into the room.
“Sorry, I was sleeping in,” she said. “You guys look like you had fun.”
There was a pause, and then one of the females said, “You’ve got a bite on your neck. Did you meet someone?”
A third female voice said, “You can’t let guys go around biting you. They’ll think you’re their property and I’m pretty sure you said you don’t want to go through that again.”
“I promise that I knew what he was doing when he bit me. We’re mates. We met last night.”
“Not that creeptastic wolf guy you were dancing with?” the first female said.
The third female said, “What if it was him? You just called him creeptastic.”
Mack decided it was time for him to make an appearance, so he wrapped a blanket around his waist and joined Miracle at the door.
Miracle said, “Guys, this is Mack. Mack, these are my friends – Jesmin, Leah, and Aria.
Mack smiled. “Miracle and I met last night, and we’re mates. I’m definitely not creeptastic.”
All three females stared at him in surprise. They said nothing for a long moment, their mouths open and their eyes wide, and then Jesmin said, “That’s fucking awesome! Congratulations!!”
She hugged Miracle, and that spurred Leah and Aria to hug her too.
“It means there’s hope for us! Maybe some more males will show up and we’ll find our mates, too. Happy dance!” Leah said, and proceeded to do a jig in the hallway.
“You should tell the director about your mating. There was a meeting before breakfast and she said that if any of us find our mate, there are some cool activities they have planned. Plus I think you get a nicer room too.” Aria said.
“Thanks, we’ll talk to her later,” Miracle said, waving at her friends and shutting the door.
“They seem nice,” Mack said.
“We’re all kind of in the same boat. It’s hard to start over. I’m pushing forty. My whole adult life I’ve been told I wasn’t good enough to be a mate in the first place, so coming somewhere like this, so far out of my comfort zone I should need a passport, was nerve-wracking.”
“Who said you weren’t good enough?” His hackles rose, and his wolf wanted him to vow to hunt down whoever the asshole was.
“Let’s get breakfast and then we can talk. We kind of skipped over all the talking.”
“I had good intentions,” he said.
“Me too. But I think our actions spoke a lot louder than our words could have. It felt very right to be with you. I haven’t ever felt so comfortable with someone before. You feel like home.”
“You do to me, too,” he said.
Their stomachs growled at the same time, and they both laughed. Instead of leaving the room to scout food, they opened the welcome basket and found a sleeve of crackers, two oranges, a wax-covered wheel of cheese, and a summer sausage. He brewed two cups of coffee and fixed them with creamer and sugar, while she cut up the cheese and sausage. They sat on the couch, him still wrapped in the blanket and her in the robe, and began to share their lives.
“I’ve been a widower for over twenty years. I was mated for two years when Elise was killed during a full moon hunt by a hunter’s stray bullet. I was drowning in grief and unable to even really function as alpha because of it. We had a lot of plans for our future, and then suddenly she was gone and I was alone. I felt like a shell of myself, like the pack would be better off without me in charge.
“And then one night, when I was wallowing in self-pity and one too many drinks, someone knocked on the door. A young shifter girl had been found in a known drug den, next to the body of a dead prostitute. It was the government’s law at the time that any shifter children found abandoned were to be taken directly to the nearest alpha, which was me.
“I’d just lost my mate. I had no idea how to help the little girl they shoved at me, but I took one look into her brown eyes, and I knew that she needed me and I needed to get my head out of my ass to be there for her. I could’ve given her to someone in the pack to raise, but I decided that she’d been brought to me for a reason. So when the government said I could apply to be her foster parent, I did it immediately.
“A few years later, I found a young wolf male who had escaped being killed during a takeover coup with his former pack. My daughter, Whisper, wanted him to be her brother, so I took Kayne in, too. And a little later, an elderly couple brought an abandoned wolf male named Kross to me, and I took him in.
“I adopted all three kids when they were teenagers. They still live in Beyton. Whisper is mated to three hyena-shifter males, and my sons are wooing their hyena-shifter mate right now, as well as trying out being alpha for the next month.”
“I didn’t know that it was a government law for alphas to be responsible for abandoned children.”
“It’s because they don’t understand. They think because we’re shifters that we automatically care about all other shifters, but it doesn’t necessarily work that way. It worked out well for us, though. I got a family I didn’t know that I needed, and they got a protective father figure to watch over them.”
“They never found anyone from Whisper’s family?”
“Actually, last fall she went to a hyena gathering in Pennsylvania and found her mates, and also her three hyena brothers. She’d been kidnapped at age two, and her family lived in Maryland, not too far from where I live. She was reunited with her family, but she chose to stay in Beyton. She teaches music at a local studio, her mates work at the bar, and she and my sons play in a band at the bar.”
“It sounds like you made a wonderful home for them, that’s so sweet. I’m sorry you lost your mate. That must’ve been so hard.”
“It was, but I always hoped that I’d be able to make peace with that loss, and because of my kids, I could.”
“Is that why you came to the resort?”
He nodded. It felt good to share his past with Miracle. “It was time. My kids are grown and mated and starting their families. I knew that none of the pack females were a match for me, and I didn’t want to just randomly pick someone and hope that things turned out well. My wolf wanted to find our other half. To be honest, I wasn’t sure it was possible to have a second chance at love, but I’m sitting here with you right now, knowing that you’re exactly what I needed.”
Her eyes glistened, and she inhaled shakily. “Oh, Mack. You’re just what I needed, too.”
Cupping her face, he kissed her gently. Then he picked up the orange, dug his thumb past the rind, and began to peel it. “That was my backstory; it’s your turn now.”
He dropped the peel onto the plate and split the orange in two, giving her half. She peeled a section off and chewed it slowly. “Do you know anything about dragons?”
“Not a thing,” he admitted. He’d never met any, and couldn’t ever remember even hearing about one, let alone a group of them.
She smiled. “My parents were in their fifties when I was born. They’d tried for years to have offspring, but although neither were sterile, it just never happened. When my mom finally became pregnant, they said I was their miracle – so that’s where my name came from. Right away, the clan thought something was wrong with me because my eyes are different colors. It’s an abnormal trait. The elders were all watching me, like they were afraid I was defective. Then when I didn’t shift into my dragon at the traditional age of twelve, they were certain that I would never shift. I did, finally, at eighteen.”
“Did they apologize for being assholes?”
He didn’t even know the dragon elders, but anyone who thought something was wrong with a child just because she happened to have bi-color eyes wasn’t a good person.
“Of course not,” she said, shaking her head with a chuckle. “That would mean they were wrong, and the elders are never wrong. My shift is screwy, too. I have odd-colored scales; they’re dark green with splotches of brown and black, which isn’t in my family’s color line. My mother is a beautiful jade green, and my father’s scales are steel blue. No dragons in my clan’s history have ever had multi-colored scales like mine.”
“Did they try to exile you from your clan?”
She didn’t say anything for a few moments while she finished the orange half. She didn’t meet his gaze, which told him that she was embarrassed about whatever had come after she shifted.
He linked their fingers. “Whatever it is, it won’t change the fact that we’re mates, or how I feel about meeting you, which is supremely lucky.”
She looked up at him with a half-smile. “The king is the head of the elders. He’s basically the boss of everyone. It’s tradition in the clan that females are mated when they’re eighteen. Because I hadn’t shifted at the right time, and my eyes and scales were screwy, the elders insisted I have a fertility test done. Much to my humiliation, it was made known to the whole clan that I was unable to carry young. The king said it was a good thing, because I was so flawed.”
Mack growled so loudly that she stopped speaking and a tear tracked down her cheek. He brushed it with his thumb. “You’re not flawed, Miracle.”
“Maybe not to a shifter group that doesn’t care about that kind of thing, but dragons do. The king attempted to arrange a mating for me with males from other clans, but one glance at the list of my…issues, and no one would look at me twice. My parents told me I should embrace myself no matter what, and that if I was single for my whole life than that was okay. I didn’t want to be single, you know? Dragons can mate with other shifters or humans, but we can’t live with the clan if we do. Although it occurred to me to strike out on my own, I didn’t want to leave my parents. The king eventually found a male who would mate me – his nephew. He was such a lousy person that even though he was related to the king, no female of worth would accept him. I was told to accept the mating as arranged by the king, or leave the mountain forever. Never see my parents or my friends again. Always be an outsider, a clanless dragon.”
Miracle explained that it hadn’t taken her long to realize that her mate had no redeeming qualities. He drank to excess, whored around with females, refusing even to hide his behavior, and took every opportunity to tell her that she was worthless.
Wolf packs in the past had arranged matings. They were often done to merge two groups together, such as when the daughter of one alpha mated the son of another. Mack’s grandfather had been part of an arranged mating, but he told Mack that he knew his father had chosen well because he’d loved his mate fiercely and his wolf had chosen her, too. Maybe arranged matings had a place in the past, but they had no place in the world today. How could a male know what a female would need in her mated life? It was idiotic to assume that one person, king or not, could make that kind of decision. And certainly, if the king knew what sort of male his nephew was, then he wasn’t worthy of the kingship title himself.
“I had to wait until we were mated for twenty years, and then I could petition the elders to free me from the mating. I had to prove that he’d been unfaithful and that he was a bad mate. He protested the mating being severed, but I had so many witnesses that the elders sided against him and with me. I was given our house in the dissolution, but I didn’t want it. I moved in with my parents, but I had to go back to the house because of my glass studio in the backyard.
“A week after the dissolution, he destroyed my studio. The king gave me the funds to restore it, and I had planned to rebuild it behind my parents’ home. Going on this vacation was my friend’s idea. She said I needed to be around males who would appreciate me. I thought she was nuts.”
Mack grinned. “She turned out to be very smart.”
When they were finished eating, she got dressed while he cleaned up the kitchen. Then he wrangled on his salt-stiffened jeans and shirt, and she followed him up to his room on the fourth floor. They made love in the shower before they both got dressed again.
“I think the girls got the better rooms,” she said as she buttoned a pretty pink top over her white lacy bra.
“Guys only care about nice rooms if there are ladies in them,” he said with a wink.
“You’re such a charmer.”
“I’m a little rusty, so I’m glad to hear that you like my skills.”
She chuckled and took his offered hand. “Let’s go meet with the director and see where the day takes us.”
“As long as we’re together, I don’t much care what else happens.”
And that was the truth. Even though the director was tickled pink to know that a couple had mated because of the resort, Mack could care less about the perks that came along with it. They were upgraded to a suite on the fifth floor, which overlooked the beach, but the best view in the whole place was Miracle’s smile.
After the bellhops moved their luggage, they checked out their new suite and were treated to a special lunch, courtesy of the director: steak and lobster, with chocolate cheesecake for dessert. She gave them a list of couples’ activities, such as a dinner cruise out in the bay, a candlelight dinner on the beach, and surf lessons, but as far as Mack was concerned, he’d gotten his prize in the form of a beautiful dragon shifter. As long as they were hanging out, they could attend a spelling bee and he’d be in heaven.
Miracle held his hand as they walked on the beach at dusk. She swung her sandals in her other hand, and he’d rolled up his trousers and was carrying his shoes. The sand was still warm from the afternoon sun, and the breeze blowing off the ocean smelled like salt and sunshine.
“Tell me about your tattoo,” he said.
“My friend Tonya drew it for me. She’s a freelance artist, and she’s always drawing in a sketch pad. She said that the phoenix was perfect for me, because it symbolized the freedom I’d been given. Dragon skin is impossible to tattoo, so I had to get tears to add to the ink beforehand.”
“Tears?”
“Dragon tears.”
“I…what?”
She laughed as she stopped and he turned to face her. She looked even lovelier in the golden glow of the setting sun. Her hair was windswept and her cheeks were flushed with happiness.
“I shifted into my form and I thought of something really sad. Basically, that I’d wasted my youth on a jerk who couldn’t have cared less about me. Tonya collected the tears in a vial, and I gave them to the tattoo artist, who added them to the ink. It made the tattoo permanent. No matter how many times I shift, it will never fade.”
The phoenix tattoo was very pretty. The feminine design was outlined in black, and beautifully colored with orange, red, and yellow. It was such a detailed tattoo that he expected it would fly off her shoulder at any moment. That her tears were mixed in with the ink made the image even more special.
“It’s a lovely tattoo. Your friend is very talented. I’ve never gotten a tattoo; maybe it’s time. Would your friend draw something for me?”
“I’m sure she would. We can talk to her when we go to pack up my things.” She made a face. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“What part?”
“About packing me up.”
“You told me that you couldn’t stay in your clan’s mountain if you mated a non-dragon. I expected you would come to live with me in the pack.”
She let out a relieved breath. “Okay. I know we just met last night, and you said we could take our time to get to know each other. We have the month here.”
“I was thinking we could stay here for a week or two and then go pack up your belongings. If the clan would let me stay for a while, you can spend time with your parents.”
“I’ll check in with my mom and dad, but I think you’d be able to stay in the mountain if it’s only for a short time.”
Mack wanted to make a studio for her so she could continue to do her glasswork, which she spoke about animatedly. She’d shown him photos of her beautiful glassware. He couldn’t wait to watch her create things.
“Are you comfortable living in my house? I would understand if you wanted us to have a place that’s just for us.”
“Your past has made you into the amazing male before me. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere but where you call home.”
“There’s room for a studio for you, we’d just have to clear some trees.”
“I can do that. My dragon is super strong.” She flexed her arm and made a muscle, giving him a light growl and waggle of her eyebrows.
He kissed her with a laugh. “You’re precious, babe. Every inch of you.”
“Aw.”
“Tomorrow we’ll call your parents and make plans to visit them when we’re done here. And I’ll call my kids and share the news with them. They’ll love you, I’m sure. Who wouldn’t want a gorgeous dragon as their step-mom?”
“I can’t wait to meet your family, Mack, and for you to meet mine. My parents will adore you, and that’s not just because you saved my life. You’ve already treated me a thousand times better than my ex ever did. Leaving the mountains will be hard because of my parents, but they’ll know it’s for the best because I’ll have you.”
“They could come to Beyton,” Mack said, thinking of the rental homes that were available in town.
“I don’t think they’d be happy anywhere but the mountain. I always knew I’d be happier somewhere else. I should’ve left years ago, but I didn’t want to lose them and be alone. Now you’re my family, too, and I won’t be alone.”
“And neither will I.”
They kissed again, a sweet, soft one, as the surf rolled against the beach, the breeze rustled through the palm trees, and the sun set on the first perfect day of their new life together.