Chapter 5
“All settled?” Deryk turned from his computer screen to look at Nathaniel as he entered the room they all used as an office.
“Fuck off.” Nathaniel felt no hesitation in using the language he had admonished Chloe for. And yes, that made him a hypocrite, but his mood was so aggressive right now, he needed to work it off somehow. Otherwise, he was going to hit something. Or fuck someone.
Deryk raised his brows. “I apologize for my behavior earlier.” He ran a hand through his already disheveled hair. “I’m back in control now.”
“I’m not.”
His brother studied him intently. “You want her.”
“What gave it away?” Nathaniel threw himself down into the chair behind his desk, and then winced as the tight material of his jeans instantly crushed his balls and cut off the blood supply to his cock. “The glow in my eyes or the fucking hard-on that’s about to burst the zip on my jeans?” He stood up to adjust the length of his cock inside his boxers to something almost comfortable.
“What are you going to do about her?”
“Oh it’s ‘you’ now, is it?” Nathaniel paced the office restlessly. His skin felt itchy and too small for his large frame, which told him he needed to change. To become dragon and fly for a couple of hours to stop this desire for Chloe from totally consuming him.
Deryk shrugged. “It’s obvious you don’t want to share this one.”
Too damned right he didn’t. He would kill any other man that touched Chloe. Any man. He would rip them apart with his bare hands, limb by limb, and then feed them to the—
“Oh God…” He sank down into a chair, threading his fingers tightly in his hair as he groaned. “What the hell is happening to me?”
Deryk eyed him searchingly. “Dylan might be able to tell you that better than me.”
As well as being their healer, Dylan spent a lot of time researching and accumulating all the available knowledge he could on dragons. Most of it was nonsense, of course, written by humans, and more often than not years after an event had taken place. But sifting through the myth and legend and translating some of the older manuscripts was helping Dylan build a file on dragons as well as Annwn.
Although how that was supposed to help Nathaniel right now, he had no idea. “Do you think I’ve skipped a couple of stages and I’m becoming dragon?”
Deryk gave a slow shake of his head. “I seriously think—hope—you might have met your mate.”
Nathaniel snorted. “Don’t be fucking stupid. We’ve all agreed there is no such thing as a fated mate. That it was just a fairy story our mothers told us so we would come to the human realm and protect our brother.”
His brother shrugged. “We’d have done that anyway, once we knew he was our brother.”
True.
But Nathaniel’s fated mate? Fiercely independent Chloe Evans? A twenty-first-century woman with a mouth on her like a dockworker? And a kick that could do irreversible damage to the more delicate parts of his body?
It had been a long time since Nathaniel had given the idea of a fated mate any serious thought. Why bother when it was never going to happen?
But whenever he’d thought about it in those early years, he’d imagined a complacent wife, a woman it was easy to be with, and who would warm his bed, cook his food, and bear his children.
Sixth-century thinking.
Women in this century didn’t necessarily do any of those things. Oh, they might, if that was their choice. But as many women as men had careers nowadays, and quite often the women chose not to have children at all.
Not that children were something Nathaniel wanted. There were too many unanswered questions as to how or if his mate, even if she was dragon, would survive giving birth to their young.
Nathaniel and his brothers had been born in human form, like their father, but that didn’t mean any offspring of Nathaniel’s would be too.
“Chloe’s human,” he stated again flatly.
“So?”
“So we’ve bedded human women for years, but no human female could survive a full dragon mating, let alone giving birth to offspring.”
“We don’t know that.”
“We don’t know anything for certain, that’s the fucking problem.” Nathaniel began to pace again before grudgingly admitting, “I kissed her.”
Deryk didn’t look in the least surprised. “And?”
He closed his eyes, remembering how it had felt to kiss Chloe. The softness of her lips. The warmth of their mingled breaths. The lush contours of her body molded against his. The caress of her hands against his chest and shoulders, and her fingers entangled in the hair at his nape.
It had felt perfect.
“I wanted to take her,” he acknowledged shakily as he opened his eyes. “Mark her. Bite her. Brand her as mine.”
“You did, or your dragon did?”
Having been born human, the brothers had always made the distinction between man and dragon, and yet as the years passed, the lines between the two were becoming more and more blurred. Nathaniel was as much dragon as his dragon was human. They were one entity.
“Both,” he acknowledged.
Deryk shrugged. “Then why didn’t you?”
He scowled at his brother’s lack of empathy for the safety of the woman they were discussing. “Sometimes I wonder if there’s any humanity left in you at all.”
His brother’s eyes narrowed to slits. “If I found a woman I responded to on the level you do Chloe, then I wouldn’t waste any time asking for her permission before I claimed her.”
“Even if it killed her?”
Deryk shifted uncomfortably. “We won’t know that until we try.”
Nathaniel gave a firm shake of his head. “My dragon is too near the surface. I don’t have the right to put her life at risk in that way. Chloe is a person, with feelings and a will of her own.”
“Oh, I noticed that.” Deryk smiled. “I imagine it’ll make taming her all more enjoyable.”
His eyes narrowed. “Keep your fucking thoughts and hands to yourself.”
His brother grinned unapologetically. “Dragon up, Nate, and take the woman.”
“She has friends. A job. Maybe family.” Fuck, she might even have a husband or a long-term partner. Maybe children.
Why hadn’t Nathaniel thought of that before now?
Because his cock and dragon were ruling his head, came the immediate answer.
“As your mate, she wouldn’t need any of those things,” Deryk dismissed.
“A human woman cannot be our mate!”
Deryk frowned. “Did it occur to you that maybe Chloe isn’t completely human? We haven’t found any pure-blooded female dragons, but that doesn’t mean their ancestors aren’t out there somewhere, totally oblivious to who they are and what they could be.”
Was it possible that somewhere in Chloe’s DNA there was dragon blood? It was a big risk for Nathaniel to take if they were wrong. “I would need Dylan to check her blood first, to see if it’s compatible with mine—”
“Dylan isn’t here right now.”
“He could be—”
“We don’t have time for that!” Deryk surged to his feet, his eyes glowing with anger. “I am this close, brother.” He held the thumb and index finger of his right hand a centimeter apart. “This close to turning and never being human again. If one of us can find his mate, then it gives the rest of us hope we will find ours. Without that hope…”
He didn’t need to finish the sentence for Nathaniel to know what it was. Without the bond of a mate, his brother would eventually become completely dragon and have to be killed. The rest of them would follow, one by one, until Welsh dragons were lost to the world forever.
Was that a bad thing?
Nathaniel was no longer sure.
The security work they did aided humans, and it gave the eight of them a focus and purpose they might otherwise not have had. But they still lived a half-life. Neither completely man nor dragon, the lonely hollow deep inside them never completely filled.
“Take a chance, brother.” Deryk’s hand gripped and then squeezed his shoulder. “For all our sakes,” he added softly.
“And if I kill her?”
His brother’s expression was bleak. “Then at least we’ll all know once and for all that there really is no hope for any of us.”
The question was, was Nathaniel willing to risk Chloe’s life in order for them to know that?
“Grigor emailed a short time ago.” Deryk changed the subject when Nathaniel made no reply. “He needs one of us to go to Colombia and help take down a particularly vicious drug cartel. I suggest, as I need to kill or fuck, that someone should be me,” he added bleakly.
As Nathaniel had no intention of leaving Deryk here to do either of those things to Chloe, he nodded agreement of the plan.
“I’ll talk to Dylan once I get to Colombia,” Deryk reassured him. “See if he has any theories other than a fated mate to explain the intensity of your reaction to Chloe.”
Could Nathaniel explain any of this to Chloe? Would she understand? Or just think he was slightly—a lot!—insane.
There was always the option of compelling her to forget once he had told her the truth.
Chloe did exactly what she had said she would and screamed, for the first ten minutes after Nathaniel had left her. As he had warned, no one heard her. At least she presumed they hadn’t, because no one came down to the dungeon to either tell her to shut up or help her escape. All she had for her trouble was a sore throat.
After that, she had paced every inch of the cell looking for a way out. An utterly futile exercise when the walls were obviously solid rock, and the bars at the front of the cell were driven deep into the bedrock, top and bottom.
When those walls began to close in on her, Chloe retreated to a back corner of the small cell before sliding down to sit on the cold stone floor. She wrapped her arms about her knees as she fought the hysteria building inside her.
They were going to kill her.
Sooner or later.
Chloe had absolutely no doubts about that.
Because she had been stupid enough to tell Nathaniel exactly what theory she had regarding the nighttime activities at the castle.
Drugs or arms, either would be a multimillion-pound enterprise, and one none of the men living here would be willing to let a nosy woman put in jeopardy.
She was going to die.
Alone here in this dungeon, in all probability.
They didn’t even have to waste a bullet on her, could just forget she was down here and let her starve to death.
Maybe they were already doing that. It had been almost an hour since Nathaniel left her here, and he hadn’t returned yet with the food or water.
How long would it take her to die without either of them? Before her bodily organs began to break down and then ceased to function altogether?
Days?
Maybe a week, if she was unlucky enough to last that long?
But no longer than that.
Would some studious archeologist a couple of centuries from now, excavating at Pendragon Castle, one day find and unearth her skeleton in this dungeon? Would they carbon date her remains and puzzle over who she was and how she came to be here?
A shiver ran down the length of Chloe’s spine just thinking about it.
Her father had done the best he could to take care of her after her mother died. But he’d had to work to support them both, meaning Chloe was left in the care of childminders a lot, both before and after school. Then he had grown sick while she was away at university doing her final year of a master’s degree in journalism and publishing. She had wanted to drop everything and go home, but her father had insisted she had to finish her degree. He was so ill by the time she graduated, he’d lived only another two months. Chloe had been alone since then.
But she didn’t want to die that way too. She—
Chloe stiffened as she heard the door open at the top of the stairs.
Oh God, she could hear the footsteps coming down those stairs now. Heavy, as Nathaniel’s had been. But that didn’t mean it was him. It could just as easily be the less likable Deryk, coming to take her, before putting her out of her misery.
Chloe stood up slowly, gaze riveted on the hallway as she waited to see which of the men it was.
Deryk, who wanted her dead, no questions asked?
Or Nathaniel, who kept his emotions hidden?
Her knees almost buckled beneath her in relief when it was Nathaniel who appeared and walked down the stone passageway toward her.
Which was totally screwed up when he was just as much her jailer as his brother was.
Nathaniel’s eyes widened as he saw the way Chloe was pressed up against the back wall of the cell, her face pale and her eyes wide with fear. The pupils were so dilated, they were only circled with a thin band of sky-blue. She looked nothing like the fiery woman who had kicked him earlier. Or the responsive woman he had kissed, and wanted to go on kissing, such a short time later.
He scowled darkly as he saw the silver tracks where the tears had dried on her cheeks. Brave and fearless Chloe had been crying. Damn it, he had left the lights on, as he’d said he would, and he hadn’t left her alone down here for very long.
Just long enough for him to regain control, not only of his dragon but of himself.
The evidence of those tears on Chloe’s cheeks was enough to shatter that control. “What the fuck…?” He bent to place the tray he was carrying on the stone floor before taking the key from his jeans pocket and unlocking the cell door.
Chloe was on him before he’d even had chance to repocket the key, climbing up his body until her legs were locked about his waist and her arms tight about his neck. “Please don’t leave me down here to die.” There was a sob in her voice. “Please, Nathaniel!” Her arms tightened even more, and she buried her face against his throat, her whole body shaking.
Nathaniel’s arms moved of their own volition, it seemed, until he had his hands curved about each of her ass cheeks. “No one is going to die,” he snapped his frustration.
“Deryk said—”
“I don’t give a damn what Deryk said,” he rasped. “Now calm the fuck down,” he instructed as she continued to shake in his arms.
She slowly lifted her head to look at him through tear-drenched lashes. “You spanked me when I swore.”
His eyes narrowed. “Well, if you think I’m going to allow you to do the same to me, you’re mistaken.”
She tilted her head. “That doesn’t seem very fair,” she finally murmured, the color returning to her cheeks.
“Life isn’t fair.”
No, it really wasn’t, Chloe acknowledged. Because if life had been fair, her mother wouldn’t have died in a car accident twenty years ago. Her father wouldn’t have died of cancer two years ago. She wouldn’t have such lousy taste in boyfriends. And she sure as hell wouldn’t be the prisoner of the most powerfully attractive man she had ever met.
She was once again surrounded by Nathaniel’s seductive smell, a combination of the freshly turned earth, a pine forest, and heat. Until now, Chloe hadn’t realized you could actually smell heat, but on Nathaniel, she could, that warmth enveloping and seducing her.
Because he felt hot too, reminding her of how cold she had become in the past hour. “I’m going to die of hypothermia if you leave me down here.”
Nathaniel frowned. “I telephoned the inn and asked the landlord to send your things up here. I’m sure you must have brought some sweaters with you.”
One more avenue of escape now denied her. The last avenue of escape now closed off to her.
Chloe had never felt as alone as she did right now. No family. No boyfriend. No close friends. Well, she had friends, from university, but they met on an ad hoc basis whenever they all had a free evening, which was only about three times a year. No one was going to even notice she was missing.
When— How had she allowed herself to become so focused on her career that her life had become virtually empty of everything else?
She knew how and she knew why. Because after the death of both her parents, she had been afraid. To love. To let anyone close enough to love her. To risk losing that person, as she had lost everyone else she loved.
Could she have chosen a worse time or place to have an epiphany?
Then she realized it was probably because it was the worst time and place and she was fearful for her life that she was having the epiphany at all.
And that she may have left it too late to do anything about it.