Chapter 8
Nathaniel had taken one look at the blond-haired Adonis delivering Chloe’s suitcase and claiming to be her boyfriend, and decided he didn’t like him.
His dragon’s kill, kill, kill had been equally as decisive.
Not that Nathaniel was going to go that far, but he had compelled the other man to leave. To his annoyance, Chloe’s sudden appearance seemed to have circumvented that instruction.
No, it hadn’t been Chloe’s appearance that broke the compulsion. That hadn’t occurred until she put her hand on the other man’s arm.
What the fuck…?
As far as Nathaniel was aware, this had never happened before. Ever. A dragon’s compulsion was powerful, unbreakable, which was the reason they rarely used it. And yet Chloe had broken it, and not even for herself, but for someone else. The man who claimed to be her boyfriend.
Nathaniel should have made his earlier questions to Chloe more specific, and not only asked her whether or not she had a husband and children.
Because she obviously had a boyfriend. A man who knew her intimately, from the expression of familiarity in his blue eyes.
More intimately than Nathaniel?
His nostrils flared, hands clenching at his sides, at the thought of this man touching Chloe, of his body inside hers.
Mine.
That inner shout came from Nathaniel this time rather than his dragon. The chivalrous thoughts he’d had earlier in deciding he had to let Chloe go were completely forgotten, to be replaced by a tide of jealousy that made him feel violent. A cold and merciless emotion that wrapped itself around his heart and wouldn’t let go. Chloe was his, damn it.
“I’m afraid I can’t let you leave yet.”
Chloe had been so relieved to see a familiar face, even if it was Keith’s, and to be outside the castle rather than inside it, she had momentarily forgotten they still had to get away from Nathaniel.
She turned slowly to face him, her chin tilted in challenge. “Keith and I are going back to the inn now.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think so,” he drawled.
“You can’t stop us.” Even as she made the statement, Chloe knew she was wrong. Nathaniel had taken her prisoner quite easily earlier today, and she knew he was equally as capable of overpowering Keith. Keith looked fit enough, but he was nowhere near as muscular as Nathaniel. Or as fast.
Nathaniel gave a mocking smile. “I’m not trying to stop you going anywhere, I merely thought you would like to take your backpack and cell phone with you.”
Damn, she had forgotten about them. Well, both those things were replaceable. “I can collect them another time.”
“Why not now?” He indicated she should go back into the castle to get them.
Chloe didn’t trust him to let them go if they delayed too much longer. “Why don’t you go and get them for me, and we’ll wait right here?”
Green eyes glittered with suppressed amusement at her obvious ploy to get him to go back inside the castle while she and Keith beat a hasty path down to the village. “I’m not sure where you left them,” Nathaniel drawled.
“What the hell is going on, Chloe?” Keith was obviously tired of being ignored. “Who is this man? And why are you staying here with him?” he added suspiciously.
She linked her arm in the crook of his. “I’m not. I thought Mr.—Nathaniel,” she absolutely refused to play to his fantasy and call him Pendragon, “was interested in sharing a story of the area with me, but I was wrong.”
Keith nodded. “The landlord said you’d been asking a lot of questions. He also said you sent down for your things.” He looked pointedly at the suitcase he had brought with him.
Chloe gave him a reassuring smile. “He must have misunderstood. I only wanted my camera from my room.” She really didn’t have time for Keith’s misplaced jealousy right now. She was grateful to him for being the means of helping her to get away from Pendragon Castle, but it didn’t change the fact their relationship was over.
Once she was back in the village, she was going to pay her bill, pack up her car, and leave, never to return. Keith could do whatever he wanted. She was leaving.
She turned back to the man standing in the doorway. “I have no idea where you’ve put them, so if you wouldn’t mind getting them for me?”
Nathaniel’s eyes narrowed at her tone. As a dragon, he was at the top of the food chain, bigger and stronger than any other predator. All animals, except some humans, knew better than to oppose him. But in the past the dragon’s ability to compel had always controlled the most rebellious human.
The fact Chloe had broken his compulsion of the man who had introduced himself as Keith Watson with the touch of her hand made Nathaniel question whether or not he had successfully compelled Chloe to forget the things he’d told her about himself and his dragon brothers.
Or was her fear of him because she still believed him to be a drug or arms smuggler, who might or might not kill her for what she knew?
Yeah, that had to be it.
No human could resist a dragon’s compulsion.
Some of the tension left his shoulders. “I’ll only be a minute.”
Chloe waited only long enough for Nathaniel to disappear inside the castle before she started to pull Keith toward the path leading down the mountain. “Move,” she encouraged desperately when he seemed to be lagging behind.
“But your cell phone—”
“I’ll buy a new one! For God’s sake, move it, Keith,” she snapped as he still made no effort to hurry. “The people at Pendragon Castle are—are— They’re up to something illegal, I’m sure of it,” she substituted for completely insane. “I’ll explain it all once we’re back in London—”
“I only just got here,” he whined.
“Then stay and finish the rest of your holiday, but first let’s get back to the village.” Chloe stumbled and slid down the mountainside in her rush to reach the bottom, all the time giving anxious glances behind her in case Nathaniel was following them. “Then I’m packing my car and going home.”
“I have no idea what’s gotten into you,” Keith complained as he finally kept pace with her.
Chloe wasn’t a hundred percent certain what had happened to her at Pendragon Castle either. Most of it was too weird to repeat.
She did know she never intended coming back.
“Why didn’t you go after her?” Dylan studied Nathaniel as if he was one of the specimens he occasionally studied under his microscope.
Dylan had returned to Wales within two days of Deryk leaving. Apparently all the brothers felt that any progress in regard to their fated mates was more important than taking down a Colombian drug dealer. Grigor had decided he was tired of negotiating and they would fire blast the lot of them, anyway. Something Deryk would no doubt enjoy.
The first thing Dylan had done when he returned was ask for an explanation of all that had taken place since Chloe first appeared on their mountain.
Nathaniel answered his brother’s questions, but he really didn’t care one way or the other. Chloe was gone, had willingly left with another man, and that was the end of it.
As Dylan said, he could have followed the two of them, but what would have been the point? Chloe couldn’t wait to get away from him.
“She wanted to leave.” Nathaniel lay stretched out on the couch in the office as he answered his brother dismissively. He hadn’t been back into the sitting room since Chloe left two days ago. There were too many memories in there.
For the briefest time, as he and Chloe made love, Nathaniel had known joy unlike anything that came before it. The memory of it was still inside his head. He didn’t need to go into the sitting room to relive it over and over again, like a never-ending movie excerpt permanently stuck on replay.
“Deryk is of the opinion you should either mate Chloe or kill her.”
Nathaniel snorted. “And, as far as I’m aware, we don’t make a habit of killing innocent humans because of an opinion. Besides, Chloe believes we’re either illegal drug or arms dealers, not dragons.”
Dylan gave a derisive shake of his head. He was as tall and muscular as Nathaniel, his coloring very Welsh: black hair, and eyes a deep sapphire blue. “You’re positive she doesn’t remember anything you told her about the eight of us?”
Nathaniel turned to glare at his brother. “Well, I haven’t seen any newspapers with the headline ‘Dragons found alive and well and living in North Wales,’ have you?”
“Nate—”
“Dylan.” He swung his legs to place his booted feet on the floor as he sat up. “If Chloe ever does remember any of that shit, she’ll just think I’m insane as well as a criminal.”
His brother winced “Well, you did lock her up in the dungeon.”
“And we both know I did that to protect her rather than keeping her prisoner.” Nathaniel stood up restlessly. “Deryk is becoming more and more unstable.”
“Grigor is going to want a report from me this evening.”
Nathaniel stared out the window but didn’t really see anything, the misery of his thoughts all focused inward. “Everything is as it’s always been, Dylan. Just us, in this bloody castle, with the occasional foray out into the world to deal with one of the bad guys.” He sighed heavily. “The exact way it’s been for fifteen hundred years.”
“I’d like to do some blood work on you before I talk to Grigor.”
“Fine.” Nathaniel nodded, without turning.
“How do you feel?”
How did he feel? Empty. Completely fucking empty. No joy, no happiness, no anger, no anything. But he was also restless, and he still had that itching under his skin, as if his dragon wanted to break free of his control. To be able to vent all the emotions Nathaniel wasn’t able to feel.
The problem with that was, Nathaniel knew, if he allowed his dragon free rein, it would focus on only one thing: finding Chloe and bringing her back here with him.
Nathaniel didn’t think he would be able to let her go a second time.
“Like shit,” he answered his brother honestly.
Dylan frowned his concern. “Has meeting Chloe made your dragon stronger or weaker?”
Nathaniel gave a humorless laugh. “Meeting Chloe has given me a permanent hard-on.” His cock had been solid as a rock for the past forty-eight hours.
“You know what you have to do, don’t you?”
“I tried that. It didn’t help,” he drawled. Half a dozen hand jobs gave him absolutely no relief and not a lot of pleasure either. How could they when as soon as his cock was spent, it sprang back up again, as rock hard and aching as before.
“I—” Dylan seemed conflicted. “We think Rufus might have found his fated mate before he died.”
Nathaniel turned abruptly. “Whose we?”
His brother looked uncomfortable. “Grigor and I.”
“Neither of you have ever mentioned this before…”
“No.” Dylan didn’t look happy. “Grigor and I discussed it and decided we couldn’t be certain enough to give the rest of you false hopes.”
“Grigor and you discussed it!” His eyes narrowed. “What the fuck right do the two of you have to keep information like that from the rest of us? And what do you mean, you think Rufus had found his fated mate?”
His brother sighed. “Do you remember the reason the hunters went after him?”
“He was my brother. Of course I remember!” Nathaniel scowled. “Somehow, Lord Haselmere and his little sect discovered Rufus’s secret.”
Dylan nodded abruptly. “The somehow was Haselmere’s daughter, Rebecca.”
“The mousy little thing that no one ever asked to dance?”
Through the centuries, the brothers had often played the part of society gentlemen, in one guise or another. Not so much in the twentieth century or this one, because two World Wars had pretty well destroyed the class system of Victoria’s time. Nowadays, the brothers were happy just to live in their castle and do their security work.
“Except Rufus,” Nathaniel now recalled with a widening of his eyes. “He sought her out several times at society functions the week before he died. Did Haselmere use his daughter as bait to entrap Rufus and kill him, is that what you’re saying?”
“No.” Dylan sighed heavily. “Grigor and I think Rufus was drawn to Rebecca because she was his mate. Did you know she died three weeks after Rufus was killed?”
“I… No, I didn’t know that.” Nathaniel had been too grief-stricken to notice much of anything after his brother died. “Was she ill because of grief after Rufus and her father…died?” They had taken their revenge on Haselmere and his followers within days of Rufus being killed.
“Not exactly.”
“I don’t understand…”
“None of us understands enough, that’s the problem.” His brother moved impatiently. “We… Grigor and I think that Rufus and Rebecca had either completed the mating or partially so. When Rufus died, Rebecca was taken ill with a fever she never recovered from.”
“What sort of fever?”
“You know what it was like in Victorian times, so bloody prudish on the surface and a den of iniquity beneath it,” Dylan dismissed disgustedly. “The Haselmere family described Rebecca’s illness as a fever of the mind as well as the body.”
“What does that mean?”
“Grigor and I believe it was a sexual fever brought on by the need to mate with Rufus, but Rufus was dead.”
“Jesus…”
His brother nodded abruptly. “Without her mate, Rebecca’s heart and body simply stopped.”
“But she was human…”
“Yes.”
Nathaniel sat down abruptly. “We’re able to mate with humans?”
“Again, our information is too sketchy. The family wouldn’t let me near Rebecca, and I’m not sure what I could have done even if they had. We simply didn’t have the technology during that time for me to do the tests I can do now.” He shrugged. “I do have a theory.”
“Which is?”
“Somewhere in her family history, Rebecca had a dragon ancestor.”
“Not related to us?”
“There were other dragons before us, Nathaniel, ones not birthed by a goddess and Uther Pendragon,” his brother said dryly. “We still haven’t ruled out other dragons existing now either. Just because we haven’t found them doesn’t mean they aren’t out there. But we’re getting off the subject,” Dylan continued briskly. “You’ve admitted kissing Chloe, and even though your mating saliva wouldn’t be as potent in your human form as dragon, and you didn’t bite her— You didn’t bite her, did you?”
“No.” But he had wished many times, selfishly, during the past forty-eight hours that he had.
“Then you could have passed some of your saliva on to Chloe when the two of you kissed. If she is your mate, and she has that same weak dragon DNA we believe Rebecca had…”
Nathaniel’s eyes widened. “Fuck.”
“Exactly.”
He flinched. “You think she might be suffering in the same way Rebecca did? In the way I am?”
“That’s why Grigor sent me back here, so that I could decide that for myself. Until now, it’s only been a theory, but… I’ll need to do the in-depth blood work on both of you I couldn’t do on Rufus and Rebecca before I can confirm that theory. But having witnessed your own suffering, the sexual tension, the listlessness, I think it’s a possibility that the mating between you and Chloe has already begun, yes. If it has, you need to go to her as quickly as possible, bite her and—” He broke off with a pained wince.
“Fuck her?”
“I was going to say take her to bed, but yes, fucking would do as well,” he conceded dryly. “Often and repeatedly, until the fever is at a manageable level.”
Nathaniel’s imagination had already given him a vision of a writhing and aching Chloe lying alone in a bed, tendrils of red hair clinging to the dampness of her forehead as her body was racked with a sexual fever that couldn’t be assuaged.
But maybe she wasn’t alone. Maybe that bastard Watson was with her. His enquiries had told him the two of them had left Wales together two days ago. Maybe the other man was touching Chloe even now. Pleasuring her. Attempting to give her the sexual release that belonged to Nathaniel.
Mine.
Yes, Chloe was his, damn it.
And from what Dylan had just told him, finishing the mating with Chloe might be a risk, but not mating her would definitely kill her.