I’m grinning as he shakes his head, trying not to laugh. “Yeah. That’s the one.”
“Okay. What about this car?”
“I got the sense he was following us.”
My stomach drops when I remember the guy from earlier. “Was it a black car?”
His eyes dart open. “How did you know?”
“With a man inside?”
“Chloe, who was that man?”
“I don’t know, but I saw him waiting outside my apartment. He took off when I looked at him.”
Ethan’s big biceps start quivering as he turns back to the lake with a fierce glare. “I knew I should have stopped and pulled him through his windshield.”
“Do you think he works for… Aylwin Kirk?” Just saying his name makes the tiny hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
I’ve been too busy enjoying and discovering Ethan
that I haven’t been thinking of him much. But now it all comes crashing back to me. The cold look in Mr. Kirk’s grey eyes when he pulled me to the floor and handcuffed me. The way he just walked out without a care in the world as I begged and screamed for him to let me loose. The smoke. The fire. Then, Ethan.
“He tried to kill you for a reason,” Ethan says. “Were you in the wrong spot at the wrong time or do you know too much?”
“Probably both.”
Ethan huffs out a breath as his forearm flexes. I jump as the glass in his hand explodes. “I’ll kill him for even thinking about hurting you.”
I drop my eyes, watching the ice cubes slide on the wooden deck as the drink and mint leaves disappear through the cracks.
“I must be too dangerous to him,” I say, more to myself than to Ethan. “I was his secretary. I knew everything. Appointment times, dates, who he met with, who he sent money too. I mailed the checks.”
Ethan stomps back toward the door. “I’m going to make a call.”
“To who?”
“A friend in town,” he says as he grabs the sliding door and rips it open. “Sheriff Austin Peters. Maybe he can find this guy so I can end his life.”
He storms into the house and I just stare at the calm lake as my insides churn. This is not good. I don’t want Ethan going up against Mr. Kirk. What if he gets hurt? Or worse?
God, I can’t even think about it. I close my eyes and take a couple of deep breaths.
When it does nothing to calm me, I open my eyes and gasp when I see an enormous grey bird in the sky.
I narrow my eyes on it and watch in confusion as it plummets out of the sky in the distance, getting bigger by the second.
“Ethan!” I call out to him as the nerves in my belly start to go nuts. “Come see this bird. It’s huge!”
Ethan rushes out a second later and wraps his protective arms around me when he sees it.
“That’s no bird,” he says as he pulls me inside. “That’s a dragon.”
My mouth drops.
“A what?!?”
Chapter Thirteen
Ethan
My bear gets ready to rock as the grey dragon comes swooping down over the lake. My grizzly charges to the surface, snarling and snapping his teeth, and for once I’m happy I have a fierce grumpy bastard of a bear inside me.
Chloe looks pale and terrified as I shove her inside the house and slam the door closed. I want to take her in my arms and tell her she’s safe. Tell her that I won’t let anyone or anything ever hurt her, but I have bigger dragons to fry.
I quickly climb up the stone wall of my house and stand on the roof as he comes. He heads straight for me and my heart pounds in excitement as I wait. I’ve been waiting to make this guy pay for touching my girl for too long. Well, the wait is over.
I grit my teeth and flex my arms as I glare at him. His huge jaws open and just as he arrives over my house, he lets out a ball of fire that surges toward me. I leap over it and grab onto his scaly foot, pulling him down as he tries to rise. My feet leave the burning roof as he struggles to fly higher with my heavy body weighing him down.
“She’s my girl,” I hiss as I reach up and try to grab his wing. My fingers graze it and my body swings back down when I’m unable to grab a hold of it.
My inner grizzly is chomping in my ear, desperate to get out. He’ll get his turn, but first, I want my taste. I want this guy to feel my wrath.
I time the flapping of his wing and when it swings back down, I lurch back up and grab the tip. This time I get a hold of it and yank it down.
The dragon lets out a chirping roar as we start spinning downward like a helicopter with the tail shot out. “No!” I gasp when I see the fire spreading on the roof of my house. Chloe is inside.
Panic starts to fill me as we crash through the trees, snapping branches and breaking trunks before we land hard on the ground. The air is knocked out of my lungs and I can’t breathe as I look around for the dragon. He’s pinned between two trees and can’t move.
“Alright, you furry motherfucker,” I tell my bear as I push up to my knees. “You’ve been a savage bastard my whole life. Now, it’s time to make it all worth it. It’s time for you to shine.”
I let the beast loose and he comes roaring out. He explodes out of me, pissed and ready to defend what’s ours.
I watch from inside as he lets out a deafening roar and charges at the dragon.
Chapter Fourteen
Chloe
I’m getting a seriously bad case of déjà vu as the house fills with smoke. I run outside and frantically look around for Ethan, but he’s nowhere to be seen.
It hits me even more how much I love him and I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself if something happens to him. Ethan told me all about mates and how happily ever after the couples live after they bond, but what about when one of them dies? He didn’t say anything to me about that. About the extreme heartbreak. The intense loneliness. The feeling of wanting to die because you know you’ll never find anything even remotely similar to what you had.
Stop, Chloe. Don’t start spiraling, you have shit to do!
I look up at the roof and curse when I see the flames spreading along it. This place has felt like home over the past few days and I can’t watch it burn.
I rush into the house with my heart hammering in my chest and head straight to the phone. I call 911 and ask the girl who answers named Kinsley to send the fire department over as soon as possible.
After that, I run back outside and grab the hose on the side of the house. I turn it on and try to spray the water onto the flames, but it’s spreading so fast and the water can’t reach much higher than the side of the house.
That’s when I hear the fighting. The sounds are so vicious that they make my legs weak with terror. I know the savage roaring is Ethan’s bear. I know he’s fighting for me, but I still hate that he’s going through this right now and I hate even more that I’m the cause of it. I’ve been nothing but trouble for him since I walked into his life.
The horrible sounds get louder and more vicious as the two animals go at it. I can’t see them, but I can see the tops of the trees shaking where they are.
My eyes are glued to the spot for what feels like hours when suddenly, Aylwin’s dragon comes bursting through the trees into the air.
“Oh my God!” I shout as my hand flies to my mouth. Ethan’s grizzly bear is on top of him, clutching onto the back of the dragon’s neck with his powerful jaws. The rest of his body is hanging down and I can’t breathe as they go higher and higher. If he falls from that height, he’ll surely die.
When they get over the lake, the weight of the bear becomes too much for the dragon or maybe the blood he’s losing from the wound on his neck is making him weaker, but he begins to fall. With Ethan still holding on.
The two plummet as my stomach sinks and then they crash hard into the water, making a giant splash as they disappear down below.
It feels like an eternity goes by as I wait there with my chest burning for him to come up.
“Oh thank God!” I whisper when I see his human head emerge from the water. But my spirits get kicked back down when Aylwin’s human head emerges as well.
Ethan’s protective eyes search me out and then lock onto me when he sees me standing on the balcony in front of his burning house. He starts swimming in a full sprint toward me as Aylwin follows close behind.
I run down to the water to meet him, but he’s shaking his head in a panic as he runs up onto the shore, waving me away. “No! Run, Chloe! Run!”
He’s naked in the waist-deep water and there are long claw marks along his chest that are seeping out blood. I don’t want to leave him. If he dies then I want to die too. I don’t want to be on this planet without him.
“I’m not leaving you,” I tell him and the look on his face is half love, half disappointment. Love that I’m staying with him until the end no matter what and disappointment that the end for both of us might be
soon.
The look doesn’t last long because he turns around just as Aylwin leaps onto him. Ethan catches him in the air, turns, and slams him into the water. I wince as Ethan throws devastating punches that land with hard thuds.
Aylwin wraps his arm around Ethan’s leg and pulls him down and I scream as he disappears underwater. I grab a baseball-sized rock from the shore and throw it at Aylwin with all my might. It hits him in the head and he turns to me with a vicious sneer.
“You’re hardly worth all of this trouble,” he hisses at me. “Once I kill your mate in front of you, I’ll bend you over to see what’s got this bear all worked up. I hardly doubt even that will be worth any of this.”
Ethan leaps out of the water, grabs Aylwin by the neck, and snarls in his face. “That’s the last time you talk to my mate!”
Aylwin’s eyes go wide as Ethan chokes the air out of him. His hands start clawing at Ethan’s wrist in desperation as my protective mate starts to punch him in the face with his free hand.
The sound of a firetruck siren fills the air and gets louder by the second. I turn to run back and meet them, but my body freezes when I see the house engulfed in flames.
It doesn’t matter, I tell myself as my hands begin to shake. All that matters is we survive and end up together.
I grit my teeth and start sprinting to meet the truck. The heat from the flames is so intense that some of the trees around the house have caught on fire as well.
“What happened?” the fire chief asks as he jumps down from the rolling truck. “Where’s Ethan?”
“Come!” I shout in a desperate tone as I run back to the lake. The four of them run after me.
“Is this chick a pyromaniac or something?” I hear one of them ask another as we run.
I guess that’s fair. Every time they see me, I am surrounded by fire.
“Oh shit,” one of them says as we run past the house. “Is that a dragon shifter I smell.”