Once again, Bird’s face flamed. “He was probably laughing at me, with my boobs covered in fake blood, and this awful tie.”
Godiva gave a disbelieving grunt as she started toward her car, which she’d left parked illegally beside the path. “If that smile was making fun, then I’m an armadillo. C’mon, campers, I hear coffee calling me. Pile in.”
“I’ll meet you there,” Bird said, unlocking her bike.
Her trick knee twinged painfully after that long climb, and she felt sticky and overheated. But she was glad to be alone for a few minutes. It was so strange, to feel so . . . unsettled around a man. She’d thought that part of her long dead. Safely dead.
But try as she might, as she biked along the familiar back streets of the little town, she kept seeing those silver eyes, and his smile. His lean, strong body, which made everything he did attractive. That bow that made him seem as if he’d stepped out of another, more elegant time.
If she was that set on returning to her hormonal teenage years, she might as well give in and let her imagination roam freely. She only had one skill, the ability to draw what she saw. She could paint him, and give him the beautiful setting that smile, and that body, deserved. After all, it was the only way she’d ever see him again, because he sure wasn’t coming to a writing group with an old bat like her in it...
No. That was the self-pity express. Already been there, done that, and they don’t award a T-shirt.
She cut it off at the pass by reminding herself of what she liked about her life. It was a good life, and one she’d made herself, bit by bit, friend by friend. Her cottage was tiny, but she’d decorated it and made it her own. So she had to scrape a little at the end of every month and be careful the rest of the time, but she had her health, and good friends, and a lovely environment. Best of all, her kids were back in her life.
She’d tuck silver-eyed Mikhail away among the Beautiful Things in her memory bank. There, she was positively rich. Whenever she woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep, or if her knee was extra-cranky, or memory of Bartholomew hurt her, she took out those images one by one. They never failed to restore her.
As she turned her bike onto Via Royale, the town’s main drag, she reflected that every detail about him was so very . . . vivid. She could call up every detail, not only of him, but his surroundings. For example, after his unexpected appearance, she was quite certain that that the only footprints on that beach had belonged to herself and the other three women. It was as if he’d materialized out of thin air.
Ah, well, she thought as she coasted her bike up to the bike rack by the coffee shop. No doubt there was some perfectly boring explanation.
TWO
MIKHAIL
Mikhail Tadeusz Kosciusko Tian-Long, Dragon Knight, Sentinel of the Imperial Peace, Defender of the Realm of the Eastern Heavens, and currently masquerading as a Professor of Art History, stood alone on the strand, leaning one hand against a towering pillar of stone, the other gripping his swordstick.
He should have been inside the cave, but instead he gazed out over the sea. Ordinarily his kind of dragon found peace from water and the vast canopy of the sky, preferring to live near oceans, seas, lakes, and rivers. Ponds, if necessary. But there was no peace for him now even so close to the vast Pacific Ocean, sparkling in the early morning sun. After all these many years, in the twilight of his life—
We have many more years left, his dragon interrupted his thoughts, somehow uttering a thundering snort without making any actual sound. The man who currently went by the name Professor Mikhail Long still wondered how his dragon managed to do that.
Mikhail had long since ceased to care about his age, which made him phenomenally successful on the sort of dangerous missions that younger dragons eager to work their way up the hierarchy insisted they should be chosen for, and then frequently failed to complete. But few of them possessed the experience and detachment that made him both successful and very, very dangerous.
He had been dispatched on yet another mission whose possible dangers he was not thinking about now. Instead, he contemplated the staggering irony of suddenly, against all possible odds, finding his mate now.
Twilight, hah. We have MANY years left, his dragon’s thought continued, with smug satisfaction, And now so does she.
Mikhail stepped to the edge of the towering rock, leaned out, and lifted his gaze to the four women toiling slowly up the switchbacks. His eyes snapped to the last of the four. All he could see was her back, and above that, a wildly curly thatch of graying dark hair. Every line of her evoked a powerful tenderness that hollowed him behind his ribs, leaving him veering between laughter and wonder.
“She’s human,” he murmured.
She is ours, his dragon retorted, as always arrowing straight to what was important. And we are hers.
He watched from behind a rocky outcropping as she disappeared at the top of the trail, his heart constricting. But there could be no doubt that they were mates. Whatever else you could say about it, the mate bond was as unsubtle as it was inarguable. It sang through his bloodstream, forcing him to fight the urge to run up that path just to get another glimpse of her . . .
Bird.
The mere thought of her name made him smile at the ever-changing sea, a smile that changed to a wince when he recalled taking that other hapless woman down in an air-to-ground drop that easily could have been lethal. It would have been, had he not felt in that split second of transformation between dragon and human that his target had no violent intent. He’d pulled back with all his strength, like a jet throwing the engines in reverse, and merely laid his sheathed sword gently over his target’s shoulders.
It was then that he, confused, had chanced meet Bird’s laughing eyes. Their inner power had poured through him with the strength and beauty of sunlight on water.
Bird. What a perfect name.
The after-image still sparkled in his mind, incandescent with the brilliance and complexity of her emotions, which he’d felt through the mate bond.
His mind seemed to have frozen more solid than the great blue-white wastes in the far north, cold even when the sun hung motionless in the sky. But his inner dragon hummed with pleasure.
Eh?