Page 15 of The Sapphire Dragon Prince
My muscles were aching from digging holes and I could have sworn blisters were starting to form on my hands. But I answered, “I’m okay,” with a short, tight smile for him.
“Do you want me to take a turn digging the holes?” Azurus asked.
I shook my head and thrust the shovel into the ground for the twenty-sixth tree. “No, I need to do this myself.”
By the thirty-fifth tree, my arms were starting to feel like rubber. I wasn’t used to so much labor. The sun was still cheery and encouraging overhead and somehow just feeling its rays made me more relaxed. But the work was growing harder and harder, and every time I glanced up to try to gauge where the end of the row might be, it seemed farther away than ever.
The entire process slowed down, and by the fiftieth tree, panic began to fill me again.
“Misha, you’re doing your best,” Azurus said. “I know that and you know that. But you need to let me take a turn at digging the holes or you’ll wear yourself out.”
I thrust the shovel into the ground then looked up at Azurus, fighting against the despair that poked around the edges of my heart and soul. “Shouldn’t I be doing all the work to get better myself, though?” I asked. “Isn’t this my quest and my burden to bear?”
“It’sourquest,” Azurus said, stepping in and closing his hand over mine on the handle of the shovel before I could start digging again. “You’re still doing the work, you’re just doing it differently for a while. Let me do this hard bit for a while. Just because I help you dig the holes, that doesn’t mean you’re not still working hard.”
I gulped a few breaths, trying to decide if I felt guilty for handing over my burden to someone else. I could see that Azurus was right, though. I couldn’t plant fifty more trees all by myself, or at least doing the hardest part of the work. Azurus was my fated mate, the alpha I would be with for the rest of my life. My mind knew that my burdens were his burdens, but it seemed that the only way for my heart to learn that was to let him help.
“Alright,” I said, stepping back from the shovel and over to the line of saplings. “You dig and I’ll place the tree.”
With a warm smile, Azurus picked up where I’d left off, digging a hole so that I could then place the sapling in it. We still filled in the hole together and watered it together, and after a few more trees, I started to feel like I was still doing the work. I hadn’t just handed it all over to Azurus.
The entire process went faster from there. We planted twenty-five more trees, and my heart began to feel light again. The sun felt more comforting than ever, and as we continued down the last stretch of the field, I actually began to enjoy the movement of my body and the strain of my muscles.
“I’m beginning to think Queen Gaia had the right idea in having us set out on this quest together,” I said when we had fewer than ten trees left to plant. “I doubt I could have done it on my own.”
“That’s what a mate is for,” Azurus said with a shrug, then pushed the shovel into the dirt for yet another hole. “Quests and tasks like this are always so much easier when you have someone to work with.”
“And you’re certain you don’t mind doing the work for me?” I asked, trying not to entertain the constant thoughts that niggled at me, saying I was a burden and weak and that Azurus deserved better than me.
Azurus glanced up at me with a look of mild surprise. “But I’m not doing the work for you,” he said. “We’re doing the work together. There’s a difference.”
He smiled, and I was struck by a feeling of love so deep and so unlike anything I’d ever felt before that it gave me the energy to continue on and plant the last of the trees. My whole life, the only people I’d ever had to work together with were my brothers, but there had been times when I felt like I was holding them back from being the men they were supposed to be.
But with Azurus, I felt like I was finally being given the chance to become the man I was meant to be as well. As we planted the hundredth tree, I started to understand what it really meant to be someone’s fated mate.
“There,” Azurus said once the last tree was planted and watered and the two of us stepped back to survey our handiwork. “That’s one hundred trees planted.”
“I don’t know if I can thank you enough for helping me,” I said, stepping slightly closer to him. I wanted to throw my arms around him and hug him tightly, but I didn’t know if I had a right to. Besides, we were both sweaty and dirty from all the work we’d done, although that just made my mate’s scent stronger, which I loved.
Azurus must have somehow read my thoughts. He scooped me around the waist and pulled me in for a tight hug. “You don’t have to thank me for doing what comes naturally to me,” he said.
“Planting magical cherry trees?” I asked with a mischievous arch of one eyebrow.
Azurus laughed. I loved the sound. I loved how light and happy I felt on the inside. It was almost like Queen Gaia’s spell to heal me was already working.
“Being with you,” Azurus answered. “Working side by side with you. That’s what comes naturally to me.”
“I like it, too,” I said, lowering my voice and glancing up at him, bashful from the swell of heated emotions that had begun to swirl in me.
I wanted to kiss him. I wanted to kiss my beloved mate like we hadn’t yet kissed. It wasn’t quite the urgency of heat finally showing up for me, but it was warm and pulsing and whispered of the way things could be.
I was certain Azurus felt it as well. His deep, blue eyes flashed with desire, and the way he held me turned more intimate. Itdidn’t matter that we were both dirty and tired from work, we wanted each other.
I would have lifted to my toes and been bold enough to kiss Azurus first, but we were interrupted by the farmer coming to see our progress.
“You’ve done well,” he said, the surprise of his appearance breaking me and Azurus apart. “The first trees that you planted are already flowering.”
It didn’t seem possible, but when I stepped to the side and craned my neck to get a look at the beginning of the row, which seemed so far away now, it was clear that the farmer was right. The first trees we’d planted were tall and pink with blooms.
