Page 12 of Hunter

She had dated in the past, and enjoyed the company of the men she went on those dates with, but she’d never had such a physical reaction to any of them.

It was as if?—

She gave Hunter a sharp glance after she heard him give a low and pained groan. “Are you feeling okay?”

“No.” A nerve pulsed in his tightly clenched jaw. “I need to get out of the confines of this car and breathe in the outside air,” he growled as one of his hands reached out to take a tight grip of the dashboard. It immediately gave a protesting groan at this rough treatment.

Enough so that Zoey feared Hunter’s hand might leave a permanent dent in the plastic molding. “Are you feeling car sick?”

“I can’t breathe!” he gasped.

“Wind down the window,” she advised quickly as she hurriedly turned the car down the lane on the left as he had requested.

Hunter did as she suggested, letting in the frigidly cold air from outside before breathing it deeply into his lungs. “It’s helping, but I really need to get out of this car,” he grated seconds later.

Zoey glanced at him, noting how rigid his body was with tension, his fingers still tightly gripping the dashboard. “To get away from the car or me?”

“Both.”

Zoey immediately bristled. “That isn’t very nice after I’ve offered to drive you into town.”

He gave a shake of his head. “I— It isn’t— Your scent is driving my—meinsane!”

She frowned. “I’m not wearing any perfume.”

“I said scent, not perfume.”

Zoey’s hands tightened on the steering wheel as she drove the Mini slowly down the narrow lane. “Are you saying I have some sort ofsmellyou find offensive?” She might be guilty of being completely aware of his seductive musk, but that didn’t mean she welcomed him saying something similar in regard to her.

“Not offensive,” he quickly assured. “Just— Everyone has their own scent,” he explained. “I find yours, Lily of the Valley, to be— I am so fucking this up,” he muttered as if to himself when Zoey continued to frown.

She snorted. “Only because your attempts to explain yourself sound bloody insulting.”

“Damn it, I’m just going to go for it,” he bit out from between clenched teeth. “Dragons.”

Zoey gave him a quick and startled glance before turning her attention back to looking out the front window at the winding and narrow lane ahead. The hedge was starting to encroach on both sides now, narrowing the lane even further.

“Going a little off track, aren’t we?” she observed lightly, having decided it was probably safer to humor Hunter’s totally unrelated comment.

“You mentioned vampires earlier,” he reminded.

She huffed. “So, you just thought, completely out of the blue, that you would bring up the subject of dragons?”

He gave a humorless grin. “Something like that.”

Zoey was becoming more and more convinced that she had made a mistake in offering to drive Hunter into town. In being alone with him at all. Her physical reaction to him aside, there was obviously something seriously notnormalabout this man.

He had also blatantly lied earlier, she reminded herself, so that he could gain access to her uncle’s house. After which, he had proceeded to tell her that Ben had been murdered, as well as implying her guardian had somehow been involved in the younger man’s death.

Yet, Zoey had still voluntarily left Tregarthen House with him.

And now, completely unrelated, he had started talking about dragons.

So maybe that meant there was something seriously wrong with her rather than with Hunter?

Whichever of those things it was, Zoey was now alone in a car with Hunter Drake. On her way to a beach no one knew they were going to, where there were no houses, and which she was sure was going to be totally deserted at this time of year.

Hunter knewhe was handling this situation badly, but being confined in such a small space with the woman he was now sure was his true mate, breathing in the heady perfume of Lily of the Valley, was driving his dragon’s senses into overload.

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