Page 55 of Dragon His Heels
Chapter 16
With Ruby seated on his left arm, Gabe stared down at the man he hadn’t seen since, what? He had still been a toddler, barely walking and talking. Three, maybe four.
He didn’t remember his mom. But his dad—he had vague recollections of the man who was supposed to be there for him, was supposed to help shape him into an adult, a respectable dragon. A future reeve, as it turned out.
And he’d done none of that. Instead, if the rumors were true, he’d been so devastated by his mate leaving that he’d abandoned his only child to chase after her. And neither one had returned for him. Until now.
Thirty years too late.
“Hello, son. You look good up there. It’s probably hard to believe right now, but I’m proud of you.”
Although they didn’t look as much alike as Ruby and her mom did, Gabe could see a faint resemblance. It was there in the man’s nose and lips, his hair, the shape of his shoulders. He wore a faded T-shirt and a pair of shorts that were frayed around the hem.Do I come by my habits naturally?
“What do you know about the curse?” Gabe demanded. He didn’t have time for unwanted family reunions. There was no room for an absentee father. He had enough shit going on in his fucked up life.
He had just declared to the entire colony that Talia was his fated mate. He had intended to let them know he would look into the curse, try to figure out how to break it, and then he had planned to grab Talia and take her away to someplace private so he could apologize properly—and make up properly, too. He’d been without her for too damn long. He didn’t feel whole without her in his life.
The man—his father—held a hat in his hands, one of those straw ones meant to keep the sun off your face. He slid the brim ’round and ’round with his fingers. “I’m not a hundred percent sure, of course, but I believe your mother created it.”
A collective gasp went up in the crowd of colony members.
“My mother?”
“Uh...” He glanced around then returned his focus to twirling his hat. “Your mother’s name is Dahlia, by the way. We dated for a few months, nothing too serious, or at least that’s what I thought. And then I met Hydra and realized she was my fated mate, so I broke things off with your mother. She, uh, didn’t take it well. Especially when she discovered she was carrying my child.”
Hold the phone. Gabe’s mother wasn’t his father’s mate? Gods above, his life was a fucking soap opera.
Waves of conversations broke out in the crowd, all bleeding into one another. Shit, his father was divulging this family gossip in front of more than a thousand dragons. Not exactly the way he would have chosen to learn all this information about his own history.
You just told them you’re in love with Talia, his dragon pointed out.Like father, like son, perhaps?
Fuck no. Half of them probably already knew I was in love with Talia. This—this is shit I should be learning in private.
“After she birthed you, she presented you to me, hoping I’d change my mind about choosing Hydra over her. But Hydra was my fated mate, so even if I wanted to keep my family intact, I couldn’t. I loved her. My dragon loved her. It was fate. I had no control over it.”
He sounded like he was begging Gabe, perhaps the entire colony, to understand.
“That wasn’t the answer Dahlia wanted, of course, so she thrust you into my arms and ran away, but before she left, she vowed to seek revenge.”
This story couldn’t possibly get any worse, could it? And it wasn’t even a story—it was Gabe’slife.
“It was a few years later when the curse took hold. You would have been almost four, I think. That’s why I can’t be entirely sure it was her. But I’ve been researching it, trying to figure out a way to break it, and considering it’s been almost thirty years and I’m no closer to figuring it out than I was when it happened, I imagine it took her a few years to come up with it in the first place.”
“You’re saying my mother—my birth mother—left me when I was an infant? Just…just walked away?” Who the fuck did that?
His father nodded without pulling his gaze from the floor. Apparently, there was something real interesting down there.
“She wasn’t, uh, exactly stable. Her parents had abandoned her, too, as a child. She’d always resented it, always threw too much of herself into her relationships with other dragons. I suppose, in retrospect, we certainly set you up to fail, didn’t we?”
No shit.Frankly, the only way he’d managed to become a halfway decent person was thanks to the colony. And Ruby.
And Talia. Especially Talia.
“And then a few years later, she cursed the colony, because she was pissed off at you for choosing someone else?”
“Well, like I said, I can’t be 100 percent certain, but…”
“But you’re like, what? Ninety-nine percent?”
