Page 4 of Dragon's Midlife Secret Baby
“All right.” He gave a single nod of acceptance. “Will you tell me more?”
She closed her eyes and used Erin’s hand as an anchor as she allowed herself to drift back to a timeshe’d been trying to forget. “Things were good between us, very good. Then one day, you didn’t show up for our dinner date or answer my phone calls. I went by your apartment, but you didn’t come to the door. The neighbors hadn’t seen you. It was like you fell off the face of the Earth.”
When she paused, her mother’s voice chimed in to help. “We tried to find you, Beck. Chelsea was concerned that something bad had happened. She said you weren’t the kind to just cut off communication like that, that you were the kind of man who would tell someone if they didn’t want to be around them anymore. We tried some location spells and we reached out psychically. Our coven isn’t huge, but we have quite the range of talents. We found nothing, not until today.”
Beck listened, quietly chewing. When Maeve was done, he shook his head. “I just don’t understand that. I don’t know why I would do that.”
“It sounds like maybe you didn’t,” Erin suggested, “or at least not on purpose. Jace said you were talking about being held prisoner somewhere. What can you tell us about that?”
He rubbed his hand over his forehead as if it could jumpstart his brain. “I don’t know.It’s like my whole mind is a cloud, or at least it’s living in one. What little I know is very abstract. I know I was hungry and cold. I wanted to leave so badly. Some days, I was so weak, I could barely even think about leaving, but when I could, it was the only thought I had.”
Maeve leaned forward. “Do you know who was keeping you captive? Or why?”
He gave it a moment, his eyes blinking and rolling a bit as he searched his memories, but again, he shook his head. “No. If they told me, then I don’t remember.”
“That must be very frightening,” Erin said sympathetically.
Though Beck didn’t truly move, Chelsea swore she saw him sink into the armchair a bit. He looked like a scared little boy, and that didn’t add up at all with what she knew about him. Something truly terrible must’ve happened.
“It is,” he admitted. “I really don’t know what to do.”
“We’ll help you in any way we can,” Maeve assured him. “Chelsea, maybe you could tell him a little more about himself. We’ll focus on small things instead of the big events over the past couple of years, which no one here truly understands.”
“I’ll try.” It wasn’t that she didn’t know. It was just hard to say. Chelsea had wanted to see him again, but she knew now she should’ve been more careful in that hope. This was the same man, yet he wasn’t the same person he’d been when she’d known him. Once again, she forced herself to rely on what she knew, which was what her inner wolf was telling her. This washim.“Like I said, your name is Beck Alexander. You’re a dragon shifter, and you’re nearly six hundred years old.”
“Excuse me?” Pure shock had injected a bit of vigor into his voice, and he sounded more like Beck instead of some poor man off the street. “I’m a what?”
“A dragon shifter,” she repeated. “I guess that’s difficult to hear when you don’t know about these kinds of things.”
He looked around the living room. “And this doesn’t bother anyone?”
“We’re all shifters,” Jace explained. He pointed at himself, his mate, and then Chelsea and Maeve. “Black bear, bobcat, wolf, and wolf.”
“It’s more than just turning into the creatures,” Maeve offered. “They’re part of us, but it’s also like they live inside us, even when we’re in our human forms. We’re certainly not likeother humans, though. Dragons in particular are quite rare, but they do live for a very long time.”
“Six hundred years?” Beck questioned.
“Five hundred and seventy-five, to be exact,” Chelsea murmured. “You’re an Aries. Among other things, that means you’re strong, independent, and competitive. You like anything that gives you a chance to win, whether it’s sports or board games. Your favorite ice cream is butter pecan, but you don’t think any ice cream holds up to the gelato you had in Florence.”
“I’ve been to Italy?” He was hardly eating anything now as he listened.
“At least he knows where Florence is,” Maeve noted.
“You’ve been all over the world. You’ve had a lot of time.” That age difference had bothered her a bit when she’d first found out. Chelsea had wondered how that would work, when her own lifespan was closer to that of a typical human’s, but now wasn’t the time to hash that out. “Your clan—your family—has moved many times over the centuries. You told me that you’d come to Salem fairly recently because the ley lines in the Earth had shifted. The dragons need to stay close to them to retain their vitality.”
“I have a family.” Beck mulled this over. “Do you know where they are?”
“No,” she admitted. “Just like with me and my coven, we hadn’t reached that point yet. We were just focused on each other.”
“I can see why we would’ve been,” he said softly.
Her wolf jolted inside her, and for a second, she could truly see the man she’d known.
“Does any of this sound familiar?” Maeve asked.
When Beck lifted his hand, she thought he might rub it over his forehead as he’d done before. This time, however, he ran the side of his pointer finger along his jawline, his mouth slightly slack.
“That!” she burst out.
