Page 42 of Tempt the Dragon
I loved you too.
The words floated in her mind the way those blue strokes moved over that canvas. “How long have you had it?”
“I ordered it before I left Miami. It was going to be a second anniversary present for you. The gallery held it for me for two weeks before shipping it to my new location.” Two weeks after she’d left him she was back in the bungalow she’dlived in with Rosilda when she was a teenager.
“Never could figure out how you could be so obsessed with clothes and style but knew absolutely nothing about art.” Memories of their many shopping sprees where Aiken always bought the most clothes between the two of them, created a light, happy feeling in the center of her chest. It didn’t damper the dull ache of the memory of the second anniversarythey hadn’t spent together.
“Because art is whatever people tell you it is, style is what you make it.” He always had an answer. Even when she told him she couldn’t stay with him, he’d had an answer—that day it was his silence.
“Myths are whatever people tell you they are.” She expected him to stiffen behind her. Instead, he inched closer, until the muscles of his chest pressed againsther back and his semi-erect dick was cradled by her ass.
“You were never afraid of anything. From the first time I saw you in action on a hunt, you were fearless. Standing up to me, pushing back against all I’ve tried to convince you to be, is nothing short of courage in action. Why does accepting who and what you are scare you so much?”
She wasn’t afraid. A voice shouted that in her mind,contradictory to the way she curled her fingers into the sheet as anxiety approached. “That’s not what scares me, Aiken.”
“Then what is it, baby? What’s stopping you from staying with me?”
She shook her head. “I really wish it was just about staying with you.” She’d almost called him “my love” the way she used to.
“Then tell me what it is. Whatever is keeping me from having you, Iwant to know.”
“It’s me,” she answered quietly. “I’m stopping us from being together because accepting this thing inside me means I never really knew who or what I was. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been living and breathing a lie. And all I know how to do is fight back to prevent that lie from destroying me. Can you understand that?”
He’d wrapped his arms around her so tight shealmost couldn’t breathe, yet the embrace felt good, it felt right.
“I hear you and I don’t want you to take what I’m about to say the wrong way, but—”
“Anytime someone says that it means they’re about to say something you’re bound to take the wrong way.”
He nipped her shoulder. “Don’t be a smartass. What I was going to say was, you’ll never truly know who or what you are if you keeprunning from what’s a basic part of you.”
“That’s so easy for you to say, Aiken. It’s so easy for you to hold tight to all that you know, all that you are. My parents didn’t tell me squat and at four years old I didn’t know to ask. All I can remember was being surrounded by rock walls and gorgeous green valleys and the brightest sun you’d ever seen. That’s it. Nobody told me I had a dragonliving inside me. Nobody said I had powers. All that came through trial and error. One day they came to take me to a new foster home and I didn’t want to go. I wished so hard that I could just blend into the wall so nobody would see me and then they could all leave me alone. And it happened.”
Her body began to tremble.
“That’s the first time I went into what you later told me was calleda chameleon cloak. For more than a hundred years I did that with Rosilda only telling me it was because I was special. I didn’t physically age beyond twenty years old. That’s when Rosilda finally explained what she was and that I was sort of like her. So I spent the next one hundred and sixty years being ‘almost’ like a half shape-shifter and a human. Until you came along and gave what I was a nameand all this legend and lore that you expected me to just latch on to.
“Do you have any idea how that feels? Having someone proclaim and prove to know more about you than you do yourself? No. You don’t because you’ve always had the perfect life, the perfect clothes, hell, even your face, you’re like some Drakon-style model. Even your dragon is beautiful.”
He’d shown her his beast for thefirst time a few months after they’d been sleeping together. On a beach in Miami in the middle of the night when he wanted there to be less risk of anyone seeing the gigantic dragon, and open space to accommodate the size without causing millions of dollars in damage.
“I’m far from perfect.” He said it so easily as if that meant she had no choice but to believe him. Instead, she flopped overonto her back and he eased only partially away from her.
“I can’t tell, not from where I’m sitting,” she snapped.
“That’s because you like sitting in the dark.” He sighed. “You see what you want to see because that’s how you remain comfortable. But blinders don’t make the truth any less true.”
She rolled her eyes, she couldn’t help it. Even in claiming he wasn’t perfect, he said theright things.
“How do you think I ended up in Miami? If my life as a Noble Drakon was so perfect, why’d I leave the Far Realm to come here? And work? I’m a Noble, my family has more money than even the richest human in this realm, yet I was in Miami working a regular job, just like you. Why would I do that if I had everything?”
She’d wondered about that a time or two, but never asked himbecause she hadn’t cared. The answer wasn’t going to change her mind. Closing her eyes, she huffed, “None of this matters now.”
“It does and that’s why I’m going to tell you.” He lay on his side propped up on one elbow while staring down at her. Their positions and the fact that they were both naked might be intimate, but in these moments she couldn’t feel farther apart from him.
“I leftmy family on the Far Realm. Walked away from the position I was supposed to assume within the Nobility there, and the legacy that had been dropped on my shoulder. You want to know why I did that?”
She felt like an idiot when she nodded.
