COWBOY ROMANCE: Justin (Western Contemporary Alpha Male Bride Romance) (The Steele Brothers Book 1) (11 page)

Chapter Six

Four days out from the border of the Wyndwae, they were riding through a deep patch of woods, the trees towering far above their heads. Around them, ferns grew high as their horse’s knees. Beneath their twisted boughs it was dark already, though above the sun was only just sinking to set, gloom stretching out around them. Mairead's heart misgave her, beating too fast behind her ribs, and she watched the shadows with sharp eyes, seeking the source of her unease. Fintan, she saw, did not seem so on edge. Though he had noted her wariness, he rode perfectly at ease, one hand loose on the reigns.

The beast dropped from the trees above with a shriek like a bird of prey, a blur she could not name until it was nearly on top of her. Mairead ducked its first pass, then swung one leg over the saddle and slipped from her horse's back, rolling as she connected with the forest floor. Her hand was already reaching for the dagger at her hip. It was ill luck that her bow was strapped over Embarr's back, unstrung. It would not serve her quickly enough to stop the griffin, which was sweeping back for another charge. The horses were rearing, their alarmed cries ringing in the air, and her own had already fled well beyond her reach. As the creature turned once more to charge, Mairead readied the dagger in her hand, prepared to throw for the throat.

Fintan, keeping his seat on his horse with easy grace, had backed the great black stallion up, and now pulled the sword from his back, spinning it in a silver arc. His eyes were fixed on the eagle-headed beast, which had perched in a tree far up and watched them with its head tipped to one side, meeting his gaze. It seemed held there, searching for something in Fintan’s face, and Mairead felt her eyebrows draw together. What was it doing there? Had it not already shown it was unafraid to attack? For what reason did it wait now?

"Go," Fintan said, and his voice was a rumble that set the hair on the back of her neck standing up. "I have not given you leave to be here."

The beast shrieked once more, rusty metal against metal, and its great head tipped the other way, but it did not move. It sidled along the branch like a dog told to heel and refusing to bend to its master’s will. Fintan growled, low and long, a noise she had not heard from a human throat in all her years. Her fingers curled closer around the hilt of her dagger. In the next moment, the creature lifted into the air and up beyond the tops of the trees, and she could hear the noise of its wings fading into the distance. Her gaze cut to Fintan, who was sheathing his sword. He looked up to meet her eyes, and even in the dim dark under the canopy, his were the color of honey.

She had thought the almost imperceptible shift from autumn brown to amber was a trick of the firelight, an illusion that made the sharp lines of his face all the more striking as they played together in its glow. Now, seeing it in the dark beneath the trees as night fell, the gleam that seemed to cast its own light in the shadowed murk, she wondered that it had not frightened her before. What did she know of him, after all?

“I believe,” she said, sheathing the dagger at her hip and looking up into his eyes. “That an explanation is due.”

Chapter Seven

“There was," he said, "a dragon in the Wyndwae."

"Was," Mairead echoed, voice flat, still even.

"Yes." He dismounted, leading his horse with him to stand beneath one of the trees. When he bent to tether the stallion, his gaze for a moment left hers.

Mairead caught the reigns of her own mount as Embarr trotted back to her side, nervous still and whickering softly. She tethered him beside the black horse, and began to unbuckle his saddle, to strip him of his tack. "I am waiting," she said quietly.

"What know you," he asked instead of answering, “of dragons?"

What knew she of dragons? Little, in fact. She had never seen one with her own eyes, had never faced one in a fight. Her father, too, had gone all his life without the sight of one. They were creatures of the ancient world, who kept to themselves except when they sought some treasure, hiding in caves among the rocks. White scaled and twenty feet from nose to flank, their tails another ten of whipcord flexible muscle. They were dangerous, and she did not believe there was one in the Wyndwae, except that Fintan had said there had been.

"Very little," she said finally. "I have only heard of them. I thought the villagers saying they had seen one must be mistaken. This far east, there are only the little drakes."

"Most times, that is true."

Over Embarr's back, she could see his face, could see the expression there in the last of the light. It was grave and attentive, though there was nothing in it that seemed to say she should be afraid. Mairead took the brush from her saddlebags, and then began working over her mount's short hair, brushing sweat and dirt from his coat.

"And other times?"

"Other times, perhaps, even dragons seek new sights."

Her gaze flicked from Embarr's coat to Fintan's face. His eyes met hers, but his expression did not change. Mairead tossed the brush she had held back into its bag, and went to kindle the fire. Neither of them spoke as she laid it, as it crackled to life under her hands. Only when the bed rolls were laid out, separated by the flame between them for the first time since the night of their meeting, did Mairead look at him once more. The firelight made strange shadows on his face.

"What am I to believe?"

"That I will not harm you." His answer was immediate. "That I never meant to do so."

"Did you think a lie was not harm?"

"I wished to know who it was that thought to challenge me," he said. "I had not expected you. When I met you, I was drawn to you, to your beauty." He smiled. "To your fire."

It was not an admission, but it was confession enough. If he indeed was the dragon, then it was she who had thought to challenge him, and she took a breath and let it out slowly, uncertain if it was anger or fear that twisted in her stomach. Perhaps it was both.

"Did you think to tell me?"

"I would have, before we reached the Wyndwae."

She began unbraiding her hair with sharp, frustrated motions, raking her fingers through it to loosen the worst of the tangles. She saw his eyes on it, and laughter bubbled unbidden in her throat.

"You are a dragon, then, so transfixed by gold."

"I admit that it is some of what drew me."

Mairead took off her boots, then settled a little more comfortably in her blankets. Her thoughts were spinning, chasing each other round and round. Questions. Condemnations. She should tell him she did not wish to see his face ever again, then pack up her things and leave. But she did not. She remained there, sitting in the warmth of the fire.

"I did not know dragons could take human shape."

"It is a well-kept secret," he said. "If humans knew, they would not rest. They let themselves be eaten up with fear. They would turn on each other, attempting to hunt us down. We are, after all, monsters."

Mairead drew a breath in sharply.

"Was that meant as accusation?"

Fintan shook his head. "No," he said, and there was honesty in his voice. "I asked you what you sought in the Wyndwae, and you said you wished to know if there was a dragon there. You said you would not hunt one that did no harm."

"No," Mairead said. "I would not."

"Then you are not the human that our kind fear. Dragons are not all the greedy things told of in your stories. Many of us simply wish to live, to be alone in our mountains. Others desire to travel. We are wiser creatures than the basilisk and the manticore. And if we eat your livestock occasionally, do you not do the same?"

"We raised it. Or paid for it."

"And in the cases in which I have taken a sheep, or a cow, I too have paid for it." He smiled across the fire at her. "As I said. We are intelligent creatures. That some of my kind choose to behave as though they are not should not have bearing on all. Certainly there are humans who fail to behave in an intelligent manner."

Unwilling, Mairead was finding herself won over, and she smiled. That much was true. She had seen it herself in every town she rode through, every inn she bought rooms in.

"I will give you that point," she said.

"I wish you to know," Fintan said, "that I have not been toying with you. I am quite fond of you, and I the nights we have shared together have indeed been blessed, whatever your church may think of them."

It was the answer to the question she had not yet managed to ask him. And yet, what would a dragon wish with a human? She slew monsters. He was, by the estimation of her own kind, just such a creature. In human form, he was vulnerable. Her dagger could be in his throat in the space of a heartbeat, if she wished it to be.

She did not wish it.

“Where is it we go from here, then?”

“That depends, I think, on you.”

For a moment she sat in silence, thinking on it, and then she nodded, and she stood. This time, it was her turn to move bootless around the fire, to stand before him. When he tipped his head down to meet her gaze, she tipped her own up and kissed him, hard as he had kissed her that first night. Her fingers tangled in his hair and drew him down nearer.

When they pulled apart for air, he smiled at her. “A decision I offer my most definite approval for,” he said, low and warm.

She remembered thinking before that Lyndoun had all of the danger and none of the beauty. And yet here before her stood a man who was beauty and danger in one. Perhaps he was not the only such thing in the world. Perhaps she would make it a mission to find out, and if luck smiled on her, she would do it with Fintan at her side.

THE END

Bear Shifter Menage Romance

Loved by Two Bears

Chapter One

Jenna woke to the sound of something moving at the edges of her camp. For a long moment, she lay still in her sleeping bag, breathing in and out with deliberate slowness, listening to the noise beyond the canvas walls.

The snuffling was not a noise she knew from experience, but she had heard it in recordings often enough. This deep in bear country, it wasn’t a surprise. Jenna wasn’t particularly worried. Her food was all properly packed, her little camp circled with a portable electric fence. Without the smell of food to tempt him, it was unlikely the bear would brave the enclosure, not this close to the feeding grounds along the Pacific coast. There were easier ways to get a meal. Still, Jenna reached for the bear spray tucked into a pocket of her hiking pack. Better safe than sorry.

She’d come to Katmai to celebrate the completion of her Masters in Natural Resources, taking some time out in the Alaskan wilderness before she headed to her first assignment down in Iowa. She’d always been more at home out in the middle of nowhere than sharing space with other people. Here in Katmai, where the crowds that came to watch the bears during the salmon run were dispersing with the change of seasons, she had wide stretches of mountain and forest all to herself and the wildlife. Most visitors didn’t hike out into the backcountry.

The bear was still pacing her perimeter fence. Jenna hadn’t expected him to linger so long. She curled her fingers a little tighter around the bear spray and flicked the safety off. Still wasn’t likely he’d try to come through the fence, but if he did she didn’t fancy her chances of scaring him off without chemical assistance. You didn’t try to move a grizzly. Her heart beat a little faster behind her ribs, but she kept her breathing slow and even, quiet. The sound of the movement in the underbrush was circling around toward her back, and she sat up tense and straight in her sleeping bag, wondering for a moment if it had been such a good idea to go camping in the backcountry of a park with North America’s largest brown bear population without a partner.

But the sounds of the bear were moving away. She heard them receding slowly into the distance, and then it was quiet again, just the little noises of night in the national park lingering in her ears. Jenna took a breath and let it out again in a rush of relief that became a laugh.

It would have really sucked to be bear food before she ever got to wear her ranger’s uniform.

Chapter Two

There was something about waking in a tent that was, Jenna thought, incredibly refreshing. Or maybe it was just something about waking without an alarm clock blaring in your ear and forty minutes to throw yourself together and leave for your next field work assignment. She stretched slowly in the honeyed early morning sunlight slanting through the screen at the tent’s rounded peak, and enjoyed the sounds of the birds calling a wakeup to each other. It was only some minutes later that she reluctantly dragged herself from her sleeping bag to dress and boil water for breakfast.

Jenna Mayfair was not a small woman. She supposed some might have called her big-boned. At 5’9” she couldn’t be described as anything but tall, and she certainly didn’t have the kind of slim-hipped build people called athletic, though her curvaceous frame was solid with muscle from long years of working outdoors. Hers was a body built for physicality, in whatever form that took.

She pulled the tie from the braid that she usually slept in, dragging her heavy fall of brunette hair back into a tail and then curling it around itself, clipping the bun into place. Then she pulled on her jeans and t-shirt, caught up her jacket from where it was slung over her pack. Her heavy-soled hiking boots waited by the door of the tent.

Outside, the weather was a little chilly, clouds rolling in from the west with the promise of later dumping the water they’d picked up over the ocean. The breeze smelled faintly of salt. Jenna made a mental note to bring her rain gear along on the hike as she lit the camp stove, starting up the water that would make oatmeal and coffee.

When breakfast was done, she cleaned up, dumping the water used to scrub food from her bowl well beyond the perimeter of her camp. Then she went back into the tent to pack her day bag for a hike. Most of the supplies she’d need were already there: sunscreen, water bottle, compass, and map. She stuffed her rain gear in as well, and a few granola bars and some dried fruit in an odor proof bag.

Jenna hiked north, the great snowy bulk of the mountains on her left, and on her right—often invisible beyond the trees—the rugged stretch of the Pacific coast. She had no particular destination in mind, only the enjoyment of the land she moved through. As she walked, she hummed to herself, occasionally letting the noise become a song, partly to alert any nearby bears to her coming, and partly because she enjoyed it. There was no one around to hear her rather terrible attempts, and she took full advantage of the situation.

The sound of footsteps and human voices approaching as she started up the ridge of a hill was a surprise, and Jenna quickly stopped singing, choosing instead to whistle as she hiked. It was a fairly easy incline, and in a matter of moments she was standing at the top of the hill, looking down at two men who were coming up the other side. They were chatting easily, if a bit loudly, neither of them wearing packs. Both of them, despite the chill, were wearing t-shirts under unbuttoned flannel.

“Hey there,” the taller man said as they crested the hill, his voice deeper than she would have expected, with a bass rumble that seemed to vibrate under her skin. “Didn’t figure on meeting anyone out this far.”

He smiled, teeth white against sun-browned skin and a neatly trimmed beard. Standing on ground even with Jenna’s own, he had probably six inches on her, and he was built big—broad shoulders, heavy arms. It wasn’t often Jenna met a man so much bigger than she was, and she felt a little rush of heat at the thought of just how easily he’d be able to put her where he wanted her.

“Neither did I,” she said, answering him. “But I’m not entirely adverse to company.”

Not if company looked like him.

“Arthur,” he said, offering a hand that swallowed hers up when she took it.

“Jenna Mayfair.”

She turned her gaze to the other man, who still hadn’t spoken. He was maybe a couple of inches shorter than Arthur, leaner, but still muscled, regarding her from under a fall of tawny hair with a gaze that seemed to see right down to her bones. For a moment she found herself caught in brown eyes, and then she gave herself a little internal shake and offered her hand.

He took it, his own hand warm, fingers calloused.

“Barrett,” he said by way of introduction. “Nice to meet you.”