Remember what happened to your father. Remember how love consumed him.
But the warnings felt distant, almost meaningless against the reality of Maple's fearless embrace of his true nature. As he continued flying through the desert sky, he could feel her pulse quickening not with fear but with exhilaration as they soared over a particularly deep canyon, her soft gasp of delight making his dragon preen with pride.
"Bank to the right," Maple's voice cut through his reverie minutes later.
The command snapped him back to their mission with jarring suddenness.
Right—they weren't flying for pleasure.
They were tracking Serena, trying to uncover the connection between Maple's academic rival and the men who had tried to run Ben and Maple off the canyon road yesterday.
He adjusted his flight path with fluid grace, feeling Maple's grip tighten as they changed direction. The pressure of her hands against his scales sent another wave of heat through him, but he forced himself to focus on her navigation rather than the way her body moved with his.
The sprawling city of Phoenix spread beneath them, glass and steel buildings glinting in the afternoon sun. He maintained altitude carefully, high enough to avoid detection by human eyes while staying close enough for Maple to guide him. Centuries of flying in secret had made stealth second nature—he knew exactly how to catch thermals to minimize wing movement, howto use cloud cover, how to remain invisible to a world that had forgotten dragons existed.
"Serena's lab is there," Maple called out, pointing toward a modern glass and steel building several blocks from his own Trigg Corporation headquarters.
Rune circled the structure with predatory patience, his keen eyesight scanning the area below. This felt like a long shot—they could wait for hours and Serena might not even be in the building. But sometimes surveillance required patience, and he had centuries of it.
"There!" Maple's voice suddenly rang with excitement. "She's walking out of the building now."
Perfect timing,Rune thought, hoping the satisfaction in his emotions would carry through the mate bond to her.
"Follow her," Maple instructed, and he obeyed, using every skill he'd developed over five centuries of remaining hidden.
They tracked Serena through several city blocks, watching as she walked with purposeful strides toward what appeared to be an upscale restaurant. But when a tall, elegantly dressed man emerged from the establishment to greet her, Rune's entire body went rigid with recognition.
The scent hit him even at this altitude—smoke and ash, the distinctive signature of a rogue dragon shifter. But this wasn't just any rogue. There was something calculated and cold about this one's presence, something that set every instinct Rune possessed on high alert.
"That man," Maple's voice carried a note of recognition that made Rune's protective instincts flare. "I think I know who he is. He's a museum curator—Dr. Elias Vorn. What is Serena doing with him?"
Elias Vorn.
The name meant nothing to Rune, but the dragon's scent told him everything he needed to know. This wasn't a coincidence.Whatever was happening between Serena and this rogue dragon, it was connected to the claim marker, to the attack yesterday, to the danger that now surrounded his mate.
As if sensing scrutiny, the man below suddenly stiffened and looked skyward. Rune's blood turned to ice—the rogue's senses were sharper than he'd anticipated.
Without hesitation, Rune banked hard to the left, putting distance between them and the restaurant with powerful wingbeats that carried them swiftly away from the city. He couldn't risk exposure, couldn't let this Elias Vorn confirm what he might have sensed.
The flight back to his canyon territory felt both endless and too brief. Endless because every protective instinct screamed at him to turn around and eliminate the threat to his mate. Too brief because once they landed, he would have to shift back to human form and face the growing intensity of the mate bond without the distraction of flight.
When he finally touched down in the clearing behind his mansion, lowering his great head so Maple could dismount, the loss of contact hit him unexpectedly hard. Her warmth, her trust, the perfect rightness of her presence on his back—all of it vanished the moment she slid down his neck to the ground.
He wanted to keep her there, to spend the rest of the day soaring through his territory with his mate secure against him, exploring the vast canyon landscape together instead of dealing with rogues and conspiracies and threats to their newfound connection.
The transformation back to human form felt more jarring than usual, as if his dragon was reluctant to retreat. When the shift completed, leaving him naked in the desert air, he found Maple watching him with undisguised hunger in her green eyes.
Her gaze traveled over his body with the same reverence she'd shown his dragon form, and his cock respondedimmediately to her attention. Heat pooled low in his belly as he bent to retrieve his scattered clothes, hyperaware of how her breathing had quickened and how her pupils had dilated with desire at his arousal.
His dragon snarled at him to forget the clothes, to pull her against him and finish what they'd started on the dining room table. The mate bond thrummed between them, stronger than ever after their flight together, demanding completion.
But his rational mind—what was left of it—insisted on maintaining some semblance of control. He pulled on his boxers and jeans with deliberate movements, then grabbed his henley and boots.
"I'm going to shower and get changed," Rune said, his voice rough. "I'll meet you and Ben down in the living room in an hour."
"Alright," Maple replied, but her voice carried the same breathless quality that had marked her responses during their lovemaking. "I'll go find Ben."
The way she looked at him—as if she wanted to follow him to that shower, as if she was remembering exactly how his hands had felt on her body—nearly shattered his resolve entirely.
