Page 33 of The Dragon’s Accidental Manny

“Yours.” He turned it, and it caught the light. “You don’t have a flame, but you’re here whether you breathe fire or not.”

I cleared my throat and tapped the clear space.

“That’s the baby’s. I’ll add the color when their fire comes in. It might be years, but they have a spot. Nobody in this family has to earn their way in.”

He hung it above the window, and it turned in the breeze, throwing its colors over the room. The green, navy, and yellow, the red and orange, the caramel, and the clear space.

We stood with our arms around one another, in a room of moving colored light, waiting for the little one who hadn’t arrived yet.

But in the middle of the night, I couldn’t get the image of the suncatcher out of my head. All those colors that represented our family and the clear space for the baby who wasn’t here yet.

“Nobody has to earn their way in,” Price had said.

I tossed and turned and made a decision, but when I put out my hand to tell Price, he wasn’t there. The one place he'd be if he wasn’t in his home office was the courtyard.

“What are you doing up?” He sat me on the couch.

“Will you marry me?”

“Marry?” His voice rose and squeaked at the end.

“Yeah, you know the thing. I do, you do, and we get a piece of paper.”

“I’ve never needed that because I know what’s here.” He put a hand over his heart.

“We’re fated, so I want something permanent so we’re official, like putting a period at the end of a sentence.”

Price smirked. “You’re comparing us to a piece of text?” He cupped my cheek. “There is something that shifters do instead of marriage.”

I climbed onto his lap. “So tell me? I have to survive a ride on your dragon? What?”

“Dragon mates burn one another.” My brows shot up, and he clarified that the human wasn’t obligated to burn anything.

“Great, that's so much better. I get burned to a crisp and you stay your hot and handsome self.”

Price rested his brow on mine. “It’s a tiny mark, like touching a flame from a lighter.” He got on his knees, and I thought he was going to propose. “Confession time. I wasn’t going to tell you about marking because I didn’t need a mark to make you mine.” He looked at his hands. “I didn’t want you to think you owed me one.”

My eyes filled with tears that he’d held back, for my sake, thinking I might not want it, that I might be scared.

“I want it, and I’ll mark you too.”

Price tapped my wrist. “Here? On the pulse point?” And I nodded. He lifted my wrist to his lips and the heat in his warm breath increased from pleasurable to a little owie, just for a second, before he pulled away.

“Mate.” He kissed me.

“My turn. I want to do it.” I held up my wrist to his lips and he kissed my mark.

Price went to his study and came back with a slim glass tool, no thicker than a pencil, that he used at work. He yanked off his shirt and breathed fire on the tool.

“Over my heart, Cam.”

I pressed it on his unblemished skin that had never been burned, not at work or by any other omega. He hissed when I scorched his skin but held my gaze until I removed the tool.

“Mates.”

SIXTEEN

PRICE