Page 45 of Dragon King’s Bullied Mate

Panic flooded the room instantly. Beckett scrambled backward off the couch so quickly he tangled himself in the blanket, his face white with terror.

“Get in your safe place in the closet,” Lyra ordered immediately, already reaching for the baseball bat leaning beside the fireplace. “Go. Right now.”

He disappeared down the hallway seconds later while another heavy bang rattled the front door hard enough to shake the frame.

Lyra’s pulse exploded back into chaos.

Her hands trembled violently around the baseball bat as she moved carefully toward the entrance, every terrible possibility crashing through her head at once.

Dag.

Royal guards.

Beckett’s father.

The pounding came again.

“Lyra, open up!”

The deep voice froze her instantly.

Mikael.

Fear still hit her anyway. Her throat tightened painfully.

She edged closer to the door but did not unlock it.

“What do you want?” she asked shakily.

For several seconds only silence answered her before Mikael finally spoke again, his voice lower now, calmer.

“I’m here to help you.”

Her grip tightened harder on the bat. “That’s not what happened last time.”

A pause followed that statement, and somehow the silence behind the door sounded almost guilty.

“You’re right,” Mikael admitted quietly. “But I swear to you, Lyra, I am not here to harm you.”

Another voice spoke then, female this time.

“We also froze half to death getting here,” the woman added dryly. “So if you could decide whether we’re murderers soon, that’d be great.”

Lyra blinked in confusion.

Slowly, cautiously, she moved toward the window near the entrance and pulled the curtain aside just enough to see outside.

Mikael stood on the porch with snow dusting his dark coat and hair, his broad frame tense in a way that made him look barely restrained. Beside him stood a tall dark-haired woman bundled against the cold with obvious impatience written across her face.

Not guards, just them. Lyra slowly unlocked the door. The moment it opened, Mikael moved.

One second he stood outside, the next his hands framed her face and his mouth crashed against hers with such sudden intensity that the baseball bat slipped from her fingers entirely and clattered forgotten onto the floor.

Shock ripped through her first. Then heat and something far more dangerous.

Because she kissed him back. God help her, she kissed him back immediately.

Weeks of fear, confusion, loneliness, and relentless tension seemed to snap all at once beneath the force of it while Mikael pulled her tightly against him as though reassuring himself she truly existed, his kiss desperate enough to steal the breath from her lungs.