Page 17 of Billionaire Dragon King’s Rejected Mate

“We’re looking at scalable solutions,” Chance interrupted again, his tone still even, still controlled, but final in a way that left no room for argument, “not experimental ones.”

And that was that. The conversation moved on without her.

Randi sat back slowly and her fingers tightening around her pen as frustration flared sharp and sudden. She knew her ideas had merit and that she wasn’t just throwing out random suggestions. And yet he had brushed them aside like they were nothing, like she was nothing.

It didn’t make sense.

Not when she could still so clearly picture him the day before leaning back against the side of the lazy river, water drifting around them and sunlight reflecting off the surface as they laughed and joked about rapids and waterfalls that every good water park needed.

For a second back then, he had looked at her like she was interesting. And just now for the briefest moment, she thought she saw it again.

A flicker. Something softer behind his eyes as she spoke. But it vanished so quickly she wasn’t even sure it had been real. The man sitting at the head of the table now had none of that warmth, none of that easy humor, none of the openness she had seen before.

By the time the meeting ended, Randi’s frustration had settled into something heavier that sat low in her chest and refused to budge. As the meeting broke up and people began to gather their things and file out, she didn’t wait or even linger before she fled without so much as a glance toward Marissa.

She just stood, closed her notebook, and walked out. No goodbye, no explanation. Just the steady click of her heels against the floor as she made her way down the hallway. Her thoughts were a tangled mess of irritation and disbelief.

The worst part that she just couldn’t shake wasn’t just that he had dismissed her. It was that she knew he wasn’t always like that.

She had seen the other version of him.

And now that she knew it existed, she couldn’t help wanting it back.

Chapter 7

Chance

The night air over Tampa Bay carried a quiet that Chance had not allowed himself to feel in years. It was the kind of stillness that pressed against the edges of a man’s control and asked him, in a voice too soft to refuse, what exactly he was so afraid of.

It was that same stillness that finally broke something loose inside him as he stood alone on the secluded stretch of shoreline with his jacket discarded, his tie hanging undone, and the city lights flickering behind him like a world he no longer quite belonged to.

He didn’t stop to think about it. He couldn’t because thinking would have stopped him from doing something that he so seldom allowed himself to do. As a result, the shift came the way it always had when he was younger, fast and consuming.

His body gave way to the truth he spent every waking hour denying. His bones stretched and reshaped, and his skin hardened into scales that caught the faint glow of the moon. His wings tore free and unfurled with a force that stirred the sand and sent a rush of wind across the dark water.

For a moment, suspended between the man he insisted on being and the creature he truly was, Chance let himself breathe.

Then he launched.

The powerful downbeat of his wings carried him upward in a surge that felt like breaking through the surface of something thick and suffocating. When he leveled out high above the bay, the city spread beneath him in glittering lines and reflections. Tampa was alive and utterly unconcerned with the war being waged inside him. In that wide-open darkness, his dragon stirred fully awake.

Mine.

The word was not spoken aloud but it resonated through him with a certainty that tightened every muscle in his body. It pulled his thoughts into a dangerous direction he had been trying to avoid since the moment he saw Randi in his boardroom and challenged him without hesitation.

“No,” he muttered aloud, though there was no one to hear him but the wind rushing past his jaws. The word was thin and ineffective against the instinct coiling deeper with every passing second.

Mine.

His wings faltered for half a beat before he forced them steady again. His anger rose sharp and immediate, not at the dragon, because that would have been pointless, but at himself. The situation was the undeniable fact that the claim had already begun to root itself inside him before he had a chance to stop it.

Because Randi was not just any woman. She was a complication.

She was an employee, and a new one at that, and far too perceptive for her own good. She was entirely too bold in a way that unsettled the careful hierarchy Chance had spent years building around himself. Worst of all, she was valuable in ways he could not dismiss without lying to himself.

The memory of the meeting earlier that day surfaced uninvited. Her voice had been steady as she laid out ideas that had cut through layers that his senior team had failed to address, and her focus was sharp and unapologetic.

He had shut her down anyway.