Page 1 of Knotted by the Mountain Man Dragon

Chapter One

Mara

Something is wrong with me.

Not wrong wrong. Not sick or dying. Just… wrong in a way I can’t explain to the roadside assistance guy currently telling me the nearest garage is forty-seven minutes away in a town called Blackridge.

“Ma’am? You still there?”

“Yeah.” I shift in my seat. Press my thighs together. “Blackridge. Got it.”

“Tow should reach you in about thirty minutes. Sit tight.”

He hangs up, and I drop the phone into my lap and stare through the windshield at the most miserable stretch of Pacific Northwest highway I’ve ever seen. Rain hammers the glass so hard I can barely see the tree line. The wipers gave up two miles ago. My engine gave up right after that. One spectacular bang, a geyser of steam, and then nothing.

October in western Washington. Fifty-two degrees and raining sideways.

So why am I hot?

Hot like a fever, except my skin feels fine. It’s deeper than that. It’s in my blood. In my belly. Between my legs, which is the part I really don’t want to think about right now because I am sitting on the shoulder of a mountain highway with a dead car and zero cell bars and absolutely no reason to be this turned on.

It started about an hour ago.

Mild at first. A flush across my chest while I was singing along to Miley on the radio. Then a low pull in my stomach, like anticipation, except I have nothing to anticipate. I just dropped my sister off in Portland. I’m driving to Seattle to crash with a college friend before I figure out my next move. There is nothing ahead of me that warrants this kind of full-body reaction.

But it keeps building.

The further I travel down this highway, the worse it gets. My nipples have been hard for twenty minutes. My panties are embarrassingly damp. And I keep… I keep seeing things.

I’m not hallucinating. I’m daydreaming. But harder than any daydream I’ve ever had, more vivid, more real, like someone is projecting images directly into my brain.

Big hands. Rough, scarred, calloused hands sliding up my thighs.

Eyes that aren’t quite human. Pupils slit like a cat’s. Irises that glow molten gold in the dark.

A chest so broad it blocks out the light. A voice I can’t hear but can somehow feel, low and raw, vibrating against the side of my throat.

I don’t know this man. I’ve never seen this face. I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup. But my body recognizes him with a certainty that makes my hands damp on the steering wheel.

Ten minutes ago, I nearly drove off the road.

Nothing was in my way. But I was hit with a wave of sensation so intense I gasped, my thighs clenched, my vision blurred, and for three full seconds I was not in my car. I was underneath someone, and he was pressing me into a mattress that smelled like cedar and smoke, and I was so close to coming that I could feel the orgasm building between my thighs.

And then a truck horn blared and I jerked the wheel and I was back on the highway, heart slamming, fingers white-knuckled, thighs slick.

I am a twenty-six-year-old omega who has never once had a heat worth writing home about. My doctor called me “low-responsive.” I have been close to plenty of alphas: at work, at bars, on two very forgettable dates. I felt absolutely nothing remarkable.

So what the hell is happening to me on a mountain road in the middle of nowhere?

I press my forehead to the steering wheel and breathe.

The rain sounds like someone emptying gravel onto the roof.

My body hums.

I wait.

The tow truck driver is a chatty beta named Dale who tells me Blackridge is “a real nice little town if you don’t mind the rain” and “the fellas up on the mountain keep to themselves mostly” and “Cage’ll get you sorted, he’s the best there is, just don’t expect him to smile about it.”