Page 10 of Knotted by the Mountain Man Dragon

“Cage—I’m—”

“I know. I can feel you.”

I move faster. Her head falls back against the seat. Her thighs clamp around my hand and she rides my hand with her eyes closed and her lips parted and she’s making desperate little sounds that my dragon decides are the most beautiful things he’s ever heard.

“Come for me, Mara.”

She shatters. Her whole body locks, her back arching off the seat, and she cries out, raw and broken and perfect. I feel her pulse around my fingers and her slickness coat my hand and I want to pull this truck over and bury myself inside her so badly that smoke leaks from my nostrils.

But I don’t.

Because she’s shaking, and softening, and melting against my side, and that matters more right now than what I want.

I bring my fingers to my mouth. Lick them.

She watches me do it and her scent goes nuclear.

“That,” I tell her, “is the best thing I’ve ever tasted. And I have had almost a century to compare.”

She stares at me with glazed eyes and a half-open mouth and says, in a voice that’s wrecked, “What is happening to me?”

I put my hand back on the wheel.

“You found your mate,” I say. “That’s what’s happening.”

Chapter Three

Mara

His cabin is not what I expected.

I don’t know what I expected. A cave? A lair? A place with animal skulls on the walls and a fire pit in the living room?

Instead, the road winds through a mile of dense timber, his timber, apparently, and ends at a clearing where the trees pull back like a curtain, and there’s a house.

Not a shack or a survivalist bunker. A house, or maybe a lodge is a better word. It’s built from enormous dark logs and gray stone, tucked against the mountain with a wide covered porch and a metal roof and windows that look out over the valley below. There’s a chopping block on the side with an axe leaning against it. A lean-to is stacked so high with fresh-cut wood you could heat a small village. There’s a workshop behind the house. A vegetable garden gone dormant for fall, neat raised beds covered against the rain.

“You built this,” I say. It’s not a question.

He parks the truck and kills the engine. “Most of it. Rebuilt the porch last spring. Did the roof the year before.”

He says it like constructing an entire house by hand is not remarkable. Just a thing a man does when he lives alone on a mountain for decades.

The rain has gentled to a steady mist. He comes around to my side of the truck and opens the door, and I realize two things simultaneously:

One, my legs are not entirely functional after what just happened.

Two, he knows this already, because he puts one hand on my waist and lifts me out of the cab like I’m made of paper.

“I can walk,” I protest.

“I know.”

He doesn’t put me down.

He carries me across the gravel, up the porch steps, and through the front door, and I am torn between indignation and the fact that being held against this man’s chest while he kicks his own door open is doing things to me that I thought I was too exhausted to feel.

The inside of his house smells like him but amplified. Cedar. Woodsmoke. Warm embers and pine resin. It’s the olfactory equivalent of being wrapped in a blanket in front of a fire, and my omega responds with an embarrassing surge of yes, here, stay, this is right.