Page 13 of Knotted by the Mountain Man Dragon

“Mates.”

“You said that in the truck. That I’m your mate.”

“You are.”

“And you’re sure?”

He looks at me like I just asked if the sky is up.

“There’s nothing but ‘sure’ with dragons,” he says. “It’s not a guess. It’s not a feeling. I know what you are the same way I know how to breathe.”

I let that settle. It should feel presumptuous. Arrogant. Some alpha I’ve known for two hours claiming biological certainty about our cosmic connection.

But it doesn’t feel presumptuous.

It feels like someone finally telling me a truth I’ve been searching for without knowing it.

“The dreams,” I say quietly. “On the highway. Before I got here. I’ve been… I was having these—”

“Visions. Heat. A scent you couldn’t identify.”

I stare at him. “How do you—”

“Three weeks.” He braces both hands on the island and leans forward, and his eyes are full gold now, burning steady. “For three weeks I’ve been waking up to the smell of vanilla and blackberry. Dreaming about a woman I’d never seen. Getting hard in my own garage in the middle of the afternoon because a phantom scent hit me and my dragon said mate.”

My breath catches.

“And then you walked through my door,” he says, “and you were real. And you smelled better than anything I’ve imagined in ninety-three years. And my dragon said mine and for the first time in my life I did not argue with him.”

The rain drums on the metal roof.

The woodstove crackles.

He watches me across the island with golden eyes and absolute certainty, and I realize I’m not scared.

I should be. I know I should be. I’m in a stranger’s cabin on a mountain in a town I can’t leave, wearing his shirt, eating his food, still feeling his fingerprints on the inside of my thighs.

But my omega is quiet for the first time in my life. There’s no low-grade hum that something is missing, the feeling I’ve carried so long I forgot it was there.

Just... quiet. Like she finally found what she was looking for.

“Okay,” I say.

He blinks. “Okay?”

“I’m not saying I understand all of this. I’m going to have questions. A lot of questions. Possibly while hyperventilating.”

The corner of his mouth twitches.

“But I felt you before I saw you,” I say. “I felt you on the highway. I felt you for an hour before I even got to Blackridge. And when I walked into your garage—”

I stop. Swallow.

“It was like finding something I didn’t know I’d lost.”

He doesn’t move. Doesn’t blink. Barely breathes.

Then he says, very quietly: