Page 23 of Knotted by the Mountain Man Dragon

“It can’t be most of it.”

“I fix engines. I maintain my property. I keep to myself. The town calls me when things break.”

“Sounds lonely.”

I consider this. A week ago I would have said no. I would have said I prefer solitude, that I’m built for it, that a dragon who doesn’t need a pack doesn’t need company.

But that was before her scent was in my kitchen and her laugh was in my chest and her coffee order was in my head.

“I didn’t know it was,” I say. “Until you.”

She puts her fork down. Looks at me across the island. Her eyes are soft and brown and slightly shiny and she opens her mouth and then closes it again.

Then she says, very quietly, “You can’t just say things like that.”

“Why not?”

“Because we’ve known each other for less than a day and you’re making me feel things that people usually take months to feel and I don’t know how to process it at the speed you apparently operate at.”

“My speed is fine.”

“Your speed is insane.”

“And yet you’re sitting in my kitchen wearing my scent.”

She opens her mouth. Closes it.

Opens it again. “I want more blueberries please,” she says.

I push the carton toward her.

My dragon settles.

Mate is fed. Mate is warm. Mate is wearing our scent and eating our blueberries and she isn’t leaving.

For now, that’s enough.

Chapter Seven

Mara

Cage drives me into town later that morning because I need Wi-Fi to check my email and he needs parts for my car.

At least that’s what he says.

What he actually needs, based on the way he positioned himself between me and the door for a full minute before we left, is to be within arm’s reach of me at all times. Which is how I end up riding shotgun in his ancient Ford while he drives down the mountain one-handed, his other hand resting on my thigh like it lives there.

It might live there now. I’m not sure he’s planning to move it.

Blackridge in daylight looks different from the rain-blurred smear I saw yesterday through Dale’s tow truck window. It’s small, maybe four or five blocks of actual downtown, but it’s pretty in a moody Pacific Northwest way. Wet streets. Cedar-shingled buildings. A coffee shop with a green awning and a chalkboard sign out front. Planters full of asters and mums going leggy in the October chill. Mountains visible at the end of every street, close enough to feel like walls.

Cage parks in front of the coffee shop.

“You need real coffee,” he says. “With cream.”

“You drove me into town for coffee?”

“I drove you into town because you mentioned needing Wi-Fi. The coffee is because I don’t have cream and that’s unacceptable.”