Page 30 of Knotted by the Mountain Man Dragon

“About you.” He shifts us carefully so we’re lying on our sides, still locked together, his body curved around mine.

I kiss his knuckles because his hand is right there and I don’t have words for what I’m feeling. I’m knotted on his couch covered in him and I can feel his heartbeat inside me and I think this might be the most terrifying, exhilarating, impossible thing that has ever happened to anyone.

Chapter Eight

Cage

Day three since she walked into my garage and my life split cleanly into before and after.

Before: Nothing. Quiet. Competent. Alone. The kind of life that looks fine from the outside because there’s nothing obviously broken, nothing missing that anyone else would notice.

After: her.

Mara Ellis, asleep in my bed with her hair tangled across my pillow, her coffee mug next to mine in the sink, her boots by my front door. Three days and my house looks different. Smells different. Is different.

She still says she’s leaving when her car is fixed.

Her car has been fixed since yesterday afternoon.

I haven’t mentioned this.

I’m aware that this is a problem. I’m aware that keeping this from her is not the behavior of a reasonable man. I’m also aware that my dragon would rather swallow hot iron than watch her drive away, and right now my dragon and I are in complete agreement.

But she deserves the truth. So this morning, before coffee, before I touch her, before my dragon can convince me to delay one more day, I’m going to tell her.

After breakfast.

She needs to eat first.

The storm rolls in while I’m scrambling eggs.

I’ve lived in the Cascades long enough to read weather the way most people read clocks. I felt the pressure drop an hour ago. Watched the clouds stack up against the western ridge, heavy and dark and moving fast. This isn’t a normal October rain. This is a Cascade windstorm, the kind that brings down trees, floods creek beds, and turns mountain roads into rivers.

By the time Mara comes downstairs in my flannel and her own jeans, the wind is howling.

“That sounds bad,” she says, looking at the windows.

“It’ll pass.” I set her plate down. “Roads will be rough for a day or two.”

She eats. I watch. The ritual.

Halfway through her eggs, she stops. “Cage.”

“Yeah.”

“My car. What’s happening with my car?”

I set down my coffee mug.

“It’s done.”

She blinks. “Done as in… done? Fixed?”

“Finished it yesterday.”

The silence that follows is loud.

“Yesterday.” Her voice is very controlled. “You finished my car yesterday and didn’t tell me.”