Page 31 of Knotted by the Mountain Man Dragon

“No.”

“Why?”

Because watching you leave would break something in me that I don’t think will heal. Because my dragon has rearranged years of solitude around you in three days and the thought of you driving away makes him want to burn the house down. Because you are the only thing I’ve ever wanted that I can’t build with my hands or fix with my tools, and I don’t know how to ask you to stay without sounding like exactly what I am: a dragon who found his hoard and refuses to let go.

“Because I wasn’t ready,” I say.

“Ready for what?”

“For you to have the option.”

She stares at me across the island. I can see her processing this. The anger is there, a hot flicker in her scent, and I deserve it. But underneath it is something else. Something that smells like the moment in the coffee shop when she reached for my hand.

“You can’t just… keep me here by hiding my car keys, Cage. That’s not how this works.”

“I know.”

“Do you? Because you have literally been keeping the fact that…”

“I know.” I meet her eyes. “I know what I did. And I’m telling you now because you deserve to decide. Your car is running. Your keys are on the hook by the door. The road to Seattle is open, or it was before this storm.”

The wind screams outside. Something crashes in the distance. A tree, probably, going down under the gusts.

“Your timing is incredible,” she says.

“I didn’t plan the storm.”

“Didn’t you?”

She’s angry. She’s right to be. But she’s also fighting a smile, and I see it, the tiniest crack in her composure, because she knows this is absurd. A dragon who fixed her car and then hid it like a toy he didn’t want to share. Her life has become a situation so ridiculous that anger can’t quite hold.

“Mara.”

“What?”

“I’m not asking you to stay because of a car or a storm. I’m asking you to stay because before you walked into my garage I didn’t know what it felt like to have someone and now I do and I will spend the next ninety years trying to deserve you if you give me the chance.”

She opens her mouth.

The power goes out.

The storm gets bad fast.

I know this mountain. I know what happens in high wind. The creek that runs along the eastern edge of my property floods first, then the road, then the lower trails. Trees start coming down, and in a forest this old, that means hundred-foot firs dropping like matchsticks.

I check the generator. Fire up the woodstove. Make sure the water pump is cycling. Mara watches me move through the house with her arms crossed and an expression that’s equal parts annoyed and fascinated.

“You’re good at this,” she says.

“I’ve lived through a lot of storms.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

I look at her.

“You take care of things,” she says quietly. “This house. Your truck. Your shop. The old people in town that Beck told me you fix things for when you think nobody’s watching.”

“Beck talks too much.”