Page 6 of Knotted by the Mountain Man Dragon

His eyes light up.

“Let’s go.”

Chapter Two

Cage

Three weeks.

For three weeks, I’ve been losing my goddamn mind.

It started in my sleep. A scent I’d never encountered but recognized instantly. Something deep in my brain clicking over like a lock engaging, my dragon lifting its head for the first time in years and saying that.

That one.

Vanilla and blackberry. Warm skin. Something that made my chest ache and my hands fist in the sheets.

I woke up hard every morning.

That’s not normal for me. I may look thirty years old in my human form, but I’m ninety-three. I’ve been alive long enough to have complete control over my body, my dragon, my instincts. I don’t get blindsided by attraction. I don’t lose sleep over scents.

But for three weeks I’ve been dreaming of a woman I’ve never met. Waking with her phantom scent on my pillow. Standing in my garage at two in the afternoon, hands buried in an engine block, and suddenly catching a trace of vanilla and blackberry so vivid it stops me cold. And then it’s gone, because she isn’t here. She doesn’t exist yet. She’s just a promise my dragon won’t let me forget.

I stopped sleeping through the night.

I split enough firewood to last three winters because I needed something to do with my hands at four in the morning when the dreams woke me up.

I stood on my porch in the dark and looked down the mountain toward town and thought: she’s coming.

My dragon has never been wrong.

I am not a hopeful man. I’ve lived in these mountains longer than most of the trees on my property. I built my cabin with my own hands forty years ago and I’ve maintained it alone ever since. I hunt. I chop wood. I fix engines. I eat, I sleep, I keep my dragon leashed, and I don’t bother anyone who doesn’t bother me first.

I accepted decades ago that I would probably never find a true mate.

Dragons are rare. True mates are rarer. Most of us live our entire long lives without ever catching the scent that rewires everything. I know of it happening twice: Beck’s grandparents and Silas’s parents. I’ve thought that must be incredible and then buried the thought because wanting something that unlikely is a waste of time. True mates tend to arrive in clusters after long dormant periods. I’ve always assumed we were in an extended dormant period.

Then three weeks ago, my dragon lifted its head.

And I haven’t had a moment’s peace since.

Now she’s lying on the hood of a car in my garage, flushed and trembling and looking at me like she can’t decide whether to run or let me fuck her, and my dragon is so quiet with satisfaction that the silence is almost disorienting.

Mate.

No question. No ambiguity. No “maybe” or “probably” or “she could be.”

She is.

I’ve known since the second she walked through the door and her scent hit me like a fist to the sternum. Vanilla and blackberry, exactly like the dreams, except a thousand times more potent in person because she’s here, she’s real, she’s inches away and she smells like mine and her body just responded to me like no omega has ever responded to me in nearly a century of being alive.

And now my dragon wants to take her home and never let her leave.

I’m aware this is not a normal reaction to meeting a woman.

I don’t care.

I need two minutes where I’m not looking at her or I’m going to put her back on that hood and finish what we started. I walk to the bay door, open it, and step into the rain. Her car is sitting in the lot where Dale left it. I drive it into the bay and slide underneath. It takes me about thirty seconds to confirm what I already suspected from the sound she described.