Page 114

I believed it too.

But Ash didn't know enough to decide what he believed because I had never given him the information.

Beside me, he shifted in his sleep and moved closer until his forehead rested against my shoulder. The response from my dragon was immediate, that restless presence settling beneath my skin as though Ash had reached inside me and soothed something with nothing more than unconscious trust.

For fifteen years, I'd treated that part of myself as something dangerous.

My father had taught me to.

After my mother died, he'd given me warnings instead of answers because perhaps warnings were all he'd had. Don't encourage attachment. Don't let people get too close. Don't assume desire means love. Don't forget what you are capable of doing to someone simply by existing near them.

I'd listened.

Then Ash Thorne had arrived and made distance impossible.

He'd argued with me, resisted me, walked away from me, and told me no often enough that I should've recognized the significance long before Ignatius pointed it out. Whatever influence my nature had on other people, Ash had never behaved like someone without choices.

Tonight he'd been given one back that his father had stolen from him twenty years ago.

I couldn't ask him to trust me while withholding another.

The realization didn't arrive dramatically. There was no sudden flash of courage, because I wasn't suddenly brave enough to stop being afraid of what might happen afterward. I simply reached the point where fear was no longer a good enough reason to wait.

When we got home to Denver, I was going to show Ash my dragon.

Not merely tell him dragons existed and then expect him to accept something impossible on faith. I wanted him to see me shift, to understand what I was before I tried to explain the rarer, more complicated truth of being lifebound.

After that, I would tell him everything I knew.

I'd tell him about my mother begging me not to leave and about coming home too late. I'd tell him what my father had said afterward and why I'd spent fifteen years terrified that affection around me might be something I created rather than earned.

Then Ash could decide.

That was the part that frightened me most, because giving him the truth meant accepting that I didn't control what he did with it.

He might need space.

He might be furious that I'd waited this long.

He might look at me and wonder whether anything between us had ever been real, and no amount of certainty from me could prevent him from asking the question.

He might even walk away.

My chest tightened at the thought, and my dragon stirred restlessly before Ash shifted closer again, one hand settling against my side.

I covered it with mine.

For most of my adult life, I'd believed protecting someone meant making sure my nature could never hurt them. Ash was forcing me to understand that sometimes protection meant trusting another person with the thing you were most afraid they'd reject.

I'd promised him everything.

When we got home, I would keep that promise, even if the truth cost me the one person I'd finally stopped wanting to live without.

Chapter nineteen

Playoffs - The postseason tournament in which qualifying teams compete in a series of elimination rounds for the championship.

Ash