Scorch: M/M Gay Shifter Mpreg Romance (Dragon's Destiny: Fated Mates Book 2)

I
wanted Maks
, and seeing so much of him lately had been heaven.

I loved his sense of humor, and the way he listened to me as if everything about me was fascinating, and the way he made even the simplest moments fun. I loved the little ways he always found to touch me, and the way he remembered the things that were important to me, and the way he looked at me, hot and tender at the same time, as if I was everything he wanted. And I appreciated that he respected my need to honor my marriage vows. I really did.

But oh, God, I desperately wanted him to fuck me. I wanted him to do things to me that I’d never experienced in real life, but I wasn’t free to ask for those things.

Whenever I closed my eyes, though, he was there… and in my dreams I didn’t have to ask. They always felt so vivid, so real, as if Maks were inside my head, inside my heart—and definitely, in those hot, frantic dreams—inside my body.

Tonight, in the way of dreams, the setting was both familiar and strange. It felt like
my
bedroom,
my
home, but not the one I lived in with Sarah. It was Maks’s home. Our home, together. And Maks was there, behind me, those hot hands that had touched me chastely so many times in the waking world, suddenly not so innocent. Slipping under my shirt, trailing a line of heat up my belly that shot straight down to my cock. Maks was kissing me, tipping my head back so he could suck lightly at the base of my throat as he undressed me. Handling me with a possessive devotion that made me feel cherished and loved and
his
, completely.

I didn’t know if the reality would ever compare to this. How could it?

In the dream, Maks’s lips scorched my skin, lighting it on fire with a fierce, burning need for more. Dream-clothes disappeared, and the feel of Maks’s powerful body, naked and pressed against me from behind, his thick shaft pulsing between us, was almost enough to make me come by itself.

Especially when he reached around and wrapped a hot hand around my own straining erection, stroking up its length with the perfect pressure, and that delicious
heat.
Slicking his hand back down me, again and again, in a rhythm that made everything else disappear. There was only him.

His touch. His heat. His voice.

He whispered in my ear, telling me all the things that I’d never heard him say in waking life, but had seen in his eyes every time we saw each. Things I was scared for him to say out loud since I wasn’t free to act on them… even though I desperately wanted to hear them. Wicked things, and loving things, and things that made me dream of a future that was unlike anything I’d ever let myself imagine before meeting him.

And then, with no transition, dream-Maks was fucking me.

“
W
here’s whatsisname
?” Ty asked, handing me a beer. “Jared. Did you leave him back in Wisconsin?”

“Jason,” I corrected him, slouching down on the couch. “And that’s been over for a few months. Thanks,” I added, tipping the beer up in a mock salute before taking a drink.

“Fuck, Maks,” Ty laughed, shaking his head. “You go through men faster than my niece goes through diapers. I thought you dragons were all ‘there can be only one’ and shit.”

I laughed along with him, ignoring the little twinge I felt at the jibe. Not every dragon shifter could be as lucky as my friend, Dane, who had found his fated mate in Ty’s twin, Wes. The first time Dane had seen Wes, his otherself had instantly recognized the pretty man as his destiny.

I’d met Dane over two hundred years ago, when I still thought I was human. He’d been there when my dragon had awoken, and when my otherself had first burst forth he’d saved me from causing harm to the people that mattered to me.

Before that day, I hadn’t known such things existed, and it had been both shocking and terrifying… but not as much as the thought of what I would have become if my friend hadn’t been there to take me under his wing. Dane was already centuries old by the time I came along, and in that time he had seen our kind do unspeakable things. He’d shielded me from most of it, guiding and mentoring me in what it meant to be what we were and becoming my closest friend along the way—a relationship closer than family for both of us.

Our nature meant that we lived lives always subtly apart from the humans around us, but that had changed for Dane when he found his fated mate. He had a family of his own now, and I’d never seen my friend as happy as he was now that he had Wes and had become a father.

He was a good man, and he deserved it.

Seeing what he had, though, had made me increasingly discontent with the endless parade of boyfriends who flowed in and out of my own life. I enjoyed human men, but from the moment I’d discovered what I really was, I’d understood that I would always need to keep them at arm’s length. I’d learned that from Dane, but where he had been wracked with guilt over the way dragonkind treated the humans who didn’t know that we lived among them, I’d always been more laid back.

Dane had been driven to protect humans. I was much more interested in simply enjoying them.

Our dragon powers made it easy for our kind to get what we wanted in life, but I’d never had to resort to that to fill my bed. I knew that men were attracted to my dragon-built human body as much as to my admittedly-hedonistic attitude, and I couldn’t ever remember meeting a man I wanted that I couldn’t have.

Of course, I always knew that I couldn’t have them for long, but I was used to that.

Humans were too short-lived to get attached to, and there was so much I couldn’t reveal to them that getting truly close was not an option. Which had never been a problem. Keeping things fun and casual had always worked just fine for me. I liked things easy, and if there was a level of intimacy lost, I accepted that as the price of being a dragon.

Lately, though, I’d started to feel… restless.

Watching Dane with his fated mate had shown me something I hadn’t believed was possible for us, and it stirred something inside me that I wasn’t at all sure I liked. It made me less and less content with being alone, but at the same time, I wasn’t satisfied with the company of the kind of men who had been perfectly acceptable before.

It was maddening.

Dragons were territorial creatures, and even among friends we tended to live apart. Still, I’d grown restless in my own territory back east and lately found myself heading north frequently to spend time with my friend Ben, another dragon shifter I’d met when Dane and I first came to this continent after getting chased out of Europe by my sire, or more often, pulled
here
, drawn to the west to be around Dane and his family.

Dane had only found his mate a year and a half ago, and they were still sickeningly in love with each other. Even though I knew Dane considered me family, too, I didn’t want to intrude… but I couldn’t seem to stay away. Being around them didn’t quite cure my loneliness, but at least it was better than being on my own.

Especially since I hadn’t been with a man since I’d ended things with my last boyfriend, Jason, months ago.

I blinked, a little shocked as I realized how long it had actually been.

“I need to get laid,” I said. Maybe that was the problem. Sex might help with the annoying dissatisfaction I’d felt lately with… well, with everything.

“Sorry. Straight,” Ty said, raising his hand as if he’d been called on in school. “Can’t help you there, dude.”

“Can’t help with what, Tee?” Wes asked his brother, walking in with his one-year-old daughter, Elise, on his hip.

“Maks is fuck—, uh, horn— er,
lonely
,” Ty said, putting his beer down with a grimace as he stumbled over his words in an effort to make it a G-Rated answer. He reached for his niece.

I laughed at Ty’s ongoing struggle to watch his language around Wes and Dane’s daughter. Given that he was a man who typically dropped a minimum of two F-bombs per sentence, I had to admit that the outgoing soldier was doing much better than the last time I’d seen him. Elise wasn’t talking much yet, though, so it was yet to be seen if he’d been successful
enough.

The little girl giggled happily as her father handed her over to her uncle, patting Ty’s cheek and launching into an intense, babbling monologue that didn’t seem to include any four-letter words—or really any recognizable words at all. Ty seemed to follow along just fine, though, nodding and talking back as if his niece was telling him the most interesting things in the world.

The sight of the normally foul-mouthed Ty getting all gooey-eyed over my friend’s daughter gave me an unfamiliar ache in my chest. Not for him, of course, but for
that.
I’d never had the desire for a family of my own, but I was beginning to see the appeal after spending so much time with Dane’s.

I really needed to quash the part of me that had suddenly become impatient to have what Dane had found, though. I was the youngest dragon on the continent, and I couldn’t expect that out of all the human men who had ever lived, my one-and-only would suddenly appear just because I was feeling a little jealous of my friend’s happiness.

Dane had waited four hundred years to find Wes. My friend Ben was even older, and
still
unmated. Ben was the child of fated mates himself, and his dragon shifter father, Anik, had been over a thousand years old before he’d met his human fated mate, Mikkel.

I needed to be patient. It could be centuries before I found mine, and I would drive myself crazy if I kept dwelling on it.

“Lonely, Maks?” Wes asked me now, his eyes sparkling with suppressed laughter as he responded to his twin’s comment. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you stay alone for long, much less get
lonely
. Dane was just telling me the other day how dangerous it was to go anywhere with you, what with the risk of tripping over all the men who fall at your feet.”

I laughed along with him. He was right. I should just go pick up some pretty young boy to fuck for the weekend and stop yearning for things that were out of reach. I was only going to be in town for a few days, anyway. I’d flown in for Elise’s first birthday, and I really had no reason to stay here in Washington State longer than that.

Even if there wasn’t anything to rush home to.

“
T
his is a ‘museum
?’” I asked, looking around the spacious building swarming with children. I was following Dane up the staircase that led to the second floor, my arms filled with brightly wrapped presents. The stairs wound around a treehouse-themed slide that looked like it would be a lot of fun if I were about three feet shorter… and not hung over.

Dragons should not get hung over, I thought grumpily.

After Ty had left and Dane and his little family had gone to bed the night before, I’d headed out to try and find some companionship. It shouldn’t have been hard, and I’d definitely found men. Lots of men.
Beautiful
men. To my intense irritation, though, I’d found myself supremely uninterested in all of them—no matter how much I’d tried to talk myself into feeling otherwise.

I’d settled for vodka instead. Too much vodka, if the truth be told.

Being a dragon shifter meant that my body healed quickly, which normally included recovering from the effects of over-indulging. But apparently I’d
over
over-indulged the night before, and even my dragon-metabolism was struggling to recover from it.

And I’d still gone home alone.

I couldn’t blame it on lack of opportunity, but even though my cock had been telling me to just pick someone and fuck them, I’d found myself turning away from one obviously-interested man after another.

The worst part was that I couldn’t really say why I’d been so picky. The dragon inside me was usually pretty quiet, but every time I’d started checking someone out the night before, my otherself had intervened, finding fault with them.

I didn’t understand it, and I didn’t like it. It was making me cranky.

Especially when we entered the birthday party room and I caught Dane looking across the room at
his
mate like he wanted to lick the man.

“It’s the Hands-On Children’s Museum, and Elise loves it here,” Dane said, and it took me a minute to remember that he was answering my earlier question about the place they’d chosen to host their daughter’s first birthday party at.

I didn’t know what was wrong with me. Hangover or not, it wasn’t like me to feel so irritable. I tried to shake it off and focus on why we were here. Dane was like a brother to me, and even if it wasn’t by blood, he was the closest thing I had to a family of my own. At least, any family that I wanted to claim an association with. His family was the reason I’d come to the Pacific Northwest, I reminded myself—not to try and hook up with yet another human whose name I would just end up forgetting in a few months. Today was about Elise and her fathers.

“The museum is more about having kids learn by doing hands-on things, rather than just by looking,” Dane was saying as he set his own armload of gifts down on a glittering table in the heavily decorated party room. The place was an explosion of sparkling pink-ness, further evidence of just how much my formerly-brooding friend’s life had changed. “Wesley brings Elise here a few times each week for activities and classes with other toddlers her own age,” Dane went on without taking his eyes off his mate.

This was getting ridiculous. I could barely stand to look at the two of them and their ongoing infatuation with each other. The hot looks Dane was shooting across the room were making me even crankier, and I suddenly wished that I had taken someone home the night before, after all.

Wes was standing near a tower of pink-frosted cupcakes, holding a wobbling Elise by the hand while the little girl babbled at another toddler who clung to her pregnant mother’s leg. “…you should start to have more energy now that you’re past the first trimester, Sarah,” Wes was saying, clearly trying to ignore the smoldering looks Dane was sending him. His flaming cheeks were a sure sign of just how aware he was of his mate’s heat, though.

“That’s how it was when I was pregnant with Holly,” the young woman replied, nodding. She didn’t seem to notice the erotic by-play of the two men. She had dark circles under her eyes, and rested her hands on her baby bump as she spoke. “But with this one, it’s already my sixteenth week and I’m still exhausted.”

“Well, you
do
have to run around after a toddler this time. If your Holly is as energetic as our Elise is, that alone would wear you out, even if you weren’t expecting again.”

“That’s true,” she said, smiling tiredly. “Although my husband is such a help with her. I don’t know what I would do without him.”

I turned back to Dane, determined to give him a hard time about his ongoing obsession with his mate, when suddenly the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. The air in the room shifted, and my otherself woke up with a vengeance. I was vaguely aware of Dane giving me a curious look, and of the ongoing buzz of conversation in the room—
“Here he is now. Have you met Devin, Wes?”
the pregnant woman, Sarah, was saying—but all of those things ceased to matter.

I turned, my attention pulled to the doorway as if by a magnet.

A man had just walked in, and part of my brain made note of the unimportant things—he was young, and small-ish, with dark hair and light eyes behind rimless glasses. He had a dimple in his chin, and a vein pulsed near the base of his throat. It was beating faster and faster as I watched it, and I wanted to taste it.

The man was beautiful. My dragon recognized him. This man
belonged
to me.

He was my fated mate.

“Honey, come meet Wes and Elise,” Sarah said, crossing the room and hooking her arm through my mate’s. She pulled him over to the ridiculous pink cupcakes, and the little girl who had been holding onto her leg earlier lit up, beaming and reaching up toward him with chubby arms. “Wes, this is my husband, Devin,” Sarah said as my mate scooped the toddler up in his arms and kissed her on the cheek.

My fated mate was named Devin.

But Devin was married. He had a child, and a pregnant wife, and he stood a few feet away from me, holding his daughter, and chatting with Wes, and ignoring me completely.

As if the whole world hadn’t just shifted on its axis.