Stranded with the Cajun (Captured by a Dragon-Shifter Book 3) (7 page)

W
hat new test was this
?

Sheriff Jackson had warned him away from Lori. Ursa wanted to shoot Lori. Both were people whose opinions he trusted. Drake wanted to keep Lori with him in the swamps as his mate, have babies with her and—if the gods ever blessed him with a way to make it happen—take her back to his home world to show her where he was born.

Drake stared at Lori, thinking of her to avoid feeling the pain in his arm. Ursa filled the silence, demanding the story of how Drake came to be on her lawn. He told her everything. There was no reason not to.

When Ursa finally dug the bullet from his arm, he was assaulted with an almost instant numbness as his body began to heal. The sound of metal clanked against porcelain when Ursa dropped the bullet into a container. She then dabbed at his arm.

“You don’t look like a dragon,” Lori said. “At least none that I’ve seen in mythology books.”

“You are thinking of female dragon-shifters,” he answered.

“I thought you said you came back to Earth because your people didn’t have female dragons.” Lori moved closer to him. He watched her expression for fear but didn’t find any. Instead, she looked curious.

“Very few in our older generations,” he answered. “But they are dying out. We have not had a female shifter birth on Qurilixen for a long time. When the problem first began, couples were encouraged to have more babies in hopes that it would result in some women. It did not work. All it did was make a large generation of men with little prospect of having a family.”

“So you all decided to move back to Earth?” Lori asked.

“Our old documents say that humans are reproductively compatible. So the portal that was used to escape persecution on Earth was unburied. Unfortunately, no one can agree on how to go about finding brides. Some wish to cross over and take batches of them by force. Some want to move our populations over in segments and bring them back once they’ve mated. Some suggest we barter with your government. Though after living here, I think that is a mistake. I have seen how your people deal with outsiders. Some believe we are defying the will of the gods and wish to close the portal permanently so humans cannot come through. They think humans will taint shifter blood. But all this matters very little for the time being as the royal families have kept the portal from the population and are selfishly only letting royal members through to find wives.”

Ursa snorted and gathered up her crude medical kit. “I’ll call de sheriff and tell him about Howards.”

Lori waited until the woman moved toward the kitchen before stepping closer to study Drake’s arm. When they were alone, she asked, “Are you in pain?”

“Yes,” he answered. It was the truth. His heart had ached since she’d left and now was filled with fear that she would go again. It was the most severe of pains.

“The royal families wish to control the population by blocking access to brides?” Lori inquired.

“I believe so.” He remained in his seat, afraid if he moved he’d be tempted to hold her. If he held her, he’d want to kiss her. If he kissed her, he’d never let her go.

“Then how did you get to Earth?” Lori lightly touched his injured arm, keeping her fingers away from the wound.

“They will not let us make decisions for ourselves on whether we wish to come to Earth, but they let the new human princess come and go as she pleases. I waited, followed her and came through the portal after her.” Drake remembered the fear he’d felt leaving his home. He’d often wondered if he’d made the right decision.

“Do you want to go back? You must be homesick.”

“I miss parts of my home world. I miss the contrasting sweet and acrid smell of the mountain air. We only have darkness once a year. And there are three suns in the sky, not one. Many of our trees are as big as your redwoods, with smooth bubble-looking texture very unlike your rough bark that grows in shards. The leaves are much wider.” He could recall the details so clearly, and yet he worried that one day the memory of home would fade. “The bayou reminds me of home, of the shadowed marshes near the borderlands where I grew up.”

“Will you return? Or will they punish you for disobeying?” She stopped touching him and let her hand hang in the air between them.

“I doubt they’ve noticed I’m gone. If they do, I’m sure they’ll suspect the Myrddin clan of doing me harm, but without proof or anyone to protest, they will not be forced to look into the matter. The friends I have said goodbye to will not betray me. I would like to return some day, but I am not sure I will ever find the way.” Drake stared at her hand. She was so delicate and soft. Everything inside him wanted to protect her. How could he do that when he had people hunting him?

“If it’s something you want, I’ll help you. We can go to the French Quarter. You mentioned the LaLaurie Mansion. We can find—”

“It is a kind offer, but the portal does not open in the same place every night. I do not know when or if it will appear there again.”

“Drake,” Lori hesitated. Slowly, she reached for his shifted face. Her fingers moved over his hardened features. The protective shell of his armor dulled the sensitivity of his skin, but he still felt her. She traced his old scar.

“I must appear to be a monster to you,” he said.

“The men who shot you are the monsters.” Lori cupped his jaw and turned his face up to look at her. “You confuse me.”

“I am not confused. I know what I feel.” He traced the tip of a taloned finger down her arm.

“Does it hurt to shift?”

Drake chuckled. “No more than breathing.”

“Can you do it whenever you want?”

“Yes.”

“Will you show me?”

“No.”

Lori stopped caressing him. “Is it because you’ll die from the wound?”

“No.”

“You don’t want me to see?” She frowned.

“Being in dragon form tempers back my desires since I cannot make love to you in this body.”

“Oh,” she said, and then, as if realization hit her, she repeated louder, “Oh.”

“If I were to shift, I might do something you don’t want me to.”

“What makes you think I don’t want you to?” Her cheeks colored ever so slightly.

Drake stood from his chair to tower over her. His skin tingled as his body transformed into his human self. Her breath caught as she watched, but she did not pull away in fear. He leaned into her and pressed his lips to hers. The ache inside him instantly lessened at the contact.

Lori gasped and pulled away. “What was that?”

“Don’t leave me again,” he whispered.

“Ole Jack said to lock up and stay here,” Ursa announced loudly. “Drake can hear sometin’ coming ten miles away. I have guns, whiskey and cards.” Ursa came from the kitchen holding all three items. “Everytin’ for de
bourre
.”

“
Boo-ray?
” Lori sounded out. She eyed the whiskey. “I don’t know what that means, but it better not involve me having to strip down naked so you can make me a Cajun.”

Ursa arched a brow and laughed. “No one is asking to see you naked. What fun is dere in dat for me?”

“
B
oo-ray” was
some kind of card game. Lori didn’t exactly know how to play it, but she was pretty sure Ursa kept changing the rules. She was also confident that Ursa moonlighted as a frat boy from a party house. The old woman might look frail, but she could knock back whiskey like the best of them and told loud, incomprehensible stories that couldn’t have been appropriate by the way she cackled and winked after each one.

Whenever Ursa left the table to do her version of a perimeter check, Drake would sneakily drink Lori’s whiskey for her. She’d nodded, grateful to him for recognizing she couldn’t keep up with the two of them. Though she tried to tell Ursa she didn’t want another drink, the woman kept trying to ply her with alcohol.

“Drake,” Lori insisted when Ursa reached for a shotgun and made her way to the front window. “She shouldn’t be carrying a loaded weapon.”

Drake reached under the table to the chair next to him and then revealed a couple shotgun shells he’d hidden there. “She’s not.”

Lori gave a small laugh and relaxed. “How did you possibly become friends with Ursa?”

The woman hardly seemed like the ideal ambassador for first contact with an alien species…or a dragon-shifter former Earthling coming to his medieval ancestors’ home.

“I found the swamps. She found me.”

“I don’t think it’s that simple. She said you saved her life. That she was about to kill herself.” Lori glanced over her shoulder. Ursa had stopped looking out the window and had taken up residence in a chair. The old woman stared at the wall, her eyes closing as she fought to stay awake.

Drake looked at Ursa and stood when the old woman didn’t move. He held out his hand to Lori. “Come.”

Lori followed him into a small room. He shut the door and turned on the light. Photographs lined the wall, filling nearly every conceivable space. An old quilt was neatly folded over a rocking chair. Tiny knickknacks and trinkets that would only make sense to their owner lined the dresser.

“All the pictures are of the same couple,” Lori observed. The wall displayed the entire life of a couple, the photos arranged like the flow of memories in no particular timeline—a party, a cigarette, a dance, a laugh, a wrecked car, tears, a ruined pie, two forks in a piece of cake. They were the small moments that made a lifetime. As a photographer, she could appreciate the simplicity of the collection. As a woman, she felt envious of all that couple had and were. She pointed to a smiling woman in a 1950s wedding dress. “Is that Ursa?”

Drake nodded. “With her mate, Irving. Ursa lost her one true love. He died on their fiftieth anniversary. I arrived ten years after, on the anniversary of his death when she had decided to join him.”

“I can’t imagine,” Lori whispered. She thought of the drunken woman holding an empty shotgun and suddenly felt very sorry for her tragic story. “To be with someone that long, to love them so much that time cannot heal you. I don’t think anyone loves like that anymore. I mean, I’ve heard my grandparents’ generation talking about love at first sight, marrying soldiers after one day before they head off to war. I can’t rationalize doing something like that. Logically, it makes no sense to leap into major decisions.”

Drake cupped her cheek. “Perhaps this is not something that needs your logic, but your heart. I watch you humans. You run haphazardly through life without stopping to breathe. You make decisions and then doubt them. You make new decisions and then doubt them as well. Sometimes, you don’t make any decision and just let things happen regardless of consequences. I do not think life is so difficult. If you see a child in danger, you save it. If you see an animal in pain, you help it. If you are hungry, you find food. If you have responsibilities, you do your duty. And if you find love, you let yourself feel it. You grab on to it because that is the only thing that makes life worth living, and you never know when it will be taken away by the gods. If you find it, there is no need to look elsewhere. The Draig understand this. We do not divorce. We connect for life like Ursa did. When dragons mate, our lives extend to our partners, becoming so entwined that it is said humans live longer because of it. I think it is because we naturally want more time.”

Lori saw the earnestness of his expression. She felt safe. Somewhere, out in the miles and miles of swamps and marshes was a maniac hunter with a gun, and yet she felt safe with Drake inside this little cabin in the middle of nowhere.

Her cheek tingled where he touched her. She swallowed, nervously, licking her lips. His gaze remained steady trained on hers. Tiny yellow swirls of color lined his pupils. Desire bubbled to the surface. It had been there all night, simmering and waiting. It wasn’t only her body that tingled, but her mind. She felt a prickling in her brain like someone scratched to come inside her thoughts.

A combination of fear and anticipation filled her. She found herself moving closer to him until her body pressed against the length of his. He leaned his forehead to hers and did not look away. The physical needs of her body caused her mind to focus on the hard press of his shaft against her stomach. The heat of him warmed her clothing.

“What’s happening?” she whispered. She couldn’t move.

“Let me love you,” he said.
“Let yourself love me.”

Lori pulled away. His lips hadn’t moved when he said the last words, but she’d heard his voice inside her mind. “Wait, what did you say?”

“Let me love you.”
Again, his lips didn’t move.
“I have to believe that my gods led me here, to you, for a reason.”

“Drake, stop that,” she insisted before thinking,
“How are you in my head?”

“We mated,” he answered, this time using his mouth.

“Are you reading my thoughts? I mean, you know that…” Lori tried not to think of all the things she didn’t want him to see—the memory of his naked body, the fantasies she’d had about that naked body, the desperate climax she’d experienced in the inn just thinking about him late at night, and imagining him all shifted and hard and fuck…

Drake grinned and let his eyes flash to gold and then back again. “The dragon skin is a protective armor, and I cannot take you in my shifted form, but if you want to be hunted like that I can—”

“Ah!” Lori hit his arm. “Let a girl have a little mystery to her.”

“Why? You want me,” he stated.

“Yes, I want you again, but—”

“Not just sex. You want to be my wife. You love me.”

“No, no.” She shook her head.
“That’s absurd. It’s been a couple of days. And stop smiling. And get out of my thoughts.”

“I like your thoughts,”
he directed back at her. He pulled her tightly against him. His skin rippled, and in the span of a few seconds, he stood before her in his dragon form. She felt the shift along the length of her body, firm flesh turning to hard skin.

“Well, then I’m just going to have to…” Lori concentrated, trying to read his mind. At first, it was fuzzy and jumbled, but then she felt him. The sensation became a tickle of pure emotion, building until every feeling he had for her came flooding in. He’d told the truth. He’d loved her from the start. She felt the ache her leaving with the sheriff had caused. Never in her life had she imagined anyone missing her that much.

“Let me buy you flowers and cake.”
Drake let his body shift back into human form.

Lori laughed at the strange request. “Well, what girl doesn’t like flowers and cake?”

“So yes?” Drake stroked her bottom lip with his thumb. “You accept that we are mated? Forever?”

“Marriage,” Lori said in sudden understanding. Her laughter faded. Without hesitation, she answered, “Yes.” She looked at the fifty years of a life filled with love on Ursa’s wall. Her path suddenly became very clear. This is what she wanted. No more searching around the next corner. It didn’t matter if she lived in a swamp if it meant she got to have a life filled with happiness. “Yes, Drake, I’ll have flowers and cake with you.”