If There Be Dragons (9 page)

“Maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing,” she whispered.

His face went very still. “Second thoughts?” he asked quietly.

She shook her head. “No. But it—happened awfully fast, Cody. And I’ve never felt anything like that before.”

“Neither have I.”

“No?” She looked at him a little shyly.

“No.” His golden eyes were very direct, very honest. “I love you, Brooke.”

She caught her breath, wondering why the words should shock her as if he’d never spoken them before. “You seem so certain,” she murmured. “So
sure
. How do you know, Cody?”

Smiling, Cody reached over to slide an arm beneath her knees, lifting her easily until she lay across his lap. Holding her close, resting his chin on the top of her head, he mused silently for a moment. “How do I know? You ask tough questions, lady.”

Brooke toyed absently with one of the buttons on his flannel shirt, content to wait for his answer. She needed to hear it, because the abandoned emotions that had raced through her demanded a definition, and she was more than a little afraid to call them love.

After a moment Cody spoke slowly, his tone sober and yet curiously evocative of the deepest emotions. He spoke as if to a third person, weaving the delicate fabric of an elusive yet heartfelt story.

“I met a lady one cold night. She was more beautiful than any dream of beauty I’d ever known, and she was wounded—a part of her hiding away and hurting. And I…wanted to take away the hurt. I wanted to hear her distant little voice shimmer with laughter. I wanted to see her lovely face light up with warmth and happiness.

“‘I knew it was love and I felt it was glory,’” he quoted softly. “That was the feeling. And her dragons were mine; I had to fight them just as I have to breathe. There was never a choice, never a moment when I could have turned away. Because I loved her.

“The days passed, and I tried to prove to her that she could trust me. She’d been hurt so badly, and I didn’t want anything to ever hurt her again. I wanted to show her how much I needed her, but I was afraid of frightening her. So I waited. And the dragons were faced and fought, and the sound of her laughter was like music. And I loved her more.

“When she turned to me finally, reached out for me, I couldn’t believe it. I craved her touch, hungered for her smile, and the need I felt for her was a growing, living thing inside of me.” Cody hesitated, then finished softly, “Because I loved her.”

Brooke lifted her head slowly and stared at him, moved, astonished. There were no longer barriers in her mind, but there existed one around her heart that not even his moving words could completely penetrate. She was afraid to love, almost afraid to
be
loved, and she didn’t know why.

Swallowing hard, she murmured huskily, “The wounds are…healing. But I need time, Cody. Time to know how I feel. Time to fight…one last dragon.”

He surrounded her face with warm hands. “Then we’ll take the time.” Golden eyes smiled at her. “And we’ll fight the dragon together.” He kissed her very gently.

Not for the world would Brooke have hurt him by telling him that she had to fight the last dragon alone.

Hearts and minds, walls and dragons—and an elusive something called love. Did she love Cody? Brooke didn’t know. That he had awakened desire within her she knew; instinct told her that no other man would ever touch her so deeply in that way. Was that love? Was her fierce, constant, maddening need to touch him love?

Was it love that made the sound of his deep voice run along her nerve endings like shimmering fire? Was it love that drew her eyes to him continually? Was it love that had given birth to the bubble of happy laughter she felt all the time now?

Or was all that only a result of defeating the dragon—her mother—that had tormented her entire life in one way or another?

Brooke sorted and sifted and tried to understand. She’d been hurt too many times in her own life ever to willingly hurt another human being; God knew she didn’t want to hurt Cody. But she would never again allow herself to accept a situation simply because she craved approval or love, or feared to hurt.

This time, she vowed determinedly, she’d know her mind and her emotions. This time she wouldn’t hide from herself as well as from others. She’d have no more dragons rearing their heads to frighten or bewilder or cause pain. Brooke Kennedy was going to take control of her life once and for all.

She had thought playfully of dragons and princes after her dream, even going so far as to thoroughly enjoy Cody’s baffled reaction to being called Prince. But that flare of brief and childlike mischief had disappeared in the white-hot blaze of a man’s desire igniting her own.

It wasn’t a game. They weren’t playing Let’s Pretend or living in a fairy tale.

At the same time something told Brooke that somehow she could combine both the warmth of her just discovered childhood and her newly blooming womanhood in Cody’s presence. He had the ability, she realized dimly, to appreciate and understand both. He could pet and encourage the child while never losing sight of the woman.

That realization warmed her, but it confused her as well. Part of her wanted to
be
the child because she’d never had the chance to be one. But a larger part of her desperately needed to become the whole and complete woman she saw reflected in Cody’s wonderful golden eyes.

Alone, Brooke sat on the couch with her feet tucked underneath her and watched the fire she’d just built up. They had turned in for the night hours ago, but she had gotten up again and crept in here to think. And she smiled a little as she remembered how Cody had sensitively and deliberately kept things light between them. He’d left her at her door with a gentle kiss, demanding neither answers nor explanations.

A remarkable man.

Someday her prince would come…. Brooke knew that the Cinderella Complex was probably a valid theory, and that many women, conditioned by too many years of romantic expectations, believed at some level of themselves that their princes would, indeed, come. Handsome princes on the modern equivalent of a white charger, sweeping them off their feet in a breathless rush of romance and carrying them to Happily-Ever-After-Land.

Cheated out of her girlish childhood by reality and denied daydreams by the control she’d been forced to exert over her own mind, Brooke knew that she herself had never indulged, even unconsciously, in fantasies. She’d never craved the “rescue” of a prince because there had been no child deep inside of her to create him. Hard reality had matured her swiftly, wrapping her in a shell of loneliness and confusion, and then layering over that with bitterness and pain.

So Brooke had no real conception of the happily-ever-after dream. Day-to-day living she understood and accepted; disappointment and unhappiness she knew to be a part of life. If one were lucky, she’d come to realize, then a careful balance between happiness and unhappiness could be achieved; if there were no great expectations, there would be no great disappointments.

And she was confused and afraid now because Cody had turned her smooth balance into something entirely different. There were high peaks and low valleys now, and the beginnings of expectations so great that they terrified her. A child locked away and hidden inside of her had been freed, and had dared to dream of a prince.

Disappointment. She’d lived with it her entire life, watched it tangle with grief and loss. She was older more from experience than years. Older from loss. Loss of illusions, of ideals. Loss of a childhood barely begun. Loss of those she loved, or had wanted to love.

She couldn’t bear to lose again.

Cody, the golden man, the stuff of princes. He’d come into her life just ahead of a blizzard, the innate warmth of him contrasting dizzily with the cold winter and her cold loneliness. He’d come and said that he loved her, and had demanded before realizing that demands were blows from a punishing fist to her. Demands had bowed to patience, and he had taught her to trust him. To trust him…and perhaps to love him, but she couldn’t love him, couldn’t be loved by him, because—

She couldn’t bear to lose again.

Brooke sighed raggedly, barely seeing Phantom’s ears twitch at the sound as he lifted his head from the bearskin rug and looked at her alertly.

That was it, then. The final dragon, the beast looming to block off her future. She couldn’t bear to lose again. She could, she thought, trust Cody not to leave her, but she couldn’t trust life not to take him away from her. And she couldn’t trust herself not to strangle him with her own fear if she let herself accept that she loved him.

She heard herself laughing, a dull and unamused laugh. The last dragon, and not all the magic swords ever dreamed could slay it. It loomed mockingly in front of her, daring her to love and lose. It tormented her, because its golden eyes held the promises she’d seen in Cody’s eyes. And the newly awakened child-woman who’d dared to dream of a prince and conceive of happily-ever-after felt the familiar sting of reality and the bitter taste of disappointment.

His voice came quietly into the firelit room, warm and gentle and as achingly familiar as bitterness and defeat.

“Slaying dragons all alone in the dark?” Cody asked, coming around the end of the couch to sit down beside her. He was wearing a dark robe belted over pajama bottoms, his golden hair a little tumbled.

Brooke absently tightened the tie-belt of her own quilted robe, looking at him and wanting desperately to go on looking at him because it fed something ravenously hungry inside of her. “Leave,” she said suddenly, almost inaudibly. “Go away, Cody—far away. I’m not good for you.”

Half turned to face her, resting an elbow on the back of the couch, Cody lifted a hand to trace the distinctive widow’s peak high on her forehead. He was clearly undismayed by her abrupt words. “Why don’t you let me be the judge of that,” he said softly.

She shook her head a little. “I—I don’t think you’re very objective,” she told him.

He smiled. “And you are?”

“Yes.” Brooke gazed at him—direct, honest, her green eyes very clear and fathoms deep. “Right now, at this moment, I am objective. Right now I can tell you to leave.”

“Right now,” he responded, “I can’t leave. Since that first night there’s never been a moment when I could have. And there never will be, Brooke.”

Brooke looked at him steadily, the moment of objectivity passing. Her green eyes clouded, becoming opaque. He wouldn’t leave, and she’d never again be able to ask him to leave. “I’m not good for you,” she repeated painfully.

His hand slid down beneath the heavy weight of her hair to cup her neck gently. “What is it, honey?” he asked quietly. “What’s that dragon been whispering to you here in the dark?”

In a low voice, apparently going off on a tangent, Brooke answered his question with a question. “How old were you, Cody, when you realized that the world was bigger than you knew, and colder? How old were you when you—put away childish things and realized what reality meant?”

He answered her soberly. “I was older than most—in my twenties. A close friend lost his parents, and I saw what it did to him.”

“Thor,” she guessed, knowing the two men had grown up together.

Cody nodded. “Thor.”

Brooke was silent for a moment, thinking about the depth of this man, his sensitivity and understanding. She never ceased to marvel at his generosity of spirit, the luxuriant warmth of him. It was always unexpected, because Cody looked like a breaker of hearts, his face full of the handsomeness women endowed their dream princes with; but there was layer after layer of him, each one showing more of the innate wisdom and understanding that a much older man would have envied.

“How about you?” he asked, knowing what the answers would be.

She looked into the flickering fire. “Six,” she murmured. “And ten. Have you ever lost something that mattered to you, Cody?”

Cody looked at her, at the beautiful profile, and something as old as the cave lurched inside of him. He knew that there was a part of this woman he wouldn’t be able to touch even after years of knowing her; a scarred and lonely part of her that could never be revealed in mere words because the hurt had gone so deep.

“No. I’ve been lucky.” He heard the choked sound of his own voice, and knew that the lump in his throat was born out of fear.

She had sat here in the dark and fought a dragon alone, and Cody realized then that she’d lost the battle. It didn’t matter somehow that other battles had been fought and won; it mattered only that the silent battle in this firelit darkness had been lost. There was something between them now, something that hadn’t been there before. It was a chasm—he on one side and she on the other—and she wouldn’t help him to build a bridge. For some reason she’d made up her mind that there wouldn’t be a bridge.

“You see?” she said very quietly. “I’m not good for you.”

Cody thought at first that she was referring to his answers being so different from hers that she was giving the chasm a name. But then he realized that she was looking at him again, that she’d seen some reaction in his face that he hadn’t been able to control.

“Look what I’m doing to you, Cody.”

“What are you doing?” he asked tautly, wishing that he’d come into the room sooner; wishing that she hadn’t come to the decision that was making his heart pound sickly in his chest.

“Hurting you,” she answered bleakly. Her hands locked tightly together on her thighs, the knuckles whitening.

It sounded like good-bye, like the beginning of good-bye, and Cody realized then that he’d walk barefoot through hell itself, fighting dragons, devils, and demons to prevent good-bye. The fleeting thought of a life without her was an emptiness that struck him a physical blow.

“No,” he said, denying that brief vision rather than her words.

The opacity of her eyes hurt him. The dull remoteness of her voice hurt him. The chasm lying between them like the toothless grin of a mocking devil hurt him. It hurt him that there was a part of her he might never be able to touch, might never know, even if he somehow managed to bridge the chasm.