The Billionaire Dragon Shifter Meets His Match: BBW Paranormal Romance (Gray's Hollow Dragon Shifters Book 6) (6 page)

He had lost all his defenses against hearing her in dragon speech, so even when they both slept he was aware of her reaching out to him, warm and open. He didn’t know how to give the same back; the best he could do was not let his nightmares into her mind. But with her there, held close in his arms, his nightmares didn’t make as much trouble as they usually did.

He woke up properly when he felt Jane rising toward wakefulness, a certain sleepy irritation overtaking the sleeping warmth of her thoughts. He hid his smile in her hair and kissed her forehead, then her cheek.

She made a discontented noise in her throat, though she cuddled closer to him at the same time.
Gold. Where’s gold?

Laurence glanced around, considering what to bring to bed for her.

She made another unhappy noise, and his dragon roared awake, furious at whatever was making his mate unhappy. Laurence froze, trying to keep under control and acutely aware that
he
was the one making his mate unhappy. He hadn’t provided her a proper place to sleep, wasn’t fetching what she needed quickly enough.

Jane made a different unhappy noise and hid her face against his chest. She raised one hand from where it had rested on his back.

Laurence watched the gold chain slither free of the pocket of her jeans—the black medallion slipped off and stayed behind. It flowed up through the air to Jane’s outstretched hand.

She let out a soft sigh of relief as the gold touched her skin. The chain coiled around her wrist, and Laurence’s dragon burned, wanting her to wear only what
he
gave her. He ought to be plying her with all the gifts a mate deserved. His entire hoard should be gathered up and laid at her feet, draped over her skin, gracing every generous curve.

Laurence wrestled his dragon into its usual grumbling submission and flicked his fingers. A chest at the end of the bed opened, and a heavy blanket unfolded from it, stretching over the bed until it reached his hand. He settled it gently over Jane—over them both, since he couldn’t let her go. The cloth of gold was a richer, denser version of the sheet he’d been lying on when he woke up in Georgian Corps custody the night before.

Jane made a shocked sound of pleasure that reminded him of the night before. His cock stirred as Jane opened her eyes and relaxed into the embrace of the gold he’d wrapped around her.

“
Oh.
” Jane opened her eyes and ran her hand lightly over the blanket, the red silk and gold threads making a vivid contrast to her fair skin and dark hair. “Laurence, why do you ever sleep on anything else?”

Laurence couldn’t think of an answer other than the greedy rumble of his dragon. He laid his hand beside hers on the blanket, letting himself feel the gold and silk properly.

Of course, that brought the black line of dragonglass around his wrist into view. The scars that littered his wrist made for an ugly contrast with the perfect smoothness of Jane’s arm.

She didn’t make a sound this time, but he felt the silent echo of a hurt noise, quite different from any other Jane had made this morning. He thought he even felt the stirring of her dragon, a flicker of protective rage that felt all too familiar.

Laurence started to draw his hand away, to put it out of sight and stop distressing his mate, but Jane hurriedly linked her fingers with his, keeping him there. He sighed and surrendered to her attention.

Jane leaned into him, the soft silky press of her body a welcome distraction from her fingers brushing lightly over the black bracelet on his wrist. The chain was made of a hundred bits of dragonglass strung together on a wire, with a few gold beads interspersed. It rested directly over the worst of his scars, thickened from repeated injuries where the dragonglass had stopped him from an attempt to shift. The bracelet was small, but it held its own shape when he tried to change his.

There was a ladder of smaller scars halfway up to his elbow—he used to move the bracelets up and down his arms to let one wound or another heal. He had worn dragonglass secured around himself in different ways, before he gave in to the simplest solution and left the basic bracelets around his wrists. He hadn’t needed them so much in the last several years, but the marks remained.

Jane’s fingers slipped under the bracelet to trace the ugly scar that wrapped halfway around his wrist. She found the next one up and the next, and his dragon, held down inside, had no more idea how to react than he did. He couldn’t be angry with his mate; he couldn’t fear her. He couldn’t hide any part of himself from her, no matter how shameful, but he didn’t want her to look. When she understood what she was seeing she would know just how bad a bargain she had gotten in her long-awaited mate.

For once his dragon was more than content to hide deep inside. That left Laurence naked in bed with the most beautiful, most precious woman in all the world as she counted his scars.

She soon found all she could reach on his left arm, and she pushed back the decadent blanket of gold to sit up and straddle his thighs. He offered her his other hand without bothering to hesitate, and watched her face while she studied his other arm. Her fingers again walked from scar to scar, up from his wrist nearly to his shoulder, only briefly circling around the freshest scar, the one she’d given him when they met.

He couldn’t read her, couldn’t even hear anything from her in dragon speech, no matter how intently he listened. All he got from her was silent, absolute focus.

When she finished with his arms she scooted back on his thighs to study his chest. She frowned at the scar just under his collarbone and the two that followed the curves of his ribs on the right side.

He couldn’t have said why, but he raised his hand to hers, guiding her fingers to the worst scar, the oldest. It was harder to see than the dragonglass marks. His mother had stitched him up with gold thread, and his skin had healed cleanly. The scars that remained were underneath.

Jane’s eyes widened as she found the knots of scar tissue and understood the arc they formed. She settled one hand over the scars on his belly and reached behind him with the other hand to find the corresponding scars on his back. He could see her measuring out the arc, imagining the size of the mouth whose teeth had caught him.

“Were you in this shape?”

He shook his head, startled and somehow pleased that the first question she asked was such a sensible one, and none of the ones he’d ever imagined anyone asking if he showed them.

“How old were you?”

Laurence stared up at her for a few seconds, fascinated by Jane’s investigative bent. “Fourteen. Small for it, though. I didn’t start shifting at all until I was nearly ten, and my dragon didn’t reach full size until I was twenty.”

Jane met his eyes, and flames snapped in the depths of her gaze, banked almost to embers but not quite.
She
had that kind of control, of course.

What if she couldn’t change him? What if he changed her? What if she wanted to burn down the world for him? Who would stop them?

“Laurence,
who did this to you
?”

Laurence shook his head. On this one point, it was easy to be calm. This one thing didn’t make his dragon angry at all, only eager to bury itself deep, in some safe place that didn’t exist.

“It wasn’t like you think, treasure.”

Jane squeezed her eyes shut for a second, and then she slid off of him to lie on her side.
Come here, lie down with me.

Laurence knew he wasn’t actually being let off the hook, but that wasn’t an offer he was going to refuse. He curled down facing Jane and let her draw the gold coverlet up over them both, closing them in a warm red-gold cave just big enough for two humans pressed close together.

Her hand found his cheek, stroking gently. “You know I’m your mate, and you’re mine, even if we haven’t properly claimed each other yet.”

Laurence nodded. His dragon growled inside, wanting to claim his mate now and let everything else go to hell.

“That’s why I can’t investigate anything to do with you,” Jane said softly, which wasn’t quite where Laurence had expected this to go. “I’m your mate; that means I’ll always take your side. I’ll always do what I can to protect you, just as I know you’ll protect me.”

Laurence nodded slowly. The silent words slipped out without effort.
That’s what I’m worried about
.

Jane smiled a little. “I won’t shoot anybody without your permission, my lord dragon. Because that’s the other thing—I’ll protect whoever you’re protecting. My loyalty to you comes before my loyalty to the Georgian Corps, and they know that as well as I do. They won’t blame me for it. They’re going to try to find where you came from; they’ll already be pretty sure other dragons live there.”

Laurence felt himself freeze inside, but Jane shook her head and pressed closer. Her fingers wound into his hair as she kissed his lips.

“That’s what I’m telling you,” she whispered. “They’re my family too now. I won’t let anyone hurt them either. But if they’re living according to the old laws, the Corps is going to be a rude awakening—and the Corps
will
find them now that they know to look. You can only give them time to prepare for being found, and I can help with that.”

Laurence let out a shaky breath, and tried to make his voice sound normal. “It’s not like that either, treasure. He wasn’t much more than a kid himself; he panicked, and it was the only way he knew to make me stop. If my brother hadn’t done what he did, I might have killed our mother.”

Jane kissed him fiercely—not a sign of desire, but an expression of her unhesitating loyalty. Still he let himself get lost in it for a moment, glad to be here, now, with Jane. It was heaven compared to being back on that hillside again, fire in his throat and Ilie’s teeth sunk into his side to throw him to the ground.

“You were fourteen,” Jane said softly, her forehead pressed against his. “And your brother was older and bigger.”

“Fifteen,” Laurence agreed, which made Jane go oddly still in his arms for a moment before her fingers slipped down to the scars on his side again. “He was closer to adult size as a dragon then. He’d been shifting since he was just a baby, even before I was born. All my life I’d been wanting to shift like Ilie. When I finally did, I was so much smaller, clumsy when I wanted to soar like him. He was patient, but it made me furious to get what I wanted and still... not what I wanted.”

“You were a child,” Jane said quietly, tracing the arc of the scars. He didn’t know if she meant when he started to shift or on that day. The difference might not seem like much to her.

“I didn’t take my dragon shape often. It wasn’t natural to me the way Ilie’s was to him. I thought I’d be just as happy to never shift at all, and Ilie seemed content with that too. If I could have given him all my dragon and he could have given me all his human... Well, I suppose Becca would have been disappointed.”

“His mate?”

Laurence nodded. “After he met her, he started keeping to his human shape more. Before then, almost never.”

“It’s important to strike a balance,” Jane said quietly. “We’re not one or the other; we’re both. Ilie needed his human shape. You needed to be a dragon, even if you resisted it. If you didn’t change often, you never had a chance to learn control.”

“That was the other thing,” Laurence went on. It was almost easy, in this dim little space with Jane, who was his alone and would never desert him, even when she should. “I wasn’t just angry about being a runt of a dragon; I was angry all the time.”

“At your mother?”

Laurence closed his eyes as he shrugged. “At everyone, everything. My mother just happened to set me off that day; I’d had some spat with my younger brothers and my mother was shouting at me about how I could have hurt them. She was really angry—scared, I think, looking back, because I
could
have hurt them. She struck me on the nose—it was nothing, she was human, it didn’t even hurt—but she was treating me like a little dragonet and telling me I had to be more grown up in the same breath. I was furious with her for taking their side, for not listening to me, for hitting me when she was yelling about how wrong it was to hurt them because I was angry, and I just...”

He stopped, unable to even let himself remember it too clearly: the flashfire of rage, the way he had reared back from his mother, taking to the sky to make himself even bigger, breathing in for flame...

“You had
younger
brothers?”

Laurence opened one eye, yanked out of the monstrous memory, and found Jane looking frankly stunned. Not about what he’d done, apparently, but about his brothers? Well, they’d always known the size of the family was unusual. No other generation of Grays had had more than one or two siblings.

“There were—are—six of us. Gus is the eldest, then Ilie, then me. I was six when the twins were born, and they’re three years older than Teddy.”

“Six of you,” Jane repeated, sounding a little faint. “Six
sons
, all children at once, and—no godparents? None of you were fostered out to other dragons?”

Laurence frowned a little and shook his head, feeling that Jane was getting oddly hung up on a tangential point. “We... our family, we were all we had, as far as dragons. Before there were only one or two in a generation, so we didn’t have cousins, but...”