The Island Of Dragons: A Paranormal Shifter Romance (21 page)

After maybe half a minute, my breath hitched in my throat when I saw Warren clearly begin to get pulled down. The water had now fully enveloped his wing and shoulder and had halfway swallowed his chest.

I clasped my hands together tightly, the fact that I was digging my nails into my own flesh barely even registering. “Oh, God, please, God. Please, please, please. Don’t let him get taken, too.”

Suddenly, Warren let loose a near-deafening roar, louder even than any he’d made while battling the golem. It was so powerful and deep that the ground beneath my feet shook with the vibrations from it almost imperceptibly. And miraculously, seemingly inch by inch, still roaring, he began pulling his wing from the steaming black water.

“Yes. Yes, Warren, please, God, yes.”

By the time his roar finally faded, his wing was clear of the water. And dangling from the end of it appeared to be a person, holding on tightly. It was Hugh.

Warren began flying him over the lake toward me, and at the sight of them both, I fell to my knees, half-laughing, half-crying. I began laughing and crying even harder when Warren landed near me, and Hugh simultaneously let go of Warren’s wing and landed on his feet. From what I could see by the light of the moon and stars, both of them looked healthy and whole. I threw my arms around Warren’s neck first, telling him how much I loved him between sobs. Next, I hugged Hugh, who unbelievably still had the strength to hug me back with his good arm. He even had strength enough to speak.

“I don’t know if this old-timer will have the energy to shift for a while, but other than that, I think I’ll be just fine. I just hope the same for poor Dalton.”

To my complete horror, I realized that in the life-or-death drama of Warren and Hugh, I’d forgotten about Dalton being pinned to a tree. I turned to look for him, but Warren was already on it. He’d already flown over to Dalton and Harold, and he now snatched up Harold in his strong jaws and began shaking him like a rag doll. Right away, Harold’s beam of white light disappeared, and Dalton fell to the ground in a heap, groaning.

Running over to him, I shouted at Warren. “The man you’re holding tried to kill me and Dalton, and he’ll try to kill us all by letting the island self-destruct if you let him go! Drop him in the lake!”

Warren had already begun heading over to the lake with Harold still clenched in his jaws the moment I’d said Harold had tried to kill me. While Warren went to do his task, I cradled Dalton’s head, asking him if he was okay.

He nodded feebly, groaning again. “For someone basically electrocuted for several minutes... I actually feel surprisingly okay. I expected to feel completely dead.”

When Warren returned, he shifted back into human form just long enough to get a lightning-fast recap of what had happened, then he shifted back to dragon form and flew us all back to the village on his back. Almost immediately after we’d landed in front of the clinic, Dr. Benson examined Hugh, Dalton, and me in turn, and declared that Hugh and Dalton would be fine after some rest, as would I. I wasn’t injured in any way, other than a few nail digs on my hands, which I’d done to my own self.

Once I’d received my clean bill of health, Warren reentered my room at the clinic, and I could tell just by the look on his face that we were about to have a
talk
. Trying to feel him out about how angry he was at me for going to the lake on my own, I asked him how he’d even known Dalton and I were there.

Standing by my bedside, he shrugged. “Melissa came over to your castle for a visit, found her bike gone, took a wild guess where you’d taken it, and immediately reported the situation to me.”

“Oh. So...”

I wanted to directly ask him how mad he was, and I wanted to say I was sorry and ask him if he could forgive me, but I just couldn’t get the first part of all that to come out of my mouth.

Seeming to sense this, Warren took my hands, looking deeply into my eyes. “Look. You know going to the lake alone wasn’t smart, and you know you can never, ever do that again, for any reason, ever. But let’s not talk any more about that tonight. Let’s just talk about us, and a future we can look forward to together.” With a slight smile curving his full lips, he paused, caressing the backs of my hands. “Because I guess it turns out we weren’t doomed after all.”

I shook my head, crying again for what felt like the millionth time that night. “I never believed we were.”

***

Later that night, one of Warren’s men reported that a Form had been spotted rising from the lake. All dark shadows and mist, except for its glowing red eyes, it had tried to go after Warren’s dragon at first but had eventually been driven back to the lake, where it would serve as a ‘plug’ preventing the island from self-destructing as long as it was there.

On the day that the island would have folded in on itself, Warren hosted an island-wide party at our village. He, Eric and Holden had all agreed that the citizens of their respective villages should socialize more. The party, which took place in the Great Hall, then later spilled out onto the beach, was such a success and was so enjoyed by everyone that the revelry continued until about four in the morning. Dalton particularly enjoyed meeting a few single women from the village of Clearwater.

About three months later, Warren asked me to be his wife. And two months after that, we were married in an oceanside ceremony attended by nearly everyone from all three villages. Hugh and Dalton both gave me away. Davy was our ring-bearer, and once he got up the aisle, he “gotcha-ed” us by claiming to have lost the rings, then gleefully pulled them from his pocket. His parents, Joanna and Lucas, sinking low in their wooden folding chairs, looked absolutely mortified, but Warren and I just laughed, as did everyone else in attendance.

About a year later, Knight’s Shore experienced a baby boom, when Melissa, Melody, and I all delivered baby girls within days of each other. Warren and I named our daughter Emma Grace, and she was so beautiful and perfect that she completely took my breath away the first time I laid eyes on her. She took Warren’s breath away, too, if the way he just stared at her, nodding silently with his lips pressed together and with his eyes pink and shiny, was any indication. She had dark gray eyes like his, and her first word was
Dada
, followed closely by
Mama
. Her next words were
Papa
and
Meemaw
, which were her names for Hugh and Sadie.

A baby boy joined our family about two years later, and he had my unusual part light green, part hazel-ish eyes. His name was Michael Warren, Mikey for short, and
his
first word was
Mama
, to my extreme delight.

One evening, when he was about a year old, he and his sister went to stay the night at their Papa and Meemaw’s castle so that Warren and I could enjoy a night alone. We definitely needed it, being that I’d recently been very busy teaching dance and tumbling classes in a gorgeous new studio Warren had built for me, and he’d been very busy leading his men in the continuous task of guarding the Form at the lake, and ensuring that it was always contained, but never killed. The Form, who no one ever mentioned by name, just simply called it The Form, could display fierce strength sometimes and often tried to head to the villages.

After a quiet candlelit dinner, during which Warren held one of my hands across the table the entire time, every so often stroking it with his thumb, as if he couldn’t get enough of the feel of my skin, we went for a stroll on the beach. As the sun began to disappear behind the horizon, we sipped glasses of champagne we’d brought with us, and Warren brought us to a stop, proposing a toast.

I smiled, butterflies rioting in my stomach just from looking at his handsome, lightly tanned face. “What shall we toast to?”

His mouth slowly curved in a grin, and he lifted his glass. “To us, and our love, and the almost indescribable sweetness and beauty of my wife, Mrs. Eleanor Christine Elizabeth Knight.”

Grinning ear-to-ear, I was sure, I clinked my glass with his. “To my unbelievably heroic and handsome husband, the chief. And to many, many more years of happiness to come.”

Once we’d each taken a sip, we capped off our toast with a kiss, twining the fingers of our free hands together as the brilliant colors of the sunset painted the sky.

THE END

Message From The Author:

Thanks so much for reading all the way to the end, I really hope you enjoyed it.

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When curvy doctor Liz Fowler is offered a job on a beautiful island she is told it is to help fertility problems on the Island. However, she has no idea that the Alphas that live their want her to solve the problem in more practical ways than she expected...
The Island Of Bears

One minute Haley was at home in New York City. The next minute she finds herself on a warm, beautiful island with no idea how she got there. She wants to go home but a hunky bear shifter named Holden seems very intent on convincing her to stay and to stay with him...

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