Outside the windows, darkness rolled in over the sea.
After a while she slept.
Reive
Reive woke with a dim awareness of pain in his side, or the memory of pain, but the rest of him was blessedly pain-free. The relief was so great that he seemed to be floating. It was a surprise to find himself anchored down—weighed down, in fact, by a heavy bedcovering and a warm, soft body pressed against his own.
Jess.
He turned his head, barely daring to move. Her hair tickled his nose. Early morning sunlight fell through high windows above the bed, striping her face and hair with liquid gold.
Reive had no idea where they were. A bedroom at Gio's, perhaps? He had no sense of danger. His dragon was calm and relaxed.
And Jess was in his bed.
From the amount of warm flesh he could feel pressed against him, she must be nearly naked under the covers. He seemed to still have pants on ... regrettably, especially as his body responded to Jess's nearness with unmistakeable urges.
But the lack of pain was a kind of bliss all its own. He would almost have thought the petrification had reversed itself, except for the numb deadness of his right arm and a tugging sensation whenever he tried to breathe deeply, as if his lungs or ribs were resisting. But this was such a vast relief after the constant pain that he could have stayed here forever, drifting in comfort with Jess's warm body pressed against his.
Unfortunately, he was starving, and thirsty, and he needed to pee.
He tried to edge away from Jess, but she woke with a jolt and a cute little moan. "Reive," she murmured, and then her eyes flew wide. "Reive, you're awake!"
"So are you," was all he could think of to say.
She really was naked under there, or mostly so; he caught an enticing flash as she started to sit up, then appeared to discover her own lack of dress as if it came as a surprise to her, too. He glimpsed some tantalizing flashes of her lean curves before she pulled up the coverlet to her chin.
"Are you all right?" Reive asked her. The last thing he remembered seeing was Jess fighting the magician.
"Am I ..." She trailed off. "You saw me. Earlier. Didn't you."
It wasn't a question, and he didn't pretend not to know what she meant.
"I saw you shift," Reive agreed, and a spasm of sorrow crossed her face. She closed her eyes. "And you were magnificent."
Jess's eyes flew open again. "I was what?"
"Magnificent. Gorgeous. Amazing."
"I heard you." She blinked, staring at him, still bleary with sleep. "Just to be clear, you ... remember what you saw me turn into, right?"
"Of course I do." How could he forget? Jess was beautiful as she was, of course, but she was also beautiful as a gargoyle, just in a completely different way. He hadn't realized it would hit him like that until seeing her do it—watching the strength and grace and power flow through her limbs. She was strong even as a human, but as a gargoyle she was unstoppably fierce, and he and his dragon had thrilled to watch her.
And she had wings. That was the best part. He could shift into his dragon and fly with her. He refused to believe it would never be possible.
"Jess ..." He tried instinctively to move his right arm. It didn't move; there was just a painful tugging sensation on his neck. Instead he put his left hand on her bare shoulder, curled his fingers around her neck and caressed her jaw with the pad of his thumb.
"You're beautiful," he said quietly. "You're the most beautiful woman I've ever seen, inside and out. It doesn't matter how your body changes. That's still you in there, beautiful and strong."
She gave a tiny shaky laugh. "Oh sure it's still me, but the outside—"
"Is beautiful, Jess. When you're a human, I love your skin and hair and all the rest of it, and when you're a gargoyle, I still love your skin and your hair and all the rest. It's just different." And now he yearned earnestly to find out what she felt like in that form. Would she be hard or soft, pebbly or as smooth as she was now, with his thumb lightly caressing her cheek ...?
"Love," Jess whispered. Her lips were parted, her brown eyes enormously huge and soft.
"Yes, I—" He faltered; how could he, how dare he love her when he might be dying?
But he did. He loved her strength and resilience, her bravery and her quiet wonder. He loved watching her deep in concentration in an Italian hotel room, nibbling the end of a borrowed hotel pen with her intent gaze fixed in concentration on her translated notes. He loved watching her fight, the thrilling and bold abandon of it.
And in Jess's wide brown eyes, now beginning to fill with unshed tears, he saw an impossibly soft warmth, as if something was reaching, answering back—
And then there was something else.
He'd never felt anything like it before. His dragon had been quiet since he woke up. But now it roused abruptly and he could feel it rising to the surface, the way it did when he shifted. Except he wasn't shifting. It was just that he and his dragon had suddenly become utterly unified in one single purpose, and that purpose was loving Jess.
She's our mate, his dragon whispered in his head.
But ... he thought.
But everything he'd ever heard from other dragons made him think he would just know the moment he saw her. And he hadn't known. He had found her beautiful and fascinating from the beginning; he'd definitely felt a spark between them, a pull of attraction. But it hadn't felt like this—like something that was always meant to be, had always been; an unbreakable bond, snapping into place.
"What ... what is this feeling?" Jess whispered, staring at him.
"What are you feeling?" he asked, shaken.
"That's just it, I don't know? It's like something opened up inside me and I just knew—" She hesitated. "Like there's a voice in my head, almost ...."
"Do you hear a voice in your head?" he asked, curious. Back in Indiana, she'd said she didn't. But maybe it was possible for the mate bond to wake up her inner animal.
"No, it's not like that. It's more like a ... a knowing, the same way I sometimes just know what stone is like inside when I touch it, like if a stone tabletop has a crack deep inside that doesn't show on the surface, or how it's made of granite instead of limestone. It's that kind of feeling. Except ... it's you." She touched his face cautiously, wonderingly, drawing her fingertips down his jawline. He shivered at the sensation. "It's like ... you're for me, and I'm for you, if that makes any sense? Does it?"
"It does." He felt himself breaking into a grin, a true wide grin. He hadn't felt like this in months, his entire body singing with joy. "Jess ... have you ever heard of true mates? In all your reading have you come across something like that?"
She shook her head.
"Every dragon has someone who's meant for them. Everyone in the world probably does, humans and shifters alike, but unlike them, we actually know it, and can tell when we meet them. Or at least, everyone I know has been able to. Except ... I couldn't tell. Until now, right now, with you."
It was like every aspect of her that had been so compelling to him had become a thousand times more so. Not instantly, in this moment—but over the past few days, gradually, and now he had suddenly and completely fallen into full awareness of it. He could have spent an eternity just looking at the way her lips curved, the slight quirk at the corner of her mouth that was just a little higher than the other side; he could have mapped every freckle dusting her cheeks, and lost himself in the way her nose was just a little bit bony across the top. He could have counted every dark lash framing her eyes. He could have spent forever staring into those eyes, mapping out their endless contrasts of color. Who ever knew brown had so many shades? He could have—