Like he needed to bury his cock in her right now while keeping the entire world away from her? Even men whom he once considered brothers, who would keep her safe, especially since they considered her one of their clan. In fact, that inborn protectiveness toward her might be why they’d both picked up on something he wasn’t entirely sure of himself.
Kanta’s slow smile only made the itch under his skin worse. “No one else noticed. Maybe the women did. But the team all figure, for you, she’s just another wounded animal in need of saving.”
As though he went around helping kittens out of trees or something else equally humanly sentimental. “Thanks for the pep talk.”
“We’re just saying, either do something about it, or hand her over to us for safekeeping,” Hall laid out, then walked away.
Kanta followed, but paused at the door to look back. “She looks at you the same way, you know.”
That grip around Rune’s heart squeezed harder.
Right. Kanta and Hall were right. Screw waiting. He was the one who should be making sure Hadyn was set for the night…and whatever else they chose to do together. Calla, much as he loved her, could get out of his damn way.
…
She should probably take it as a bad sign that, rather than wanting to be with the lovely woman who was doing her best to mother Hadyn into an early bedtime, her mind and heart were somewhere else. With someone else. A man whose eyes were black as pitch, but whose soul, she suspected, glowed bright.
Coming out of the bathroom wearing a T-shirt and sleep shorts Delaney had provided, her teeth brushed, she smiled at Calla who was sitting in a chair reading as she waited.
The older woman raised her head and smiled back, then lifted her book, what appeared to be a historical romance with the lady on the cover in a gorgeous flowing dress. “I always have one with me. Luckily humans are excellent story tellers, so I always have more to read.”
Trying to force herself to stop wishing Rune was sitting there instead, Hadyn climbed onto the end of the bed, crossed her legs, and tipped her head. “This might be forward, given that we just met, but I am fascinated by mating stories when I can hear them. Do you mind telling me how you and Deep met?”
Calla was silent, her gaze moving over Hadyn’s features as though determining for herself why she asked the question. “I can see how your history would make you curious.”
Hadyn propped her chin in her hand. “It’s natural, I think. After all, if Kip had lived…” She glanced away, suddenly struggling with a sense of disloyalty.
She knew Kip was supposed to have been her fated, her soul mate, the love of what should have been a very long life. She’d been told that, but her heart had never felt that. She’d been too young when she found out. Even when he died. All they’d shared had been affection. Qara and Chaghan didn’t have pictures of him, though Qara talked of him all the time, almost as though determined that Hadyn’s feelings toward him would change once she was older. But that hadn’t happened, either.
Hard to fall in love with a dead man. That didn’t help the guilt.
“Do you remember him?” Calla asked. A woman who obviously observed more than most.
Hadyn traced the pattern of stripes on the bedspread. “Flashes of memories of playing with him as a child. His laugh. Though if I try to picture his face…” She paused. “Does it make me a horrible mate that I can’t?”
Calla leaned forward and patted Hadyn’s hand. “It makes you a child when he died.”
“That’s what Chaghan says, though I think it breaks Qara’s heart.”
“They are lucky to still have you.”
Not for long, in the scheme of their two thousand years. “I’m lucky to have them.”
And she was. They’d treated her as a precious daughter, given her love and support unconditionally, taught her to survive in a world that could easily harm her.
“Deep and I met before the days of the Mating Council,” Calla said.
Oh! So she was going to get this story. Hadyn leaned forward, elbows on her knees. This was a rare treat.
Calla hummed a sound that said she understood. “I lived in a village near a small mountain that housed Deep’s extended family. While he mainly stayed in Everest, he had gone to visit that family and happened to scent me as he’d flown overhead. Later, after I’d learned and accepted what I was, he told me that he’d just known. That I’d smelled of champa flowers and smoke. Ambrosia, he said, and he knew.”
“He knew by the smell?” Hadyn asked.
Calla settled back in her chair, tucking her feet up under her. “It’s one of the great mysteries of our kind, isn’t it? Even this many centuries later, he can’t explain it.”
“How did he make you believe?” This part was always the hardest for Hadyn to figure out. Most mates—born to humans and only aware of the human world—were not found as children, like she was, but as adults with their beliefs in what was and wasn’t real more firmly entrenched. How did they accept what they were, change an entire way of thinking? How did they leave their human lives behind to join their mates? What would compel them to do that?
The only thing that answered the question for her was the way, even unmated, the pull to the dragon part of herself was like a siren’s call. It affected her, even now. As though a dormant knowing lay inside her. Except she’d always wondered if that was because of how she’d been raised.
“Deep infiltrated my village, joining daily village life as a human.” Calla chuckled, the sound rich and so like Qara’s. “The first time I met him, I was washing linens in the river nearby. He tried to speak with me, and I pushed him into the water and ran away.”
Hadyn sniggered. “Why?”
“Because a strange man doesn’t appear out of nowhere and just start speaking with you. Not in my small village.” Calla nodded, her expression a reflection of the same fear and ire she’d probably had on that day.
“I’m surprised he didn’t wipe your memory and start over.”
“I wouldn’t let him close enough. Which was probably why he wooed me slowly over several years. Eventually, I fell in love with him, and we became engaged.”
“Did you know he was a dragon by then?”
Calla shook her head. “He waited to tell me until the day I sparked my first fire only a few weeks before our marriage. He said that he expected me to trust him, because by then he’d earned my love. Then he explained everything.”
“That must have been mind-blowing.” All Hadyn remembered was that being a dragon had always been true for her. She vaguely had a picture in her mind of her human parents’ faces—slack-jawed and pale—when Chaghan and Qara explained things and showed them the mark on her neck.