Chapter 65

ASHLEY

Maybe it was foolish to forgive him.

He told me that he never actually slept with anyone else, that he just tried to keep up appearances to drive me away, but it didn’t lessen the sting. He lied to me for five years, kept a secret that could have had us both killed or hurt.

I knew that in the long run, he was doing what he could to protect me, but it still hurt all the same.

Healing witches arrived just a couple hours after he woke up. Heather brought coffee for me and pain elixirs for Matt.

The room full of women, although wonderful and supportive, was driving a small piece of my mind crazily jealous. My mate had left me, been hurt and unconscious, hadn’t even touched me for weeks before the incident, and was finally back with me. I needed him, needed to prove he was mine and make sure he never did any of that foolishness again.

The witches Heather brought got to work quickly. They were only students doing this to help a friend, but as they healed him and his stitches fell out, the results were amazing. He was scarred, pale pink marks across his dark chest, but he wasn’t hurting anymore. The teeth marks took a little more focus for them, but they were able to seal that up as well.

They couldn’t do much for his headache or his sore limbs, but he was a thousand times better already.

“I can’t thank you enough.” I hugged Heather as the students gathered their things to go.

“You could always watch little Sammy some time,” she teased.

“I’d love to,” I smiled back at her. They left, and when the door closed, it took all of my strength not to just go to the couch and straddle him. I had to give it time. He stood slowly, stretching, trying out his arm to make sure it wasn’t too stiff.

“They did an amazing job,” he admired. “M…hm,” I agreed. “How do you feel?”

“Better,” he nodded. “Thank you for taking care of me.”

His shirt off, without all the gore, he was just as hot as ever. His torso was built like a swimmer, broad and thick shoulders, one with a new scar, leading down into an amazing set of pecs and abs and a small waist that funneled all of that muscle into the pair of my loose jogging shorts I put on him while he was healing. The scars were a little sexy, giving him something dangerous and new that he didn’t have as my high school sweetheart.

“Like what you see?” he teased. I laughed and looked away.

Surefooted, he walked up to me and lifted my face to kiss me.

I didn't kiss him back at first, but my stubbornness melted away little by little, and finally, I returned it. His thick arms pulled me closer to him, my hands were on his naked and familiar chest. Every part of my brain was just screaming to mate, to have him take me, to let him fill me with his pups, finally.

Before I could give in to it, there was a thud that shook the whole cabin. “What was that?” I gasped.

“Stay here,” he said as he headed towards the door.

There was no way in hell I was going to let him run out there alone!

I stripped quickly and caught him throwing me a more than approving glance as he headed out. If it weren’t for the situation, I would have laughed at him goofing around like that. Opening the door, I shifted and quickly followed him down the steps. As a wolf, he was so extremely large next to how small I felt as a fox. Usually, I'd feel protected by that, but at the moment, I felt like I needed to be more to help him.

At the bottom of the stairs, we saw what was causing the commotion.

The dragon was trying to break down the stilts that half of the house stood on! One of his wings was broken, it looked like it was hardly holding on by a thread. Magic, powerful and periwinkle bounced and clashed with his every hit. It wasn’t impermeable, though. In the ground, the rut of how far he’d pushed one of them was visible. He couldn’t break it, but he sure could move it.

He was going to make the whole cabin fall off the side of the mountain! Matt growled and howled at the dragon, who turned quickly and roared, before charging us.

Suddenly I no longer wanted to be out there.

Backing away as the two of them attacked each other, I ran back to the house and shifted into my human form. If I could find it, there was still some bear spray in that bottle. It might not help much, but it had to be enough. I heard another roar and could feel the heat as I stepped outside.

He was using fire!

This bear spray wasn’t going to do anything.

Maybe, to a human, the spray could do something, but with him as a dragon, I doubted I could even get it into his eyes. I heard Matt howl and bark, which meant he was still okay. Heading down the stairs a little, just to watch, in case I could help, I could smell wood burning.

He’d set parts of the forest on fire.

A good portion of trees, maybe twenty altogether, were burning. That was going to spread in no time, the complete dumbass dragon. I wanted to get a hose and do something to stop the burning, but I’d have to get past him to do anything, and that was impossible.

He’d crush me easily.

I was amazed at how well Matt was holding his own.

He went for the dragon’s neck, biting and clawing, and there was so much blood. Matt looked unharmed so far, but the dragon was trying to claw at him. The sun went down the rest of the way and I tucked in close to the house to be out of sight.

I looked over at the fire and realized with a shock it had already gone out.

There was no smoke. Nothing.

Rushing around the side of the house further, I tried to get a better look. Something, creatures from deep in the forest, had grabbed the dragon.

Matt jumped back, growling at them, but they hardly looked at him. They only cared about the dragon, which was shifting back to its human form. The tall lanky man from yesterday struggled and yelled. What kinds of shifters were these?

I thought back to the way I’d felt as I watched that first night when I took the trash out.

It was so easy to assume it was just that dragon … but now? Matt said he didn’t drive his way back …

What the hell was this?

He shifted back to human once they were out of sight and I followed his lead.

“What was that?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he shook his head, staring out at the tree line. “They looked like they were made out of rock up close,” he said.

It didn’t make any sense, but Heather’s words came back to me again.

‘There are things in these woods we couldn’t understand if we tried.’ Things that punished companies for trying to build out further into the woods, things that were bad enough that local folklore sprung up wildly around it.

I wasn’t sure what those things were, but I was glad they left Matt out of

it.