Page 16

Still, I had no right to take her.

I know it, and Kenna knows it too as she finally comes back to stand in front of me, livid anger vibrating through her.

“You don’t get to do this, Blair.”

I don’t like hearing her say my name. At least, not that one.

Blair.

It’s what I’ve mainly gone by for the last two or three hundred years. It’s become natural to hear and even to think of myself using that name.

It’s not the one I want her to use.

Why it should matter at all to me, I don’t know. Not that I have time to contemplate it, not when Kenna’s still laying into me with devastating precision.

“If this is some kind of shifter instinct thing, you need to figure it the fuck out. Deal with whatever shit it is you need to deal with, and leave me out of it.”

The mouth on this woman. If all her profane ire wasn’t directed at me, I’d almost be amused by it.

“You say it’s not a mating thing, fine. Then don’t get all dickish and agro and possessive like someone else just picked up the toy you wanted to play with… Are you even listening to me?”

I am. Sort of. Because it’s pretty damned hard to concentrate on all the different ways she’s insulting me when she’s still all wind-rumpled and pink-cheeked from flying here, and when those jeans she’s wearing cling to her thick thighs like a second skin.

She snaps her fingers in my face, and the motion of it makes her breasts bounce in a way that draws my attention immediately.

I’m being an ass right now. I’m being a beast right now.

The more elevated side of my brain knows it, but that side isn’t really in charge at the moment.

“Un-fucking-believable.” Kenna throws her hands in the air in frustration before turning around and stomping away from me toward the forest at the edge of the clearing.

“Stop,” I grate out. “Do you even know where you’re going?”

She whirls back around. “No, Blair, I don’t know where I’m going. And do you know why that is?”

I huff out a breath, not answering her rhetorical question.

“No? Not even a guess? I’ll clue you in. It’s because some fucking dragon kidnapped me and brought me out into the middle of nowhere and won’t have a normal conversation with me to try to figure all of this out.”

She steps closer to me while she speaks, not afraid for a second, temper growing hotter and more vibrant with every word. By the time she finishes her tirade, she’s only a few inches away from me, poking her index finger into my bare chest. My skin burns at the contact.

Kenna is close enough that I could pull her to me, kiss the rest of those insults off her lips, wrap her riot of curls around my fist and—

“Youdid this, asshole,” she continues, cutting off that particular train of thought with incandescent anger flowing off her in waves. “And now you refuse to be reasonable and control your damn shift so we can talk. So I’m going to find someone else who can help me.”

Magnificent. Kenna Byrne is magnificent.

She’s also a big damn problem right now, and one of my own making. Slowly, the primal haze is receding and reason is taking back over. With it comes the stunning clarity of just how badly I’ve fucked up.

I kidnapped her. Plucked her right off the street in the middle of downtown Seattle and carried her away like some kind of war prize.

And what a prize she is.

Staring at me with her hands on her hips and embers kindling in those beautiful green eyes, she looks as if she’d like to set me ablaze in my own dragon fire.

Joke’s on her, though, because I’m already burning. With shame, with regret, with the lingering remnants of the fiery instinct that made me take her in the first place. I’m being charred from the inside out, and I don’t know how to make it stop.

Patience finally snapping, she shakes her head and lets out a short, scorn-filled laugh. “I’m outta here. Have a nice flight back to the city.”