Page 36 of Brushed By Moonlight

I eyed the attic windows on my next flyby, cursing Henrik the whole time. A damn good thing I’d been out flying our first night here, when he’d snooped over to Mina’s side of the house. Sensing something awry, I’d sprinted into a low, blasting flyover to warn him away.

My woman!my dragon had nearly roared in wrath.

I’d barely bitten the sound back, not wanting to spook Mina.

But man, had I spooked myself with that out-of-nowhere urge to protect.

I would have burned the roof off the house if Henrik had made a move toward Mina, but he’d stopped. Not solely because of my warning, however. Something else had surprised him at about the same time. One of the other guys, maybe?

My dragon growled.If one of the other guys is after Mina, he’s dead.

I frowned at the word choice. I wasn’t after Mina, and I never would be. I just had to figure out how to…to…

I struggled to fill in the blank. To get her out of my mind? My heart?

Too late,my dragon rumbled.

All that flashed through my mind in the seconds it took to fly along the château. Then I was soaring over the forest, washed by a thousand earthy scents from below. Damp, musky moss. Peaty bark. Fresh leaves, musty fungi…and something else.

My chin jerked down, because something didn’t fit. I craned my neck to inspect the ground, then whirled around for another pass. The third time around, I cursed. A dragon’s-eye view of the world had its advantages, but it didn’t come with X-ray vision to peer through foliage. What I really needed was to inspect the area on foot.

Or get Bene to,my dragon decided.Better yet, Roux.

The tiger shifter might be an uptight asswad, but he wasn’t bad at heart. Of course, he had punched Mina — by accident, but still. I would love to send him on a mission through the forest, and if that patch turned out to be boggy, even better.

Asshole,my dragon grumbled, though the target that time was Henrik. Mina’s injury was as much his fault as Roux’s.

Sendhimthrough the bog,my dragon grumbled.

I flew over the area several times, failing to pinpoint anything amiss. But that feeling of trouble creeping over the horizon was hard to shake.

I flew back to the château, touched down, and shifted to human form. Then I pulled on my clothes and stood by the corner of the house, staring into the forest.

“Now, wouldn’t Gordon just love it if someone reported a dragon flying around in broad daylight?” Bene drawled, startling me.

I whirled to scowl back. “Good thing I don’t give a damn what Gordon thinks or knows.”

Bene snorted. “You give enough of a damn to be here.”

I scuffed the ground, acknowledging the truth. Like Bene and the other guys, I’d made one big mistake, and the price of clearing my name was six months of working for Gordon. The guy had worked himself to the very apex of Europe’s supernatural underworld, and what he said, went. If he declared the four of us forgiven, rehabilitated, or whatever other spin he used to gloss things over, we would be clear.

If he didn’t, we were as good as dead.

And honestly, the thought hadn’t fazed me much — until now. Until Mina.

Now, something in me yearned to live. To start fresh.

“Yes, I give enough of a damn to be here,” I admitted. “Same as you.”

Bene gave me that look that said some lion wisdom was about to pour forth.

I’d met a lion or two who had wisdom to share, but Bene wasn’t one of them.

“Yes, same as me,” he agreed. “But I figure, why make it hard on myself? Why not look on the bright side of life?”

Because life didn’t have a bright side — not on the side of the tracks I was familiar with.

“The food is good, and we have space to roam,” Bene went on. “The rooms aren’t great, but I’ve had worse. And as for Mina…”