Forbidden Embers (18 page)

Shit. That was all he needed to deal with—another psychic dragon. His shields were excellent, but there was always somebody better out there. His life depended on the fact that a Wyvernmoon wasn’t that somebody.

More than a little pissed off, Logan gave up looking. Though he kept the top layer of his consciousness focused inside the compound, he turned the rest of his attention to Shawn. His friend’s unnatural silence was freaking him out. Finally, when he couldn’t take it anymore, he demanded, “So, what are you doing here?”

Shawn shrugged. “I came to check up on my best friend. Is that not allowed?”

“Not when I’m supposed to be a rogue dragon, without friends or clan affiliations. And you practically have
Dragonstar
stamped on your forehead.”

“Don’t worry about it. No one’s out there right now.”

He didn’t argue, because he knew Shawn was right. He’d done a scan right before he’d arrived. The only thing currently moving around on the mountains was the wildlife.

“So, seriously, how’s it going?”

Logan shrugged. “As good as to be expected, I suppose.”

“Really? Because you’ve been gone more than a week and you’re still sleeping in the hills instead of on the Wyvernmoon compound. Is that psychic mind meld of yours not working?”

“I think you have me confused with Spock from
Star Trek
. I don’t even know what a mind meld is.”

“Don’t go getting all technical. You know what I mean.”

“I’m working on it. Things are complicated.”

“Really? Do tell.”

“Shawn—”

“Come on. You know I like to live vicariously through you,” said the dragon, who spent most of his life juggling five women at a time, as well as some of the Dragonstars’ most dangerous assignments.

Logan snorted. “I think you have that backward.”

“Maybe. But it still looks like you need some help out here. So what can I do? Spill.”

“I finally found my in. It’s just going to take a couple of days to make it work.”

“Oh yeah? What’s her name?”

“I didn’t say it was a woman.”

“What do I look like—an idiot?” Shawn reached over and shoved his shoulder so hard he would have toppled over if he hadn’t been expecting it. “Who is she?”

Logan took another sip of his beer. Weighed the consequences of letting Shawn in on his plan. Then shrugged. His king needed to know what he was up to, and telling Shawn was as good as telling Dylan. “Cecily Fournier.”

Shawn choked on his beer, spewing the cold liquid all over the ground in front of him. “Are you fucking kidding me?” he demanded. “Your
in
is the fucking Wyvernmoon princess herself?”

“Can you think of anyone better?”

“That depends on whether you want to survive. The woman was raised by Silus, Logan. There’s no way you can trust her.”

“I don’t have to trust her to do what needs to be done. I just need her to trust me.”

“Yeah, but—” Shawn shook his head, then picked up a rock and threw it as hard as he could. Logan watch it soar through the air before finally bouncing off the Wyvernmoon safeguards.

“That was smart. Why don’t you just hand them an engraved invitation if you’re so eager to get caught?”

But Shawn wasn’t listening. “Man, come on. If she finds out you’re double-crossing her, she’ll rip out your entrails and feed them to the fucking vultures.”

“She’d do that, anyway, whether she invites me into the clan or someone else does.”

“Have you never heard of a woman scorned? Dude, there’s death. And then there’s praying for death because the torture’s so bad. Guess which side of the line a betrayed woman stands on.”

An image of Cecily’s face as he’d last seen it—through Thierren’s eyes—flashed through his head. Young, vulnerable, and so despondent that it made him hurt for her, she had looked nothing like he’d expected Silus Fournier’s daughter to look. There wasn’t a hard edge showing, and while he told himself it was because she was a consummate actor, the little skitter of uneasiness working its way down his spine said something very different.

Was he making a mistake using Cecily? He hadn’t thought so when he first met her, but now he wasn’t so sure. Not that it mattered, he supposed. Whether he used her to bring down the clan or whether he used someone else, the result was going to be the same. Cecily would lose everything, and on this Shawn was absolutely correct: she would never forgive him.

But he wasn’t going for her forgiveness. How she felt shouldn’t matter to him one way or the other. The fact that it suddenly did . . . Yeah, the fact that it suddenly mattered made him very, very nervous.

He glanced over at Shawn, only to realize his friend was watching him with shrewd eyes.
Fuck.
Shawn was his best friend, and sometimes even he forgot that beneath the happy-go-lucky attitude was a force to be reckoned with. He braced himself for whatever was coming, knowing whatever Shawn decided to say, he wasn’t going to like it very much.

But the other shifter just shook his head and grinned. “I guess you know what you’re doing, right?”

“Right.” He relaxed a little at Shawn’s obvious understanding. “Absolutely. I know exactly what I’m doing.”

“Yeah, that’s what I figured. That’s how you always play, isn’t it? Go big or go home.”

Shit. Fuck. Goddamn.
There it was, and he’d walked right into it. They both knew that if things played out the way Logan wanted them to, he wouldn’t be going home ever again. Hell, he wouldn’t have a home to go to.

Dylan tolerated a hell of a lot, but blatant disobedience of this magnitude—not to mention the destruction of an entire clan when some of the members were innocents—was not one of them. If the Wyvernmoons didn’t kill him, he’d be damned lucky if Dylan didn’t do the job for them.

“Is that why you came out here?” He shoved to his feet, strode away. “To rub my nose in it?”

Shawn was right behind him, grabbing his arm and spinning him around so quickly Logan didn’t even have a chance to react. Damn, the fucker was fast.

“You don’t have to do this.” Shawn looked him straight in the eye, and his face was more serious than usual. “You can go in there, steal the data and blow up the lab. That’s enough. More than enough, considering they’ll kill you if they catch you. You don’t have to throw your whole life away—”

“I watched Marta die! And Michael! And how many others because of this goddamn virus and these goddamn motherfuckers who seem to think they have the right to play God? I can blow up the fucking lab today, but that doesn’t mean they won’t come up with something new, something worse, tomorrow. These bastards have no fucking honor, and they don’t give a shit who they hurt. They need to go down and go down hard, or we will spend the rest of our goddamn lives looking over our shoulders and watching as our clan mates die.” He knocked Shawn’s hand off his shoulder and stumbled back a few steps.

“Gabe lost it when Marta died—he fell apart like nothing I’ve ever seen before. And Quinn? What do you think would have happened if he hadn’t found a way to save Jasmine? He was on the brink, man. You know that. Not only would we have lost a friend; we would have lost the best healer the clan has. How many other people have to die before it’s enough?”

“Dylan—”

“Dylan’s a king. He can’t make this kind of decision. He’s too goddamn honorable.”

“You’re honorable, too, Logan. I think you’ve forgotten that.”

“Bullshit. I’m a king’s bastard who’s spent the last four hundred years looking for a place to fit in. I’m practical. Honor is the least of my worries.”

“Goddamnit!” Shawn roared as the last vestiges of good humor evaporated. “You need to listen before it’s too late!”

“No. You need to listen and you need to hear me. It’s already too late. I’m doing this, and when it’s done, the Dragonstars will be safe. That’s all that matters.” He turned away, looked straight out into the darkness and willed his words to be true.

“And what about you?” Shawn asked.

He shrugged. “What about me? I’ll be fine. I always am.”

“No. You just think you are.”

“Damn it, Shawn! I—” He turned around to let his friend have it, but Shawn was gone. He was, once again, completely and totally alone.

H
e wasn’t here. Cecily had landed in the middle of her clearing, after working up a whole speech for Logan during the flight from her house. But now that she was here, standing next to what were obviously his tent and other possessions, he was nowhere to be found.

And wasn’t that just typical? Her father had tried to sell it, but she couldn’t even give her virginity away. She supposed the joke was on her.

She shifted back to her human form and prowled around the camp, trying to work off a little of her angst from her overemotional state. It didn’t work. Not when Logan’s unique scent still lingered in the air. Her beast picked up on the sea-and-peppermint smell right away, and Cecily drew it into her lungs. Wrapped it around her and promised herself that everything was going to be all right.

He couldn’t have gone far or been gone long. Plus, the fact that all of his things were here meant that he obviously planned on coming back. But when would he back? Her beast wailed, itchy and desperate inside her.

It was a question she couldn’t answer, so she ignored it. If her dealings with the
factionnaires
had taught her nothing else, they had taught her not to fret about things she couldn’t change.

That’s why she was here, after all. Why she had come looking for Logan when, really, this was the last place she should be. But she couldn’t help herself. She wanted him, and while there were a lot of things she wanted that she now knew she’d never get—peace for her clan, prosperity, a rational
Conseil
—sleeping with Logan was one thing she did have control over. It was one thing she could take for herself before giving everything she had, everything she was, over to her clan.

As she walked from one end of the camp to the other, she ran over the possibilities for where Logan could be. He could be sightseeing—maybe he’d gotten a sudden hankering to see Mount Rushmore. Though he didn’t exactly strike her as the tourist type, she’d been wrong about a man before. Fourteen men, to be exact, so what was one more in the grand scheme of things?

And if he wasn’t off doing the tourist thing, maybe he was around her still. Hiking, swimming in the lake he’d shown her yesterday, or maybe just going for a short flight to stretch his wings.

If she really wanted to meet up with him tonight, she had two choices: she could go looking for him or she could pull up some ground and wait for him to return.

The first option seemed vaguely desperate to her. Okay, it seemed completely desperate; nothing vague about it. And while she was desperate, it wouldn’t do to let him know that. Not if she wanted a shot at keeping the upper hand with him.

For a second, she flashed back to the fantasy she’d had the night before, the one that had seemed so real she had woken up with sore muscles and tender nipples. If Logan was even half as dominant as she imagined him to be, then she was going to need every advantage she could muster.

She shivered at the thought, a thrill of heat working its way through her at the idea of being at Logan’s mercy. She’d never fantasized about anything like that before, would never even consider giving herself over so completely to any of the Wyvernmoon men she knew. But there was something about Logan, something about the way he held himself, something about the mixture of kindness and darkness in his eyes when he looked at her, that told her she would be safe with him. Or if not safe, then at least unharmed. That was not a feeling she had ever had around her father’s
factionnaires
.

For one second, thoughts of her future crept in, but she shoved them away. There would be plenty of time for her to think about that later—an eternity, really. Tonight she would think only of what she wanted and needed.

Tired of walking the same stretch of ground over and over again, and growing cold without her clothes or dragon’s skin to keep her warm, Cecily stopped in front of Logan’s meager possessions and looked them over. His black sleeping bag was rolled up tightly and rested against one of the outside poles of the tent.

Before she could think twice about manners and the inappropriateness of touching anything that belonged to him, she grabbed it. Unzipped it and spread it out on the ground. Then pulled one side over her and prepared to wait for him to return, no matter how long it took.

 

Logan landed a couple of miles away from the clearing where he’d been sleeping, just in case he’d been followed from the Wyvernmoon compound. He didn’t think he had been—he’d done numerous scans while he was there and on the way back to ensure that he had gone undetected. But he’d learned many, many moons ago that it was better to be safe than sorry.