The Billionaire Dragon Shifter's Mate: BBW Paranormal Dragon Shifter Romance (5 page)

Gus jogged back up the spiral staircase to the roof. Ilie was gliding in over the lawn as Gus stepped out onto the roof, and Gus was shocked by the sudden burst of fury he felt, flame-hot.

Gus?
Ilie inquired, veering away from Gus’s rage.

Gus pressed both hands—hands, not claws, not rending, not fighting to defend his mate—to his face. His human face. He must be human for Cara, and equally he must not shift with Ilie so close. He must not fight Ilie over Cara, or over anything else.

Sorry
, Gus replied.
She is my mate, but—she has not accepted any proper gifts
.
I must protect her against any who comes near.

Ilie said nothing to that, only flew further away in a few great sweeps of his black wings. When he was halfway across the mountain, Gus heard his voice again.
I’ll send Mouse.

Thanks
, Gus told him, feeling suddenly desperately lonely. He didn’t have Cara yet, not really, and until he did he couldn’t be near his brother, either. Just as well the rest of the boys were safely out of town now, though they usually were these days.

Don’t let anyone bother her car, will you?
Gus remembered to ask.

No one will
, Ilie assured him, and then he was entirely lost in the dark.

***

When Cara stepped out of the bathroom, Gus was nowhere to be seen. She was wrapped in a towel that didn’t cover much, her hair roughly dried and finger-combed, and she’d managed to tape a new bandage in place on her arm, though the cut seemed to have stopped bleeding.

She smiled at the sight of the pajama top left on his bed, exchanging the towel for it. It was sinfully soft against her skin, so smooth it felt almost liquid everywhere it touched. She did up a handful of the buttons, letting it just barely cover her breasts. The hem just skimmed the top of her thighs, but it still felt less precarious than the towel.

She took the towel back to the bathroom to hang up, and when she came out to the bedroom again, Gus had reappeared. He was standing in front of the family portrait she’d noticed earlier, wearing only a pair of silky pajama pants that matched the top she was wearing.

Cara walked over to him, and he smiled for her, reaching out to tuck her against his side. His smile was dim, almost the way he’d looked before he so suddenly turned away from her downstairs. He wasn’t going away this time, though.

She looked at the portrait and thought at first that it must be the loss of his parents that he was thinking of, but then she noticed something else.

There was no gap in the crowd of boys, and there were
more
boys than in the portrait downstairs. The baby—Teddy—was held on his mother’s hip, just a toddler, and the rest of them stood in age order. Gus was the tallest, maybe twelve years old, and there were
two
younger boys between him and the twins. The gap in the portrait downstairs was the space that had belonged to Gus’s next-younger brother.

Cara reached out and touched the image of that boy; his smile looked stiff and uncertain, but Gus and Laurence each had an arm around him.

“That’s Ilie,” Gus said quietly. “Eli is his English name, but he—he’s more a Dragomir than any of us.”

“He’s not in the portrait downstairs,” Cara realized. He wasn’t one of the ones whose names he had told her when he was pointing them all out. But Mouse was his, so he had to be here somewhere.

“He is, actually,” Gus said. “Just—further away than the rest of us, so he’s hard to spot. He’s different, but I hope I can introduce the two of you someday soon. He’ll like you.”

“Will I like him?” Cara asked, and then, watching to see if it was safe to tease a little, “Am I going to think he’s handsomer than you? Is that why you’re keeping us apart?”

Gus gave a startled laugh and turned to kiss her. Cara felt her body rousing to him despite the thoroughly satisfying time they’d had on the roof.

“I don’t know, you might,” Gus said. “I’ll have to make sure you’re really attached to me before I let you see him.”

“I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled,” Cara told him.

Whatever Gus might have said to that was interrupted by a dog barking.

It sounded far away, but Gus turned his head toward the noise, and Cara was reminded again of how quiet the big house was—how empty.

“That’s Mouse,” Gus said. “We should go see what he’s gotten into.”

Cara nodded, and Gus led her downstairs and down and down again—the tower turned out to have its own staircase that let out on the far side of the porch from where they’d come out of the woods.

Mouse was sitting right there, and when they appeared he set down something he’d been carrying in his mouth. Gus leaned over and picked it up, wiping it on his pajama pants before he turned to Cara.

It was her phone—with a huge crack in the screen like a lightning strike.

“If this is yours,” Gus said, “I’ll be happy to buy you a new one.”

“I thought it was gone for good,” Cara said, switching the phone on—miraculously, despite the cracked screen, it actually lit up, showing her usual lock screen. She raised her eyes to Mouse, trying to picture how he’d gotten to wherever her phone had landed, and how he’d known to bring it to her.

“Did he—did Ilie send him to bring it back?”

Gus opened his mouth, closed it, and then nodded. “Yeah. Ilie also saw you fall and told me where to find you, actually.”

That was…a little bit weird, but also sweet. If Gus hadn’t known to come and find her she might still be sitting on that ledge under the scenic overlook. “Well, then when we do meet I probably owe him a big…”

Gus gave her a dark look and Cara grinned. “Hug. Of course.”

“Go home, Mouse,” Gus said, wrapping an arm around Cara’s waist. “And you—tell me you’ll stay?”

“I didn’t really dress for anything else,” Cara said, hooking one bare leg around Gus’s silky one, feeling the material slide against the inside of her thigh.

“Good,” Gus agreed, and that was the last thing either of them said for a while.

***

Cara woke up in the middle of the night, tucked under Gus’s arm in his enormous bed. He tried to hold on when she squirmed away.

“I’ll come back,” she whispered, “go back to sleep.”

He let her go, and she was able to visit the bathroom without him protesting.

When she was finished with that she felt restless. Instead of going back to the bed where Gus was sleeping in a loose, invitingly naked curl, she padded barefoot down the stairs.

She stopped in the empty room below, even though the open space made her more conscious of her nakedness than she’d ever been. She put her chin up and walked all the way across the room, just because she could. She was rewarded with the sight of the moon rising out the eastern windows, casting a cool light into the room.

She leaned her forehead against the glass and looked out, wondering what she was doing here.

She was pretty sure that when Gus said he wanted her to stay, he meant
stay
. He’d grown up surrounded by people, but they’d all gone away from him, leaving him alone in this huge house. He wanted her here. He wanted—

Cara looked around the empty room again, and it suddenly fell into place; the little cluster of lines she saw on the windowsill were only confirmation. She knelt to look closer, and sure enough, the lines were labeled in lovely cursive writing:
Augustin, 2 years
—
Ilie, 2 years—Teodor, Radu, Sorin, Laurentiu
. Childish writing had corrected that last to
LAURENCE
.

This empty room was the nursery. Gus’s children were meant to sleep here someday. Gus had filled up every other room of his house; he would want to fill this one too. He would want a family like the one he’d grown up in, a pack of kids to fill up this place.

Cara ran her fingers over the set of names and thought about her own family. She hadn’t lost her parents, really. She visited them twice a year, for a sweltering week in the summer and a weirdly snowless Christmas. They talked on the phone once in a while, told her about their friends and their golf trips and their life that had nothing to do with her—like once she had turned eighteen and left the house, they were finished with her. She had no one.

But she could have Gus. She could have a family here, complete with a weird brother who lived in the woods and four more scattered around the world. Mouse. Kids. A life and a future where she had people to belong to, things to keep her in one place. Something to hold her.

She felt the emptiness of the room around her all over again, and she shivered a little and wrapped her arms around herself, wanting Gus’s arms holding her more than she wanted clothes. When she turned and found him standing at the bottom of the stairs, quietly watching her, it wasn’t even a surprise.

She hurried over to him, and he hugged her tight and then swept her up into his arms.

“Back to bed?” he murmured.

Cara put her arms around her neck and rested her head on his shoulder. “Where else?”

***

Cara put on the day before’s clothes just long enough for Gus to take her down to get her car the next day. He turned out to drive a pretty basic SUV, several years old.

“What, no BMW? No…” Cara couldn’t even think of a car fancy enough.

“A car’s just a car,” Gus said, shrugging. “Uh, also the hills out here are no place for expensive cars, especially in the winter. The good cars are at the house in Monaco.”

“…Monaco,” Cara repeated. “Oh. Of course.”

Gus offered her a nervous smile, like he was the one who might be found wildly inadequate. “I almost never go there. Laurence and Teddy—Teo—mostly use that house. I like it here. This is home.”

Home
. Cara nodded, and looked out the window into the woods for the couple of minutes it took to get to her car. She kept looking into the woods as she followed Gus back to the house, searching for a glimpse of Mouse—or Ilie.

But she spotted nothing but trees and Gus’s bumper, and then it was time to get dressed and go to town to buy a new cell phone. Gus drove them down to the valley in his SUV, and parked it behind a pretty old stone building that turned out to be the Town Hall, where of course Gus had a reserved parking space.

“Do you need to go to work?” Cara asked, abruptly reminded that not everyone in the world had quit their jobs and run away from their whole lives. Gus was the mayor here. He had responsibilities.

“Not really,” Gus said, smiling. “Work always finds me when it needs me.”

Cara quickly found out what he meant: they didn’t make it a hundred feet from Gus’s car before someone called out, “Mayor Gray!”

Gus held on firmly to Cara’s hand as he turned. “Hello, Mrs. McCullough. Everything all right at the shop?”

“The shop’s fine, dear,” said Mrs. McCullough, who was at least eighty years old and whose sharp eyes were scanning intently over Cara.

“But how are you? I don’t believe I’ve met your friend.”

Gus shot her an apologetic look and mouthed
small town
.

“This is Cara Linley,” Gus said. “She’s from Iowa, she’s been looking for a new place to settle down.”

“Well, dear, you can’t beat Gray’s Hollow,” Mrs. McCullough said immediately, with a blinding smile.

“And you can’t beat Mayor Gray, either.” This was followed by a wink that made Cara blush a little, even though she agreed.

“Thanks for that vote of confidence, ma’am,” Gus said, and Cara could hear him struggling not to laugh. “But I just met Cara yesterday. Let’s not rush her into anything.”

He was holding on tight to her hand as he said it, though.

Mrs. McCullough shook her head. “Your mother and father decided on each other in the time it took her to pour him a cup of coffee, young man. I don’t know why you think you need more than a day.”

Gus shot Cara another sideways look, and Cara smiled and squeezed his hand.

“I’m not going to rush the lady,” Gus insisted, turning his gaze back to Mrs. McCullough. “Let’s give her until after lunch, at least.”

“You’ve dragged your feet long enough, Mayor,” Mrs. McCullough said sternly, but she added, “lovely to meet you, dear,” to Cara before she headed back across the street to a florist’s shop.

“Sorry,” Gus said, aiming them toward a surprisingly sleek-looking electronics store for such a small town. “That… might happen again.”

It happened eight times in the time it took Cara to pick out a new phone.

No one would let her have anything but the newest, shiniest one with all the best features, but there was some debate about exactly which one was the
very
best. She heard four different times about Gus’s mom pouring his dad a cup of coffee and the two of them basically being engaged by the time he’d finished drinking it.

She couldn’t decide whether that made her feeling of instant connection with Gus feel more or less strange. It did explain why he seemed willing to jump to the same conclusion, though. He must have been hearing that story about his parents all his life, and he’d been waiting for some girl to come along and give him a story of his own like that.