Total pages in book: 58
Estimated words: 54811 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 274(@200wpm)___ 219(@250wpm)___ 183(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 54811 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 274(@200wpm)___ 219(@250wpm)___ 183(@300wpm)
“Do you?” He halts suddenly between a pair of giant redwood trees and swivels his head back toward me at a freakishly unnatural angle that makes me wonder if the bones in his neck connect. His glare stops me in my tracks.
I skid to a halt somewhere near his back leg.
He snaps his teeth and makes it all kinds of awkward.
“You’ve made this awkward,” he accuses, huffing like I’ve disappointed him.
“My mistake.” I throw my hands out again in the universal sign of surrender, and I note a twinge in my knee that, yep, is bleeding. Huh. I must have landed on a twig or something back there. “Making things awkward is kind of my specialty.”
His head tilts like he’s debating the veracity of my statement. “That is true.”
“All right.” I take a minuscule step forward. “I was wrong. You’re definitely mine. Or I’m yours. However you want to think of it is fine with me. What do you say we try this again?” I attempt to smile, but it feels more like a curved grimace.
He huffs a breath that stinks like sulfur. I take the fact that I’m still breathing as a good sign and forge ahead.
“I could go back to the stream and everything.” I nod vigorously. “But this time I’ll get it right, and we’ll fly off into the sunset together.”
“It’s barely noon.”
“Now who’s humorless?” I cock my head to the side and lift my brows. “Let’s do it over. Please.”
He blinks. “No.”
“No?” My chest tightens. What in Malek’s name am I supposed to do now?
“No.” His nostrils flare a few times. “If you want to be my rider, prove it.”
“How?”
“We’ll see if you can keep up with me.” He crouches, then bounds upward, jumping higher than any dragon I’ve seen, flaring his wings when he’s clear of the trees and taking off into the sun.
“I can’t fly!” I yell the obvious as he soars higher.
“Your loss.” He pulls what Kaori likes to call a switchback maneuver as his momentum stalls, flipping his body weight and coming back toward me in a steep dive. At this angle, at this speed, he’s going to land right on top of me in about five seconds.
Fuck. Am I supposed to show him I’m smart and I’ll move? Or demonstrate my trust and keep my feet right where they are? Browns have the fastest reflexes, so he’d probably appreciate me showing that I can match him.
“Choose wisely.” He’s almost on me when he opens his wings, stalling his descent just before the trees, then snaps them in tight and plummets, four claws down.
“That’s not helpful!” I take a single step backward, just enough to show that I can both trust him and be flexible. At least I hope that’s the message it sends.
He lands with a thud right where I was standing, shaking the ground. The force of impact sends leaves flying, and my vision goes dark.
A heartbeat later, I sputter and rake the leaves off my face. I’m covered in them, thanks to him spitting all over me a few minutes ago.
“You look like a feathered goose.” He chortles. “Where is your sense of humor now?”
“You’ve made your point.” One side of my mouth rises in a lopsided grin as I pluck leaf after leaf from my shoulders.
“Points. Yes. Score one yourself, and we’ll see what happens.” He pivots left and begins climbing up the giant redwood that’s as thick as he is. Bark falls to the ground as he pulls himself up the tree claw by claw. “Catch me if you can.”
He has to be kidding me. Right?
“What are you? A damned cat?” My jaw hangs as he climbs the height of his full length, and the tip of his tail swings a few feet off the ground. “Nowhere in our studies did our professor mention any of your kind scaling trees.”
“Not everything about our kind is meant for human knowledge,” he counters, swiveling his head to look down at me and swinging his tail like a pendulum.
My heart jolts and I jump to the side as it whizzes by, cutting through the air like the giant double-edged blade it is. “Little too close for comfort!”
“You missed an opportunity to gain your seat.” Sarcasm drips from his voice.
“You want me to get up there…like this?” I jump forward as the tail comes back by, swinging at an arc that tells me he knows exactly where I am and can skewer me with that thing if he wants.
“If you can’t think on those clawless feet, we are no match.”
“Got it.” Holy shit is he making me work for it, and I’m all right with that. Or at least, I will be as soon as I figure out how to get through this. The tree is too big to scale, which means the only way up there is on him. But rising to a challenge is my specialty, and the faster I prove that, the quicker we’ll fly off into the sunset together like the perfect little pairing we are.