Such pain slashed across Wyatt’s face, Harper couldn’t bear to look at him. Couldn’t bear to see the heartbreak there.
He swallowed audibly. “You’re right, Wes. I’ve fucked up my whole life, and it hurt Harper. It hurt you and the people back home. I hurt everyone I care about. But I want to be better. I need to be.”
Ryder leaned forward and gripped Wyatt’s shoulder, shook him gently, then relaxed back against his seat.
“Why couldn’t you just leave him alone, Harper?” Weston asked so softly she almost missed it.
She bit her lip and stalled on answering because, if she was honest with him, Wes might hate her. Not because he was jaded, but because he’d always worried over her. But if she didn’t draw her line in the sand and tell them exactly where she stood, they would never really get it. None of them would.
She gave a helpless shrug. “Because I love him.” She didn’t dare look at Wyatt when she admitted that out loud, though she could feel him glance over at her.
Weston huffed a disappointed sound. “Bad choice, Harper.”
Harper wrapped her arms around her middle and rested her cheek against the headrest, stared out at the night woods that lined the road. “You’re wrong, Weston.”
“Yeah? About what?”
She tossed a sad smile to Wyatt’s faint reflection in the window. “You’re wrong about love being a choice.”
Chapter Eight
Harper massaged her palm with the thumb of her other hand. It still tingled from where her bones had healed. It would probably feel sore for a few days, but Weston was good. The crew he was born into, the Gray Backs, were notorious for fighting each other. Bone-setting was a skill they all possessed.
She touched her lips as she remembered the kiss Wyatt had given her against his truck. Nothing in her entire life had felt bigger. Perhaps it was because of the moment he had chosen, when she was in pain and in need of a beautiful distraction, when her emotions were soaring, and she was so relieved to still be breathing. Maybe it was because of that.
But more likely, that kiss had felt completely consuming because it was Wyatt, and she’d been suffering away from him. Her dragon felt whole in that moment, like nothing could break them apart again.
But as much as she wanted to bury herself in the shadow of safety Wyatt cast, she had a life away from here. She worked for her grandfather as his in-house lawyer. She had family and friends in Saratoga. There, things were easy and comfortable, while here, over the course of thirty hours, she’d experienced every emotion imaginable. Dragons weren’t built for that. They were steady-eddy and cool, calm, collected. Swinging emotions got people burned and the earth scorched. Her ancestors had waged war on each other and killed off nearly every single immortal dragon. Now, only mortal halflings like her walked the earth. Maybe that’s why she’d always struggled to fit in. She’d had a law practice down in Saratoga for a couple of years before she accepted the position overseeing all legal documentation pertaining to Pop-Pop’s businesses. And in that two years, she’d made an effort to find something outside of Damon’s mountains. She’d made friends, but as hard as she tried to build lasting bonds with the humans she spent time with, she was always other. She’d started wearing a brown contact over her dragon eye so people would stop staring and so she didn’t have to smell their fear anymore.
And then Derek had come along, and she’d thought maybe he was the one she was supposed to find. She didn’t feel as passionately about him as Wyatt, but he had been there for her, up until the day she saw him in the local coffee shop sucking on some skank’s earlobe right there for everyone to see. She, Harper Keller, dragon-shifter, lawyer, powerhouse…hadn’t been good enough. She, Harper Keller, vessel for The Unrest, displaced shifter, confused soul…had come in second to the trail of Derek’s mistresses that drifted out of the woodwork after that.
She’d closed down her practice, let go of the relationships with the humans she’d been grasping at, and went back to the mountains where she almost belonged.
Everything had been perfect before Wyatt had left. Everything. It was home, little league baseball games on the weekends, school, family, crews, and safety. She could fly everywhere and never worry about being judged. But when she’d given up on Saratoga and gone back to the mountains, the air she flew felt different. Colder. Empty. The joy was gone because Wyatt’s bear wasn’t strolling the evergreen woods below her anymore.
And now she was here, and all those feelings were flooding back. All those memories. Shifting in the woods with the boys, Wyatt always let her Change first so he could watch her dragon emerge. Birthday parties with all the crews, treehouse rendezvous, Friday nights helping her surrogate mother, Riley, make furniture in her shop, and Wyatt bringing them dinner when they got so caught up in the work they forgot to eat. Homecoming dates and Ryder and Wyatt stealing a bottle of peach schnapps from one of the Gray Backs. The first time Wyatt held her hand, the first kiss. And the second kiss because he’d told her, “I can do better.” And the first time they slept together…
Harper blew out a shaking breath and wrapped her arms around her stomach. Now he was different, and somehow even more enamoring to her than when they were kids.
With every hour she spent here, Wyatt felt more and more like her fire-starter, just waiting to ignite her.
“You shouldn’t be out here alone,” Wyatt murmured from the corner of the house.