Page 19 of Dragon Detective

He held out his arm with the dragon tattoo I’d noticed earlier. “This says I do.”

“Nice. Kind of cute, don’t you think?”

He frowned. “Why cute?”

“Dragon shifter. Dragon tattoo? It’s almost a cliché.”

“This is a mating mark.”

I gulped. “Mating . . . What?” I barked out the last.

He stepped closer, and honestly, I hadn’t realized there was much space between us, but now he filled it. “It appeared the moment I met you.”

“What does that, um, mean?”

“You’re mine, Hannah. All mine.”

Chapter 10

Reylor

Iwas revealing too much. If she was a shifter like me, she would’ve known right away what the mark meant. We’d be acting on it already. There’d be no argument about who stayed where.

I’d be lying beside her inourbed.

How had a human triggered a mating between us? As far as I knew, humans couldn’t.

“Do you have any shifter blood?” I growled.

Her eyebrows lifting, she stepped backward, putting distance between us.

My inner dragon howled. I had to suppress my urge to take her outside, shift, then fly with her to my cave where I’d lay her in my nest and love her until she couldn’t remember anything other than that she belonged to me.

But I was a civilized dragon shifter. We’d formed treaties with humans. We weren’t allowed to kidnap them and take them to our nests where we’d persuade them to give us everything.

“Not that I’m aware of,” she said pertly. “I’m all human. And I’m not yours. I belong to myself.”

More howling commenced inside me.

“This mark means you’re my fated mate,” I said, struggling to sound reasonable. I wasn’t an alpha sort of guy. But with Hannah? I ached to claim her.

“I’m having a hard time believing in something like fated mates,” she said.

“Where I come from, it’s common.”

Her mouth formed a pretty O, and I wanted to tug her into my arms and kiss it away. Keep kissing her until all she could do was moan.

My cock shifted, and there was no hiding my arousal while wearing what I suspected were another male’s sweatpants. I couldn’t wait to peel them off, toss them into a metal barrel, and let my inner dragon burn them.

“Put a leash on that thing, would ya?” She whirled around and strode over to the sofa on the opposite side of the room, dropping down onto it. “I can’t be your fated mate. I’m not a shifter, as we’ve already determined.”

“It happened.”

“So make it unhappen.”

I joined her in that section of the parlor, though I resisted my overwhelming urge to sit beside her and took one of the high-back chairs instead. “It doesn’t work like that.”

Wait until my sisters heard about this. They’d be all over Hannah. Next thing she knew, she’d be wearing red, holding a big jewel in her hand, and saying I do—the dragon equivalent, that is.

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