Page 5 of Pierce

“You’re much better looking for starters.”

Ah. That. I should’ve known. Humans only saw what was right there on the surface, never what existed underneath.

“Thanks very much,” I replied, though it wasn’t much of a compliment.

I had gotten an eyeful of the inbred, bucktoothed, beer-bellied slobs who did their shopping there and was hardly impressed.

She wasn’t finished, either. “That dark hair, paired up with those beautiful hazel eyes?”

“Genetics,” I grinned.

“That body isn’t genetics,” she purred.

I raised an eyebrow. “Maybe I’m just fortunate that way. I hardly ever work out.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s true.” And it was. My muscular build was common to all of my breed.

“Hmm. If you don’t spend your free time working out, what do you spend it on?”

I grinned as I handed over the cash for the sale. “I keep myself busy.”

She visibly deflated when I didn’t follow up with an invitation to see for herself what I did with my free time and handed over my change without another word or even a smile.

It wasn’t that I wouldn’t have liked to ask her out if I was into human women with overworked hair and too much makeup.

Hell, she might even have been a good time, and I could’ve used a good time. The dragon roared within me at the thought of having a woman.

But not just any woman, and that was the problem. The cashier was right about my looks and my body.

I could’ve had just about any piece of ass who crossed my path. And many had tried to get into my pants—a few had even succeeded. Yet it never ended well, because none of them were the right woman—my fated mate. So I’d stopped trying after a few hundred years. It wasn’t worth the hassle.

The rain was coming down in earnest by the time I finished loading the bags of food and other supplies into the truck, and the image of flooded roads flashed before my eyes as I left the parking lot and turned in the direction of the mountains. Of all the days to go out.

It didn’t get better the longer I drove—in fact, by the time I reached the winding uphill drive leading to the mouth of the cave, the road was little more than a massive mud puddle. I had the benefit of a heavy, four-wheel-drive truck.

The rusty little car in front of me, however, did not.

“What are you doing?” I called out, knowing the driver couldn’t hear me but needing to express my disapproval anyway.

The little two-door was barely managing the turns and kept slowing down when it hit particularly muddy patches.

I could’ve powered through much faster if it weren’t for those patches.

“Why did you bother trying to make this drive in this weather? And what the hell are you doing up here, anyway?”

That was a fair question, too, since there weren’t any campgrounds in the area that I was aware of. Perhaps one had just opened, or the driver had simply forgotten to check the weather forecast before taking a scenic mountain drive. Regardless of the why, the trip was becoming more dangerous by the second.

And that was when the road began to give way.

“Oh, shit!” I yelled, jackknifing as I hit the brakes and turned ninety degrees to avoid driving straight into the wall of mud coming down the side of the mountain and flooding the road.

The driver in front of me wasn’t so lucky, leaning on the horn in one last, desperate attempt to signal for help before the mud swept the car up and pushed it across the road.

I watched in horror as the car came to a stop just inches from tumbling over the edge of a cliff and hundreds of feet down to the forest floor.

My body started moving before my brain could quite catch up.

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