Page 8 of The Dragon at the End of This Pregnancy

"It is?" I wanted Galen, but mating was altogether different. Did we want another dragon in the world? They'd already tried to destroy us once. What if our child, my child, finished the job their ancestors started?

"We worried your love was unrequited."

"We?" I hated the thought of other kobolds discussing my relationship with Galen behind my back. It wasn't any of their business.

"Lark worries about you. He worries about Weld, too."

I'd traveled to Earth on extraction missions with both Lark and Weld and considered both alphas my friends. Friends could worry about me, I supposed.

The priestess might also be worried about Weld, I realized. The green-striped alpha had moved from the fortress for some distance from his fated omega, Robin, another of Lark and Punky's clutch.

"Weld has moved on to the village Galen calls The Valley," I said, taking the opportunity to steer the subject further from mating. "He's teaching them how to grow crops with magic the way we do here."

She nodded. "We've had a few emails from him already."

Right. I probably should have sent emails, but I'd left my tablet at home. "I'm so sorry," I said.

"You sent the important news through the new teachers you found."

She was still hunched over her desk. It was only a few more inches for her to reach out and pat my hand where it rested on the edge. "Lark will be overjoyed to hear Galen is your mate. You and Galen can tell him all about it when you travel to Earth with him. He and Punky are taking the children to see Punky's family in Iowa tomorrow."

"Tomorrow." I chuckled at the sheer serendipity. Not only were we operating within Galen's timeline (everything always right now), we were also going with my two favorite villagers and their adorable family. "That's perfect."

She grinned. "Our resident dragon is impatient, I take it?"

"You could say that. They would take offense, but it's true."

She stood and walked me to the door of her classroom. "Lark will break for lunch soon. Do you want to ride with them, or do you want to take a dragonet?"

"Are there any available?" I asked. "I don't want to frighten Odessa." While Lark's dire weasel had put up a brave front on the field on Reemergence Day, dire weasels and dragons did not mix well. Dragonets, like kobolds, had evolved from dragons. It would be easier to convince a dragonet to let us ride on their back in our human forms.

"You can check the stables after we talk with Lark."

I needed to visit my coworkers, anyway. I'd stayed away too long already, and now I had to plan another absence.

Everything was moving along so quickly, I worried I wouldn't have time to plan for the trip to Earth. Before I met Galen, I had planned everything down to the smallest detail. Since then? Not so much.

ChapterFour

Galen

I was not asimpatient as Mac implied. I was not! He was my fated mate, and I waited three years to tell him. See? I had some patience.

Young dragons could mate with dragons, but adult dragons mated with kobolds. That had always been the way of it. I was not reinventing the wheel or breaking it. I was following tradition, fate, and my cock. Only one of my genital appendages counted as a cock, but both wanted Mac. One wanted to fuck him senseless. The other wanted him to put a baby in me already, so I could give birth to the next generation of human/kobold dragons.

Or was it kobold/human dragons? Either way, it gave me pause. I knew nothing about actual humans. When I recognized the ones from Mac's favorite movies, shame rolled over me like a tidal wave. I had known Mac was my fated mate, and that he was part human, but at no time in the past three years had I tried to learn what that meant.

I assumed I would learn his past with time, but then I saw the images he had memorized from human media. My Mac had not lived a human experience himself. The priestesses saved that privilege for the alphas and omegas. Now, I was asking him to travel to a foreign plane so I could learn firsthand how unaltered humans behaved.

I trusted Mac. He was sweet, caring, and honest to a fault. Though he feared my fiery rage, he told me the truth. Even when he tried to hide facts from me, his scent gave him away. I always knew when he was lying, and it was never to deceive me on purpose, merely to curb my temper.

He would be angry, too, if his parent had run off to who knows where looking for a mate for me without asking what I wanted. Granted, until I met Mac, I didn't know what I wanted, but now? They'd been off searching for a kobold I didn't even want, which meant I'd spent the last century alone for no reason. If my paragon showed their face at The Spike again, I now understood why dragons greeted each other with fire.

I trusted Mac with my whole being, but I didn't know what to expect from his human genes. I'd never met a human. I worried they were as devious as the cinema characters Mac shared from his memory.

I knew Mac was my mate, but that was only biology, a suggestion. From the moment he had volunteered to serve me, I wanted to learn everything there was to know about him.

Years. I'd had years to get to know him. All I'd learned was how he handled new situation after exotic setting after unique experience. Mac was still as much of an enigma to me as the rest of Ignitas was to him.

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