Page 8 of Fated to the Grumpy Dragon
I found if I moved slowly, the headache didn’t bother me. Shuffling to the side, so the broad shoulders of the stranger didn’t block my view, I noticed a town in the distance, the buildings butting right up to the sea, where a large boardwalk eventually gave way to piers and docks where a number of large boats were tied up.
“Emma.”
“How do you know my name?” I asked. Whoever he was, he wasn’t giving off dangerous vibes. Besides, running seemed a surefire way to split my skull in half even if things were fading.
He sighed, throwing up his hands. “We’re going to keep doing this, are we? Fine. The answer is you told me your name. Do you expect me to believe you don’t remember any of this? Really, Emma? Come on.”
“Stop using my name like you know me!” I shouted, nails digging into my palm as I clenched.
Those same broad shoulders rose and fell in a fittingly large sigh of resignation. “What would you like me to call you, then, if not your name? I suspect if I started addressing you as ‘woman,’ you’d get mad at me too. So, no matter what, I’m screwed. May as well use your name in that case, right?”
I shot him a glare, but it washed off him like water. “Fine, whatever.” I shook my head.
OW.
That was a bad move. The blinding headache receded quickly, but I made a note not to dothatagain anytime soon.
High above, the cry of a gull broke the silence between us. I gazed out to sea. The ocean wasn’t new to me. In fact, I had lived less than an hour or so away from it. But that was the North Atlantic. Things never got warm like this. They never gotbalmy. I was elsewhere. Farther south. Which meant I’d traveled. Somehow. And why couldn’t I remember this man? He was certainly handsome enough to warrant a spot in my memory, with his sculpted shoulders and arms peeking out from under the sleeves of his shirt, not to mention a stomach that appeared as firm as could be when the wind tugged his red and orange flecked shirt tight to his abdomen.
But it wasn’t enough. Everything was too strange.
“Home,” I murmured.
“What’s that?”
“Home,” I repeated, louder. “I want to go home, mister. Please. Help me get home.”
“I …”
“Then just tell me where Iam. I’ll figure out the rest if you won’t tell me.”
“You’re near the beach,” he said with a shrug.
I willed my eyes to turn into laser beams as I fixed them on his face, the features rugged and windswept but in a handsome way despite the lack of smile lines.
“You don’t say,” I drawled slowly. “Care to, oh, I don’t know, be a little more specific?”
“You’re on the beach on the northwest corner of the island?” he said with a careless shrug. “We don’t really give it names.”
“The island,” I repeated, staring out into the endless horizon of blue-green water. “Okay. I’m on an island. That’s … that’s something. I … what island?”
There was a long pause. “The main one?” The stranger sounded truly regretful.
“The main one? The mainwhat?Is there not a name for it?”
“The Dragon Isles.”
I whipped my head back around to stare at him. “The what isles? Did you sayDragon Isles?There’s no such place. Where is that?”
He shook his head slowly back and forth. “You really don’t remember, do you? You’re in the land of dragons, Emma.”
I laughed. It was a high, brittle sound. I was on the edge, and I knew it. But he was talking crazy. “Dragons aren’t real,” I scoffed.
The stranger just cocked his head at me then slowly swung it around to stare inland. A direction I’d so far refused to look.
Slowly, I followed his gaze.
“Oh my god,” I whispered.
