Pia Saves the Day (12 page)

A sense of peace threatened to take away his bad mood. He whuffled at her.

“I’m not ever going to be a good man,” he warned.

She pressed a kiss to his snout. “We talked about that once, and I told you then—maybe you’re not a good man, but you make a truly excellent dragon.”

He muttered, “Maybe over time I can make peace with that other Dragos.”

“If you give it a serious try, I think you’ll be surprised at how well you do.” She lifted a shoulder. “And if you can’t adjust, maybe we’ll go somewhere else and do other things. We’re going to live a long time together, and things change.”

The last of his tension eased away. Heaving an immense sigh, he shapeshifted and laid his head in her lap. She stroked her fingers through his hair, and for the first time since the accident, he fell into a truly deep, restful sleep.

*     *     *

The sun traveled
across a blue, cloudless sky as Dragos slept.

After a while, she grew sleepy too, until finally she couldn’t keep her eyes open any longer, and she nodded off, her hands laced protectively over the back of his head.

Sometime later, he began to stir, and she came awake with a jerk. She rubbed her eyes and looked around. They had dozed the afternoon away.

After nuzzling her thighs, he yawned and rolled onto his back. She gave him a smile as she flicked bits of grass off his skin.

He never got sunburned, no matter how long he stayed out in the sun. Instead, the dark bronze of his skin grew more burnished and rich. After a moment, all the bits of grass were gone and she gave up on that small excuse to touch him and simply stroked his bare chest.

He watched her, his expression more peaceful than it had been in some time. It would always break her heart a little to look at the new white, jagged scar on his brow. She touched it with a finger, swallowing hard.

He’s mated with me, she thought, not once, but twice.

I am so lucky. I am the luckiest woman in the world.

The smile she gave him twisted, because it was simply too small of a gesture to contain the enormity of the emotions inside her.

“I love you, you know,” she told him.

He cocked a sleek, black eyebrow at her. Coincidentally enough, it was the same brow that now carried the scar. “You surely must, woman.”

She chuckled. “Yeah.”

Stomach muscles flexing, he sat up and twisted to give her a lingering kiss. “One of the craziest things that has been running through my head,” he muttered, “is how goddamned jealous I’ve been of that other Dragos.”

She put her arms around his neck. “Maybe I tried too soon to make you feel better about him. I could have used the threat of him to keep you under control.”

Maybe that wasn’t a very funny joke, but she was pleased with the effort. Every time they talked, every joke, every revelation, meant they put one more step between them and what had happened.

He must have agreed because he smiled briefly against her lips. Putting a hand at the back of her head, he deepened the kiss, and it escalated swiftly—a hot, explosive flash fire of emotion.

Coming up on his knees, his face taut and flushed with need, he yanked her clothes off. She was a willing participant, wriggling out of her top before he could figure out the complexities of undoing the buttons.

When he kicked off his jean shorts, his hardened penis bounced as it came free of the material. He pulled her down onto the grass and covered her with his body.

They could find time for foreplay and finesse later. Much later, after the first wave of the mating urge eased, or perhaps, for her, after the memory of the fear and pain over the last two days faded.

They weren’t there yet. For now, he took her in a blaze of heat, and they coupled like the animals they were. Words tangled with motion, and it all became one thing.

I love you, love you.

I’ll never let you go. You’re mine. You’re my mate.

They burned each other out, until at last they could rest quietly in each other’s arms.

At last, he pulled away from her. She watched as he went to the pile of wrapped gold and jewels. Unceremoniously, he dumped the sapphires into her pack, took the cloth that the jewels had been wrapped in and dampened it at the spring.

When he returned, he washed the inside of her thighs gently. She stroked his arm as he did it, marveling at his intent expression. Sometimes he wanted so desperately to get something right, the sight of it shot like an arrow right through her.

After he finished, they dressed. The sky was darkening by the time they packed the rest of his treasure into the pack. He shifted back into his dragon form, invited her into the curve of his paw, and after she had settled comfortably, they flew back to the estate.

Once the buildings came into view, he banked and wheeled overhead, not suspiciously, as he had the day before, but in a more leisurely fashion, as he took a good look in the last light of day.

She glanced without much interest over the scene. They had flown over many times, just like this, as they talked about plans for renovations and the new buildings. Most of her attention remained on him, as she gauged his reaction to the things he saw.

Which was why she noticed the small hitch in the rhythm of his flight.

He said, curiously, “We never talked about that building.”

She looked down again at the focus of his attention.

It was the house of the estate manager, some distance away from the construction site, along the curve of the lake.

A pang struck. Although she wouldn’t trade her memories away for anything, it was hard to remember their time together all by herself.

She told him, “It’s the estate manager’s house. His name is Mitchell. He used to live here full-time when the main house was empty, but he’s taking a vacation right now, as we figure out how to restructure his job.”

Dragos folded his wings and descended. Even though she knew he would never drop her, the abrupt change in altitude made her clutch at one of his talons.

Landing on the shore of the lake in front of the house, he set her down and shapeshifted. He wore a strained, listening expression.

Watching him, she said, “We spent our wedding night in that house.”

He whispered, “You gave birth there. In that room, with the big window, while we looked over the lake. We were all alone.”

Her breath stopped, and her heart began to race. “Yes.”

He turned on her, with the swiftness of fresh outrage. “You stole one of my pennies!”

She wasn’t sure what pure joy looked like.

But she knew what it felt like, shining out of her own face.

W
hile his first
breakthrough was nothing short of miraculous, his recovery was not quite so simple or easy.

They took two more days together, partly so that he could gain some control over the volatility of his mating urges, and partly to see if he might regain more of his memories before they began to deal with the outside world again.

After hours of patiently talking between long bouts of lovemaking, he recalled most of their time together. A few odd bits and pieces still remained missing, but he lost the sense of competing with
the other Dragos
, especially when he recalled the intensity of mating with her the first time.

She was right. She was in his bones. One morning, as they lay exhausted and entwined, he whispered into her hair, “I’ll always mate with you.”

He could hear the smile in her voice as she whispered back, “I believe you.”

Pia managed to convince him that he should have at least one consultation with Dr. Kathryn Shaw, the Wyr surgeon who often treated sentinels when they were injured. Because of that, the doctor was privy to certain confidences.

Although he finally agreed, Dragos was reluctant to do even that. Secretive by nature, it went against a very strong instinct in him to reveal to anyone the fact that his memory still remained impaired.

The morning of the consultation, Graydon brought Kathryn to the house. She was another avian Wyr, a falcon, and they flew in to land in the clearing, shapeshifted into their human forms and stood talking together for a few minutes before walking up to the front door.

They were the first people to return to the estate. Their arrival had been carefully choreographed, with nothing left to chance, so that Dragos could observe both of them from a distance.

When he laid eyes on Graydon’s brawny figure, Dragos said immediately, “Of course, I know him. He is a good friend of mine—one of my best friends—and we’ve worked together for centuries.”

Pia’s expression lit up all over again. “You absolutely have.”

When Dragos switched his attention to Kathryn, his frustration returned.

Like most Wyr falcons, the doctor had a nervy, slender form. Her large, honey brown eyes were sharp with intelligence, and she had thick chestnut hair, which she wore pinned away from her narrow face with a plain tortoiseshell barrette.

At Pia’s inquiring glance, he said, “I’m supposed to know her too.”

She responded as though he had actually asked a question. “Yes. She’s part of our extended inner circle, and she’s one of the few people who knows what my Wyr form is. Between her surgery skills and my healing ability, we managed to save Aryal’s wings after she’d been badly hurt earlier this year.”

Aryal was one of his sentinels, the contentious one. He and Pia had gone over everything she knew about the sentinels the night before.

His mouth tightened. “I’ve got nothing.”

“That’s okay.” Pia laid a hand on his arm, and he calmed. He always calmed when she touched him. “Will you still let her examine you? Please?”

If the doctor knew about Pia’s Wyr form, Dragos could deal with her knowing about him too. “Yes.”

She leaned out the front door and waved her arm in invitation, and Graydon and Kathryn approached.

As they drew close, they slowed. At their uncertain expressions, Dragos said to the doctor, “Not you.” He looked into Graydon’s familiar gray eyes and smiled. “Yes, you.”

A broad, relieved grin broke over Graydon’s rugged features. As the other man stepped forward, Dragos pulled him into a quick, hard hug.

After letting him go, Graydon made as if he might hug Pia too, but she stepped away nimbly with a warning smile, at which he caught himself up with a sheepish expression.

Dragos had room to be grateful for her quick thinking at maintaining some distance between her and the other man. Wyr could be dangerously volatile when they were in the middle of mating, and in so many ways, he was still a stranger to himself.

Dragos and Pia had cleaned up the broken glass in his office and taped the open window with a covering of thick plastic, so the doctor examined him there.

Graydon went to the kitchen to wait, while Pia remained close by Dragos’s side as Kathryn shone a bright penlight into his eyes, tested his reflexes and balance, and asked him a series of questions.

She took care to ask before she did anything, which helped. After getting his assent, she also examined him magically.

Gritting his teeth, he endured the sensation of alien magic sweeping through his head. She was clearly adept at handling injured Wyr with uncertain control over their more violent impulses, and she finished that part of the examination quickly.

Afterward, the doctor perched a hip on the edge of the nearby mahogany table and regarded them with calm, intelligent eyes.

“You already know I’m a surgeon and not a neurologist,” Kathryn said. “So my first advice is, we should find you someone who specializes in treating patients with amnesia.”

“No,” Dragos said. Beside him, Pia stirred. They held hands, and he clamped his fingers tightly over hers. He told her again, “No. It’s hard enough for me to trust Kathryn with this. I will not consult with a total stranger.”

Pia’s shoulders slumped, and she sighed, although she didn’t look surprised.

Neither did Kathryn. “Let me know if you revisit that decision,” the doctor said. “In the meantime, treating memory loss is as much an art as it is a science, but we do know some things. For example, different types of memory are stored in different ways. Your procedural memory, which involves skills and tasks, appears to be undamaged. You know how to take a shower, how to fly, how to get dressed, etc.”

Unexpectedly, one corner of Dragos’s mouth quirked. He said, deadpan, “Or how to ride a bicycle.”

He felt, rather than saw, Pia’s attention flash to him. An exhalation of laughter escaped her, as she shifted in her chair.

“Exactly,” said Kathryn. “Then there’s declarative memory, which has two parts—semantic and episodic. Semantic memory contains facts and concepts. Episodic memory contains events and experiences. From what you’ve said, most of your semantic memory appears to be undamaged, but not all of it. You retain many concepts and facts, but the more closely those are tied to your episodic memory—or your events and experiences—the more likely there might be some impairment.”

As wordy as that was, it was starting to sound a lot like Pia’s
complicated concepts
.