The DRAGON Gene: A Sensational Paranormal Shapeshifter Romance (WereGenes Book 1) Read online

  Amy agreed that it would be a huge problem if Matt couldn’t even come to a place where he was certain that he could open his heart to his own children. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, though. Let’s hope that soon Matt will decide to give love another chance.”

  “Let’s hope. On one hand, I really think he’d be pleased if I’m not home when he gets home, but on the other, I’m taking the fact that he gave the dogs pepperoni last night to be a positive sign. Maybe he’ll toss a little pepperoni my way next.”

  I’d meant my last comment to be an innocent, lame little joke, just basically meaning that I hoped Matt would incrementally become more caring toward me, like he seemed to be doing with the dogs. I had not meant “pepperoni” to be a metaphor for anything sexual. However, I realized almost instantly that it had probably really sounded that way, and I told Amy that I hadn’t meant it that way.

  After a brief bout of laughter, she picked up her cappuccino cup, smiling slyly at me. “Sure you didn’t. And besides…there’s nothing wrong with wanting a bit of ‘pepperoni’ tossed your way.”

  I rolled my eyes, though smiling, thinking that I really wouldn’t mind at all if it were Matt’s ‘pepperoni’ that was being ‘tossed’ my way. In fact, earlier that morning, while I’d been showering, my mind had inexplicably turned to Matt’s body, and I’d begun imagining what it might look like completely free of clothes.

  Maybe this wasn’t so inexplicable, though. Even fully dressed, Matt had the kind of body that stayed on a woman’s mind. He also kissed in a way that stayed on a woman’s mind. I’d also been recalling the way his body had felt covering mine while we’d been kissing, how good it had felt. I was sure I wanted to feel his body covering mine again, and this time, without layers of clothing between us.

  However, I figured we were probably a little way off from that happening, if it ever did. First, of course, I needed to figure out if we were even going to go forward with getting married.

  After leaving the café, Amy and I took a little stroll around the greenspace in the center of the village square, where a group of kids and a few women were setting up Thanksgiving decorations, which consisted of large wire installations shaped like turkeys, pumpkins, and ears of corn that the kids were wrapping with long strands of yellow, orange, and white twinkle lights.

  A woman Amy recognized as one of her new neighbors soon waved us over and invited us to help, which we gladly did. The day was much warmer than the day before had been; the bright sun was melting the snow; and I found it nice to just be outdoors, surveying the natural beauty of all the towering trees that surrounded the village.

  Once the decorating was finished, Amy’s neighbor, whose named was Enid, asked all the kids assembled if they’d like to go for lunch and hot cider or hot chocolate at a small, diner-style restaurant across from the square. When all the kids answered in the affirmative with a chorus of excited cheering, Enid asked Amy and me if we wanted to join her and the other moms on the “Greenwood square decorating committee” for lunch.

  “I promise, we sit far enough away from the kids to have conversation.”

  Smiling, Amy and I said we’d both love to.

  A short while later, the two of us were sitting at a booth with Enid and her friend Mira, who was an attractive, friendly, very outgoing brunette in her late twenties who served as the head of the decorating committee. Once the four of us had placed our lunch orders and had been served mugs of hot spiced cider, Mira immediately began chattering about all the new shifter-gene-positive arrivals in town, saying that from what she’d seen so far, love was definitely in the air, and that she expected a baby boom to happen in Greenwood in about nine months.

  “I heard that even the commander has been paired up, and that he and his ‘match’ are among the couples that are scheduled to get married at the village hall the day before Thanksgiving. I haven’t seen his ‘match’ yet, but, oh…I imagine that girl is just glowing. I mean…what a lucky girl. Now, don’t get me wrong…I love my husband Mark dearly, and I only have eyes for him, if you know what I mean, but Commander Grant…well, a woman would have to be literally blind not to appreciate his looks; am I right, ladies?” Mira suddenly paused, looking from Amy to me. “Wait. Have you two even had a chance to see him yet?”

  Slightly uncomfortable, I opened my mouth to respond, but before I could, Enid gave her throat a little clear and spoke to Mira.

  “Kylie, here, is the woman who’s been paired with the commander.”

  Turning red, Mira just looked at Enid for a long moment. “Oh.” She then shifted her gaze to me and began apologizing profusely. “Open mouth, insert foot, right? I am so good at that. It’s almost become my hobby. I’m so sorry for saying what I did. I just wasn’t thinking, or I was, but I guess I was just thinking that you and Amy were paired up with two men named Eli and David.”

  Enid shook her head. “Nope. I told you that Eli and David were paired up with the two new women from Indianapolis. The two red-haired cousins. Remember?”

  Further reddening, Mira looked at Enid. “Oh. Well, now I remember.”

  Mira soon began apologizing to me again, but I cut her off, saying that there was no need to be sorry. Enid then changed the subject to the committee’s Christmas decorating plans, and then after that, the four of us at the table began discussing Amy’s and my tentative plans to open a gymnastics and fitness center in the community. Enid and Mira both said that the community would love one, and there was definitely a need.

  Mira then told Amy and me about a vacant building near the square that had been built about a year earlier but then had never been used for its intended purpose. “It’s kind of just a massive pole-barn-type building…maybe ten thousand square feet…and it might be perfect for a gymnastics center. The ceilings are sky-high, and it’s heated and has plumbing and all that…and the shifter who owns it is so desperate to just do something with it that he’s offering to rent it out for just a thousand dollars a month.”

  Amy and I said we were very interested, and Enid texted her husband to get contact info for the building’s owner. Once Enid got the info, she texted the owner, and by the time we were finished with lunch, Amy and I had an appointment to meet with the owner in just ten minutes.

  Before the two of us left the diner, Mira kind of pulled me aside and once again apologized for her earlier gaffe. “Just please know that I’m not ‘after’ your husband or anything like that. I find my own husband quite attractive, too.”

  She gave me a little smile, and I smiled back and told her that I understood, which I truly did, because it wasn’t like I could really blame anyone for talking about Matt’s attractiveness. If I’d been in Mira’s shoes, I probably would have, too.

  There was only one thing about what she’d said that I disagreed with her on, which was what she’d said about the woman that Matt had been paired with being “lucky.” Currently, with Matt seemingly determined to never allow himself to love again, I wasn’t feeling very lucky. I was feeling more “borderline tortured” than anything.

  I’d been paired with a man so attractive that women in town felt compelled to make comment about his looks, and yet, I didn’t know if he’d ever be “mine.” I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to fully enjoy his looks and body in the way that some women in town probably thought that I already was.

  About an hour after leaving the diner, Amy and I signed a lease on the building that was going to become our new gymnastics center. Exhilarated, we allowed ourselves a few minutes of celebration out by our cars once the building’s owner, Tom, had left, but then Amy’s expression suddenly became a bit more serious.

  “With what little we both have left in our savings, we’re not going to be able to afford much equipment at first, you know…not until we both get our first payments of a hundred grand from the government in about a year. And even then, a lot of that money is going to have to go toward paying off our debt. So…well, let’s just hope this new gym starts turning a profit right
away. And in the meantime, at least we can combine our savings and buy a used set of bars and a beam, and some mats. A spring floor, a vault, springboards, and maybe some foam pits can probably come later, and for yoga and mat Pilates classes, we can just ask that people bring their own mats.”

  I agreed that that was a good plan and that we didn’t really have much of a choice but to go with it, even though we’d be opening the new gym with a definite shortage of equipment. At our old gym, we’d had no fewer than five sets of bars, all brand-new; six full-height competition beams and many half-height and floor beams; and two vaulting tables with runways, one of them with a foam pit.

  All this was even in addition to numerous other pieces of equipment that allowed us to run several different classes simultaneously, thereby saving on heating, cooling, and lighting costs by only having the gym open a few hours a day.

  After we’d discussed a few more subjects related to the business, like setting some of our savings aside for the first few months of liability insurance, Amy said she needed to get home because she wanted to see Mack when he came home on his break from patrolling the skies around Greenwood.

  I said that was perfectly fine because I wanted to get home, too. I wanted to be there when Matt returned from his dragon flight to the Upper Peninsula. “Even if he doesn’t want to find me home, so what. I feel like avoiding each other will just make things worse. Besides, I kind of want to hear about his trip. He said that a group of USSA shifter bears reported some strange activity with the Bloodborns, and I’m kind of curious to hear what’s going on. If they’re planning another war again or something, I guess I’d rather find out sooner than later. We sure don’t need to be setting up a new business in the middle of another war zone.”

  Amy agreed and told me to tell her what Matt said, and I promised that I would.

  A short while later, I was back at home, organizing and tidying up a few things after having taken the dogs out. Charlie “helped” me in my organizing and tidying, following me all around while Shadow very cutely watched TV just like a human, lounging on the couch in the spacious living room with his gaze on the screen.

  He was proving to be a loving and mostly obedient dog, although he just didn’t seem to require nearly as much attention as Charlie did, which was okay with me. I was finding it difficult to do some tasks, like sweeping the kitchen floor, with Charlie so close that I nearly tripped over him a few times, not that I really minded. I was growing to love my new little buddy with every additional minute that I spent with him.

  Once I’d run out of tasks to do, I had a look in the laundry room on the ground floor, finding what I could only think of as an “explosion” of clothes inside. Mud-caked jeans and t-shirts covered nearly every inch of the hardwood floor, looking like they’d overflowed three full-to-bursting laundry baskets. Additional items of clothing, these ones not quite as heavily soiled, were piled on a shelf above the washer and dryer.

  Yet a few more items sat atop the washer and dryer, with socks and underwear filling a small gap in between the two machines. A quick look in the washer revealed several damp t-shirts that smelled of mold, indicating that Matt had washed them but had forgotten to transfer them. A quick look in the dryer revealed a load of dark sweatshirts, t-shirts, and sweaters, all horribly wrinkled. I asked Charlie how it was possible that Matt had any clean clothes left at all to wear, and Charlie silently cocked his head to the side, as if contemplating this.

  Deciding that an afternoon of doing laundry was in order, I soon set myself to the task, and a few hours later, I had five large laundry baskets full of clean, wrinkle-free, folded clothes. I might have been done with it all even sooner; however, somewhat to my embarrassment, I hadn’t been able to stop myself from taking little breaks just to inhale the woodsy, masculine scent that clung to Matt’s shirts.

  It was a scent that actually made me slightly dizzy while I pulled it into my nostrils, curling my toes into the hardwood floor at the same time and feeling like some kind of a creepy stalker.

  Charlie followed me up the stairs while I carried the first three baskets up to Matt’s room, but then I started to get concerned that he might accidentally trip me. I told him to stay on the ground floor while I carried up the remaining two, and somewhat surprisingly, he did.

  When I returned from carrying the fourth basket up, he was sitting at the foot of the stairs like a good boy, and when I told him he was a good boy, he dissolved into a wriggling ball of joy, jumping up on his hind legs to give me a “hug.” Displaying that he was much smarter than Matt gave him credit for, he then remained downstairs while I carried up the fifth and final basket of clothes.

  Once I’d put away all Matt’s clothes in his dresser and closet, hoping that he wouldn’t mind that I’d taken the liberty of doing all his laundry, I spotted a half-full hamper just a little way inside his master bathroom, and I decided I may as well load these clothes into a basket and launder them as well.

  However, just like when I’d been in the laundry room, I was unable to stop myself from taking just a few whiffs of Matt’s heavenly scent from one of his t-shirts. Being that this shirt had been more recently worn, his scent was more pronounced. Starting to feel incredibly embarrassed, and even slightly ashamed, I nearly swooned, wondering just how heavenly it would be to breathe in his scent directly from his bare skin.

  This thought led to my gaze landing on his unmade, king-sized bed, and it occurred to me that his blanket and sheets probably held more of his scent than his freshly-worn t-shirt even did. Figuring that I’d probably already lost all dignity anyway by this point, I only hesitated for a few seconds before climbing right on in Matt’s bed and pulling his blanket over me, sighing with pleasure while I did so. I’d been correct that his blanket and sheets might hold traces of his scent at its most potent.

  Reveling in my new olfactory paradise, and already beginning to feel drowsy, cozy, and warm, I remained in his bed for a little while, and eventually I dozed off and began dreaming. And the dream I started having was a little more vivid than the ones I’d had about flying dragons the night before. In this dream, I was at first flying on Matt’s broad, scaly back while he was in dragon form, holding fast to the part of his body that narrowed near his neck.

  This part of the dream didn’t last long, though, before morphing into something else. Now, Matt had landed and shifted back into his human form, and contrary to how things happened in real life, he’d shifted into his human form completely naked. Not even aware of where we were, I surveyed his body with a stifled gasp, seeing that somehow, he was already fully erect and that his manhood was quite sizable and long.

  In the dream, which had a real lucid feel about it, this excited me but didn’t exactly surprise me, because the night before, when Matt and I had been kissing in the yard, I’d felt his manhood hardening already, and it had felt like a pretty sizable male member.

  In the dream, Matt soon pulled me into his arms, and although I had a hazy awareness that I’d been fully dressed while riding on his back while he’d been in dragon form, suddenly, through the magic of dreaming, I realized that I was somehow completely naked, too. We began kissing, and I pressed my stomach into Matt’s hardness, moaning into his mouth.

  This was as far as my dream got, and I’d probably only been dozing for a few minutes when I was pulled out of my slumber by the sound of footsteps. Still half-asleep, I thought that the footsteps sounded particularly heavy, like those that might be made by heavy boots on hardwood, and I hazily wondered who might be making the footsteps. It took several seconds before the haze clouding my mind suddenly disappeared, and I opened my eyes, mumbling a name.

  “Matt.”

  With his long, muscular thighs at my eye level, he stood beside the bed. I slowly lifted my gaze upward, taking in his slim hips, chiseled chest, and powerful shoulders, eventually coming to focus on his face, which didn’t bear the expression of indignation that I was expecting, considering that I was in Matt’s bed completely without h
is permission. Instead, he was looking at me with something like tenderness, his gray eyes twinkling in the pale sun slanting in through the windows.

  “You look utterly gorgeous when you’re asleep. But then again, you look utterly gorgeous when you’re awake, too.”

  Suddenly mortified that he’d “caught” me in his bed, I yanked myself up to sit with my legs over the side of the bed, feeling my face begin to flame. “I wasn’t sniffing your shirts. I’m not creepy like that. I wasn’t sniffing your blanket and sheets, either. I really have no idea how you smell. When I did all your laundry, I didn’t even notice.”

  Realizing how completely asinine all my lies and protestations sounded, I cringed, briefly covering my face with my hands. “Look. Those were all lies, but I’m really not creepy. It’s just that you smell so damned good. See, it’s your fault. Yes, I’m actually going to turn this around on you. It’s your fault that I was acting like some sort of a deranged stalker, sniffing all your clothes.”

  With the corners of his mouth twitching, Matt took one of my hands and pulled me up to stand, clearly a bit amused. “I don’t think it’s ‘creepy’ at all that you were smelling my clothes. In fact, I feel bizarrely flattered, somehow. Also, you smell pretty ‘damned good’ yourself. Last night when we were kissing, I stole a few sniffs of the area around your throat…and I thought you smelled heavenly. Like the sweetest flowers and vanilla.”

  The perfume I spritzed on daily was a floral with a subtle vanilla note.