Last Immortal Dragon (Gray Back Bears #6)(20)

She read her file out loud. “Clara Emory Sutterfield. Birthdate, ten twenty of nineteen eighty five. Grizzly lineage…” her voice trailed off.

“Read on.”

“Grizzly lineage began six generations ago.” She hadn’t even known when her family had gone bear shifter. “Green eyes, red hair, five-foot-five, curvy figure.” Here someone had scribbled, this one feels important. She looked at Damon and quirked her eyebrows.

He shook his head and muttered, “That is Mason’s writing.”

Huh. She continued. “One red-headed female born to each generation. Dominant grizzly shifter. Alpha of the Red Claws. Lost…” Her voice faded to nothing. She shouldn’t have asked to see this. It was nothing she didn’t already know. She’d lived it. Barely survived this part, in fact. Her voice shook as she read on. “Lost her crew, Charles Redding and Daniel Myer, to an explosion on an offshore drilling rig. Didn’t recover.” She huffed a sad and humorless laugh. Didn’t recover. Her or her crew? Didn’t matter. It was true on both accounts.

“Why didn’t you find another crew?” Damon asked low. He wouldn’t look at her anymore. His attention was on a loose thread on the comforter that he wrapped around and around his finger.

Clara lifted one shoulder in a helpless shrug. “I just couldn’t love anyone like that again.”

“Because you were afraid to lose them?”

Her lip trembled, and her vision blurred with tears. Blinking hard, she nodded her head. She couldn’t trust her words right now. She couldn’t trust her words about her crew ever. Burying them had broken all the good things she’d liked about herself. She’d lived a half-life ever since. Her choice.

“Is the hole they left why you want a child?”

“No,” she rasped through a tightening throat. “I wanted a baby before Charles and Daniel died. We had all these plans. We didn’t even want to know who the father was between the two of them because we would all be a family, raising our cub, and it wouldn’t matter. And then when I…” Her voice broke, so she cleared her throat and tried again. “When I got the call about the accident, all of our dreams of having a family were gone. Just,”—she snapped her fingers—“gone like that. Everything was gone. And after a few years of living this empty, lonely life, I wanted to feel again. I wanted to love someone, but in a safe way, you know? I wanted to be a mother as badly as I ever had, but I’d missed out on bonding to another male after I lost Charles and Daniel. So I tried the doctor’s way until my savings ran out. Pretty pathetic, huh?”

Damon sighed and draped his arm over her shoulders, then pulled her tight against his side. Turning his head, he rested his chin on top of her hair. “I would’ve done the same thing.”

Clara’s shoulders sagged, and a sob worked its way up her throat. “It feels good to say all that out loud and not carry it alone anymore.”

“Dangerous Clara,” he said softly.

He’d called her that several times now, and she winced against the moniker. She wanted to tell him he was wrong, and that she wasn’t dangerous to him at all. She wanted to tell him to stop calling her that and go back to calling her love as he had earlier. She wanted to tell him he was wrong about her, and that she would never hurt him, but when she opened her mouth to explain all of this, the words stuck in her throat. Why? Because she suddenly understood him.

I would’ve done the same thing, he’d said.

He had done the same thing.

Something in his past had brought him to his knees and made it easy for him to shut down his emotions. To turn his face into a lineless, emotionless mask.

He didn’t want her talking about his past or breaking down his walls, and she understood his hesitation. She was terrified of him for the same reasons.

The life of a fearful grizzly had clashed with that of a stone-cold dragon, and somehow along the way, they’d become one in the same.

He could call her “Dangerous Clara” all he wanted to. Because now, she’d opened up her heart to him and given him the ability to hurt her.

Now, he was Dangerous Damon.





Chapter Eight




Pain, jagged like broken glass, sliced through her head.

Clara buckled into herself with a whimper as a screaming sound pounded against her ears. She convulsed, then opened her eyes as the ache behind them lessened. That steady current of sound wasn’t screaming at all. It was the wind.

Looking down, she had to be a mile above the ground. She wanted to gasp, wanted to panic. Wanted to scream, but she couldn’t do anything other than observe.

This was a dream. One of those nightmares that felt so real, like the ones Grandma used to have. A wave of sorrow washed over her as she thought about how fast the insanity was happening. She’d wanted to experience motherhood before she went. She wanted to raise a child before the end of her life. Before the end of her clarity. Selfish.

She couldn’t speak and couldn’t move, but beside her, something enormous beat the air currents. Wings the color of fire flapped on either side of her, and when she looked down, four giant red claws were tucked close to her cream-colored belly scales.

She was a dragon.

Below, rocky crags and wilderness stretched as far as she could see. There weren’t homes or farmland or landing strips. The world was just…empty.