Total pages in book: 23
Estimated words: 20835 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 104(@200wpm)___ 83(@250wpm)___ 69(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 20835 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 104(@200wpm)___ 83(@250wpm)___ 69(@300wpm)
After searching through all of my stuff in the cabin, I let out a roar of frustration. With the pregnant mates and babies of my packmates nearby, I knew better than to make so much noise this early in the morning. But I couldn’t tamp down the fury coursing through my veins.
Bellowing with rage, I ran out of my cabin, stripping off my clothes along the way. My T-shirt was still on as I reached the edge of the woods, but my inner beast was done waiting. My bones popped as he pushed for control. As my wings sprouted, they ripped through the back of my shirt, the tattered pieces falling to the ground as the transformation into my dragon was complete. Then I took flight and headed back to my cave.
Instead of using the path I normally took to the front of the system of tunnels where I had built my other home, I landed near the back of the outcropping. Shifting back to my human form, I didn’t worry about being naked since there wasn’t another person for miles around.
A small entrance to my cave was mostly concealed by foliage, but as I neared the small gap between the rocks, I realized it had been disturbed since the last time I’d been back here. Which had been too long ago.
I had grown too comfortable with my surroundings and was now paying the price for relaxing my safeguards. The moon rock could’ve been taken weeks before I noticed, the thief’s trail too cold for me to chase. My inner beast snorted in my head, disagreeing as he urged me to drag the scent he’d caught into my lungs. Flaring my nostrils, I did just that, intrigued by the sweet trace of vanilla in the air. None of the nearby flowers smelled anything like it, so the most likely explanation was that the scent belonged to the person who had taken my moon rock.
I was shocked when my dragon brushed against my skin with a purr as I flared my nostrils to drag the delicious smell deeper into my lungs. Locked into the scent, I let him come to the surface and took to the air again, being careful to fly just above the tree canopy so I was as close as possible to the path my intruder took. It also limited the odds of me being spotted if any hikers wandered into our territory. Cameras with telescopic lenses meant that I had to be much more careful, stretching my senses more than a mile around me to make sure nobody was around.
When I reached the edge of our property, I shifted back to my human form, grateful for one of the many stashes of clothes I’d left up in a tree behind a No Trespassing sign. After getting dressed, I followed the scent trail out to the parking lot and all the way to a college campus two towns over. It took me all damn day to get there, and tracing the person who smelled like vanilla was complicated by all of the students milling around.
For a guy who hated crowds, it was a fucking nightmare. Leaning against a tree in the middle of the quad, I ignored everyone around me while I focused on locating my prey. My patience paid off when a redhead stepped out of the building across from me.
Her scent drifted on the wind toward me, and I instantly knew she was the one I’d been searching for. My little thief was fucking gorgeous.
Her dark auburn hair hung in waves down her back, and her hazel eyes were a splash of color against her pale skin. She was tall—but still a good six inches shorter than me—and on the thinner side. My fingers itched to trace her gentle curves as my cock hardened to its full length for the first time in my very long life.
I hadn’t just tracked down the person who had taken my lunar meteorite…I had finally found my fated mate.
4
MARIELLE
Waiting two whole days to show Dr. McCord what I had found during my field study had been tough. When I arrived back on campus on Saturday, I had been tempted to email him to ask if I could pop into his office this morning. But I knew how protective he was of his research time and that he rarely saw students outside of his regularly scheduled office hours. No matter how excited I was by my first geological find, I didn’t want to get on his bad side when so much of my education was in his hands.
Unfortunately, he arrived in the lecture hall right when class was scheduled to begin, so I had to wait until he was done before I could speak with him. Rushing down the steps, I called, “Dr. McCord, can I have a moment of your time?”