The Dragon's Witchy mate

    The curtain was sheer enough to be practically useless as a shield, but Dreanna Vance stood behind it anyway, her fingers barely grazing the pale fabric, her emerald eyes fixed on the man next door as though she'd lost the ability to look anywhere else.

    He was lifting a cedar beam. By himself. Without so much as a grunt of effort.

    Dreanna watched the thick column of timber rise as Maverick Sterling hoisted it into place along the skeleton of his future home, the muscles of his back shifting beneath bronzed skin in a way that made something low in her stomach pull tight. The morning sun was generous with him, spilling gold across the broad plain of his shoulders, catching in the sweat that traced the ridges of his spine and illuminating the ancient runes tattooed across his back. The markings were sprawling and dark, spiraling across his shoulder blades like a language written for something larger than a human being, something old enough to remember when the world was mostly fire.

    Stop it, she told herself. You're staring. You've been staring for twenty minutes.

    She had been. She knew it. She couldn't stop.

    Dreanna pressed her palm flat against the windowsill and tried to remember what she had come upstairs to do. Something practical. An errand that wasn't this. The guest suite that Liora had given her was warm and comfortable, tucked into the second story of the estate with a window that faced east, there was also a balcony with doors just six meters away facing the same way, which was wonderful for morning light and absolutely catastrophic for her concentration since the day the construction crew had cleared the neighboring lot and left only one man standing in the middle of it, apparently intending to build an entire house on his own.

    She felt it again — that low, resonant thrumming in her chest, a vibration that lived somewhere beneath her ribs and had nothing to do with any spell she'd cast. It was the kind of sensation she associated with old magic, with ley line proximity and deep earth power. But the ley lines ran beneath the estate, not the construction site next door, and the only thing on that lot was him.

    She pressed two fingers to her sternum, frowning.

    She hadn't felt anything like this since she'd fled her coven eight months ago. Since she'd packed what she could into a single bag, driven north through the dark, and arrived at Liora Quillen's door with silver sparks still crackling in her hair from the last ward she'd burned in her escape. She'd been numb for weeks after that. Careful. Quiet. Content to be invisible in the background of this vivid, chaotic household of pixies and wolves and ancient, elegant vampires.

    And then he had appeared on the lot next door with a truck full of lumber, and the numbness had cracked clean down the middle.

    On the lot below, Maverick Sterling went still.

    It was subtle. Just a pause, his massive frame balanced on the unfinished subfloor, one hand resting against the cedar beam he'd just set. His head turned slightly, not toward the street, not toward the road that ran behind his property. Toward the house. Toward her window.

    Dreanna's breath locked in her throat.

    She watched his chest expand, slow and deliberate, as though he were drawing in a long breath through his nose. The morning air between the two properties seemed to shift, a faint, charged pressure that prickled across her forearms and made the fine copper hairs there stand straight up. The sensation moved through her like a plucked string, resonating in the same hollow space beneath her sternum where the thrumming lived.

    He knows I'm here.

    The certainty of it was absurd. She was behind a curtain, fifty feet away, on the second floor. But his head had turned exactly the right number of degrees, and when he lifted a hand to wipe the sweat from his brow, the motion was slow and unhurried in a way that felt entirely deliberate. As though he knew, with absolute certainty, that someone was watching.

His golden eyes swept once across the face of the estate, and even at this distance, his gaze pierced through the double-paned glass and the thin veil of the curtain as if they were nothing but smoke, hitting her with an intensity so sharp, so physical, that Dreanna felt the weight of it like a warm hand pressed flat against her chest.

    She stepped back from the window.

    Her heart was hammering in a deeply undignified way. She was a witch. She had faced down a coven elder who had pinned her to a wall with a binding curse and called it discipline. She had driven out of a southern city at three in the morning with ward-fire still burning in her rear-view mirror. She had survived things that would have unmade lesser practitioners.

    She was not going to be undone by a shirtless man with good shoulders and a very large collection of cedar beams.

    He's not even your type, she told herself, which was a spectacular lie, because she was not entirely sure she had a type, and if she did, it appeared to be enormous, tattooed, and disinclined to use power tools.

    She pressed her back to the wall beside the window, exhaling slowly. She could still feel the charge in the air, that faint, electric static that hummed at the boundary between the two properties like something alive. It settled against her skin and didn't leave. It felt less like a warning and more like a question.

    Down on the street, at the far end of the block where the oak trees thinned and the road curved toward the main thoroughfare, a dark sedan sat with its engine idling. It had been there for nearly half an hour. The tinted windshield was a black, oily mirror, reflecting the morning sun in a single, blinding glint that obscured any hint of a driver. The car hadn't moved, and Dreanna, who had spent eight months learning to notice things that didn't belong, noticed it now with a cold, sliding unease that had nothing to do with the warmth still humming beneath her ribs.

    She pulled the curtain aside, just a fraction, and looked from the man building his walls in the morning light to the car watching them both from the shadow of the oaks.

    The thrumming in her chest shifted, just slightly, into something that felt less like resonance and more like a warning bell.