The Bronze Dragon's Baby (Shifter Dads Book 5) Read online

  Santos wondered what her hometown was like. Ronan had given a sense of the place’s brutality, but not of its families or businesses, of whether dragons were well known among the population or whether they kept hidden, that sort of thing.

  Well. They’d be spending some time together now. He’d have to ask her.

  Chapter 7: Athena

  Back at the furniture store, Athena let Santos lead the way inside. But this time, he kept going through the door at the back, into another big space. This one was full of unfinished wood, half-built tables and chairs and shelves, tools, and sawdust.

  “Oh,” she said, despite herself. “You make all of it.” She thought abruptly about the size of his hands, the callouses on his fingers, and flushed.

  “Sure do,” Santos said, sounding amused. “Did you think I was just a retailer?”

  “Well, how was I supposed to know?” she asked, ignoring any thoughts about big hands. Instead, she turned in a circle to see all of the different...things. Wood things. “How did you learn how to do all of this?”

  “Apprenticed,” he said briefly. “There’s a woman a couple of towns over who spent her life making furniture for the whole area. She’s retired now, but she taught me everything she knew.”

  Athena absorbed that. A woman. Most of the men she knew would die starving before they admitted that a woman might have useful skills to teach them. “Another dragon town?” she asked.

  “Nope,” he said, sounding cheerful. “Regular human. Didn’t slow her down any.”

  That was another astonishing fact. “How did you even find her?” she asked. “Did your parents object to you apprenticing to a human?”

  “She had a pretty wide reputation,” he said, still sounding like this was funny somehow. Athena scowled at an unfinished nightstand. “It was more about convincing her that I was worth taking on, which took some doing, believe me. And my parents were happy that I was learning a good trade that I could use to make a living.”

  This all sounded so—strange. She tried to picture Shiloh, or even Alaric, apprenticing to a human to learn a good trade and caring about making a living, and came up totally blank.

  Santos, on the other hand...

  She found that she could picture him learning from some older human woman, asking questions in his calm, deep voice, working slowly and intently to get better. He didn’t seem to have that need for confrontation that she knew from home.

  She looked down at Olivia. Her daughter had her fingers in her mouth and was staring around at all the new stuff, just like she’d spent most of the morning doing. This town was just full of things that Olivia had never seen before.

  “Where’s this spare room?” she said finally, turning away from all the in-progress furniture. She could think about all this later, when he wasn’t standing right there.

  He opened a door that led to a narrow staircase, and started up. Athena followed, realizing almost immediately that she was looking right at his—extremely well-shaped behind. His jeans were tight enough to show off the very, very firm view.

  And apparently, as foreign as Santos was and as strange as this whole situation had become, she wasn’t above looking.

  After far too short a climb, Santos was opening another door into a wide-open room, full of windows, with gleaming wooden floors and a warm-looking rug. On the left was a kitchen area, with a big table separating it from the right, where a couch and a comfy-looking chair were set up, with a big television mounted on the wall.

  It was all so—nice. And clean. And he’d probably made all the furniture in here.

  “Spare room’s this way,” Santos said after a second, and Athena forced her mouth shut and followed after him, suddenly self-conscious about whether she was grubby after twenty hours of traveling and a nap in a public store. With a baby. Probably.

  “Bathroom’s right here,” Santos said, as though he was reading her mind. “You’re welcome to use the shower and whatever’s in it, no need to ask or anything. And here we go.”

  He opened a door to a room that was softly lit in the new light of dawn, with white curtains in the windows, and a bed with a thick quilt on it. There was a chair and a table in the corner, a big chest of drawers, and a nightstand with a wooden lamp on it. Athena was once again pretty sure that Santos had personally made everything in the room.

  “Do you have a lot of guests?” she asked, looking at it all. It seemed ready for company to show up at any minute.

  Santos was quiet for a second, and when she looked at him, his cheeks were—flushed? Was he blushing?

  Athena realized abruptly that they were standing very close, crowded in the doorway together. Normally, she wouldn’t have let herself get so distracted that she let down her defenses like this—she wasn’t even thinking about the possibility of an attack.

  But Santos wasn’t acting aggressive at all. And his presence didn’t awaken a defensive instinct. She found herself, weirdly, rather wanting to lean closer, to let herself brush against his side, feel his body heat radiating from his enormous form. Her eyes traced the broad lines of his chest.

  “Not really,” he said, and she started, trying to remember what the question had been. Guests, right. “I wish I had more, sometimes. It’s pretty quiet here. Well, when we’re not...”

  “At war with another dragon clan,” Athena finished. Huh.

  Olivia chose that moment to decide that she did not want to be in the carrier any longer, and Athena welcomed the distraction. She put down her pack and got the carrier undone—too late, she caught Santos with his hand out, probably ready to offer to help with the straps or hold something. But she was far too used to doing all of this by herself.

  “She can crawl around if you want to let her,” Santos said, once Olivia was free. “I keep the floors clean. It’s safe.”

  Athena forbore to say that her daughter was tough enough to withstand a little dirt on the floor, because she was still feeling a little self-conscious about how sparkling the place was compared to her. Olivia would probably get the floor dirty, rather than the other way around. “Thanks,” was all she said, and set Olivia down, letting her shoot off immediately to explore all the corners of the room.

  “Mrow?”

  She turned at the noise...and found a black-and-white cat slowly approaching from the hallway.

  “Oh, that’s Humphrey,” Santos said. “He wouldn’t hurt a fly, so you don’t have to worry about Olivia. He’ll probably be more scared of her than she is of him.”

  Athena stared down at the cat. “You have a pet?”

  There was another one of those little moments of silence, and when she looked up, Santos was staring at her with probably the same expression she’d been giving the cat. “Is that strange to you?”

  “Well—yes.” She looked back down at the cat, which had sat down on the floor and was looking up at her as though expecting something. “I’ve never met a shifter with a pet before.”

  “Why not?”

  “I guess...I don’t know why,” she said slowly. “I guess I learned it was a human thing. They keep animals because they don’t have an animal side of their own, I suppose.”

  “Huh,” Santos said thoughtfully. “I don’t keep Humphrey for his animal side, I don’t think. I keep him because I like him and he likes me.”

  Athena processed this. Meanwhile, across the room, Olivia had sat down by the desk and grabbed the chair legs, discovering to her delight that she was strong enough to move the whole chair a tiny bit. She squealed happily, and the cat’s ears went back, his pupils widening as he crouched a little.

  Well, Athena could respect that sort of readiness for danger.

  “Hello, cat,” she said. No, he had a name. She wondered if he knew it. “Humphrey. Hello, Humphrey.”

  The cat looked up at her when she said his name, so maybe he did know it. After a long pause, he came forward, padding on silent feet, until he was right up near her. Athena stayed still, not wanting to scare him off.

&n
bsp; He sniffed her boots, sniffed her pant legs, sniffed her boots again...and then suddenly pressed his entire body against her leg, sliding himself forward as though he’d decided to just pet himself.

  “He likes you, too,” Santos said, sounding pleased. “You can pet him if you want, but don’t worry about it if you don’t. He’ll live.”

  Cautiously, Athena reached a hand down, half-expecting to be bitten. But Humphrey leaned up and sniffed her fingers—his nose was a little damp, his breaths so soft and delicate that she could barely feel them—and then rubbed his chin along her hand. She followed his movements as best she could, and then, a little more tentatively, ran a hand down his back.

  “He’s very soft,” she said. “Could he survive out in the wild? Or does he need a person to take care of him?”

  “Well, I got him because he showed up outside the shop and kept getting inside the back room,” Santos said. “So he was surviving somehow, before that.”

  “And you decided to take him in, not chase him off?”

  When she looked up, Santos was watching her with an unrecognizable expression, leaning back against the doorjamb. His shirt strained against the muscles in his arms, and Athena looked away again.

  “He didn’t seem to want to be chased. And I thought we could both use a friend. But cat hair and unfinished wood do not mix at all, so I figured he’d be better off up here, where all the furniture is already done.”

  Athena stared down at the cat. Petted him again. She didn’t know why she found this whole idea so...disconcerting. Maybe it was just the fact of taking in a totally foreign creature and deciding to feed it and care for it, with no reason for it whatsoever beyond, I thought we could both use a friend.

  Olivia let out another loud shriek, banging the chair hard against the desk, and Humphrey was suddenly gone, darting off down the hallway and disappearing into the front room.

  “Whoops,” Santos said ruefully.

  “Sorry,” Athena offered.

  “No, it’s no problem. He was just startled. He has a pretty...predictable life most of the time, it’ll do him good to get shaken up a little.”

  Athena hoped so, because keeping Olivia quiet when she was determined to be loud was absolutely impossible.

  “Listen,” Santos said, hesitant. “Do you want to take some time, get cleaned up, or maybe have a nap? I can watch Olivia for you if you do. But no pressure. If you’d rather stay with her, I understand.”

  Of course she’d rather keep Olivia with her. Right?

  It was the weirdest thing. Athena’s instincts, which nearly always drove her to the smarter, more protective choice, were urging her to say Yes.

  Trust him, her dragon hissed. Let him care for the baby.

  Now that was completely unprecedented. Her dragon was almost always even more paranoid than she was.

  She looked up at Santos. He wasn’t smiling anymore, but his face was still—open. Honest. Earnest. Something. It reminded her of Alaric at his most noble, but there was still something so...gentle about it.

  “Okay,” she heard herself saying. “Thank you.”

  He blinked, looking about as surprised as she was to be saying it. “Of course. My pleasure.”

  Before she could talk herself out of it, she went down to one knee and started digging through her pack. “Here’s diapers and some formula, just in case. Changing pad. I’ll just take a shower, it won’t be very long.”

  “Take all the time you need.”

  She found the single change of her own clothes that she’d brought in the pack, and looked over at Olivia, who still seemed like she was having a fantastic time with the chair legs. “Okay. Back in a few.”

  Athena fled to the bathroom, and behind her, she could already hear Santos saying, “Hi, Olivia. You want to hang out for a little bit? Enjoying that chair?”

  There was a weird space in her chest where she’d been expecting the anxiety she always felt when she had to leave Olivia with someone else. It just...wasn’t there.

  God, this was weird.

  Chapter 8: Santos

  Santos didn’t know what had prompted him to make the offer. He wasn’t an expert on babies—he’d occasionally babysat for Lachlan’s son Aidan, back when Lachlan was still a single father, but that had been mostly after Aidan was already a toddler.

  Also, he would have sworn that Athena would categorically refuse to leave Olivia in his care even for a few minutes, even while they were still in the same apartment together. She was clearly a fiercely protective mother, and Santos was practically a stranger.

  But since he’d been given this unexpected, fragile-feeling gift, he was absolutely going to demonstrate that he was worthy of it.

  “Hi, Olivia,” he said again. The baby looked up at him from where she was sitting, now practically underneath the little desk chair he’d made on a whim and had no one to sell to. This room—and really, the entire apartment—was mostly furnished with things he’d made simply because he wanted to, not because of a commission or any true demand, and then decided to keep rather than leave on the show floor.

  This particular room he’d furnished with a sense of purpose, with the idea that at some point, someone would come and stay here. The problem was, Santos led a pretty predictable life, and almost all of his friends and family lived right here in Oak Ridge, and had no need of a guest room.

  He’d always wanted to get a little further afield, find some more excitement, but never quite gotten around to it, too attached to his shop and his furniture, his family and friends, his cat.

  And even though he loved his job and his community and wouldn’t have given it up for anything, he’d always regretted ending up in circumstances that, at least viewed from the outside, were sort of dull.

  Keeping the guest room always ready for company had been a small effort towards the hope that there might be some excitement around the corner, someone who might need a place to stay, something that might disrupt his established routine.

  When the fight with Victor’s lion pack, and then with the red dragons, had come to Oak Ridge, Santos had thought disgustedly, Well, be careful what you wish for. He’d gotten some excitement, all right, and immediately wanted it gone again.

  But now, well. At least his guest room was getting some use.

  Olivia abandoned the chair and started crawling back towards the door of the room. Santos followed behind her, watching to make sure she wasn’t headed for anything dangerous. But the apartment was pretty safe, and Humphrey was probably hiding under the couch for the moment.

  “Intrepid explorer, huh?” Santos asked Olivia as she headed out into the hallway without a single sign of hesitation. “You take after your mom, I guess.” He thought of The Iliad again, and smiled. “A family of warrior women.”

  Olivia smacked her hands down on the hardwood as she crawled, giggling at the sound. Her laugh was still adorable.

  Santos wondered where her dad was. Back at home in Oak Ridge? At breakfast, Athena had mentioned a couple of names of male dragons, but she hadn’t sounded as though she was talking about a husband. And she seemed so fiercely independent, it was hard to imagine her tied down to a man.

  Plus, if she did have a husband, surely she could have left Olivia with him while she came on her solo mission to hostile territory.

  Unless she couldn’t trust him to take care of a baby. Santos frowned down at Olivia’s tiny form, now chugging on forward towards the front room. If that was the case, he hoped Athena wasn’t going to stick with him for long.

  Though from what Ronan had said—and from what Athena herself had said at breakfast—it sounded like the red dragon men weren’t very interested in family and caregiving.

  “Whoa there, kiddo,” Santos told Olivia as she headed for the heating grate. “That’s not going to be great on your hands. Here.” He gently lifted her up and turned her to face the kitchen.

  She sat back and looked up at him seriously, as though to ask, Who are you to get in my way?

&
nbsp; “I’m just some guy, honey,” he told her. For now, he added silently. “But I’m not going to let you burn your hands.”

  She studied him carefully with those big green eyes for a long minute, then obviously dismissed him from her consideration and headed off to explore the big dining table. Santos smiled and sauntered after.

  He caught a glimpse of Humphrey’s white nose poking out from under the couch, and hoped the cat would be brave enough to venture out again soon. Watching Athena slowly, carefully lean down and pet him had been—well, it had made his chest hurt, but he also wanted to see it again.

  The way she’d asked, You have a pet? as though it was the most incredible thing...Santos wondered more and more what it was like back in her hometown. No pets, no female authority, no trust in men to take care of babies—and Santos hadn’t missed how unsure Athena had been at Lachlan’s. He wasn’t sure if it had just been foreign territory, or if she really wasn’t used to sitting down for a decent meal at a restaurant. She hadn’t even looked at the menu, just copied Santos’s order.

  He watched Olivia wrap herself around one of the table legs like it was a fireman’s pole and acknowledged that he was feeling more and more protective of these two brave ladies. He didn’t want them to have to go back to that town, to fall under the authority of those men.

  “I’m going to figure out how to tell your mom that,” he said to Olivia, in a low undertone so that Athena wouldn’t hear him with her shifter ears. He added, “Hopefully in a way that doesn’t make her punch me.”

  Olivia looked up at him, and laughed again, that full-on laugh that shook her whole little body, and Santos laughed right back.

  Chapter 9: Athena