A loud pounding sounded on the bedroom door of Grigor and Gayle’s suite within Castle Pendragon.
“Oh for fuck’s sake!” Garett swore loudly on the other side of that door when the couple ignored him. “Will you two stop fucking for five minutes and open this bloody door!” This last demand was accompanied by Garrett’s fist beating repeatedly against the wooden barrier.
“How does he know that’s what we’re doing?” Gayle didn’t budge from her position of straddling her husband’s naked thighs, Grigor’s cock buried to the hilt inside her heat.
“All the brothers’ emotions are linked,” Grigor reminded with a smile, his hands on her hips urging her continue to ride him harder and faster.
Gayle looked horrified. “I know that but it never occurred to me— Does that mean they all know what we’re doing?” Her green eyes widened. “That they’ve always known?”
Grigor shrugged. “We can sense each other’s pleasure as easily as our other emotions, yes.”
“We’ve been together for two years, and I’m only just learning this?” Gayle buried the heat of her blushing face against his throat.
Grigor and his brothers’ emotional link existed because all eight of them were dragon shifters. There had been ten brothers originally, born fifteen hundred years ago to their ten goddess mothers and their human father, Uther Pendragon. At the age of thirty-five, they had come into their power to shift into their dragon and leave Annwn, the Welsh Underworld, in order to become the dragon army of their human brother, King Arthur.
One of their brothers, Gideon, had died during those bloody battles fought alongside Arthur. The remaining nine had continued to live on for centuries after Arthur had died, having fulfilled his destiny to Wales.
The brothers had continued to fight on wherever their service could be of use to the oppressed and needy. Then they had lost a second brother during Queen Victoria’s reign, when the dragon and vampire hunters had been all the fashion and a group of them had captured and beheaded Rufus with his own sword.
Being beheaded with their own sword, or his mate denying their mating or dying, were the only ways in which a Pendragon dragon shifter could be killed.
But the eight who were left had continued on, century after century, fighting and protecting, and ever hopeful of finding their fated mate. That mate would prevent them from eventually turning completely feral and remaining in dragon form, wreaking havoc and destruction wherever they went. Their brothers, in order to prevent the discovery of dragon shifters, would then have no choice but to end their lives.
In the twenty-first century, the brothers hid their dragons and their desire to protect behind the shield of their company, Pendragon Security.
Miraculously, two years ago, after fifteen hundred years of the eight brothers being alone in the world, all of them had been blessed with meeting their fated mates before claiming them.
Unexpectedly, all those mates were human, and so most of them had also been joined in a human marriage ceremony.
The mating, along with the small amount of dragon DNA in the human mates’ blood, meant they would now live as long as their dragon shifter mates.
Grigor still remembered the shock of realizing that Gayle was his fated mate. She was only twenty-two human years of age at the time, whereas he was fifteen hundred years old. He was also stern and demanding, and Gayle was possessed of a fierce and modern independence that had often gotten her in trouble. As such, she was far from the obedient mate Grigor had envisaged for the head of the Pendragon family.
She was, he quickly discovered, far more than that.
Gayle was beautiful inside as well as out. She was fiercely loyal to those she loved, which, thank Goddess, included Grigor, their son, her sister Holly, who was mate to Dylan, another Pendragon brother, and also the rest of the Pendragon family.
In return, she was Grigor’s world. His life. The very air he breathed.
He smiled at the memory of trying to persuade Gayle that he would be a suitable husband for her. Fifteen hundred years old, set in his ways, and arrogant in the extreme.
But somehow, despite their initial arguments, they had managed to fall in love with each other. Their beautiful son was the embodiment of that love.
It had never occurred to Grigor until now that Gayle didn’t completely understand the depth of his emotional link with his brothers, but her reaction now said she obviously hadn’t.
Garrett gave another loud knock on the door. “We have an emergency out here.” His increasing frustration could be heard in the rising of his voice.
“We have an emergency in here we intend dealing with first.” Gayle gave a pointed undulation of her hips even as she answered Garrett.
Grigor groaned his physical and emotional pleasure. Gayle was as fierce as any dragon, and he was proud to have her as his mate and mother of his son and any future children they might have together. She also had the power to arouse him to a depth of passion more powerful than anything and everything else. “My wife wishes for you to go away, Garrett,” he chuckled.
“I. Said.” Garrett, now half shifted into his silver dragon—his hands had become claws and his face sharper angles, and both were covered in iridescent silver scales—crashed through the locked door, splintering it off its hinges. “We. Have. An. Emergency,” Garrett repeated in a guttural boom.
Gayle gave an indignant squeak, not at having the half dragon in their bedroom, but because of the intrusion itself. She was used to seeing her husband and all her brothers-in-law in their twenty-foot-tall dragon form, but not to having Garrett see her naked.
She instinctively bent down, her red hair falling like a silky curtain across her husband’s chest. The move had hidden her bared breasts and also the point at which Grigor’s cock was buried inside her heat. There wasn’t much she could do about her bare arse sticking up in the air. “What the hell, Garrett?” She turned her head to glare at him.
Silver eyes narrowed. “I need Grigor.”
She gave a derisive smile. “Well, obviously, so do I.”
“I need him now.”
“So. Do. I,” she repeated, mimicking Garrett’s earlier method of emphasized speech.
“You’re going to fix that door before you do anything else,” Grigor warned his brother as he pulled the bedcovers over Gayle and himself.
“I’ll do it later.”
“You most certainly will.”
His brother snorted. “We have something else, far more important than your modesty, to deal with. A…situation has arisen requiring your attention.”
Grigor’s scowl was even darker than his wife’s. “As you can see, we plan on doing other things for a while.” The mating barb on his cock hadn’t embedded itself inside Gayle yet, but it would very soon, and when it did, it would ensure not a drop of his seed was lost when he released inside her. Possibly impregnating her? Grigor hoped so. Their son was almost a year old, and Gayle had expressed a desire for them to have more children sooner rather than later.
Garrett bared very sharp and pointed teeth. “This situation is urgent—” He broke off as the sound of the bellpull at the front doors resounded throughout the stone castle. “Make that immediate,” Garrett added in a doom-laden voice.
“Carys will answer the door,” Gayle dismissed.
Grigor winced. “Is that wise, love? I realize it’s taking her a little time to adjust to being temporary housekeeper here while her mother recovers from having her hip operation, but our security is paramount. We’re all aware that last week Carys invited in a man she had only assumed was a new client for Pendragon Security. It took Dylan ten minutes’ conversation with the man before he realized he was actually a door-to-door salesman trying to sell us tablets to correct erectile difficulties. Not that there’s anything wrong with providing medical help with that condition. I just don’t think any of us have a use for those pills right now.”
Gayle tightened her inner muscles about Grigor’s steely hard cock. “Or ever.” She chuckled.
“I—”
Mine.
Grigor froze, every muscle and sinew of his body on immediate alert. “What the hell was that?”
Garrett sighed, obviously having felt that mental link too. “I believe that is connected to the urgent situation I’ve been trying to tell you about.”
If it was, then it was far more serious than a situation.
Because Grigor had recognized that growled claim as coming from another dragon. A dragon that did not have permission to enter Pendragon territory.
The only other dragons they were aware of were the seven Romanov brothers, but as none of them were due for a visit from Russia, he doubted it was one of them.
Besides, that wouldn’t explain why Grigor had been able to sense the emotional need through a mental link that shouldn’t even exist with someone outside his immediate family. Even the Russian dragons, despite being their allies, couldn’t contact them in this intimate manner.
Garrett was obviously aware of Grigor’s concern as he strode across the bedroom to shove a laptop in front of his older brother’s face. “I’m in charge of checking the security cameras today, and this is something you really need to see.”
“I am going to rip you a new one once I’m up and dressed,” Gayle muttered fiercely at this blatant intrusion into their personal space.
“You and what army?” Garrett scorned.
“Oh, I believe eliciting the assistance of your wife will be a sufficient deterrent,” she came back sweetly.
“In that case, I apologize,” Garrett muttered. Billie Pendragon was a force all her own.
Grigor was barely aware of the conversation going on between his wife and brother, his attention on the black-and-white view being channeled from a security camera onto Garrett’s laptop.
It showed a tall man with dark hair standing outside the main entrance of Pendragon Castle, currently in conversation with Carys.
A man Grigor instantly recognized.
At the same time as he knew how impossible that was.
To Grigor’s certain knowledge, the man their visitor resembled had been dead for fifteen hundred years.