Cash (Dragon Hearbeats Book 3) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Epilogue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Cash

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Excerpt

  Afterword

  Cash

  Dragon Heartbeats

  Ava Benton

  Contents

  Cash

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Epilogue

  Excerpt

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Afterword

  Cash

  Iron is kryptonite to Cash and his dragon shifter clan. He offers to be the guinea pig in a laboratory to help them overcome their weaknesses.

  Unfortunately, Cash didn't count on meeting a sexy doctor called Carissa.

  Carissa's no stranger to shifters. Her cousin has hooked up with one of Miami's Everglade shifters. But she has no clue that there's such a thing as dragon shifters. She thinks she's helping out an average, run-of-the-mill wolf, bear, or tiger shifter. And Cash doesn't tell her his secret.

  Then again, Carissa's got a secret of her own. Her nephew has been kidnapped. The only way she can get him back is if she delivers the blood of the shifter she's supposed to be finding a cure for.

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  1

  Cash

  I was never the big idea guy in my family. Which was what made sitting here, looking around at my family and waiting to hear what Smoke had to say about going back to Scotland, a little weird for me. I was usually on the other side of things.

  “Let’s take a step back,” Smoke suggested. He took the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger and rubbed. Hard. “You’re right. We still don’t know what happened to the rest of our clan in Scotland. And Mary hasn’t gotten back to us with any concrete information. I’m concerned about it as much as you are.”

  “Okay. We’re on the same page, then.”

  He held up a hand. “But.”

  “I knew that was coming.”

  He nodded. “But, let’s not rush into anything. We’ve been here all this time for a reason. We can’t walk away from our duty.”

  “We wouldn’t all have to go,” I reasoned. “A couple of us, a few of us. Whatever.”

  From the corner of my eye, I noticed Jasmine and Alina almost collapse against each other. They were glad—maybe their men wouldn’t have to go.

  I bit my tongue to keep from telling them I didn’t care if they got a little lonely while we took care of things that mattered a long, long time before either of them were even born. It was because of them that we lost focus in the first place.

  “What’s Pierce think about this?” Smoke asked. I turned my attention back to him.

  “He wasn’t thrilled, but he was willing to leave it up to a vote.” I didn’t feel like rehashing the argument we had.

  “And what’s the vote look like so far?” he asked.

  “It’s crazy,” Miles muttered under his breath.

  “Yeah, Miles, you made it clear that you think this is a crazy idea,” I groaned. “Can you maybe say it one more time, though, in case somebody around here didn’t hear you yet?”

  “I don’t think it’s crazy,” Gate announced. That was a surprise. He didn’t usually back plans he had nothing to do with. “None of us wants to sit around and do nothing, just let things happen around us. It’s not how we are. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to move things forward.” I wondered if he wanted to go, if that was why he was on my side. Maybe he just needed a chance of scene.

  “I want to know what happened to the clan, too,” Fence agreed. “What if whatever happened to them happens to us?”

  “So, I’m the only one who thinks this is insane?” Miles glared at the two of them.

  “Don’t assume,” Smoke murmured. “I think it’s insane, too.”

  “Oh, come on.” I thought for sure he would see the reason behind my idea. He was the only family member I had counted on.

  He shrugged. “I’m only saying, I think we need to work out the fine points before we make any big decisions.”

  “Fine points? Such as what?”

  “For one thing, is the cave as safe as it can be while part of the group is gone? For another, if we split up, what happens to those of us who go to Scotland? What if they find something terrible? What if something terrible happened out there, and the ones who did it are still around? We can’t just jet off to the father country without considering everything.”

  I sat back in my chair and looked up at the ceiling. “I wasn’t planning on leaving tonight,” I growled.

  “Nobody said you were. Hey. You know me. I have to look at everything from all angles before I can make a decision.”

  “It doesn’t get annoying at all,” I muttered. I was sure his mate would love that part of his personality. She might think it was cute since she barely knew him. Try putting up with his bullshit for a thousand years, honey.

  “What about Mary?” Miles asked. He sounded like a man clutching at straws.

  “What about her?” I looked over at him.

  “I think we should ask, see what she thinks. She may know what me might be up against if we go there. It’s worth getting all the information we can—like Smoke said,” he added, when I opened my mouth to argue with him.

  “Fine. We’ll ask her.” A total waste of time. So what if we saved her life when she was younger? Yes, she owed us, but she wasn’t all-knowing. She wasn’t part of our family, either. It was almost like having to ask for permission to do what I felt was right.

  “You know what? We’re gonna go… do anything else but this,” Jasmine announced as she linked arms with her sister. “Catch you all later.”

  One good thing about Jasmine: she knew her place. And that place wasn’t with us when we were talking about dragon issue.

  Aline took one more look at Smoke before she left.

  Smoke sat at the terminal and pulled up his Skype account. Mary answered after the second ring. “Congratulations. You caught me out of bed this time.”

  “Taken out of context, that’s a very different statement,” Smoke grinned, but it was a short-lived grin. “We have an idea. Well, Cash has an idea, and we’re exploring it. I take it you still haven’t heard anything from your contacts in Scotland?”

  Her forehead creased when she frowned. “I’m sure they’re doing all they can.”

  “That wasn’t an accusation,” I was quick to add. Sometimes Smoke had all the finesse of a dragon in a china shop.
I nudged him out of the way. “Hi, Mary.”

  “Cash. I like the beard. Very distinguished.”

  “Thank you.” I had to grin as I ran a hand over my jaw. “Do you think the ladies out in Scotland will like it?”

  “Ah.” She nodded. “I see. Scotland. That’s the idea.”

  “Who would do a better job of finding out what’s wrong with the clan than us? You know how secretive our kind are. That could be why your contacts haven’t been able to find anything—because the clan is so well-hidden.”

  She nodded again. “I had considered that, but I didn’t want to sound like a naysayer.”

  “Say nay all you like.” I flashed her a smile.

  “If you want to go to Scotland to see for yourselves, that’s your right.” She looked down at her desk with a sigh. “There’s only one issue that gives me pause, and I wonder if any of you have considered it yet.”

  “I’m sure we can keep the cave safe with fewer of us available to guard,” I replied.

  “It’s not that.” She looked up, eyes falling on all of us. “What about your iron issue?”

  Issue. More like a weakness.

  It was like a punch to the gut. All the air left me at once. Of course. I hadn’t thought about it in so long because there was little reason to. We had taken great pains to keep iron out of the cave, down to the bars on the prisoner cells. There was no way we’d risk having the material used against us.

  Smoke made a thoughtful noise. “I have to admit, I forgot about that.”

  She smiled softly. “You can bet that if any outside forces did harm to your clan, they know your weakness. They’ll clap a pair of iron shackles on you the moment they see you, to be sure you can’t shift.”

  “Damn it.” I slammed my closed fist on the tabletop. “I refuse to sit here and do nothing. They could need our help out there. They’re our kin. There has to be something we can do.”

  She nodded, mouth pursed. “Maybe there is something, after all. Give me a day or two to work out the specifics. But don’t get your hopes up, either. There’s no guarantee I can do anything to help you.”

  “We appreciate the time you’re spending on this,” Smoke assured her.

  “Hey. You’ve waited all this time to call in the favor I owed you. The least I can do is see it through.”

  Smoke turned to me after closing the Skype program. “All right? We’re moving forward. Or trying to.”

  My dragon snarled at the tone in his voice. “Don’t gaslight me right now, man. This is important. I’m not overreacting.”

  “Nobody said you were,” Gate interjected.

  I didn’t like his response much better. If there was anything worse than condescension, it was being patronized.

  “Let me know when you hear something from her.” I left the room before I said anything I couldn’t take back.

  They had no idea how I wished I could tear them all limb from limb right now. They could say all they wanted that it was important we find out about our clan, that we should assist them if they were in need. Yet when the time came to put their money where their mouths were, they acted as if I were crazy for being concerned.

  Perhaps it was because I still felt the pull of the old country and they didn’t. We had all acclimated to our new life, even if it had taken years. At first, there was little difference between what we’d known in Scotland and what we found in the New World—except back then, it wasn’t even known as such.

  It was the home of multiple tribes of indigenous people who had lived alongside us without asking questions or making demands, and we had done our best to avoid them in turn. Probably because we scared the hell out of them. I’m pretty sure, in spite of wards to keep others from seeing us shifting into our dragons, that somehow one of them had seen and spread the rumor. How knows what they thought we were. But they steered clear. And that was just fine with us.

  Over time, when settlers came from Europe, the tribes thinned out until the area where our mountain sat was literally the middle of nowhere. There were no villages for as far as the eye could see, no smoke from distant fires. It took a few hundred years for people to settle there, in such rocky and remote terrain.

  Even then, we were virtually alone. Only the bravest of the brave had dared venture to our mountain, and we’d made short work of those who had cared to trespass. The only human contact we’d indulged in took place during our trips to the market. We had grown up with the area, so to speak. That was probably why the rest of the family acted like they had all but forgotten where we came from.

  But I didn’t. I couldn’t forget the highlands in all their glory, the jade green grass and rolling hills. The lochs and glens, the fairy pools. There was nothing so beautiful where I’d spent the last thousand years, especially not in the advent of technology. Today’s blinking lights from radio towers barely peeking through the layers of smog and pollution were somehow less magical.

  I could thank technology for allowing me to revisit my homeland, however. Sometimes, when none of the others were around, I’d look up photos of our home. The place where I’d left my heart so long ago.

  Ruins of castles which weren’t ruins when we ran and flew and breathed the fresh, pure air there. Winding streams that had widened and even changed course thanks to the water as it carved new paths into rock. The beauty of it made my heart ache in a way nothing else ever had.

  And there was something wrong with it. The heartbeats of our clan had stopped. Heartbeats that had run concurrently with ours over the millennia, like nature’s lullaby, now gone. Silence had replaced it. And it was a silence that gave me pause. And alongside the missing heartbeats, was the clan which inhabited that land. The ones that created the heartbeats. Our blood, in our true home.

  And none of the guys seemed to care. At least, not as much as I did.

  No wonder their derision and snide little jabs left me feeling murderous.

  Any of them would’ve behaved the same if they gave a damn.

  2

  Carissa

  The day started as it always did.

  Knock, knock, knock. “Aunt Cari! Aunt Cari!”

  I turned my face to the pillow and muttered a curse. Sometimes, I just couldn’t hold it in. “Yeah, bud?”

  “I’m up!” Every morning. He had to announce it every morning. Just in case I forgot he was there.

  I rolled onto my back, rubbing my eyes. How was it possibly morning already? Never my favorite time of day. Especially with a living, breathing alarm clock waking me at the crack of dawn on the daily.

  I took a deep breath and made sure to inject a little light into my voice before calling out. “Okay, buddy. Good morning. I’ll be out soon.”

  “You want me to make your coffee?”

  Just when I was sure my stint as his guardian would send me to the loony bin, he said something like that.

  I giggled softly. “No, thank you, sweets. I’ll do it in a little bit when I come out to fix breakfast.”

  I wasn’t sleepy or desperate enough to agree to letting a five-year-old work the coffee maker. His footsteps echoed down the hall as he ran to the living room and flipped on the TV. He ran everywhere. I was sure the downstairs neighbors were in love with that tendency. They were already on my Christmas shopping list, even two months out.

  I sat up with a groan. My head was in a fog, with the last fading impressions of a dream clinging hard. I wanted to go back to it, even though it didn’t make any sense. I wouldn’t have told my best friends about it, it was that embarrassing. I had been on the back of a dragon, flying through the sky in the middle of the night. I could still envision the moonlight glinting off the dragon’s scales. It was so stupid.

  Stupid or not, it was better than waking up in a chilly apartment with the sun barely peeking over the treetops. At least the chill in the air helped wake me up a little. I rubbed my arms briskly before reaching for my bathrobe, lying across the foot of the bed. I should’ve paid closer attention to the weather forecast and
adjusted the heat before I went to bed. Poor kid must’ve been freezing all night. Another way for me to feel like I was coming up short. There was always something.

  Some ridiculous kids’ show was on, the theme song reaching my room as I belted my robe and slid into slippers, then made up my bed.

  I remembered the days when the morning news was the soundtrack to my routine. In a way, cartoons were better. At least, I didn’t start the day off in a bad mood after hearing all the negativity, reports of murder and robbery and other depressing facts about living just outside D.C. When Tommy asked if he could watch his favorite shows over breakfast I hadn’t hesitated before agreeing. He didn’t need to know the truth of the world at his age.

  He already knew too much.

  I twisted my long, dark-blonde hair into a bun on top of my head as I walked out to the bathroom. He’d already been in there, as evidenced by the raised toilet seat and the toothpaste he’d left all over the sink.

  At least he brushed his teeth, I thought with a grimace as I lowered the seat.

  Had it really been eight months already? The longest of my life. The most rewarding, too. Even more rewarding than my work, which used to be all that mattered. I hadn’t known the first thing about raising kids before the state dropped him off at my front door, and I still didn’t know half of what I felt I should. Then again, who did when they had their first child? I reminded myself of that every time I felt like I was failing Tommy.

  I couldn’t fail him any more than his mother had.