“It’s over now.” A slow smile took his lips in the gold hues of the porch light. “Back to the fun stuff. I won’t show you how to do anything. I won’t try to be your hero. You can do your thing, and I’ll do my thing in my own lane.”
“You…” She frowned. “You want to go to the range with me?” She’d thought he’d just been bored out of his mind with her stories about her dad.
“My mom is human. She got sick.”
Tammy parted her lips to say something, but she felt like she was on uneven ground with him again. She tried again. “I’m sorry.”
“She’s okay. You asked why I think you’re fragile. Because my mother was. For a while at least.”
“What was she sick with?”
“Same thing all you humans get sick with.”
“Oh.” He was sharing with her. Sharing about his mother. “Do shifters not get cancer?”
“No. She was going through treatment but her immune system was down and she kept getting little colds that turned into big colds. So…put a fucking jacket on.”
She snorted and hung her head at his sweet-and-then-sour demeanor. Okay, so he bossed her around about the jacket for a reason. Did he…did he like her? Did he care?
“I thought Sentry dragons don’t have feelings.”
“Who said that?”
“You hinted at it, and also Harley told me.”
“You asked Harley about me? Harley doesn’t know me.”
“No, but she asked Kade and Jess. One of them must’ve told her Sentry dragons don’t have feelings because that’s what she told me. The internet was next-to useless for information about your people. Wait,” she uttered as something struck her. “Your mother is human?”
“Yes,” he clipped out, and then waited.
“So, your father is a Sentry dragon?”
“Was.”
“Oh. Oh, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. He and my mother weren’t exactly travel-the-world-together-after-retirement types. He was…” He narrowed his eyes at the ground, searching for the right word. “Strict. With me but especially with my mother.”
“It’s hard to live in a home like that.”
“My mother was too sweet for a man like him. I don’t know why he was her choice. I’ve asked but she doesn’t know the answer either. She was just taken with him, and put up with a lot, and then he left, and it was better. For her.”
“Not for you?”
He shrugged. “I had to learn a lot about my dragon the hard way.”
And she tried to imagine it—a young boy with a mighty dragon growing inside of him, having to figure out everythingwith no guidance, and a human mother who couldn’t truly relate to what her son was going through.
“That must’ve been very hard.”
“Hardship makes worthwhile men.”
Chills rippled up her forearms. “Where did you hear that?”
He shook his head, and confusion swirled in his glowing eyes. “It’s just how I feel.”
“Hardship does give life experience.”
