She faced Eiric then, and sat on a beach towel next to him. He reached toward her and wiped tears from her cheeks. She hadn’t even known she’d been crying.
“Are you okay?” he asked quietly. “I can’t imagine what this must have been like for you.”
She swallowed hard. “They’re so amazing,” she whispered. “Did you see Elise was bigger than Aksel in this form?”
Eiric smiled. “Yeah, he’ll have to work to keep up with her.”
Lottie wrapped her arms around her bent knees. “It’s just…” She gazed out toward the sea, trying to imagine that her small children would soon be braving the huge expanse of water on their own. “How do I keep them safe?”
Eiric made a low sound in his throat. “I’ll help you. I’ll do everything I can to protect them, I swear.”
Lottie knew without a doubt that she could trust him completely. She was closer to him than any human man she’d ever dated. Watching him for a reaction, Lottie leaned in, one slow inch at a time.
Fire kindled in his eyes, and he moved fast, claiming her mouth in a bruising kiss. His fingers tangled in her hair as he lifted her face and held her immobile to devour her. She allowed him to swipe his tongue against her, heat scorching her insides. He tumbled her back on the beach towel, and she stared up at this incredible, beautiful man who had come to mean so much to her.
With heated, deliberate kisses, he drove her wild, his every caress warming her skin, and she clutched him as hard as she could, half afraid he would suddenly disappear. She was painfully aware of the kids sleeping not far from them, and didn’t reach for the hard ridge of his erection, though she arched her hips up at him in a futile attempt to find some release.
His dark chuckle had her shivering. “You’ll have to wait for that,” he murmured in her ear, then kissed her neck below it.
Lottie stifled a moan and leaned her head to the side in clear invitation. But Eiric caught her chin with his fingers and kissed her again, deeply, driving away her worries and her sanity.
When at last he pulled away and lay on his back next to her, they were both breathing fast. Lottie tipped her head back to face the blue sky where an occasional gull flitted past. Eiric reached for her hand and entwined their fingers.
“What happens now?” she asked after a moment.
He turned his head to look at her. “Whatever you want.”
She smiled. “That’s nice of you to say. But we need to make sure they’re safe first. You said there were people who wanted to hurt them?”
Eiric’s sigh was lost in the whoosh of the waves. “Witches are the reason sea dragons have completely hidden themselves away from the world. Several clans remain, but their locations are fiercely guarded. Only one here in Norway,” he explained. “But there are more in Iceland, on Greenland, even in Alaska.”
Lottie nodded but didn’t interrupt. She wished she could write this down, though she suspected that would be frowned upon.
He continued, “There are chronicles going back centuries, reporting battles between witches and dragons. Not just sea dragons, either. Our land-dwelling cousins were slaughtered as well. It was probably because the witches’ magic didn’t work on us, so they used their numbers against us and tried their best to exterminate us.”
His voice turned harsh at that, and Lottie squeezed his fingers.
“That was before witches went into hiding and humans started to rule the world. Witch covens retreated into shadows, so nobody knows how many still exist.” He ran his other hand over his face as though the story weighed on him. He glanced at her from the corner of his eye. “Then my great-grandfather, King Halvor, decided he would root out the ‘witch scum of Europe,’ as he put it. It couldn’t have been a coincidence that this happened during World War II.”
He stared straight at the sky, so Lottie only saw his profile. His mouth pulled into a grimace, and a muscle jumped in his cheek. Lottie didn’t want to judge his grandfather, but she suspected she knew what Eiric was implying. The middle of the twentieth century had been a time of great violence, and it seemed that the supernatural beings had fought just as viciously as humans.
“What happened? Did he succeed?” she asked gently.
Eiric let out a low snort. “He rounded up half of our clan, called the Swedish and German sea dragons for help, and somehow convinced a Portuguese clan of land dragons to cooperate. Together, they flew to Britain, where the largest strongholds of witches were said to be.”
Lottie listened to him, her eyes wide. “And?”
“And they never returned.”
Eiric’s words landed like stones, heavy and cold.
“What, none of them?” Lottie gaped at him in horror.
He shook his head. “Not one. The witches then retaliated and completely wiped out the Swedish and German clans. Our clan barely escaped because our location wasn’t known by outsiders. It’s hard to find as it is. But that was the beginning of the end. Our kind is dying out, and even with careful management of our family lines, we have to mate with dragons from other clans to keep from inbreeding.”
“Wow.”Inbreeding. Holy shit. This was not what she’d expected when she wished to learn his family history. “And your parents?”
Eiric let out a harsh laugh. “Oh, my parents. Where do I start?” He glanced at the babies as though to make sure they were still asleep, and said, “My father caught a witch after he became king.”
