At the door, she turned back to Eiric and found him standing close enough to touch. She hadn’t heard him come up behind her, and it was disconcerting that such a large man could move so silently.
“Um. Yeah. Where can I reach you?” she asked and lifted her phone.
He stared down at the device. “I don’t have a phone.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Okay. Do you have an email address? Somewhere I can contact you for when I get that meeting with the social services?”
Eiric mulled her questions over. “I’ll find you,” he said at last.
Well, that wasn’t cryptic at all.
Lottie opened her mouth to protest, but he added, “I’ll be staying here for a week or two. To get the house in order.”
That would have to do. Hoping Mikkel’s brother wouldn’t disappear in the dead of the night, Lottie left, hopping off the front stoop and hurrying toward the garden gate. With one foot on the road, she glanced back at Eiric.
He remained in the doorway. She couldn’t see his expression because the light was behind him, but she was sure he was staring at her. She raised her hand in farewell, and instead of waving back, he retreated farther inside and closed the door.
Lottie sighed. If the entire family was this reticent, she was in for an uphill battle. But she wouldn’t give up, not until she was sure her babies had enough family to dote on them and love them as they deserved.
Straightening her shoulders, she marched down the road. If Eiric Siemensen thought he could get away with vague statements and non-answers, he had another thing coming. She hadn’t got to where she was by giving up. If she were a quitter, she would have escaped from Norway the first time she’d tried ordering coffee in Norwegian.
Everyone had laughed at her then, even if they’d been good-natured. But she’d persisted and learned, and now she’d created a life for herself that she was proud of. Her kids would have the best future possible, and if she needed to charm the Siemensen family to achieve that, so be it.
Two
Eiric
His irresponsible,dead brother had fathered not one, but two children.
Eiric sat at the dusty kitchen table, an unopened bottle of whiskey in front of him, and stared out the bay windows toward the white-capped sea. He couldn’t see the waves but he heard them, felt them calling to him to shed this human skin and embrace his true form.
Of course, other sea dragon shifters might claim thatbothforms were true, that the gods of old wouldn’t have granted them two skins if they thought one was better than the other. But Eiric loved to swim, feeling the water currents sluice against his rock-hard scales, and the more time he could spend as a dragon, the happier he was.
Which was why he was currently the opposite of happy. As if the chore of settling his dead brother’s affairs wasn’t enough, he was now saddled with another problem: Charlotte Shaw and her offspring.
Even if the babies weren’t actually Mikkel’s, and she was somehow confused about the…timing of events, she was still convinced of what she’d told him. He couldn’t be sure until he saw the kids. He might be able to smell the dragon blood inside them.
If the twins were really sea dragons, this was a massive complication. The fact that nobody had run tests on them that would uncover their true heritage was a miracle. Eiric didn’t know a lot about human medical practices, but he suspected that sooner or later, some hapless doctor would draw their blood and make some very dangerous discoveries.
He groaned and cracked the top on the bottle, then took a deep swig. The cool liquid hit his tongue, then burned a fiery path down his throat, stoking the fire smoldering in his belly. Dragons couldn’t really get drunk from whiskey, so drinking was a reflex in such a situation more than anything else. Eiric didn’t want to think about that too much—what did it say about a guy that he was drinking alone in the dark? He hadn’t slept in days, and the whiskey fueled him for the moment, until he could get his ass over to the Sverdfisk, his restaurant, named after his favorite snack: the swordfish.
He needed food—and information. Two months had passed since Mikkel’s death, but he was no closer to finding out what had happened to his brother.
The police had ruled his death an accident, probably alcohol-induced. The car had skidded on an icy patch in the road and flipped over the barrier, falling down the cliff. The vehicle had then burst into flames, which meant that if the force of dropping forty feet hadn’t killed his brother, he’d been roasted alive.
First of all, Eiric hoped that Mikkelhadbeen dead on impact. Being burned alive was a terrifying way to go.
But a second thought had niggled at him ever since he’d read the accident report two weeks ago: dragons, even those that dwelled in the sea, were very hard to kill. In their human forms, they weren’t exactly impervious to fire or injury—human skin was a poor defense compared to dragon scales—but it would take more than a little tumble down the hill to finish off an adult sea dragon shifter.
No, there was more to Mikkel’s death than the police report said.
He didn’t exactly blame the authorities, since they had no idea sea dragons even existed, let alone what their abilities were. But that meant he had to investigate Mikkel’s death by himself if he wanted the truth.
With a sigh, Eiric capped the bottle and set it on the side table. He’d thrown away the rotten food from the fridge and taken out the garbage, but the smell of decay remained heavy in the room. It was comforting, though, in the sense that he was now more certain that his brother’s death hadn’t been aself-inflictedaccident.
With how Mikkel had been spiraling out of control in the past couple of years, it was a serious consideration. Magnus, their elder brother, had brought up the possibility when he’d handed Eiric the accident report the police had sent him.
“Can you check if he’d left…a letter?” Magnus had asked. “The police might have missed it. See if you can root through his usual hiding spaces.”
