Midlife Dragon Daddy (Midlife Shifters Book 10) Read online

  “I know that,” Ryker said. “That’s why we need Haley. That’s why this plan is going to work.”

  “And you really think that using Haley for it is the best idea?” Barty asked. “I know you think you can trust her, Ryker, but don’t forget, she’s been dishonest with you before. She tricked you into thinking she was your true mate.”

  “No, she didn’t,” Ryker said. “I told you already, that’s not how it was. I’m the one who lied about what happened between the two of us. I was upset that she was infertile. I wanted another chance to conceive a child, and I thought I needed to be with another woman in order to make that happen. But we were in love. That part was real. She was my mate. I knew for sure when I saw her again that I wasn’t wrong about that.”

  “How could you know that for sure?” Barty asked. “Couldn’t you have been mistaken?”

  Ryker shook his head. “I don’t know how to explain it, exactly,” he said. Barty wasn’t mated, so he wouldn’t be able to understand exactly how it felt. But Ryker gave it a try. “It’s like my body recognizes her,” he said. “It’s like...when I see her, when I catch a whiff of her scent, something inside me wakes up. Every atom in my being is on the alert. It’s like I’m being magnetically pulled in her direction, and I can’t resist her.”

  “Well, that sounds dangerous,” Barty said. “To be honest, it sounds like she has a little too much control over you.”

  “She’s not trying to control me.” Ryker was almost certain of that.

  “She could be,” Barty said. “I’m sure she’s angry about being exiled. She might want to take revenge against you. Against the clan. Did you think of that? She doesn’t like us. She doesn’t want to do us any favors.”

  “It’s not a favor,” Ryker said. “She’s being paid for doing this.”

  “But you paid her in advance,” Barty said. “She could screw you over now and still keep the money.”

  “Haley wouldn’t do that,” Ryker said. “She’s not that kind of person.”

  “You don’t know what kind of person she is,” Barty pointed out. “Even if that’s not who she was ten years ago when you were married to her, you have to acknowledge that she’s been out on her own for a long time. It’s almost definitely changed her. She’s not going to be the woman you remember, the woman you were married to and were able to keep under your control. She’s been living with other shifter rejects. I bet she’s picked up a few things. And you know those people are some of the worst around. You’re not going to be able to manage Haley as easily as you might be hoping.”

  Ryker was quiet.

  He didn’t want to concede that Barty might be right. But hadn’t he had his share of trouble keeping Haley under control already?

  She’s promised to go along with the plan. She’s promised to make it easy for the both of us, and to do whatever I say to get the job done.

  He just hoped he was making the right choice, and that he would be able to count on her.

  Chapter Seventeen

  RYKER

  Ryker had never really learned how to cook. It was probably the thing he liked least about himself—apart from the fact that he hadn’t been able to rise to the alpha role, of course, but that wasn’t his fault. The fault there lay with Shane.

  He thought about what had happened as he heated up a can of soup for his dinner. After Haley had left, he’d intended to conceive a child with another woman in order to position himself to take over. He hadn’t much cared who the woman was. It didn’t matter. Whoever she was, she wouldn’t be his mate—he’d known, even then, that Haley was his real mate, and that any woman he was with after her would never measure up in terms of the strength of their connection.

  But there were certainly plenty of women who were willing. Every woman seemed to want a child with the heir to the alpha position in the pack. Everyone wanted their son to have the chance to become alpha one day.

  There’d been no shortage of takers. And Ryker had tried. But none of the women he’d involved himself with in the years following Haley’s departure had become pregnant.

  He hadn’t intended to give up, though. He’d known that a pregnancy might take a while to happen, especially since he was no longer with his true mate. Usually, it was easier for true mates to conceive together. The fact that that hadn’t been true for him and Haley had always made Ryker feel cheated—though it had also made it easier for him to get rid of her when the time had come. He knew that.

  Eventually, when Ryker hadn’t produced an heir, Shane had stepped forward.

  What was awful about it was that he had done so without speaking to Ryker. He hadn’t included Ryker in the conversation at all. He’d gone directly to Ryker’s father and insisted that it was time for him to take over, that they couldn’t spend any more time waiting for Ryker to sort out his issues. And he must have been persuasive, because the next day, his father had called a meeting of the entire clan and had turned leadership over to Shane.

  To this day, Ryker ached to know what Shane had said to his father behind closed doors. After all, he didn’t have a child. How had he possibly convinced Ryker’s father that he would be the better alpha?

  Ryker would never get the chance to ask. Two days later, his father had died of unknown causes. The clan medic had examined him but hadn’t been able to explain why he’d fallen asleep that night and not woken up the next morning.

  “He was old,” was all the medic could say. “Maybe he sensed his time was coming, and that’s why he was so ready to pass along the alpha role.”

  Maybe. But that still didn’t explain why he’d wanted to give it to Shane instead of to his own son.

  Shane said something to convince him. I just know he did.

  The soup began to simmer on the stove. Ryker turned off the heat and transferred it from the pot into a bowl. He carried it over to the table and sat down, waiting for it to cool a little bit so that he could eat.

  Soup again.

  It was his typical Friday night fare. He’d gotten into a bit of a routine with food over the past several years. Not knowing how to cook would do that to you. Every week, he cycled his way through TV dinners, pasta, instant noodles, cold cut sandwiches, and hard-boiled eggs.

  It hadn’t been like this when Haley was here.

  Haley had known how to cook, and every night she’d made the most amazing meal for the two of them to share. There had been roast turkeys, multi-layered lasagnas, grilled steaks and ribs, pots of chili—every evening, he’d looked forward to the moment he would walk in the door of the house and smell what she had cooking.

  He wondered whether it would be like that again now that she was coming back. Surely it wasn’t too much to hope for that she might cook again. After all, she was going to have to eat.

  Maybe that’s why I’m so determined to use Haley for the plan even though it complicates things. Maybe I’m really just missing her cooking.

  He wished he could believe it was that simple.

  The truth was that he knew he was taking a risk by working with her. Hell, the two of them had already slipped back into their old ways! He hadn’t planned on having sex with her at all. It was just that she was so familiar, so well-known to him, and she’d been right there, and she wouldn’t shut her fucking mouth—

  And she wanted me too. That couldn’t have been any more obvious.

  Still, he knew that if anything like that were to happen again, it would only serve to complicate matters for them. They were going to have to find a way to stay professional with each other through all of this. They couldn’t be giving into their lust every time the opportunity arose.

  I need to make sure my mind is on Shane and how I’m going to displace him. That’s what this is all about. It’s not about some kind of reunion with my ex.

  For a moment, he even considered that it might make sense to call her up and tell her the plan was off. Maybe he would do better to go and find another shifter.

  But it would be so hard to find someone,
he reasoned. And harder still to convince her to help with this. I’ve already got Haley on board. And besides, he had already paid her. He very much doubted she would agree to give the money back.

  Just then, Ryker’s thoughts were interrupted by a knock at the door.

  Chapter Eighteen

  RYKER

  He got to his feet, glancing at the clock. It was almost nine. Who would be here at this hour? Had Barty come back? Was he going to offer some further criticism of the plan? Ryker gritted his teeth. He really wasn’t in the mood to defend himself any further to his friend today. He had expected that Barty would be on his side, not awash in doubt, as he seemed to be.

  He strode over to the door and wrenched it open.

  It wasn’t Barty.

  Tall, stocky, and with fiery red hair, Shane stood on the other side. He was leaning into the doorframe slightly so that when Ryker pulled the door open, his cousin was closer than he would have expected someone to be. Ryker took a quick step back and was immediately frustrated with himself for giving up ground.

  “Ryker,” Shane said.

  “Shane,” Ryker returned.

  Shane stepped over the threshold and into Ryker’s house without so much as asking whether he could come in. Ryker fell back a little further, allowing it. He had learned over the years that it wasn’t worth getting into it with Shane about every little thing. You had to pick your battles.

  Shane led the way into the kitchen, and Ryker followed him. Shane kicked a chair out from under the table and dropped into it without so much as an apology for interrupting Ryker’s dinner.

  “How about a beer?” he asked.

  Ryker would have liked nothing better than to turn him down, but he knew he’d get rid of Shane more quickly by cooperating with whatever this was than by protesting. He went to the refrigerator, pulled out a can of beer, and tossed it to the alpha. Shane cracked it open and took a long swig.

  “So,” he said at length.

  Ryker raised his eyebrows.

  “You’ve been out of town,” Shane said.

  “Yeah,” Ryker agreed. Though he hadn’t told anyone, apart from Barty, where he was going or what he was doing, the fact that he’d been away was certainly no secret. In a clan this small, you couldn’t very well disappear for a week’s time without your absence being noticed and remarked on.

  “Where were you?” Shane asked.

  “I went wild,” Ryker said. It wasn’t unheard of for members of the clan to spend time as their dragon selves for weeks or even months at a time.

  “You didn’t tell anyone you were going,” Shane said. “You didn’t tell me.”

  “I didn’t plan it,” Ryker said. “The mood just struck me, and I decided to go.”

  “Well, you can’t do that,” Shane said. “Not without reporting your plan to the alpha first.”

  “What are you talking about?” Ryker asked. “There’s no such rule.” People went wild on a whim all the time. Shane himself had done it, leaving his cluster of betas in charge. The betas, too, often went off on their own. It had never been stipulated that anyone had to ask Shane’s permission to leave the clan for a short stretch of time.

  “New rule,” Shane said.

  “Come on,” Ryker said. “You can’t make a rule like that. A rule that everyone has to tell you where they’re going all the time?”

  “I can do whatever I want,” Shane said. “I’m the alpha. It’s my job to enact rules for the well-being of this clan. And your disappearance was exactly what the clan didn’t need. Everyone has enough to do without you blowing off your responsibilities.”

  “If you’re talking about guard duty—”

  “Of course I’m talking about guard duty. The women of this clan need to be protected from the dangers of the world.”

  That was such an insane thing for Shane to be saying that Ryker was hard pressed not to laugh. “You’re not worried about protecting the women from outside dangers,” he said. “You’re worried they might run away if they get the chance. That’s what guard duty is really all about, and everybody knows it. You’re fooling nobody with this talk of protecting them.”

  “Watch your mouth,” Shane growled.

  “The women of this clan hate it here,” Ryker said. “Most of them would leave if they could, and you know it.”

  “Because you were gone, the betas had to do extra work to cover for you,” Shane said, turning the conversation away from Ryker’s accusations.

  “They didn’t have to,” Ryker said. “I arranged for my shifts on guard duty to be covered while I was away. There were no gaps.”

  “It isn’t up to you to do that,” Shane said. “I know what you did. You asked your little friend Barty to take your shifts for you while you were away.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “In addition to his own.”

  “He didn’t mind,” Ryker said. “He was happy to do it.”

  “I set up the schedules the way I do for a reason, Ryker,” Shane said. “I distribute strength evenly throughout each shift. You can’t just replace a strong member of the clan with a weak member.”

  “Barty isn’t weak,” Ryker said, offended on his friend’s behalf.

  “I’d be surprised if that man weighs a hundred pounds soaking wet.”

  “Don’t be an ass, Shane,” Ryker said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “He’s small, but he isn’t that small. And he’s a really good fighter. Not everybody has the same attributes, you know. We can’t all be super brawny.” Ryker and Shane had both been genetically gifted with height and thick muscles, but Ryker had never allowed that fact to lull him into thinking that people with Barty’s build were less of a force than he was. They just had to internalize different fighting styles, that was all.

  “Everyone is overworked,” Shane said. “And it’s all your fault. If you’d informed me that you were leaving, I could have planned around it. As it is, you left your clan high and dry.”

  He drained his beer and got to his feet.

  “Don’t do it again,” he said. “Or you’ll go the same way as that ex-wife of yours.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  RYKER

  Something about his encounter with Shane made Ryker nervous to leave his house. What if Shane came looking for him again and he wasn’t there?

  I’m being stupid. I’m allowed to leave my house, for fuck’s sake. Shane’s new rule is about leaving clan territory, not leaving your own home.

  Still, the rule was so unreasonable that it wasn’t at all hard to imagine Shane making another unreasonable rule. It seemed clear to Ryker that the only thing he really wanted was to exert control. Ryker felt that Shane had always been intimidated by him, even though he had been boastful about rising to power where Ryker had failed ever since he’d taken the alpha role. There was a part of his cousin that still worried about Ryker as a threat to his dominance.

  So when Ryker eventually did leave the house, it was through the back door instead of the front. He hated that he was making such a concession to his anxiety—to Shane’s bullying—but on the off chance his cousin was having his house watched from the street, he didn’t want to get hit with a new rule that he wasn’t allowed to leave his property without getting permission.

  His sister Farrah lived a block away. They’d been neighbors once, but when Shane had taken over as alpha, he had changed the rules of the clan and declared that all the women needed to live together on the same group of streets. He claimed this would make them easier to guard. Ryker had known then that there was something wrong with Shane’s policies—no one had ever attacked the clan, and it was hard to imagine that anyone ever would. After all, they were a giant clan of dragons. It would take another, larger dragon clan to overpower them, and there just wasn’t any such clan anywhere nearby.

  Still, he’d helped Farrah move. She hadn’t seemed to mind. She was getting a bigger house in the process. Ryker had pointed out at the time that the move might be benefitting h
er but that there were a lot of women who were being forced to move out of the homes they shared with their mates.

  “It’s for their own safety,” Farrah had said. “I don’t see how anyone can complain.”

  She was younger than he was by nearly ten years—she’d been in her early twenties and living on her own for the first time. In recent years, though, Ryker had seen her beginning to take notice of the things that weren’t quite right around the clan.

  Farrah’s house was definitely being watched. There was no chance of his not being seen here. He walked up the front steps onto her porch, crossing his fingers that whoever had guard duty tonight wouldn’t feel the need to report to Shane on something so mundane as a brother visiting his sister.

  He knocked on the door. Farrah wrenched it open quickly, almost as if she had been waiting for him. “You’re back!”

  She grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him inside, then threw her arms around him. Ryker returned her embrace. It was impossible not to worry about Farrah. This wasn’t the kind of place a guy liked to think about his little sister living in.

  Not for the first time, he wondered what his father could possibly have been thinking when he’d left Shane in charge of the clan. How could he have thought that would be right for Farrah? His own daughter?

  Farrah led the way into the kitchen and got them a couple of beers. “Did you have fun out in the wild?” she asked.

  He kind of wished he could tell Farrah the truth about where he had been and what he was doing, but it was too dangerous. He had to limit the number of people who knew the plan. “It was all right,” he said. “But I wanted to check in with you now that I’m back. Was everything all right while I was gone?”

  “Oh, you know.” She shrugged. “It was the same as it ever is.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning Shane’s a dick,” she said. “You know that already.”

  “Did he do anything?”