Free Jorden: The McCade Dragon –Erotic Paranormal Romance by Kathi S. Barton

and very observant, but I think that in your mind lurks something that I don’t want to know about.” He nodded but said nothing. “I don’t think you showed your gun to scare me, more…I think you just didn’t think about it being there until I saw it. You’re not a terrible person, but I think you feel you’ve done some pretty terrible things. I have no idea why I think that, but I do.”
    “I’m sorry about the gun. And you’re right, I don’t think of it unless I need to use it. It’s there because I have needed it. Ever since I’ve been back from places better left unnamed.” She nodded and looked at the tree line when he did. “The man that’s after you, he doesn’t care for the dragon, even though he wants others to think he does. He wants the riches that come with owning the dragon. Do you know the legend, Jasmine?”
    “Some of it. I’m not sure how much of what I’ve been told is true, but I’ve heard it. You’re one too.” He nodded. “I don’t know a lot of history about this whole thing, as I said. I know what Emma told me, and the dragon. But I don’t think he knows that much either. He seems to be as lost as anyone about what he can do, and what is coming with each piece. And what happens once they’re all here.”
    Vance stood up and handed her a sheet of paper. It was a picture of all the pieces, she’d bet. “Do you see them as they are in the photo, or do you see them at their best?” She asked him what he meant. “What do you see when you look at the brooch there in the middle? Just tell me what you see and I’ll tell you what I know.”
    “All right.” Jasmine picked up the picture off her lap. “I see a dragon on an oval piece of onyx, I think. His body is blue, small stones that I think are sapphires seem to merge together into a larger piece that makes him glitter and glow. He has emeralds for eyes and his wings.... His wings look like they’re made of some kind of opal; blue opal, I think. The pendant is made of gold, brilliantly polished so that it’s almost painful to look at.”
    “The picture, to most people—humans—is in black and white. Nor do they see them as you and the rest of us do. They see, as they’re meant to, just a bunch of cheap looking jewelry that they don’t understand the fuss over. Those that cannot see the pieces for what they are have no magic in them. And being a dragon, or any shifter, is magic.” She said that she had never seen a shifter or magic until coming here. “Not true. You know several shifters where you lived. I’ve talked to a few of them. Mr. Brown, the butcher, he’s a cat. The woman who would ring you out at the grocery store was a wolf. Those animals there, the ones that you can see along the tree line, they’re shifters as well. And once you are comfortable with them, they’ll come and introduce themselves to you.” Jasmine looked at the three wolves that were staring at her like they knew she was thinking about them.
    “What does this have to do with the picture?” Vance laid it on his lap and closed his eyes. Jasmine wondered if he was going to answer her, and decided that while she really wanted to know, she wasn’t good at playing games.
    “When they come for you, you’ll have to do just what we tell you to do or you’ll be killed.” The calmness in his voice, the way he said it as if he were talking about the coming rain, chilled her to her very core. “There are two men, even as we sit here, that are finding clues as to where you are and what you’re doing. At first I thought them working together, gathering what they could to combine their efforts to come for you. But they’re not. One is coming soon, the other is biding his time. Waiting for the other man to make a mistake. Or to get a piece of the jewelry that he already thinks of as his.”
    “They mean to kill whoever has a piece of it, like Emma and myself do, or take it before someone else can put a claim on it. And the picture? What