Read Online Dragon Her Back (Entangled Covet) by Susannah Scott - Free Book Online Page A

didn’t. I just want you to be happy.”
    Mei laughed. “Like you and Leo. Like Lucy and Alec. All happy, happy, happy? Not everyone gets to be happy.” Frost webs circled the room, and still she did not break her hard glare.
    “Tee, I think you should leave now.” Jane increased the shaking of the cushions so they rose and whirled in a circle around Mei. The cushions created a visual barrier between her and them. Mei pulled her dragon forcefully back under her skin, caging her anger and her fury and hurt.
    “I’m so sorry, Mei.” Tee’s voice broke, and she backed away toward the door and left.
    When the door slammed, the whirling cushions came into sharp focus, and Mei heaved a breath in. “Stop that!”
    Immediately, the cushions fell to the floor.
    “What in the hell?” Jane asked.
    “Don’t start.”
    “Too bad, ice dragon.”
    Mei flinched at the erroneous label that had never bothered her before. She was a water dragon. A creature so hated, it had been ordered to extinction for its treachery. “Leave it alone. I didn’t hurt her.”
    “What happened to make you go postal on our best friend?” Jane was beyond annoyed. She stood tall. Her wide-legged, bent-knee stance said she was ready to fight it out if necessary. “Don’t tell me it’s because she had some silly conversation with Darius.”
    She didn’t want to fight with Jane. She didn’t want to fight with Tee. Exhaustion weighed her down, and she sat hard on the couch and curled her legs to her chest.
    “I’m in trouble.”
    Jane sat by her. She reached out a hand to touch her, but Mei flinched away. “What can I do?”
    “I don’t know.” Mei put a nearby pillow between them, feeling better for the separation.
    Jane frowned.
    Sitting wasn’t helping. Mei set aside the pillow and stood. She continued straightening the room, avoiding the pools of water on the table. She moved to the bookshelf against the wall. The top row of the double bookshelf came to the top of her head, and the jagged edges of the books grated at her raw nerves. It was a mess, too.
    She pulled the books from the top shelves, glanced at the spines, and stacked them in alphabetical piles on the floor. Most of the books on the shelf were hers. She’d collected them after she’d come to Vegas, determined to master the English language and fit in with the other dragons.
    All That Rises Must Converge , Crime and Punishment , To Kill a Mockingbird , and Psychology 101 grew like stalagmites from the floor at her feet. The familiar rough bindings and smell of her books distanced her dragon from all that was water.
    “There’s always something that can be done,” Jane insisted from the couch.
    “Not this time.” Mei set a James Rollins book to the right of Plato. “I’m going to have to leave.”
    “And leave me with this mess?” Jane’s voice was teasing.
    Mei moved the A’s to the top left, but felt dissonance in her mind. She couldn’t restack them until the whole shelf was empty. She wouldn’t know where to space the B’s, they would all have to come out of the shelves.
    She pulled the next shelf of books out and piled them on the floor.
    “Would you stop stacking books and talk to me?” Jane said.
    “It helps me think.” More like not think , but the rote chore was a relief to her overtaxed mind. The Book of Dragons came off the shelf, and she paused. When she’d joined the king’s sanctuary, she’d spent hours memorizing the history so it wasn’t obvious she’d never even heard of the ancient text. The book was the law, and it contained every house, every dragon fold ever recorded.
    Every dragon house, that was, but hers.
    The end of chapter two detailed the uprising of the water dragons, their banishment from the folds, and finally, their execution. She’d been amazed to find that after the second chapter, there was no further mention of them. Slippery is a water dragon , the final edict had been the last word on her kind for a hundred