Page 17 of Dragon King’s Bullied Mate

“I provided medical attention,” Lyra shot back instantly, and for the first time Mikael heard genuine anger beneath her calm. “And unless you’ve somehow learned to control mountain blizzards now, traveling through that storm would have killed him. Leaving him unattended might have done the same.”

“You still should have called.”

“I had no way to do that.”

Silence followed again. “You don’t have a phone?” Dag asked finally.

“No.”

A lie. Mikael knew it was false because he remembered hearing it ring earlier, remembered the tension in Lyra’s voice afterward and Beckett’s fear. He prayed it remained silent now.

“Even if I could have called, what would I have said?” she demanded. “That I found an unconscious stranger half-frozen in the snow while roads were impassable? Your king is alive because I kept him alive.”

“Search the house,” Dag ordered.

“Absolutely not. You have no need.”

No.

Mikael’s body jerked violently against the mattress as pain exploded through his ribs hard enough to drive a ragged sound from his throat.

“Mikael?”

Fear entered Lyra’s voice instantly.

“He’s conscious?”

“Not fully,” Lyra answered Dag tightly as footsteps moved closer to the bed.

“Your Majesty?” Dag called sharply.

Mikael fought desperately toward the voice, forcing everything he had left into the effort to move, to speak, to command them to stop, but nothing obeyed.

“He needs rest,” she said coldly. “And you are not searching my home. I have done nothing wrong.”

A dangerous silence followed.

“You presume much for a woman harboring her king.”

“I presume,” Lyra replied while fury simmered beneath every word now, “that I don’t need armed men tearing through my home after I spent days keeping your king alive. Days that you were not here searching for him, I might add.”

Dag ignored her innuendo. “You interfered with royal authority.”

“And you’re interfering with my home.”

“You should be careful,” Dag warned quietly.

“No,” Lyra snapped suddenly, emotion finally breaking through the calm she had maintained so carefully until now. “You be careful. I dragged him out of a snowbank and I kept him breathing while storms buried the mountains outside. Now you arrive here acting as though I’ve committed some crime because I chose not to abandon a dying man.”

Dag exhaled slowly through his nose, a sound Mikael knew well as the narrow line between restraint and temper. “Get him ready to travel.”

Cold panic surged violently through Mikael at the words, and every instinct inside him rebelled immediately against the command while his dragon lashed beneath the haze with sudden fury.

Mine.

Not the cottage. Her.

Mikael forced everything he had left into one final desperate attempt to rise to tell Dag no, but his body betrayed him completely. Then warmth touched his hand.