by Mina Carter
He spread his cards on the table, a gleam in his eyes. She knew before her gaze dropped to them that he had her. He’d been bluffing. Double bluffing.
“Shit.”
She threw her cards down on the table and leaned back in her chair, studying him levelly.
“Okay... what’s the damage?” she asked, bracing herself for the worst.
Black dragons loved to bet, but they never played for money. Ever. The loser usually ended up doing the winner’s chores for a couple of weeks or the shit jobs no one wanted to do. She’d probably end up scrubbing the toilets for a week or something.
“Chores? How many weeks?”
He shook his head. Lounging back in the chair, he watched her, tapping the edge of one card on the table.
“Four days,” he said. “That’s all. But not chores.”
She frowned, wariness slithering up her spine. “Four days of what then?”
If he asked her to pose naked or something, she didn’t give a shit about the rules governing violence in the rec room. She was so roasting his ass right here and now.
“Nothing much. I need a plus one for a business getaway.”
“A business getaway?” she laughed. “I know absolutely nothing about business.”
He shook his head. “You don’t need to. I just need a lady on my arm for the social part... the brunches and dinners.”
The penny dropped.
“You need some arm candy, you mean?” She laughed and waved dismissively. “Ask one of your bimbo girlfriends. With the hair and the tits out here...”
Nik pursed his lips. Her gaze was instantly riveted to them and heat rolled through her lazily as she remembered how they’d felt on hers.
“I don’t want a bimbo. I want you.”
He held her gaze, heat lazily coiling in their dark depths, and she couldn’t look away. She was held by the desire there in his eyes, a desire he didn’t try to hide.
The next time I kiss you, you’ll beg me...
“I’m not your girlfriend. And I’m not pretending to be,” she said bluntly, folding her arms over her chest. Instantly, she realized it was a defensive gesture and dropped her arms, but it was too late. He’d seen it.
“You don’t have to. Obviously,” he smiled, “it would make my life a shit-ton easier. But seriously, I need to focus on these meetings and I need someone to watch my back. You’re the best. I need you.”
She couldn’t help the burst of warmth filtering out from the center of her chest. The idea that he needed her, trusted her to have his back... yeah, she might even be able to forgive him the “beg” comment for that.
Chapter 3
Her friends were going to be the death of her.
“This place is way too expensive,” Adra hissed as she was practically hauled bodily through the door of Rose Riveria, one of the most exclusive boutiques in the city. She tried to fight, digging in her heels, but it did no good.
For saying neither of her friends were black dragons, when they worked together, she was done for. They grinned as they got her in through the doors and all three women paused as they looked around the understated luxury.
“Oh my scales,” Claire whispered in awe, practically bouncing as she reached the first rack of dresses. A quick glance over them had Adra sucking in her breath as well.
They were stunning. Absolutely stunning. The sort of stunning that usually adorned women too beautiful to be anything other than sirens plastered all over the pages of glossy magazines. In fact, an image from one of those magazines was suspended in high-definition poster form on one of the columns in the shop.
Instantly, Adra felt dull and dowdy. She did an about turn and tried to walk out, only to find both arms hooked—Jenn on one side, Claire on the other. They hauled her right back in.
“This stuff is too fancy,” she hissed at them. But they were relentless, a matching gleam in their eyes.
“Yeah, well. You said fancy date,” Jenn said. “Fancy date means fancy clothes. Can’t make a pizza without cracking a few eggs.”
“Cake,” Claire corrected.
Jenn looked up from where she was holding two dresses up against Adra, a frown on her face. “What?”
Adra tried to look for the price tags on the dresses. There were none. Shit. That always meant things were like, well, expensive.
“Cake,” Claire repeated, looking through a display with lacy underwear on it.
“You want cake already? Scales, woman, we haven’t even done the shopping bit yet. Cake is later!”
Adra practically felt the affectionate eye roll, despite the fact Claire’s back was to them. A petite moss green dragon, she was definitely the calming element in their little group.
“No,” she said as she turned. “It’s cake you break eggs for. How’s this?”
She held up a set of underwear that made Adra’s eyes bug out of her head. The thing was like something out a porn film.
“It’s a work thing,” she exclaimed. “No sexy underwear required!”
Both women looked at her, eyebrows raised.
“So what are you gonna wear under your sexy cocktail dress? Hmmm?” Claire asked. “Because a sports bra and your granny knickers just ain’t gonna cut it.”
Adra’s eyes crossed for a moment. They had a point, but that didn’t mean she wanted to hear it. She was an active woman.
As a serving council member, she spent most of her time either training or patrolling. In fact, the last time she’d gotten all dressed up fancy was for the queen’s recent wedding. And that had been the first time in years she’d worn a dress. So pretty much all the underwear she had was sport or active wear.
She eyed the confection of lace and satin Claire had in her hands. “Okay, but does it have to be so sexy? I’m not trying to get into his pants!”
Neither of them looked away. Suddenly she knew what it would be like to be stared at by a snake. She’d thought Cadeyra, the queen, had a good stare on her, but it was nothing compared to her two friends.
“And why not?”
“Doesn’t he find you sexy? I’ma get my bat.”
She shook her head at the chorus. “This is Nik. I am not getting into his pants.”
The two exchanged meaningful glances.
“What? What’s that supposed to mean?” Adra demanded, breaking into a laugh at their antics.
No one had believed it when the three of them had become friends. After all, who would have thought a feared black dragon, the biggest and baddest of their kind bar the queen, would make friends with an earthen brown and a moss green? When shifted they were like little, not so little, and freaking enormous. When they flew, Jenn could just about keep up, but Claire had long since given up and instead hitched a ride between Adra’s wing joints. Sometimes they both did, especially when they flew down to the Caribbean, usually in human form and arguing over the snacks.
“Nik,” they said in unison, “who you never stop talking about.”
“I do not talk about him all the time!” she exclaimed.
“Yeah, yeah... and my name’s Fred.” Jenn spotted some shoes and squeaked. “Oh my scales, those are perfect! You are so getting those.”
She grabbed them, and the two women circled her like a pair of sharks, comparing shoes with the two dresses until a decision was reached.
“Hey, do I get a say in this?” she asked, laughing as they herded her toward the till.
“No!” they chorused again, Claire grinning at the girl behind the counter as she rang their purchases up.
“Special night out?” she asked, chirpily. “Sexy underwear like that, seems someone’s getting lucky.”
Adra sighed, shaking her head. Seemed the world and his grandmother was insistent on her getting into Nik’s pants. Just as she reached into her pocket for her wallet, her cell pinged.
“Oh hell, sorry about this,” she said to the girl, ferreting her cell out of her pocket and checking the number. As soon as she saw it, she groaned. It was her aunt’s. Wh
ich meant there was a problem. “Sorry, I have to take this. Hold on.”
She walked to the other side of the boutique, by the big windows, pressing to answer the call as she went.
“Aunt Alma? What’s wrong?” she asked, checking back over her shoulder to where Jenn and Claire were waiting. They were checking out the stand of evening purses by the till.
“I’m sorry to bother you, Adra, but I don’t know what to do,” her aunt said, her voice strained. She’d been crying, the wavering note one Adra was unfortunately well acquainted with.
“What did Jimmy do now?” Adra sighed.
Her cousin Jimmy was very much the black sheep of the family. A sky-blue, he’d spent his life trying to prove he was bigger and badder than Adra. Gangs, drugs, theft... you name it, he’d not just fallen into it, he’d taken a running jump.
Recently, though, he’d gotten himself mixed up with a gargoyle gang and that bothered Adra. Gargoyles tended toward the seedy underworld of the city—places where even a black would want someone watching their back—but unfortunately Jimmy had never had that kind of awareness.
“He started playing the tables.”
Adra closed her eyes. Gambling of any sort was a problem for some dragons. It was the whole gold/acquisition thing. Most knew when to call it a day but not Jimmy.
“How much is he in for?” she asked, mentally calculating how much she had in her account.
Her aunt whispered an amount that made Adra gasp. “What the fuck? Shit... okay, don’t panic,” she said quickly when her aunt started to cry. “I can cover it.”
She could. Just. It would mean she’d have to buy a cheaper a dress or something for her trip but it was doable.
“Thank you, Adra. Thank you so much. But please... he took the rent money as well. And the landlord is on his way.”
Adra closed her eyes for a moment. Okay, so no dress.
“No problem,” she said, her voice firm. “Hang tight. I’m on my way.”
Limo will pick you up at 7. Dress for evening.
The words of Nik’s text rolled through Adra’s mind on repeat. An endless loop that mocked her as she looked at her small bag and its pitiful contents.
She couldn’t do this. Nik lived in a different world. One where she didn’t understand the rules. Not at all.
Unlike him, she hadn’t been born with a silver spoon in her mouth. Hell, she’d have been lucky to get a plastic one and even then someone would have tried to steal it.
Saying that she’d been brought up in a rough neighborhood was a little unfair. There were worse neighborhoods in the city—ones where even the vampires went about in pairs for their own protection—but there were better ones. Lots of better ones.
She hissed to herself. Different worlds. She doubted Nik had ever had to deal with a gambling addict, wannabe street punk cousin or had to spend his last fifty dollars on groceries so his aunt didn’t starve.
Which meant that new clothes for this weekend had been out of the question. Normally, that wasn’t a problem. She wasn’t a vain woman and generally lived in comfy combats and skinny-fit tees. Normally.
For some reason, even though this was a fake weekend date thing, she’d wanted to look different. Nice. Feminine. Maybe even, if she was lucky, beautiful.
But new clothes weren’t important when there were mouths to feed, and what was hers was her family’s. Thanks to the color of her scales, she was the only one who had managed to escape poverty, even if it was a job so dangerous she was unlikely to reach old age. Whatever happened to her, though, her family would always be provided for.
And she had a lot of them, all trying desperately to get themselves an education and better jobs so they could pull themselves out of poverty. But times were tough, and not many people wanted to hire a dragon from the wrong side of town.
She grumbled as she zipped the bag up. It was her biggest kit bag, her training equipment turfed out and dumped in the bathroom to make way for the weekend stuff. She’d bet that Nik had never had to choose between buying new clothes and groceries.
He was always well dressed, tailored shirts and suits that probably cost more than her entire wardrobe clinging to his well-muscled frame. Even her untrained eye could pick out they were either designer or were specially made for him.
And she was in a tight, black dress borrowed from Jenn’s cousin. That was the thing about tight-knit communities. Share and share alike.
“How old did you say Nicky was?” she asked over her shoulder as she fought with the scrap of clingy fabric.
She wasn’t curvy by any stretch of the imagination. Nature and a highly active job had ensured her love of chocolate and ice cream hadn’t given her the sort of voluptuous figure she was secretly envious of on Jenn and Claire... but scales alive, this damn thing was so tight, it was practically sprayed on.
“She’s twenty-eight, hon. Why?” Jenn replied, coming to stand behind Adra. She reached up and fixed a silk red rose in her hair. “There we go. Perfect!”
Huh. Not a child then.
Adra looked at her reflection again and bit back a sigh. Short, tight and low cut...
“My boobs are practically falling out of this thing,” she complained, but her voice held a note of surprise. When you had little more than a couple of fried eggs for boobs, falling out of anything was a novelty.
“They’re not out.” Claire grinned as she joined them by the mirror. “They’re ‘out out.’ You look awesome, honey. You’ll knock his socks off.”
Adra bit back her reply. She didn’t want to knock Nik’s socks off. This was a work thing. Nothing more, nothing less. He might want more but she didn’t—
Yeah, right, the little voice in the back of her head interrupted. You’ve been like a cat on a hot tin roof since he kissed you.
Heat flooded her body at the memory. Their kiss had been full of heat and anger, tension running through his bigger frame as he’d pulled her against him, but she’d responded to it in a way she’d never responded to a man before.
When his lips had gentled and his grip had changed from controlling to possessive, she’d been lost. She’d started to kiss him back before she’d come to her senses. He was just the sort of playboy womanizer her mom had warned her about. The kind who would have his fun and then leave her alone and pregnant.
“Shit. I can’t do this,” she whispered, her gaze colliding with Claire’s and Jenn’s in the mirror. The color had drained out of her face, leaving her as pale as a ghost.
She’d have to call and cancel. Offer to do Nik’s chores and training duties for a month. He could easily get one of the blonde bimbos she often saw dangling off his arm in the media to be his pretend girlfriend. Or real girlfriend. No pretense necessary.
The doorbell rang, the discordant jangle making her almost jump out of her skin.
“You can. You are,” Claire said firmly, grabbing her by the shoulders as Jenn brought up the rear with Adra’s bag.
Between them, they practically frog-marched her to the door and opened it. She took a breath to argue, to tell the driver who’d come to collect her that his services weren’t necessary.
But it wasn’t a driver on the other side of the door. Nik stood with his back to her, his broad shoulders and the dark curly hair slicked back instantly recognizable.
Surprise filled her. She hadn’t expected him to turn up to collect her. She’d expected him to send a driver or something. But there he was, looking totally out of place on the grotty apartment building landing.
Then he turned, their gazes locked, and she lost the ability to breathe. The two women behind her—her so-called friends—shoved her through the door, dropped her bag on the floor and slammed the door behind her.
“Hello, Adra.”
Nik had never known where Adra lived when she was off duty, so the address she gave him caught him off guard. It was one of the neighborhoods within his development plans and, he’d realized as they drove through it, very much in need of better development.
But it wasn’t the buildings that bothered him. It was the empty looks on the faces as the limo passed—blank expressions and eyes without hope. And it rocked him to the core.
Reaching her apartment had been another revelation. Leaving the driver outside with the limo, he’d reached the lobby only to realize the elevator was out of order. From the rust and battered state of the sign directing him to use the stairs, with its curling edges and ancient tape, the thing had obviously been out for a while. A long while.
No wonder Adra was so fit. He hadn’t seen any balconies at all, never mind anything large enough for her to take off from. Lumping her kit bag up and down ten flights of stairs every day was a hell of a workout even for a dragon.
Doors cracked as he made his way up the stairs, suspicious eyes gleaming at him from the darkness within. Fear and panic filled the air, scents his dragon easily picked up on as it did the muttered conversations behind the paper-thin walls. Voices were filled with worry, which then turned to relief as they apparently realized he wasn’t Rodriguez’s man. Who Rodriguez was, he didn’t know, but he sure as hell planned to find out... just as he planned to find out who the hell owned this building and why they’d allowed it to deteriorate to such a state.
He reached Adra’s landing and instantly knew which one was hers. The door was freshly painted and there was a cute little number plaque adorning it. He smiled at the sight. He’d never have put her down as the sunflower and hedgehog type, but it fit her perfectly.
He rang the doorbell and stepped back. Idly, he moved to the middle of the landing to peer down the stairwell. At one point this building had been a grand one, and his dragon appreciated the finer details that could still be seen under the neglect, like the curve of stairs and handrails that had been built by master craftsmen.
