Dirty Dragon: Breath of Air Collection (Dragons Love Curves Book 7)

by Aidy Award

  "I know." As soon as the words popped out of her mouth, she tilted her head a wee bit to the side and her eyes flicked from side to side considering the validity of what she'd said. "Huh. Why aren't I afraid of you anymore?"

  "You tell me." This woman was either very good at hiding her dark nature or the most fascinating creature he'd ever encountered. It made him want to stick around until the day Match did find a mate to see if she might be the one for him.

  Wait. He did not just think that. No way. She might be dangerous. Either to all of mankind or maybe only his bachelorhood. Either way, he needed to be more careful of letting his libido drive his judgment of her.

  "Magic?" she whispered all wide-eyed and expectant.

  How was he supposed to answer that. Maybe she was trying to tell him something and wanted him to lead her into revealing her secrets to him. "Because you're a witch?"

  "No." She narrowed her eyes. "Aren't dragons magic?"

  Galyna came back into the room, a lot of the worry gone from her face. "The babies are still fast asleep. Their chubby little legs aren't running anywhere."

  Jules sat up, propping herself on Dax's knee for just a moment before pushing off to stand up. "I'm so glad. I wish I understood better what was going on. I hate worrying everyone."

  She wavered on her feet and Dax grabbed her by the elbow to steady her. No way that was feigned helplessness. He could not figure this chick out. "You're exhausted. You should rest. We can talk about this more in the morning."

  Tonight he'd do some investigating on his own. It was either that or spend the night fantasizing about all the things he wanted to do to her body. Yes. He needed some space to clear his head. And a drink. He'd start his search for answers at the speakeasy owned by the Troikas. Plus free booze.

  Plus other pretty girls that he could distract himself with.

  So why didn't he actually want to go?

  Maxsim glanced at him then at Jules and back. "Dax, will you escort Jules home?"

  "I'll be fine, I don't need anyone to escort me. It's only a few blocks." She was already moving toward the door.

  In a hurry much? Damn he was getting such fucking mixed signals from her. She was definitely hiding something. He should go home with her and check out her house, look for any indication that the demon wyrms had been there. Yes. He'd thoroughly search her kitchen, her living room, her bedroom.

  Max folded his arms and puffed up his chest in that way all alphas did when they were ready to lay down the law. "I'd feel better if you allowed him to take you home. We don't know what this threat is or what it means, but we do know you're the key."

  Jules clasped her coat to her chest and backed away. "I don't want to be the key. I can't be. I'm no one special, you know that as well as I do."

  She was about to go back to running scared. Dax wasn't going to get any information out of her if she did. Trust. She had trusted him for that brief minute after she'd woken up out of that vision and he'd held her in his arms. It faded as he questioned her.

  Fine. No questions, more physical touch. Sounded like a good plan. Take her home, touch her.

  No hardship there. He plucked her coat from her hands and held it out around her shoulders. "Don't worry about that now. Everyone is safe for the moment. Take the reprieve when it's offered."

  Jules slid her arms into her jacket and Dax turned her to button it up. He leaned in close and whispered in his best seductive tone, "Let me take you home."

  And do naughty things with you.

  She Will Survive

  A dragon wanted to take her home. A dragon.

  What was worse was she wanted him to.

  She really shouldn't allow it. Somehow she still found herself saying yes. "Okay. I guess that would be fine."

  Fine? Really? When he'd whispered in her ear a second ago she'd felt anything but fine. Hot, achy, needy, wanting, wanton, but not effing fine.

  She was going to blame her addled-headedness around this guy on that vision. This one had been very different from the last. At first she'd been afraid, she'd been petrified. She kept thinking how the Black Dragon was going to steal the children from her side.

  But she'd survived. With the help of someone else. A woman. She simply could not get the image of anything besides that big red dragon and its fiery breath to form in her mind's eye. Whatever that woman had said changed everything. She'd taken the fear of all dragons away and replaced it with a calm trust.

  That had to be a spell or something. All these stupid supernatural beings could take their transformations and their visions and shove it. Jules would not be manipulated, and she would not be afraid. Visions schmisions.

  If she wanted to take a hot guy home with her, she was going to. Who cared if he could shift into a big red scaly beast the size of her teeny house. It was her choice to trust him. Not some faceless, nameless magical woman. Nobody was going to control her and her decisions.

  But would she ever make the decision to take a strange man that she'd only just met home with her, after dark, with every intention to kiss him until she was weak in the knees?

  Not yesterday. Not this morning. Not even an hour ago.

  What had changed? Because she really wanted to grab Dax by the hand and drag him on out of the house, down the street and tangle tongues with him in the moonlight.

  Maybe it was him. He was a flirt, that's for sure. She'd known other men exactly like that. They used their good looks and charm to get women to do exactly what they wanted. She'd fallen for it before.

  She didn't feel like that's what he was doing, though. He was different. She couldn't put her finger on how, but his flirting didn't feel like insincere flattery. There was genuine interest in his eyes when he looked at her.

  In fact, no one had ever looked at her the way he was right now. He'd waited for her to consent. He hadn't assumed she was going to say yes. That alone was enough to give him some of her trust.

  She trusted him, but she didn't trust herself.

  Had she ever?

  Jiminy Crickets, she was overthinking this to death and irritating even herself. Enough. Quit thinking and act. She grabbed Dax's hand and hauled him out the front door before anyone else, including the scared untrusting girl who lived inside her head, could say anything else. "Okay, bye. We'll see you all tomorrow."

  Dax squeezed her hand and that gave her the smidgen of confidence that she needed to know she'd done the right thing. Probably. God, she hoped he wasn't going to get her home and murder her. She had threatened him with haunting if he did. So there was that. "I only live two blocks up and one block over. We can be there in a couple minutes."

  The night air was still warm and a sliver of the moon hung low on the horizon. The slight haze from the humidity in the air made the stars sparkle and the whole scene was entirely too romantic. Best not to think of that and concentrate on getting home and figuring out what the hell she was going to do once she got there. One foot in front of the other directly down the sidewalk in the pretty suburban neighborhood. With her dragon in tow.

  Jules dragged Dax a good block and a half, with only one more to go, before he slowed her down. "I love that you're in a hurry to get me home, lass. It's quite the turnon."

  Uh-oh. His voice was a little too loud and a lot too creepy. Damn, she had made a mistake. Dax gently yanked her toward him and into his arms. She ducked her head to avoid his mouth coming down on hers, but he chased her and pressed his lips to her ears. "Pretend you're totally in to me and we're going to get down and dirty right here in the middle of the street."

  Wait. Pretend? Jules heartbeat picked up and that old familiar tingle of fight or flight raced across the back of her neck. Her breath froze in her lungs. There was something out there and he knew it. But then Dax wrapped a big warm hand in the same exact spot and all of a sudden she could breathe again.

  She leaned into his body and sighed, wrapped her arms around his neck and tilted her head to the side giving him more access to her neck and ears. "What
's going on?"

  "Don't be afraid. Well, do, but don't worry because I'm not going to let anything happen to you." He pulled her even tighter into his arms so that her body was completely flush with his. Her curves molded against his hard muscles, and there were oh so many of them.

  Jules didn't have to pretend she wanted to make out with Dax. Not even a little teeny tiny bit. She pushed her hands into his hair and wrapped her calf around the back of his. "What am I not supposed to worry about?"

  He brushed his lips along the skin at her neck and up to her ear. "Over there, in the shadow of the houses, there are at least a half dozen demon wyrms. They followed us from the Grimm house."

  If he had said any other words she wouldn't have even cared. The sensations running up and down every nerve ending she had were on fire, burning for him. Their flames were stoked to burn even higher by the surge of adrenaline his revelation brought down on her. "We have to go back, warn them."

  "I will. But first I want to get you safe. They're blocking the route to the turn I'm assuming we were to make up ahead because there are another six hiding under the various cars and in the bushes of the houses on the corner." Dax tilted his head to the side, indicating where she should look.

  She didn't even know what she was looking for. Demon sounded bad, but what was wyrm? Demon worms didn't sound that bad, unless they were like the ones from the horror movies that dug up from the core of the earth to swallow whole cars and houses whole. Eek. Did the earth below them just tremor?

  She held as still as possible so they didn't feel the vibrations from her body even though she was pretty sure she was shaking in her boots. "I don't see them. Or I mean, I guess I don't know what to look for. Which doesn't really matter because what are we going to do?"

  "You aren't afraid of heights, are you?"

  "No. Should I be?"

  "As soon as they realize I see them, they'll attack. I can hold a dozen of them or so off myself, but where there's a dozen, there's more. If I can get you to safety I can call up any other dragons in the area and then come back and burn them all to the ground. To do that, I need to shift into my dragon form and fly you the hell out of here."

  Big gulp. Like sixty-four ounce X-treme Double Big Gulp. "You want to turn into a dragon and I'm supposed to crawl up on your back and fly away?"

  "More like you'll catch a ride in my claws. I promise I won't drop you. Ready?"

  Oh, like right now? Crap. No. "Yes."

  "That's my girl. Hold on." Dax kissed her then. Hard and fast and with a slip of the tongue. A brilliant red sparkle of light shimmered across his skin and in two blinks of her eyes she was looking into the snout of a fire-breathing dragon.

  A red one that looked awfully familiar. Jules gaped at his beauty for a whole second before he blew a snuffle across her hair and lifted into the air.

  Grab onto my leg and hold on tight, here they come.

  Whoa. Mental telepathy. She was so going to ask him about that later. Jules jumped into the curled claw full of talons that he held out for her. It looked scary as hell but once she was wrapped up in his grasp she felt safer than if she had a protective forcefield around her.

  Good thing, too, because that's right when the velociraptors came out to play. If she had known that a demon dragon looked like an evil black dinosaur crossed with a bat and an ostrich with wings and beady red eyes and also breathed fire, she would have been a whole lot more worried than she had been.

  Dax's wings flapped in one great big whoosh and they gained fifty feet in altitude while the demon wyrms were blown back by the force of the blow. That didn't stop them, though. The second they recovered most of them took to the air as well and the chase was on. Holy crapballs was it on.

  Jules hung on tight, but there was no way she was closing her eyes for a second. "Dax, look out. There's one on your three o'clock coming in fast."

  Dax dove and spun just like a fancy jet fighter and Jules squealed. Sorry, lass. I'll try not to do that again.

  "I loved it. Do it as much as you want. This is the best dragon fight I've ever been in."

  A big rumbling sound came from the dragon's belly above her and she realized he was laughing. Okay, then. Hold on tight.

  He wasn't kidding either. Jules gripped him with all her might and Dax dove and twirled and swirled, flying in and out and in between the demons in the sky with them. He shot great swaths of fire and caught several of the nasty little beasts in his flames. They flailed in the air and one burst into a pile of ash right in front of her face.

  She continued to call out to him like a wing man when she saw the creeps trying to get into his blind spots. "One on your six and two more at four o'clock."

  Next time they did this she was bringing a weapon, a shotgun, or a rifle, or a slingshot at least so she could help too. No way these bastards were getting anywhere near those sweet babies if she could help it at all. She knew Dax's original plan was to get her out of there, but they were working well as a team and the demons’ numbers were dropping like flies as he eviscerated one after another.

  We've almost got them. Can you hang on a little bit longer?

  "Yes. Get them, murder their asses all the way back to hell."

  Yes, my blood-thirsty lassie. Dax beat his wings hard again like before and pulled up into a wide arcing backflip, swooping over their heads of the group on his tail, and coming out behind them. He spit out a series of rapid release balls of fire and took the whole clump of the demons out bang, bang, bang.

  When the last one exploded into flames and oily black demon bits rained down on the street below them, she let go of Dax's leg for one brief moment to thrust her arms in the air in a double fist pump. "Yeah. Take that, you suckers."

  In the middle of her victory cheer something that smelled like the rotting carcass of a skunk high on stinkweed grabbed her arms with razor-sharp talons and yanked her out of Dax's grasp.

  Her stomach leaped up into her throat, presumably trying to stay in its rightful place in the safety of her dragon's claws. She fell at least ten feet full on thinking she was going to die splattered along with the ashy remains of the enemy in the middle of Elm street. The demon wrym was grabbing at her legs and arms but all it managed to do was cut and scratch her.

  Hold on, Jules. I'm coming. His voice in her head was cool, calm, and collected, like free diving to her death was no big deal. His confidence that he could save her helped, and the next time the demon dragon grasped at her she punched it in the face. "Ow."

  Dax cut the damn thing all the way in half with one of his talons and scooped her into the other one about three feet from the ground. Jules hadn't even noticed she was that close yet because she was concentrating on the other thing trying to kill her. They glided back down the block to the Grimm house and Dax set her gently down in the grass in the front lawn.

  The outer motion detector lights were already on as Jules dashed up to the front door. She had to warn Max and Galyna as soon as possible and make sure the babies were okay. She wanted to check on them herself, see their cherubic little faces, and give them a kiss.

  If that's what was after them, they not only were going to need backup from Dax and any other dragons he could round up, but the rest of the packs in Rogue. Max as the alpha of Grimm could contact his brothers and sound the alarm.

  Jules, stop. Look. The front door is open, but the house is dark. I can smell the taint of the wyrms. Do not go in there. It isn't safe.

  No. Oh no, no, no. She ignored Dax's command and burst into the house. The furniture was in shreds, anything not nailed down was askew and none of the family was in sight. What if they were dead? What if the babies had been kidnapped like she'd seen in her vision. "Gal? Max?"

  An arm came around her from behind and pulled her back into the darkness of the foyer's coat closet. She opened her mouth to scream but a hand slapped over her mouth. "Lass, shh. It's just me."

  She nodded and he removed his hand. "We have to find them. Right now."

  "It
's okay, they're here and they are okay. I caught their scent along with the demon wyrms. If they are hiding, we don't want to out them. Understand?"

  "Yes. But what if they are hurt? Please help me find them. We have to help protect those babies. I know that's why I was sent that vision."

  "It might be." He let her go and stepped to the front of the closet and looked both ways. "Take my hand and no matter what, do not let go. They are toward the back of the house. I will lead you there. You keep an eye out behind us just like you did when we were in flight. I can destroy demon wyrms in my human form too, but it's a harder fought battle, so a lot of warning if we're under attack will be good."

  "Got it. Let's go."

  They stepped back into the foyer and this time Jules took in a whole lot more than the overturned furniture. There were giant claw marks in the carpet and along the walls. Demon's or wolf's? She couldn't tell. They crept into the hall and toward the nursery. The door was closed, but there were giant basketball-sized holes that went all the way through it.

  "This is where their scent is the strongest. Softly call to them, so we don't startle them with our approach. They'll be in beast form and ready to strike out at anything that could be a threat, including you and me."

  "Okay." Jules swallowed and put her mouth near one of the holes in the door. "Gal? Maxsim? It's okay, Dax and I are here. We killed a bunch of demon things outside."

  Nothing.

  "Are you in there? Are you injured? Can we come in and help?"

  This time a very low and dark growl came from inside the room. Then another joined it. That had to be Max and Galyna in their wolf forms. A second later a tiny little howl resonated through the air, follow by another slightly higher pitched one. Uh. That wasn't either of her friends? It sounded like wolf pups howling at the moon. But the babies weren't old enough to shift. They wouldn't learn how to become wolves until they were around five years old, according to Serena, the matriarch of the Rogue pack.

  Jules carefully turned the knob on the door and pushed it open. The growing increased but this time it was followed by little yips and yowls.