by Jenn Burke
Table of Contents
Blurb
Sneak Peek
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
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Copyright
The Dragon CEO’s Assistant
By Jenn Burke
A Golden Kingdom Novel
The heart remembers.
When Aidan Bishop staggers out of the woods, naked and suffering from amnesia, he needs to relearn who he is and where he fits in the world.
His boss, nearly five-hundred-year-old dragon Nassim, head of a successful tech company, hurries to claim his wayward assistant and guide him back into the life he disappeared from. As they get to know each other again, Aidan wonders if their relationship went deeper than employer and employee. But Nassim isn’t telling, and Aidan has a secret of his own… even if he doesn’t know it yet.
Slowly Aidan picked out other lights, just as dim and muted as the first. But it was enough to get some sense of the floor, and wow. Were those rocks? Oh, that was what that glow was—phosphorus lichens. Or paint that was supposed to emulate them, maybe.
“Of all the things you could remember, you remember phosphorus lichens?” Aidan muttered.
“They’re kind of an interesting thing to remember.”
The voice was Nassim’s, but not. It was lower, with more bass, and rumbled through Aidan’s chest and from the floor into his feet. “Nassim?”
A loud snort that sounded more like a horse than a human came from Aidan’s right. “Over here.”
Aidan turned slowly, suspecting what he’d see. A large black mass loomed there, like a hill cloaked in the deepest night. But this hill moved, its surface lifting and falling in a distinctive rhythm—a breathing sort of rhythm.
Two pinpoints of fire flickered to life, and Aidan fell back with a shout.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Nassim—dragon-Nassim—rumbled. “I’d never—”
“Sorry. Sorry.” Aidan held out a hand as he pushed himself back to his feet. “I know. I, uh… I wasn’t expecting… this.”
“Seeing my dragon form?”
“Dragon, rocks, phosphorus lichens—are they real, by the way?”
“Yes. The rocks too.”
“Huh. When they call it the cave, they’re not kidding, are they?”
Another snort. Aidan wondered if that was the equivalent of a human grunt. Those fire-laden eyes remained focused on Aidan. “Sometimes… I need to not be human for a little bit.”
“Oh?” Aidan ventured a step closer.
“You can come here. I already ate a goat earlier.”
Aidan froze. “That’s not funny, Nassim.”
Vibrations traveled through the room. “It’s a little funny.”
To the ones who never stop dreaming—fly higher, always higher.
Acknowledgments
THIS book was one of the most challenging ones I’ve written. I wrote it and submitted it, was asked to revise and resubmit it, and the thing fought me every step of the way with that revision. But in the end it’s a stronger book, and I have Lynn West and her team to thank for the push to revisit it.
Thank you to my beta readers, Avon Gale, Piper Vaughn, and Kelly Jensen, for your patience in reading more than one version of this. Your input was, as always, essential.
A big thank-you to the Dreamspinner team for helping to refine the story until it sparkled.
Thank you as well to all of the readers willing to take a chance on a weird story set in Canada. You clearly are my people.
And lastly, thank you to my family and their continued support. Love you all.
Chapter One
HIS life started with a single step forward.
It was as though someone flicked an On switch. Suddenly there was the world in front of him, around him—new and weird and kind of familiar, but not. Branches brushed his bare arms as he stepped between a pair of trees, and he knew the tree on the right was a pine and the one on the left was a maple. He knew the item on the grass in front of him was a typical picnic table. He knew the time of day was twilight, the wetness falling from the clouds was rain, and the gentle rumble in the distance, like a father’s lullaby, was thunder.
He knew all of that, but not why he was naked.
A gentle breeze tickled the orange-gold hair on his arms and chest. The grass was slick beneath his bare feet. He wriggled his toes and stared down at them as he tried to determine what he was feeling. Was he feeling something? There should be some emotion there, right?
Maybe?
He held out his arms, fingers splayed, and noted the scattered cinnamon freckles on his pale skin. His arms were toned, not flabby. Same with his chest, though there were a pair of marks on his left pectoral, over his heart—two crescent scars. He ran his fingers over them, but they didn’t hurt. He traced the line of muscle down his ribs and across to a trail of hair in a slightly darker shade of copper that led down to a flaccid penis.
He let out a sigh of relief at seeing that particular part of himself. Then he wondered why.
He looked back up, beyond the picnic table, to the large low building in front of him that stretched to the right and left. It was constructed of plain brown brick and had black cladding along the roof’s edge. There was a cargo door for truck deliveries and a smaller one for people by the end of the building farthest from him. A large garbage container hunkered near the delivery bay, and the faint smell of rotting food wafted by on the air. This was probably the back of the building, he realized, because there was no sign to indicate what the structure contained. There was nothing to give him a clue why he was standing in front of it, naked.
Why was he here?
He… he should know this.
Another On switch triggered, and emotions came rushing back. He should know where he was and why he was there and why he was naked and….
His name.
What was his name?
Oh God, what was his name?
His knees gave out. The chill of the wet grass was even more evident against his bare buttocks, but the shiver that rolled through his body had little to do with the damp ground or the rain or the breeze. A sound wisped by—a tiny moan—and it took a moment for him to connect the reverberation in his throat with the utterance.
“I,” he said, and choked. “Oh my God.”
He didn’t recognize his own voice.
He didn’t recognize his voice or his body, and he didn’t have a name, and he didn’t know where he was, and—
He rocked forward and whimpered.
“Hey. Hey, this is private property. You can’t—”
The voice jolted him, and he looked up. A figure stood a few steps from the people-sized door, frozen. He had a split second to note that the figure was male and dark-skinned before the man darted across the grass toward him. He scrambled backward, his heart thudding against his breastbone as he tried to get back to his feet and run, dammit, he had to run.
“No—Aidan, wait. Stop.” The man followed his own inst
ructions, his dress shoes slipping on the wet grass. “Oh my God. I can’t—you’re here. Holy shit, you’re here. And you’re naked. Why the hell—” He shook his head. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”
He—was his name Aidan?—stopped his backward movement and watched the man warily. “Who’re you?”
“Who—” The man’s brows dropped low over his light brown eyes, and he took a breath. “Okay. Okay. Gonna assume you’re not playing me, buddy, because this is way too far for a practical joke.”
“I—” He looked down at his naked legs. “No. No joke.”
“Right. I’m, uh….” The man lifted a hand and slowly moved it to the pocket of his gray dress slacks. He wore a matching vest over a light pink shirt that was rolled up to the elbows. “Just getting my phone, okay?”
He—Aidan—watched, still wary.
The man pulled out the phone and dialed someone. “Boss? You need to come out back. It’s Aidan. Aidan. Yes, I’m—” He clicked off the phone. “He’s on his way.”
“Who?”
“The boss. Our boss. This is an office. You work here.”
“I don’t—” Aidan’s breath caught as the people-sized door slammed open and another figure marched toward them—all but ran, actually. Dark, glowering, dressed in a three-piece suit, looking like he was eight feet tall, and… pissed off beyond words.
Panic clawed at Aidan’s throat, and he pushed himself back again, digging at the slick grass and damp dirt.
“No, stop. Nassim! Christ.” The first man rushed forward to intercept his boss—their boss. “He’s confused, he—”
“Aidan?”
He didn’t know that voice either, but the hitch in it made Aidan’s fingers relax. He didn’t know why. The boss—Nassim?—looked so intense, his black eyes and black hair and bronze skin all adding up to a dark figure who looked anything but welcoming.
Except… his voice broke, and that….
Aidan didn’t know what that meant.
“He’s naked. Why is he naked?” Nassim pushed the first man aside and stepped forward. Aidan stayed where he was and managed not to flinch when Nassim swept off his suit jacket and draped it over Aidan’s shoulders. It was incredibly warm and far too big for his slender frame, and it carried an earthy but sweet scent that made him want to bury his nose in the lapel. Nassim’s hand hovered by Aidan’s cheek, but he didn’t make contact, clenching his fingers instead and redirecting them to pull his jacket closed over Aidan’s chest. “Did you call the police?”
“No, I—”
“Merry gods, Jasper, call 9-1-1.” Nassim knelt in front of Aidan and brushed off the shoulders of the too-large jacket. “I’m here. You’re going to be okay.”
For some reason, that statement made Aidan’s teeth chatter. “I’m not okay.”
“Maybe not,” Nassim admitted, “but—”
“Who am I?” This large, imposing man who’d given up his jacket, didn’t care that the moist earth was soaking into the knee of his slacks, and who was rubbing his shoulder soothingly—he’d know, right? He’d have all the answers.
Someone had to have the answers.
Nassim said nothing for a moment, but he stopped rubbing Aidan’s shoulder. “You’re Aidan Bishop.”
Aidan shook his head. “I don’t know that name.”
“You work here. For me. You’re my executive assistant.”
“Executive—” No. That wasn’t right. It didn’t fit. Just like his name didn’t fit. Just like he didn’t fit. His teeth chattered harder. “I don’t—”
“Breathe, Aidan.”
He was breathing—but too fast, too raggedly. Nassim cupped his shoulders and leaned closer, and part of Aidan welcomed that.
A larger part wanted to run.
He squirmed out of Nassim’s grasp. “No. Please, I—”
“You’re safe. I promise you, you’re safe.”
Aidan shook his head back and forth, and he didn’t seem to have the ability to stop it. But it spoke for him when he couldn’t force words out of his throat. Denial. This couldn’t be real. This couldn’t be happening. He couldn’t have lost everything—all sense of self, all sense of who these people were, all sense of where he belonged.
“Why?” he managed. “How?”
Nassim held up his hands in a gesture of harmlessness. “I don’t know. You’ve—” His voice hitched again, barely discernible but there. “You went missing four days ago.”
“Missing? Like… gone?”
“Gone,” Nassim confirmed. “Without a trace, gone. And I… we… we’ll find out what happened. I swear it.”
Sirens drifted through the deepening night. The sound made Aidan want to curl up into a ball. Hide. “I don’t—I—”
“I’ll lead them back around here,” Jasper said softly. Then he disappeared out of Aidan’s field of view.
Nassim didn’t even note Jasper’s departure. He was looking at Aidan, his black eyes intent. A streetlamp flickered on overhead and teased out the lighter strands in his hair. They were probably silver, but they took on the greenish-blue tinge of the LED bulbs.
“I won’t—” Nassim seemed to struggle with whatever it was he wanted to say, and finally his head drooped, as though he’d given up. “You’re safe, Aidan. I promise.”
He wanted to trust this man—needed an anchor in a world he didn’t know. But even as he watched, Nassim’s gaze grew less intense, and he pulled away and stood up.
“You’re safe,” he said again, but he wasn’t looking at Aidan anymore. His gaze was turned toward the ambulance as it lurched around the building.
Aidan wondered who was supposed to benefit from those words—him or Nassim?
AMNESIA.
After spending the night in the ER with lovely drugs to cushion the anxiety and panic and then his waking hours in a private room being scanned, poked, prodded, checked for trauma that didn’t exist, and asked thousands of questions he couldn’t answer, that was the doctor’s conclusion. But she admitted that his symptoms didn’t follow the recognized and recorded characteristics of the disorder.
“Typically amnesia is the result of trauma—usually physical, but sometimes mental or emotional. And in the retrograde version, which is the closest to what you’re exhibiting, the memory loss is limited to the time surrounding the traumatic event.”
Dr. Singh leaned her hip against Aidan’s bed, and either she hadn’t noticed Nassim’s glowering form in one corner of the room—because somehow Aidan warranted a full room to himself—or she was choosing to ignore him. It was impossible for Aidan to do the same. Nassim drew his gaze like nothing else. He wasn’t allowed to accompany Aidan to his tests, but when Aidan was rolled back into his room, there was Nassim, waiting, normally with a hand in his pocket, as though he were rolling coins through his fingers but without the jangle of change. He didn’t know what Nassim had told the hospital to allow him to stay, but whatever it was, Aidan was thankful for his continued presence.
It was so much better than being alone.
“Sometimes it extends backward for—well, there have been cases where patients were missing whole years of their lives. But the memory loss you’re displaying is nearly unheard of.”
Aidan flexed his hands on the thin blanket covering him and his less-than-warm gown. “Meaning?”
“A total wipe of self.” Dr. Singh looked at him over her glasses. “You can answer questions about current events with relative ease, and you retain your knowledge of language and your sense of place… for the most part,” she amended because he hadn’t known he was in Ottawa to start. But once it was mentioned, things clicked, at least regarding his geographic location. “But details about you—your history, your childhood, your interests and hobbies—they’re gone.”
Aidan shifted under his blanket at Dr. Singh’s uncomfortably direct words. “I’m not faking it.”
Her stern look eased up. “I’m not saying you are, and I’m sorry if I made you think that. That’s not my intention. S
omething happened to you, Aidan. Despite the lack of evidence of physical trauma, I have no doubt of that. Something that you’re blocking out, along with everything that makes you you.”
“How do we fix it?” Nassim’s voice was gravelly and just as dark as his gaze.
Dr. Singh glanced in his direction. “The brain is a delicate, mysterious beast. Therapy might help, but time is probably what’s needed.”
“So I… I just wait for my memory to come back?” The idea was horrifying in a way Aidan had difficulty expressing, even to himself.
“It might not,” she said gently. “You have to be prepared for that too. The best advice I can give you is to simply live. Rejoin your life and see where it takes you. One day you may wake up with your memories intact. Or you might build new ones and not miss the old.”
“That’s shitty advice,” Aidan grumbled.
“It’s the best I’ve got, kid.” She gave him a quick smile as she straightened and turned to Nassim. “Can I see you in the hall, Mr. Kader?”
As much as Aidan appreciated Nassim’s presence, it was kind of a relief to have a moment to himself. He retrieved the hand mirror one of the nurses had left him and regarded his reflection. It was as unfamiliar as his voice.
Red hair, long on top, short on the sides. His eyes were blue—light and bright—and his chin and cheekbones were sharply delineated. His lips were nice, full, but not overly so. Underneath a proliferation of freckles, his skin was pale. The phrase “peaches and cream” came to mind, but he didn’t know from where.
He lifted his eyebrows, and it was weird seeing a face he felt no ownership of carry out the action. He frowned. Smiled. Pouted. Narrowed his eyes. Made them wide.
None of the expressions he saw in the mirror clicked.
But he knew it was him—Aidan Bishop, middle name Donnelly. Nassim had shown him pictures of himself with Nassim and other people he didn’t recognize. He’d even gotten an image of Aidan’s driver’s license from somewhere, but none of the data it contained meant anything to Aidan. His birthday was just a date. June nineteenth—he was twenty-five years old. Twenty-six in a couple of months. His height was just a number. Six feet, one inch. His address was a location he couldn’t picture and wouldn’t be able to find without a map.
