The Dragon CEO's Assistant (Dreamspun Beyond Book 39)

by Jenn Burke

  “And if your mate dies?” Maybe Aidan shouldn’t have gone there, but the dark somehow muted the insensitive nature of the question.

  Nassim didn’t take offense. “In theory you can find someone else to complete the puzzle.”

  “Not that easy, huh.”

  “Not even remotely,” Nassim agreed.

  Aidan looked out the window and tried to figure out how this new information fit into the puzzle that was Nassim Kader. It wasn’t quite the same kind of puzzle Nassim had spoken of—this one was missing a whole lot more than just one piece—but he was starting to see hints of its final picture.

  Nassim hadn’t mentioned love, but he didn’t have to. Aidan could read between the lines. A dragon’s sense of compatibility might be the first step in forging a relationship, but love was what cemented it. Nassim wasn’t suffering from some magically induced backlash that prevented him from attaching himself to another being. He was simply, sadly, a victim of a broken heart that he clearly hadn’t known how to heal.

  Aidan hoped the therapy helped. Maybe… someday… he could encourage Nassim to open up again. Explore possibilities.

  He huffed a chuckle. Probably best not to hold his breath on that.

  “What?” Nassim prodded.

  “Hm? Oh, nothing. Silly thought.” Aidan gave Nassim a smile and started to scoot to the edge of the bed. “I should—”

  Nassim leaned forward to grab Aidan’s arm. “Wait.”

  Stunned at the contact and the request, Aidan froze.

  Slowly Nassim pulled back. Every movement was hesitant. His entire body shouted uncertainty. Aidan waited as Nassim had asked, watching him battle with himself.

  “I shouldn’t ask this,” Nassim breathed.

  “What?” Aidan asked, his voice just as soft.

  “Can you….” A muttered curse in his native language escaped Nassim’s lips, cutting off his hesitation, and he said, “Can you stay?”

  The plaintive request pinged hard against Aidan’s heart. How could he turn away from such an entreaty? Aidan’s memories might comprise no more than a week and a half, but he knew Nassim. He knew that he wouldn’t have asked for such a thing frivolously.

  “Completely platonic,” Nassim continued. “It’s terrible of me to even ask, but—”

  “Sure,” Aidan said quietly.

  Nassim paused as though he couldn’t believe Aidan had agreed. “Okay. Okay, good.” He leaped out of bed and pulled up the covers, a sheet and a light coverlet. “You get under and I’ll lie on top—” He coughed. “—of the covers.”

  Smiling at Nassim’s slip, Aidan got under the covers. He lay on his side, facing Nassim as Nassim settled onto his back, and he was about to ask if Nassim would get cold when he remembered the conversation they had in the cave.

  Nassim turned his head. A gentle flare of dragonfire glowed within his black eyes. “Thank you.”

  Aidan grinned. “Are you hoping my presence will chase away ghosts?”

  Nassim traced Aidan’s face with his gaze as though he were committing every angle, every shadow, to memory. “I’m counting on it,” he whispered.

  Aidan didn’t know what to say to that, so he closed his eyes. Maybe the talisman nature of sharing a bed went both ways, because he tumbled into sleep free of the uncertainty and fogginess he’d experienced earlier.

  Chapter Nine

  AIDAN was warm—so damned warm. His internal clock said his alarm was probably going to go off soon, but all he wanted was to sink deeper into this heat and enjoy it. He kept his eyes closed, luxuriating in it… but his alarm didn’t go off.

  Instead something behind him rumbled.

  Memories rushed back in—interrupting Nassim’s nightmare, their conversation, Nassim asking him to stay. So that heat… that was Nassim. Spooning him. His arm draped over Aidan’s hip, his breath feathering Aidan’s hair.

  A distinct hardness pressed into Aidan’s buttocks.

  Aidan knew he should pull away. Instead he arched his back, pressing his butt more firmly against Nassim. There was another rumble, and Nassim pulled Aidan closer. Desire pooled low in Aidan’s gut, and he shivered in reaction to how much he suddenly wanted.

  “Merry gods, I missed you,” Nassim whispered.

  Aidan froze as reality washed over him like a bucket of cold water. Nassim thought he was Riladi. God—no. He couldn’t take advantage of that. It would be wrong—so, so wrong.

  “Missed you so much, Aidan.” Nassim jerked as though he’d woken up fully. “Aidan?”

  Aidan could hardly breathe. “You missed me?”

  Nassim was suddenly out of bed, standing beside it, and all of the heat suffusing the room drained away. Aidan rolled over, not expecting to see Nassim’s bronze skin drained of color to the point it was almost gray.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You did.”

  “No.” Nassim looked horrified. He shook his head and strode around the bed, aiming for the en suite bathroom. When he spoke again, icy, aloof Nassim was back. “I think you should return to your room.”

  “You can’t just walk away and not explain—”

  The closing of the bathroom door cut off Aidan’s words, and he stared at it, unsure what he was feeling. His chest was sore, and he couldn’t seem to take a deep breath. His eyes burned, making him blink, and a drop of wetness rolled down his cheek.

  Crying. He was crying.

  He swiped a hand across his eyes and jumped out of Nassim’s bed. He fought an urge to tear off the sheets and duvet and make a mess, to have some outward expression of the terrible emotions roiling up his insides.

  Instead he settled for saying the truth. “You made me cry, Nassim.” He didn’t yell, but he was sure Nassim could hear him. “I don’t like it. And we will talk about it.”

  There was only silence as Aidan made his way out of the master suite, but that didn’t surprise him.

  AIDAN leaned against the fence and watched the action on the ball field… or, rather, the lack of action. It was the bottom of the third, and Brock from marketing was up at bat. Of course he was going for the home run. Again. He’d popped out once already, and the rest of the team was calling for him to hit a grounder instead. Nassim was on third, ready to run in, but no. Brock wanted to be the hero.

  Asshole.

  Okay… something else to add to his list of Aidan-isms. Apparently he was a competitive bastard. He’d struck out just before Brock, but at least he wasn’t trying to get a homer. He was just trying to hit the damned ball.

  The pitcher threw way outside, and other team called encouragement to her. Aidan let his eyes drift to Nassim. If you didn’t know who Nassim was, you would never peg him as a CEO. He looked like the rest of them, wearing athletic shorts and a T-shirt jersey and ballcap with the Tuninas Titans logo. There was even a streak of dirt on one leg where he’d slid into third.

  No one would ever guess, a few short hours before, he was holding Aidan so tight and proclaiming he missed him.

  And then refusing to talk about it.

  Aidan turned away to watch Brock hit another pop fly. This time the second baseman caught it, and Brock left home plate muttering to himself. Aidan couldn’t drum up a “good try” like Jasper did, so he kept his mouth shut.

  “Shit—time!” Their third-base coach, Louise, waved a hand. “I gotta run—my babysitter says Connor is throwing up.”

  Jasper grimaced and waved her off the field. “Yeah, no worries. Please don’t bring it back to the office.”

  Louise grinned as she jogged around the chain-link fence and headed toward the parking lot. “I’ll do my best!”

  “Aidan, you want to coach third?”

  Aidan blinked. “Sure—yeah, I guess.”

  In the odd swiss cheese of his brain, softball rules had somehow survived. He knew the basics—if a pitch was inside or outside, what a ball was, what a foul was, the roles on the field, and so on. The fact that he struck out both times he was up to bat revealed that, while he mi
ght know softball, he definitely wasn’t an expert at playing it. But that was all right. It was fun to be out here on the field, embraced by camaraderie.

  Aidan caught Nassim’s eyes briefly as he took up position near third. Anger rose again. How could Nassim drop the “I missed you” bombshell and refuse to talk about it? He’d actively avoided Aidan all day, refusing to explain it. Had it been a dream? Had Nassim truly missed Aidan in… that kind of way? Was Aidan blowing it all out of proportion?

  “Look out!”

  Before Aidan had time to react to the shout, something—someone—flattened him to the ground. It took only an instant for him to recognize that someone as Nassim, his hard body pressed to Aidan’s. Awareness skittered across every nerve ending like lightning crackling along his skin.

  Nassim lifted his head to look Aidan in the eye. “Are you okay?”

  For a second, Aidan couldn’t find his voice. He nodded and managed, “Yeah. Sure. I’m fine.”

  “You sure? That ball came really close to your head.”

  “Um, yeah.”

  “Stop groping your assistant, Boss,” Jasper called from the dugout. Everyone from both teams cracked up, and Nassim scrambled to his feet.

  “He’s the keeper of my schedule, so I need to keep him safe,” Nassim explained with a grin.

  “Sure, sure,” Jasper said. “Okay, let’s go, Titans!”

  Jasper’s cheer didn’t have much effect, as the person at bat struck out to close the inning. The opposing team, from another tech company in Kanata, got a couple of runs in the top of the fourth. From the scowl on Nassim’s face, he liked the two-nothing score about as much as Aidan did.

  Aidan stood next to Nassim at the fence, close enough that he could feel the heat emanating from Nassim’s skin. They both watched the field, but Aidan knew Nassim was just as aware of him as he was of Nassim.

  “We need to talk about it,” Aidan said, his voice pitched low enough than no one but Nassim would be able to hear.

  “It was—”

  “If you say a mistake or unintentional, I’m not going to be happy,” Aidan warned.

  “It was both of those. And now is not the time—”

  “This is the first time I’ve been able to talk to you all day.” Aidan cast a quick glare at Nassim. “Because you were avoiding me.”

  “I needed some space.”

  “You had it. And now I’m saying we need to talk.”

  Nassim concentrated on the field as though his company’s net worth depended on it.

  “Last night you talked about puzzle pieces being hard to find, and I’m not saying I’m your puzzle piece, but if you missed me like… like that… maybe—”

  “Nassim, you’re on deck,” Jasper shouted.

  “Not here,” Nassim said to Aidan.

  Aidan gritted his teeth. “Nassim—”

  Nassim looked at him, his black eyes flaring with dragonfire. “Not. Here.” He marched out of the dugout to pick up the bat, leaving Aidan just as frustrated as he’d been that morning.

  Thunder rumbled in the distance. Jasper looked at the darkening sky and pulled out his smartphone. Aidan glanced over to see a red bar across one of the apps and moved closer. “What’s up?”

  “Looks like we’ve got a thunderstorm moving in.” Jasper shrugged and put his phone away. “We should be good to finish up.”

  The thunder rumbled consistently, though distantly, through the next few innings. Aidan didn’t try to talk to Nassim again, and Nassim didn’t try to talk to him either. But Aidan could feel the tension simmering in the air between them, a push and pull of want and need that wasn’t entirely sexual. Aidan wanted to talk—he needed to—just as determinedly as Nassim wanted to avoid any discussion of what had happened that morning. Aidan had no doubt that once the game ended and they were back in Nassim’s apartment, Nassim would find a reason to retreat and avoid the entire topic. Again.

  At the top of the eighth, it started drizzling. After a quick consultation, Jasper, the umpire, and the other team’s coach declared this would be the last inning. Good thing—the wind started to pick up just as the opposing team suffered its third out.

  Nassim was up to bat first for Tuninas and hit a solid double. Next was Rebecca, and she got on first. Then it was Aidan’s turn.

  The wind buffeted Aidan as he stepped up to the plate. To the west, thunder growled, louder and longer than it had a few minutes before. But the sound didn’t bother Aidan. If anything, he found it soothing, as though the sky itself were cheering him on. The fanciful thought made him smile, even when he missed the first pitch.

  “Strike one!” the ump shouted.

  Aidan repositioned himself and waited for the next. He caught a piece of that one, but it fouled.

  “Strike two!”

  The pitcher readied herself, setting up—

  Thunder crashed hard just as she released the ball. She jerked with the noise, and the ball hit Aidan in the upper arm.

  “Oh my God!” she shouted. “Are you okay?”

  Aidan’s words were stolen by another crack—and this one, like the last, sounded as though it were right overhead.

  The umpire waved at the players on the field. “Everyone in! Game’s called. Come on, come in!”

  People rushed past Aidan, and he knew he should turn and join them in the dugout, under the cover of the overhang, but he stayed where he was. Absently he pushed off the batting helmet and barely heard the thud as it hit the ground. The wind whipped around him, toying with his hair and peppering the exposed skin of his arms and legs with grit.

  It felt… amazing.

  “Aidan!”

  He ignored Nassim’s shout and stepped farther out to field. The rain was no longer a drizzle—it pelted down, pushed sideways by the wind, and soaked through his clothes and hair in seconds. Thunder crashed around him, louder than the shouts of his colleagues in the dugout. He could ignore them. He couldn’t ignore the beauty, the comfort, the wonder in the elements surrounding him.

  A hand gripped his upper arm, and Aidan opened his eyes to see Nassim glaring at him. “Get off the field!” he shouted over the wind.

  Aidan just looked at him. Water traced the planes of Nassim’s face, almost like a caress—like the storm wanted to learn him, know him. There was a wild beauty inherent in Nassim’s drenched features, with all of the societal trappings of hairstyle or clothing diminished by the rain. It washed away everything, but it couldn’t wash away Nassim’s underlying strength.

  “You’re beautiful,” Aidan whispered.

  “What?” Nassim leaned closer.

  Aidan leaned in too. Energy crackled between them, energy that had been flaring on and off since Aidan settled into Nassim’s guest room. Aidan could feel it building to a crescendo, higher, harder, faster. Just like his pulse—

  Wait.

  Despite the rain, the hair on Aidan’s arms stood upright. It wasn’t tension sparking between himself and Nassim—it was old-fashioned electricity. The air itself was charged, and it would—

  It would discharge.

  “Get down!” he shouted. He pushed on Nassim’s shoulder with strength he shouldn’t have, and Nassim collapsed to the ground.

  Just as the world exploded.

  Aidan couldn’t hear anything. He couldn’t see anything. The ball field disappeared, taking with it the pelting rain, the rumbles of thunder, and the screams from the dugout. Pure, unbroken white surrounded him. Buzzing infiltrated his ears, his brain, until his entire body seemed to reverberate with it. Despite the lack of senses, he felt more alive than he ever had, more connected.

  So tempting to follow that connection. He could feel it calling him. He could also hear Nassim shouting his name, but his voice was muffled, as though Nassim were blocks away. Aidan gave up all thought of chasing down that connection and refocused on his body. Bit by bit, his sight cleared until he could see the sky again.

  The cloudless, star-filled sky.

  What?

  Nassim
stood in front of him, far enough away that Aidan couldn’t reach out to touch him. Not that his dark expression invited touch. At all. He looked… pissed off. No. He looked furious.

  “What happened?” Aidan asked. His voice was rough, his throat dry, as though he’d run a race without water.

  Nassim said nothing. He didn’t have to. Jasper bounded up, his eyes sparkling with excitement.

  “What happened?” he repeated. “Holy shit, Aidan. Holy. Shit.”

  Aidan looked up at the sky again. There was no trace of the storm. Even the wind had died down to little more than a breeze. “I don’t—” He shook his head and looked at Jasper and Nassim again. “Did I imagine the rain?”

  “No,” Nassim said curtly.

  Jasper shot Nassim a look, his excitement diminished for a brief second. Then he shook his head emphatically. “No. It was raining. And thundering, lightning, and then you…. I mean, oh my God, Aidan.”

  “What?”

  “You grabbed lightning out of the sky.”

  Aidan stared. “I did what?”

  Nassim placed a hand on Jasper’s arm to halt his forward movement. “You’re mythos, Aidan. And I need to report you to the Gryphon King.”

  Chapter Ten

  THE royal residence—castle? enclave?—was located just outside of Montreal in the upscale neighborhood of Senneville. If Aidan had ever visited this part of the country before, he had no idea. Nothing seemed familiar. But then nothing about Tuninas Software was familiar either, and he’d spent forty hours or more per week there for the past few months.

  Nassim pulled up to a guard house situated in front of a large black iron gate. A serious-faced security guard bent down to look inside the car, his quick eyes missing nothing. After checking their names, he waved them through without even a terse “Have a nice day.”

  A winding drive led to a manor that looked like a cross between a Scottish castle and a French chalet. It had turrets, for God’s sake. The exterior was made of rough-looking aged river stone of various hues of brown and gray. Bright green buds dotted ivy branches that crept up the stone walls and onto the eaves of the roof. It was an impressive house, Aidan supposed, but he wasn’t in the mood to appreciate it.