“No need,” someone said next to her. Isabel turned in the direction of the low, cool-toned voice. The first thing she saw was a flame, flickering at the top of a vintage lighter –Isabel thought it looked too classy to be a Zippo –extended just in range for her to light a cigarette. She quickly plucked one out of her pack and brought it to her lips, leaning towards the flame.
“Thank you,” she said when she pulled back, exhaling the first, quick throatful of smoke. The lid on the lighter snapped shut and the flame extinguished. Isabel glanced at the source of the convenient light and nearly dropped her cigarette in shock. What the hell is a guy like you doing in a place like this? The man who had offered her a light was every bit as gorgeous as the one she had caught staring from across the room, but he was quite different in appearance. He had long, slightly curling dark hair that stopped just above his shoulders, and big, deep eyes which Isabel thought were some shade of either hazel or brown. His features were sharply cut, his strong jawline softened by a dusting of dark stubble. Instead of a tailored suit, he wore jeans and a fitted black tee shirt. But just the sight of the man was enough to make Isabel’s throat dry, and enough to make her heart pound.
“My pleasure,” the man said, smiling slowly. There was something beautiful, and brightly warm about the sight of him. Isabel’s heart fluttered in her chest. Down girl! He’s probably here with a date. And if he’s not, he’ll leave with a date for the night who’s so far beyond a “10” that they knock the number scale out of the water! He’s probably just nice. But there was unmistakable warmth in the dark eyes looking down into hers, and something she couldn’t quite make out in the curve of his lips; a kind of promise that Isabel hadn’t seen before. “You can take it, if you want,” the man added, opening his hand and extending the lighter towards her.
“That looks like it probably costs my entire bar tab,” Isabel said with a laugh.
“I have a dozen of them,” the man told her with a shrug. “I have three on me tonight alone.”
“Collector?” Isabel smiled politely. That explains it, if he’s single: he’s some kind of nerd.
“I just enjoy beautiful things,” the man said, smiling at her again. “Take it, please.” Isabel hesitated a moment longer, but there was nothing in the man’s face that made her doubt his sincerity. She reached out and took the lighter. For a moment, she thought that the man’s skin felt strange – smoother than she would have expected, almost hot to the touch. But she dismissed it as her fingers closed around the cool metal of the lighter. “I’ll see you later, Isabel.”
“How do you know my name? And what’s yours?” Isabel frowned for a moment, wondering if she had – somehow – gained a reputation beyond the usual for an Underground regular.
“Lucky guess,” the man said. “I’m Oz.” He leaned in and brushed his lips against her cheek. “I’m friends with one of the performers: Miss Kitty Galore. I need to run, but I will definitely find you later.” Isabel highly doubted that, but as the man walked away, she thought that if nothing else, her ego had been propped up by the strangely charming man.
“Ladies and gentlemen! Make sure you have your drinks in hand. The show is about to begin!” Isabel turned her attention towards the stage, pushing the two supernaturally gorgeous men out of her mind in her determination to enjoy the show. She told herself that there was no chance in hell that she would end up with either of them that night; she might as well forget they even existed.
Chapter Two
Isabel stumbled into her bathroom the next morning, groaning as she made a beeline for the shower. She turned the water on and waited for it to heat up, taking care of other physical needs first and wondering what she could have possibly done the night before to feel so utterly exhausted and sore. “Well,” she said to herself, sitting on the toilet seat lid and staring blankly at the water shooting down from the showerhead. “One thing I definitely know is that I got laid.” She shifted her hips and cringed, pain seething through her.
The possibility that she might have been drugged floated up into her mind, but Isabel dismissed it; it felt more like she had been spectacularly drunk, though she thought she had only had maybe four Jameson-and-Cokes over the course of the evening. “Okay,” Isabel said, rising to her feet and reaching a hand into the shower to test the water temperature. “First things first: what do I actually remember?”
She stepped into the hot water and closed her eyes, letting it pound her throbbing skull for a while until she was drenched from head to toe. Isabel started from the beginning of the evening – her arrival at Underground – and tried to work from there. She remembered one or two of the burlesque acts: there had been a debut performer, doing her strip tease to one of Isabel’s favorite songs, and a few others that were noteworthy, in a span of maybe ten acts total. “And then what happened?” Isabel turned her back to the showerhead and reached for her soap, racking her brain. The gorgeous man – the second one she had seen, with the dark hair – had approached her at some point. He had offered to buy her a drink, and she had accepted, though she had watched Jesse make it and had taken it directly from the bartender’s hands. She couldn’t have let the man bring it to her, reasoning as always that one couldn’t be too careful.
They had spent the rest of the time – that Underground was open – talking on the back patio, though Isabel couldn’t remember what they had specifically talked about. She had a mental image of the man attentively listening to her, nodding occasionally, and heard – in her mind – bits and pieces of things that she must have said: something about what she did for a living, writing ad copy for the agency. Something about the worst client she had ever had to deal with, and about petty office politics.
She could remember the dark-haired man, Oz, she recalled, finally pointing out to her that she seemed more drunk than she should be to drive home. He had offered to drive her to a diner up the street when the Underground’s manager announced last call. Isabel frowned again, thinking to herself that Oz had somehow managed to pay her tab as well. She had another mental image of the two of them seated in Bien-Venue, the preferred after-hours eating spot in the downtown area – owned by the same people who owned Underground. She remembered talking while they ate the high-end diner fare.
Isabel began scrubbing herself, turning her head this way and that, hoping that the heat of the shower water would loosen the tight feeling there. She couldn’t quite remember what she had eaten at Bien-Venue, only that she had gradually sobered up – not fully, but enough to think to herself that she might be capable of driving herself home.
She had walked with Oz to his car, and somehow – Isabel saw flashes in her mind’s eye – she had ended up in the back seat with him. As she slid her soapy hands along one of her legs, Isabel felt a rough patch, like a scab, just below where her hip and thigh met, only inches away from her vagina. “What the hell is that?” Isabel looked down at her leg, turning out at the hip to examine the patch. It looked like something between a small, deep scratch and a bite mark. She scowled at the mark, trying to remember how it had come to be there; certainly, it hadn’t been there before that night.
There was no way that there had been enough room in the back of Oz’s car for him to have done that, and on top of that, Isabel thought, it doesn’t look like anything a person could have done. Was there some kind of critter in his car? Had she done something after getting out of Oz’s car when they had finished?
Isabel shuddered, trying to imagine how such an odd mark could have ended up in such an intimate area and failing utterly. “Okay, it’ll come back to you later. Think about it later,” she told herself. “No sense in getting yourself all worked up.”
She finished her shower and grabbed her towel, feeling a small measure more human than when she had stepped into the bathroom, even if there were still bits and pieces of the night before that Isabel thought she would never quite recall. There had been a few nights like that in her life before; she had learned not to worry herself about it too much
. But the soreness, the tender feeling between her legs, told her that whatever had happened, she must have been enthusiastic.
Isabel wrapped the towel tightly around her breasts and walked across her apartment to the kitchen. Her head was still throbbing, but she thought it had subsided a little. “Maybe next week, I’ll stick with my usual,” Isabel mused, pressing the power button on her coffee maker to start it up. She remembered suddenly that she’d also had one or two shots of something – maybe a Fireball, something with cinnamon. The shots hadn’t been drugged; but they had utterly destroyed her inhibitions. “No wonder I feel like death warmed over,” Isabel murmured to herself. She put a coffee pod in the brewer and grabbed a mug out of the cupboard. The whole evening was so strange; Isabel shook her head in disbelief.
There were other things; that much Isabel knew. Whatever she had done with Oz in the back of his car, it hadn’t caused the strange mark on her inner thigh, or the tenderness she felt along her labia and along her inner walls. Isabel snickered softly to herself as the coffee began pouring into the mug. “Whoever else I ended up with, they must have been big.” She shook her head again.
Isabel —added cream and sugar to her coffee then walked to her couch and sat down, sipping carefully. As the caffeine began to do its work, a few more flashes of the night before came back to her. There had been another man; she couldn’t remember who, just the fact of hearing someone call to her, quietly, as she had left Oz’s car.
I told him I was fine to drive home, that I didn’t feel like going back to his place. Isabel drank down some more coffee and set the mug aside. And then on the way to my own car ... who was it? She couldn’t remember, only that she had seen the guy earlier in the night at Underground.
There was a second guy, she thought; she had gone to his place. “No wonder I’m sore and feel eaten up,” Isabel said, amused at her own decadence and mildly appalled at the same time.
The guy had climbed into the passenger seat of her car; Isabel could remember his voice, cool, low, and calm, directing her to his address – which she couldn’t remember the house. She could remember the feeling of him inside of her, and something about his skin being strange under her hands, but that was it. Isabel shuddered, smiling slightly to herself at the memory of how the second man – whoever he was – had felt. That explains a lot. It didn’t explain the odd marks on her leg, but Isabel pushed that thought aside; there were too many good memories from the night before to wonder about odd scabs on her body. They didn’t look like anything that could be an early STD indicator, plus when she had scrubbed at them with the soap, they didn’t hurt. Resolving to get them checked out if they didn’t clear up within a few days, Isabel turned on the TV and considered how to spend the rest of her weekend.
After she had finished her first cup of coffee, she made breakfast: eggs and toast, with some apple juice to put an end to the dregs of her hangover. Her phone buzzed, and Isabel – grateful that she had plugged it in before passing out – checked it to find that Alicia, one of her friends, wanted to get dinner. She figured that would fill up a few hours, at least. Isabel sighed, looking at but not quite watching the TV, knowing that all too soon it would be Sunday morning, and then it would be Sunday night, and she would have to go back to work. “At least I have a good story to tell about my Friday night out,” she mused to herself. She imagined the look on Alicia’s face when she told her that she’d had sex with not one, but two guys in the same night.
Setting her plate in the empty sink, Isabel walked back into her bedroom. She started going through her clothes to figure out what to wear that evening, and thought to herself that it was a damned good thing that she hadn’t let either man come home with her. “Not that they weren’t gentlemen, in their own way,” she said, countering her own thought. “But probably just as well not to let them know where I live.” Isabel smiled wryly to herself; there was no way that either man would want to have anything else to do with her, as much as she would have liked a repeat performance with either. The fact that she couldn’t remember who the second man had been bugged her a little; but there wasn’t anything to do about it. She would just have to accept that it had been one of those magical evenings where things went even better than expected, and leave it at that.
Chapter Three
Isabel stepped into the bathroom closest to her desk at the office, feeling a strange skin-crawling sensation all over. Mondays suck but this is ridiculous, she thought, hurrying over to one of the stalls.
As she stepped out of the stall, Isabel glanced at herself in the mirror, and froze where she stood, not even hearing the noise as the door to the cubicle slammed shut. She stared at her own reflection, frowning, trying to figure out what was so shocking about it, why it had stopped her dead in her tracks.
After a few seconds of staring, Isabel shook her head in disbelief. She had seen herself in the mirror so many times in the course of her life that unless she was checking her hair or makeup, she barely even looked. But the woman she saw in the mirror in front of her was both the same one she always saw and somehow, indefinably, different at the same time. She continued staring, trying to understand what it was she was seeing.
She reached around to the back of her head, and almost thoughtlessly, Isabel’s fingers found the elastic band she had used that morning for twisting and tucking her dark hair into a bun. Isabel felt a sharp tug at some of her hairs, stuck in the elastic, and then the bun unwound, and her hair fell around her face. She gasped at the sight of it; just that morning, or so she had thought, she’d had dark brown hair, stick-straight and healthy, if not particularly glamorous. But the woman in the mirror bore a hood, a cascade made of flowing, crackling, dark wavy hair, that seemed to have a life of its own; shot through with glimmering highlights in warmer coppery and cinnamon colors. It was as if she had spent the morning being pampered at a salon – a high-priced salon – and not at her desk, reviewing a client brief trying to sort out the conflicting instructions.
She hadn’t put on makeup that morning, because she had barely managed to get out of bed by the third snooze cycle on her alarm. But the woman in the mirror had artist-worthy makeup, a gleam in her gray eyes that was hot and cold all at once, full lips that promised everything a man could want. “Is my face ... thinner?” Isabel hesitantly stepped closer to the mirror, peering into the image. Her cheekbones looked as if she had gotten them filled in, her chin had somehow become sharper, and the expanse under her cheekbones was firmer. “What the hell is going on?” Isabel lightly slapped at her face, unable to quite fully believe it as the woman in the mirror did the same. Even the clothes she was wearing – a comfortable ensemble made up of a cardigan and shell, and a pencil skirt seemed to look more glamorous on her, somehow.
Isabel shook her head and turned away from the mirror. She remembered that in her distraction she hadn’t washed her hands, and turned back, keeping her eyes averted from the hypnotizing woman in the glass as she bent to clean up. “Don’t think about it,” she told herself quietly, thankful for the fact that she was alone in the restroom. “If you suddenly look like a model, just ... just don’t think about it. It’s not important.”
She dried her hands and left the bathroom, moving quickly towards her desk. Try as she might, Isabel couldn’t put the arresting image of herself out of her mind, even as she worked on the copy she had been assigned. Her stomach felt strange; both tight and loose, and she hadn’t been able to make herself finish her breakfast. Her options for lunch didn’t sound at all appealing to her, though she thought that if she waited too long she would end up making a bad decision in the midafternoon. Isabel sat back in her chair, frowning to herself, remembering the sight of her own reflection. It had to have been a fluke, some kind of weird hallucination, didn’t it?
Isabel glanced at her purse, set aside on her desk out of the way of her computer and keyboard. Her fingers itched as she tried to type a few more sentences, but the temptation was irresistible. She grabbed her purse quickly, convinced
– or at least hoping – that the compact mirror inside would reveal the woman she had woken up as that morning. She fumbled amongst the detritus in her bag until her fingers closed around the smooth compact. Taking a quick, deep breath, Isabel looked around; everyone in the office was busy at their own tasks, completely absorbed in their computers, paying no attention to her. At least that much is normal, she thought.
She opened the compact and steeled herself, not certain whether she wanted the sight she had seen in the restroom to be the truth or a hallucination. If it was a hallucination, you have bigger things to worry about than just suddenly being weirdly gorgeous, she thought. But then again, if it wasn’t a hallucination, you’re going to have to figure out how to explain to everyone – including yourself – how you suddenly turned into a glamazon. She closed her eyes and held the mirror part of the compact up to her face, a few inches away from her.
Isabel opened her eyes, and for just an instant, she felt disappointment that the image she saw was exactly what she had seen before leaving for work that morning. But the next instant, her eyes focused, and she saw that if she had been hallucinating before, she still was; she was utterly stunning. Okay, so this doesn’t answer that question…. not exactly, anyway. Isabel closed the compact and put it aside. She could still be hallucinating; it could still be fake.
Love of A Dragon (Exalted Dragons Book 1) Page 47
