Dragon Blood

by Madelaine Montague

  A glance toward the pool tables to assess her situation as they reached the small dance floor and Phil slipped his arms around her possessively completely diverted her. There was a tall, cool drink of water propped against the back wall that set her ‘man-dar’ to jangling like a fire-alarm fire and threw her into a state chaos she’d never experienced but once before—when she’d encountered Gabriel.

  Actually twice, she realized abruptly—and the first time was when she’d noticed the Native American dancer—and the man staring at her was definitely Native American. He was looking directly at her—not the pool table—his eyes narrowed and assessing in a way that made her kegels clap together frantically and her throat close with desert dryness.

  Disconcerted, she broke eye contact with an effort and tried to pretend he hadn’t thrown her entire system into disorder, glancing blindly at the people around him. She had no idea if any of the rangers were still among those clustered around the pool tables or not, though. Worse, before she even realized the song that had started up was a slow piece, Phil had dragged her much closer than she would’ve allowed if she’d had her wits about her.

  Thankfully, she didn’t have to turn the dance into a wrestling match. He resisted when she wiggled to put a little more distance between them, enough to set off fresh alarms, but he yielded quickly enough that she began to think she’d imagined his attempt to get way too close.

  When her pulse had regained some of its natural rhythm and the movement of the dance allowed, she flicked a surreptitious glance toward the pool tables again. Thankfully, the gorgeous hunk she’d spotted was leaning down to take a shot, not looking at her as he had been before, but just looking at him was enough to cause heart palpitations. The knit shirt he was wearing looked to be about two sizes too small. It molded to a body that looked like it belonged to a bodybuilder—impossibly broad shoulders, deep chest, washboard belly and arms thick enough he looked like he could bench press four hundred pounds without breaking a sweat.

  And that was just the top part! The snug, well-worn blue jeans he was wearing conformed to equally impressive thighs and a ‘package’ that made her belly abruptly go weightless.

  “Looks like we’ve got a couple of injuns in the back tonight,” Phil muttered, jerking her attention back to him. “That usually means trouble.”

  Marlee sent him a shocked look. “What?”

  “Long stringy hair at ten o’clock.”

  Her cool drink of water? Revulsion flickered through her. “I don’t see anybody that matches that description,” she said tightly.

  Her reprimand seemed to go right over his head. “If he ain’t drunk yet, he soon will be and the minute they get drunk they get belligerent as hell. I’m surprised Floyd even let him in the door.”

  She supposed he was referring to the owner of the place and that shocked her even more.

  He’d said it as if there was a standing policy of no ‘injuns’ allowed! “I thought that was generally the idea of about ninety percent of the people that hit the bars on the weekend—to get drunk,” Marlee said drily.

  “I don’t know which is worse—the injuns or the wannabes.” He snorted. “You think blondie over there thinks he can pass as injun?”

  She hadn’t noticed ‘blondie’ but she discovered she couldn’t resist glancing around for the man in question. Her heart had stopped dead in its tracks at the mention. It restarted painfully when she spied the man, thumping dully in disappointment when she saw it wasn’t Gabriel. She wondered it if was just pure imagination that he looked enough like Gabriel to be related or if she was as guilty of ‘profiling’ as Phil and had decided he did merely because he was blond—with a very similar golden tan.

  He seemed to be the companion of the man who’d raised her heart rate and blood pressure. She didn’t know how she’d missed him once Phil had pointed him out, though. That bright, golden, beautiful mane of hair alone should have snagged her attention—especially when Gabriel had been on her mind most of the day.

  She saw he was right—in a sense. The blond also had unfashionably long hair, at least as long as the dark haired man he was with. He was dressed similarly, as well, and just as impressively built—maybe a tad broader and a shade shorter, but close. He looked a lot more like a Viking than a Native American, but there was no getting around the fact that he had a similar effect on her libido.

  She’d always admired a man with a hard body, but she didn’t recall ever having such an excessive reaction to just looking at a man—except with Gabriel and the Native American dancer. The heat surging through her went just a bit beyond mere admiration.

  Uneasiness she couldn’t quite grasp flickered through her. She was willing to admit that there was a good chance Gabriel and maybe even the Native American dancer had tapped in to a libido she’d been ignoring way too long in favor of focusing on her career—easily, both because she had ignored her natural needs and because both of them were extremely attractive. She thought the pair across the bar were also well above the norm as far as good looking and well built went, but … it was like her libido was on steroids or something!

  Raging hormones because she was pregnant?

  She knew pregnancy caused some extreme shifts in hormone levels, but this seemed really excessive to say the least!

  She didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry when the song ended and Phil cupped a hand under her elbow and guided her toward what was left of their group. Frankly, she was barely aware of it. From the moment she realized she was being steered closer to the objects of her unaccountable lust, she was thrown even more off-kilter.

  Try as she might to refrain from gaping at the two like a moonstruck teenager, she couldn’t seem to command herself to behave at all ‘normally’.

  They were about halfway between the dance floor and her goal and she was frantically trying to figure out some way to introduce herself when the fight broke out.

  She hadn’t even noticed the beautiful twosome were playing against two other men until the movement of the pool cue caught her attention. She wasn’t certain she would have then except the man wielding it was aiming for the dark haired Adonis’ head. She threw a hand up as if she could ward off the blow. “Watch out!” she gasped in warning.

  The ‘injun’s’ reflexes were nothing short of amazing. Time seemed to slow to a crawl.

  The pool cue smacked into the ‘injun’s’ palm rather than his head and shattered. Before Marlee could blink, there was a full-fledged brawl involving a half a dozen men in progress—the blond and the black haired man on one side and four against them.

  Her ‘cop’ instincts kicked in and she surged forward to break up the fight, but a virtual wall of patrons sprang up from seemingly nowhere, surging around the combatants and throwing punches. She’d been buffeted enough in the melee to bring her focus entirely to the situation at hand before they managed to get the fight under control.

  Huffing for breath when she managed to subdue the man she’d ended up struggling with, she glanced around to survey the damage and saw that the other rangers had leapt in to help quell the battle. A dozen patrons were lined up against the back wall. The rest of the bar patrons began emptying into the parking lot the moment the sound of sirens penetrated the quiet that fell over the bar in the wake of the fight.

  Without surprise, she saw that the objects of her interest were lined up with the others, their hair disheveled, t-shirts half torn off and their faces battered but still lovely. Sighing with irritation, she guided her catch to the wall with the others and stepped back to await the arrival of the local police. They didn’t have long to wait. Four grim faced deputies entered the bar, looked around, and headed straight toward them. When they’d cuffed the brawlers, they began questioning everyone.

  Without surprise, Marlee discovered no two accounts of the fight matched, not even among the rangers. To her disbelief and anger, however, one theme prevailed—the two ‘long haired dudes’ had started it. Even the other rangers, who’d certainly been c
lose enough to see how it went down, gave statements that the two men had started the fight.

  “That isn’t how it happened,” she said tightly.

  Everyone, it seemed, turned to look at her in disbelief and dawning anger.

  “And you are?” the deputy demanded brusquely.

  It flickered through Marlee’s mind that she had no business getting involved, that it was liable to get her in a lot deeper than she could afford. She discovered she was too outraged at the plain bigotry to simply ignore it, however. Reluctantly, she pulled her badge out and showed it to the deputy.

  He glared at her identification as if more than half expecting to discover it was a fake.

  “What’s your take on this, Agent Madison?”

  “I was looking directly at the man, there, when that man,” she pointed to a man further along the wall, “tried to hit him in the head with his pool cue.”

  The deputy’s eyes narrowed. “So you didn’t actually hear the argument before that?”

  Marlee gaped at him in disbelief. “There wasn’t an argument that I saw.”

  He scribbled in his notebook. “What happened after that?”

  “The man that was attacked retaliated in self-defense,” Marlee responded tightly.

  “You saw him hit that man over there?” the deputy asked, pointing from one man to the other.

  “I saw that man attack and then he retaliated.”

  “I thought you said the first man tried to hit ‘chief’ over there?”

  “I said he tried to hit him on the head. The Native American man threw up his hand to deflect the blow and he was struck on the hand instead.”

  He asked her a few more questions but it seemed clear to her that he’d made up his mind about who was guilty the minute he saw there was a Native American involved. Without surprise, she watched as the deputies hauled all of the men up and escorted them to the patrol cars outside.

  Phil made his way back to her to stand beside her and watch until the last of the men were escorted out. “I guess you’ll want to get back to the campground?”

  Anger flickered through her, but maybe she’d misunderstood the undertones? Maybe it was just her imagination that he was hinting about resuming the party somewhere else? “Yes. I believe I’ve had enough excitement for one night.”

  She was still fuming inwardly when she reached the campground and stalked into her cabin. She wasn’t certain why she was still wound so tightly. She supposed a good bit of it was pure adrenaline over the battle in the bar. Probably a good bit of it was anxiety that she’d been caught up in the mess at all—completely destroying her intention of keeping a low profile, gathering what information she could, and taking off before her tail managed to catch up to her.

  Thankfully, she hadn’t been involved in many full scale battles like that one, but it wasn’t a new experience either and the one thing that was to be expected was that it took a while for the ‘fighting’ blood to settle afterwards.

  That was only part of it, though. Most of it, she realized, was the angry sense of injustice boiling in her veins. It was procedure to pick up all the combatants in a fight, whether they’d started it or not, but the fact that everyone seemed determined to focus on the Native American as the instigator thoroughly pissed her off when she knew better.

  Was it pure prejudice that they’d focused on him like she felt it was? Or were they simply profiling when they hadn’t actually seen who’d started it?

  It occurred to her that it was also possible that she’d missed something herself. There could’ve been undercurrents from trading insults that had touched off the fight. Maybe she was wrong?

  She didn’t believe it. She knew it was possible, particularly given the fact that she’d been more focused on jumping the guy’s bones than actually paying any attention to the interaction between him and his opponents at the pool table, but she still didn’t believe it.

  Trying to dismiss it from her mind, she prepared for bed, but it was a long time before she finally managed to sleep. She woke at the crack of doom, disoriented by her surroundings and the grogginess from too little sleep. Regardless, it didn’t take long for her mind to leap to the fight the night before and her emotions to begin roiling again.

  A shower didn’t improve her mood either. The urge smote her to beg off her excursion with Fletch and head down to the police station instead. She hadn’t especially wanted to go off with Fletcher to start with and she could always hit Boyd up to guide her the next day.

  She’d made up her mind to do just that and yet, when Fletcher pulled into the lodge parking lot beside her car, she changed her mind yet again.

  She needed to stay out of it, she told herself. It was a local matter and she couldn’t afford to be caught up in the mess any more than she already had been. She was going to be damned lucky if she hadn’t already screwed herself thoroughly by flashing her badge! Because she was going to be in a jam if the local PD found it necessary to check out her credentials.

  Fortunately, Fletcher didn’t seem any more inclined to chat than she was. He pulled into a fast food joint and went through the drive-through for coffee and a breakfast burrito. Marlee rarely ate breakfast herself, but she hadn’t eaten much more than half the meal she’d paid for the night before. She ordered the same for herself and managed to consume enough to keep from wearing half of it as Fletcher reached the park and turned down a pothole pitted service road.

  The food and coffee briefly improved her mood, but it wasn’t long before her mind was traveling the same ruts it had most of the night while she’d tried to sleep. As hard as she tried to convince herself that the Native American would be out in no time, with the charges dropped, she couldn’t.

  It took an effort to focus on her own concerns when they reached the site at long last after tramping through rough forest for nearly two hours. The site itself had been well trampled, unfortunately, by the searchers and the investigators that had walked the scene. Marlee surveyed the area without a lot of hope. She’d seen it and it didn’t look familiar to her. “Were you one of the first on the scene?”

  “Nope. They hadn’t moved you by the time I got here, though. You were lying right there, curled up in a ball.”

  She wondered if it was merely her imagination that he seemed to be undressing her with his gaze. Turning, she studied the spot and moved closer, working a slow circle around it and then widening it. “Do you know if they only connected me to the bear they found because I told them I’d been attacked? Or if they had some other reason to suppose there was a connection?”

  She discovered when she turned to look at him that he was focused enough on her that the sensation increased that he was remembering what she’d looked like then—naked. “It wasn’t anything they actually released … and I’m guessing they didn’t tell you, either, but they found your DNA under the bear’s claws. Weird, ain’t it, that you didn’t have any marks on you when they found you? How do you suppose the bear got that DNA in its claws?”

  Marlee’s uneasiness increased tenfold. “Maybe somebody just made that part up?” she suggested. “There were some guys at that site yesterday talking about information they’d gotten off the web.”

  “Ah … well, it’s possible. Thing is, those government guys that were here seemed to connect you to the bear, too, and I’m wondering why they would if there wasn’t something to the rumors.”

  Anger flickered through Marlee. “Why don’t you tell me your theory?” she said tightly.

  He shrugged. “I don’t have a theory. I’m just a park ranger.”

  He was lying. He suspected … something. She didn’t know what, but she could see he had some theory. “I don’t suppose any of this jogs your memory?”

  Marlee stared at him, realizing at least part of the explanation for the suspicion in his eyes. He thought she was lying about not remembering anything. “I had the impression that I was carried here.”

  “Well … I guess that’s something, then. Weird thing is, nobo
dy found tracks leading to you … any kind of tracks. It’s almost like …. You sprouted wings and flew.”

  “I didn’t fly,” Marlee said dryly. “Why don’t you just spit it out, Fletcher? I can see you have some thoughts on this.”

  “No ma’am. I’m just pointing out that nothing about this really seems to add up. We’re about ten miles, as the crow flies, from the site where the bear was killed. That’s a long way to wander off, even if you were dazed—which is also weird when you didn’t have a mark on you.”

  Marlee uttered a snort. “So … you’re suggesting I made up the whole thing? What possible motivation could I have for that?”

  He lifted his head and looked around the area. It made Marlee more uneasy, emphasizing the fact that they were miles away from anyone else. “That hadn’t occurred to me. Did you … make it all up?”

  “Like I said—no! I was in the middle of an exercise. I had every reason to want to complete it with flying colors and none to fake an … abduction.”

  “That’s interesting. Nobody mentioned an abduction. At least not officially.”

  “And unofficially?” Marlee asked tightly.

  “Well, now, there were rumors that there were signs of a sexual assault.”

  Which maybe explained why his fucking mind seemed to be in the gutter? “There wasn’t an assault, sexual or otherwise, unless you count the bear.”

  “Which also didn’t appear to have assaulted you. I’ve seen people that had a bad encounter with a bear. It’s an ugly thing what they can do to a person—really quickly.”

  He wasn’t just digging, Marlee realized abruptly. He had his own theory. She just couldn’t piece it together from the comments and questions. One thing seemed very clear, though. Even though he kept emphasizing the weird circumstances, he didn’t seem to think they were weird at all. It seemed to her that he was adding them up to something. But what? Aliens?