Oh, My Dragon

by Lani Lynn Vale

  Text copyright ©2017 Lani Lynn Vale

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Dedication

  This one is dedicated to my mom. If you hadn’t urged me to follow my dreams, I wouldn’t have the life that I do right now, doing what I love. Thank you. I love you.

  Acknowledgements

  Marisa-Rose Shor, you made this cover freakin’ beautiful, thank you so much.

  Kellie Montgomery—You’re an amazing editor, and thank you so much for getting to this so fast and never yelling at me for the short notice!

  Danielle Palumbo—I couldn’t do this without you. You’re amazing! The amount of time and effort you put into making these beauties shine is amazing, and I’m truly blessed to have found you.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Other titles by Lani Lynn Vale:

  The Freebirds

  Boomtown

  Highway Don’t Care

  Another One Bites the Dust

  Last Day of My Life

  Texas Tornado

  I Don’t Dance

  The Heroes of The Dixie Wardens MC

  Lights To My Siren

  Halligan To My Axe

  Kevlar To My Vest

  Keys To My Cuffs

  Life To My Flight

  Charge To My Line

  Counter To My Intelligence

  Right To My Wrong

  Code 11- KPD SWAT

  Center Mass

  Double Tap

  Bang Switch

  Execution Style

  Charlie Foxtrot

  Kill Shot

  Coup De Grace

  The Uncertain Saints

  Whiskey Neat

  Jack & Coke

  Vodka On The Rocks

  Bad Apple

  Dirty Mother

  Rusty Nail

  The Kilgore Fire Series

  Shock Advised

  Flash Point

  Oxygen Deprived

  Controlled Burn

  Put Out

  I Like Big Dragons Series

  I Like Big Dragons and I Cannot Lie

  Dragons Need Love, Too

  Oh, My Dragon

  The Dixie Warden Rejects

  Beard Mode

  Fear the Beard (3-30-17)

  Son of a Beard (4-27-17)

  Chapter 1

  Some girls watched Beauty and the Beast and wanted the prince. I want the library.

  -Meme

  Wink

  The stairs screamed in protest as I made my way back down the ladder.

  I hated my job.

  Well and truly hated it; I had no clue why I continued to do it when I hated it so much.

  In fact, if I’d just quit already, I would be free to do my photography full time.

  But that was the thing about me. I hated quitting. Anything.

  It didn’t matter what it was.

  A sport. A novel. A job.

  They were all the same in my book.

  Not to mention that I had no guarantee that next month would be as good as this month.

  Christmas was now over, and I’d realized that if I managed to get at least six clients a month, I could make enough to carry me through until next month.

  I also sold my photography as well. Anything I was able to sell was an added bonus that gave me a tiny cushion and made everything a little bit easier.

  But my brain was still stuck in ‘poor’ mode. Meaning that I couldn’t quit. Not when my mind still had me eating Ramen noodles when my bank account clearly could accommodate Velveeta mac and cheese.

  My brain just couldn’t process that I was in the black on the balance sheet, not the red.

  So, until I was confident in that, it meant I had to stick it out at my day job.

  Once I had enough in my savings to hold me for a year, then I’d know it was time to stop my day job and pursue my passion, but not until then.

  Not after the last four years.

  Which was why I was currently crawling down the steps of the upstairs loft in my client’s house.

  I was a professional cleaner.

  Or maid, if you wanted to get all technical and shit.

  I worked for a man who I never saw, yet he always managed to make a huge fucking mess.

  My guess was that he only came out at night, after I was gone.

  That would certainly explain why I never saw him.

  It would also explain why his house was such a freakin’ pigsty every other morning when I came back.

  Last night, it appeared, he’d had another party, because there were dishes and cups everywhere, as well as questionable things on his sheets.

  My boss owned a large house on the outskirts of Dallas, right on the lake.

  It was a three story monstrosity that was the bane of my existence.

  But, alas, I had it clean.

  For today, at least.

  Now it was time to go home.

  Which I did not five minutes later, being sure to lock up so I didn’t get another threatening letter from my boss for forgetting.

  Which I never did.

  Ever.

  I was a freak about locks.

  I had six of them on my door at home, as well as a reinforced door, a security chain, and a half-assed security system I’d bought off of Amazon.

  So yes, I understood all too well the importance of locking doors.

  Something I’d found out the hard way.

  Meaning I didn’t screw up when it came to locking a door, especially not someone’s that I had to go into where there were so many freakin’ places to hide.

  After locking up, I made my way home, thankful that the day’s traffic was over with. Mostly.

  The interstate was always busy, but it was nothing like the five o’clock rush hour.

  Today, as I drove by Taco Bell and decided to get myself a burrito that I ate in the car on the way home, I was told myself that tomorrow I would start my diet.

  Tomorrow I would lose the ten pounds I’d been promising to do for the last half a year.

  But would it even matter if I did?

  It was highly unlikely that I would find anyone.

  Not unless I could meet them in traffic, at my boss’s shitty big house, or at the houses where I painted my murals.

  Speaking of murals, my best friend and brother from another mother, Shane, chose that moment to call.

  “Hello?” I answered, pulling into my driveway.

  “Why, oh why, do I not know how to paint yet?” he as
ked me.

  I laughed.

  “Because you like to work with metal,” I said amusingly. “And you don’t paint well.”

  “You like to sculpt with metal, but you can paint, too,” he countered.

  “That’s true,” I said, getting out of my car, being sure to grab the trash from my devoured burrito out of the cup holder.

  I sighed and started up the front path that led to my apartment, then even further inside the building.

  “What are you doing tonight?” I asked him.

  “Working at the bar,” he said almost distractedly. “Hey, can I call you back? I think someone’s here.”

  He hung up before I could reply, and I sighed, dropping my phone into my purse and hitching the handles back over my shoulder.

  I had no life.

  Really, I didn’t.

  I’d worked my ass off all day, and what did I have to show for it?

  Nothing.

  Absolutely nothing.

  No friends besides one who was a self-proclaimed workaholic and another who hated going out and doing anything, and that included spending time with me, unless she was between books.

  A job that I hated.

  I had nothing.

  Except a dead body lying in the middle of the hallway leading to my apartment.

  And a man leaning over that body.

  I didn’t scream, though.

  No, I did something stupid. I pulled out my phone and took a picture right when his head turned.

  He tensed, and it was then that I did the only smart thing I’d done in all day.

  I ran.

  I’d never been more thankful in my life that I only wore tennis shoes everywhere I went.

  The jeans were a hindrance since they were so tight, but they didn’t stop my legs from pumping or slowing me down.

  Not with my heart beating ninety miles an hour and all that adrenaline coursing through my veins.

  The soft curse of the male who’d been leaning over my neighbor’s dead body sounded from behind me and then his heavy footsteps ate up the distance.

  I ran faster.

  So fast, in fact, that I ran right out of my shoe.

  I didn’t dare stop for it, though.

  I kept going. Down the steps, out the door, and around the corner to the laundry room.

  I made it through the door and got it shut and locked, eyes on the handle just in case he somehow had superpowers that made him able to open the lock without a key.

  I bid him good luck. I wasn’t able to do it even with the key. Which was why the residents of the building had started leaving it open for that very reason.

  I kept staring at it as I backed up towards the stairs that led inside the building.

  I had just made it to the steps when I felt it.

  A man’s—the man’s—steely arm circled my waist, pulling me back against his hard chest.

  I opened my mouth to scream but found that my vocal cords didn’t work.

  Mostly because the man’s hand had tightened around my throat, putting pressure there and letting me know that freaking out was not the way to go right then.

  My body, however, didn’t get that memo.

  Using my hands, feet, head and teeth, I started to thrash wildly.

  My arms dug into the flesh of the man’s hands.

  My feet started kicking at his shins.

  And my head turned to the side so I could bury my teeth in his shoulder.

  His other hand came up, though, and squeezed my jaw until I had no choice but to let go of him.

  And once I was free, he held my head in place and spoke softly in my ear.

  “I didn’t kill her,” he growled. “But the man who did is still here. He hasn’t left the building, so please shut the fuck up and be still.”

  I froze, utterly and completely.

  I also don’t know why I believed him, but I did.

  The sureness in his voice, the complete truthfulness I could hear from that raspy dark tenor, had me believing him.

  And I went limp in his arms, no longer fighting.

  “Where?” I managed to squeak out.

  My voice worked this time.

  “I don’t know,” he whispered almost soundlessly. “But I need you to go into your apartment and not come out.”

  I started to panic slightly.

  “How do you know whomever it is isn’t in my apartment?” I asked wildly.

  “Because I can see his trail,” he answered, pulling me back and confusing me all at once.

  He started walking, me supported in his hands now, until he’d stepped over the lifeless body of my neighbor.

  “Go.”

  I went.

  Straight to my apartment.

  Where I then called the police.

  ***

  Ian

  “What happened?” the cop asked me.

  I fought the urge to tell him ‘none of your fucking business.’ But only just barely.

  Narrowing my eyes, I sent my stories into his subconscious, giving him the idea that I’d explained it all sufficiently.

  The cop nodded.

  “You can go. Please don’t step through the crime scene again. Use the emergency stairs.” He pointed to the hallway just to the side of the woman’s door.

  Wink.

  My hand burned where I’d touched her neck earlier, and I had to also battle the urge to knock on her apartment door and demand she come with me.

  At least until the fucker who’d killed her neighbor was caught.

  I had a nagging suspicion that this wouldn’t be the end of it. Whomever had killed Farrow’s girl had done so because he knew who Farrow was.

  That’d been the only impressions I could get before Wink had interrupted me with terror in her eyes as she ran from the site of the murder victim.

  My eyes went down to the body of the woman again, and I had to resist the urge to place my hands on her again.

  See, dead people told stories.

  Not too many, but some of the people on this Earth were sensitive to ghosts.

  Me being one of them.

  I was what one would call a retro cognitive. Or, in layman’s terms, I was able to see things that happened after they happened.

  I received that gift, as well as the gift of healing, from my dragon, Mace.

  Mace was my bonded dragon and had been since I was nineteen.

  Being thirty-six now, I’d had Mace for seventeen years and would hopefully have him for many years to come.

  But the fact is, there were times that I wanted to kill him just for the fact that he liked to mess with me.

  He liked to make my life harder than it needed to be and, at times, it went overboard before he realized he’d gone too far.

  Like now, for instance.

  I was ready to go, and he was nowhere in sight.

  He knew I wanted to leave.

  Knew I needed to leave. Yet he wasn’t here.

  “Mace,” I said through gritted teeth. “Where are you?”

  If I didn’t leave soon, I’d likely lose whatever patience I had left and go back up the stairs, ruining what I’d put in place by taking the woman who had made my dick stir for the first time in well over a year.

  Which was why I started walking instead of staying there any longer, waiting for my wayward dragon who thought he was being funny when he wasn’t.

  I was about a mile away when I heard the flapping of Mace’s wings from behind me.

  He landed just long enough for me to sweep myself gracefully onto his back before he was up and away, heading straight for my house.

  The house that, incidentally, was the same house that Wink cleaned three times a week.

  I smelled her the minute I walked in the door to my domain.

  She smelled sweet with a hint of flowers. Honeysuckle and vanilla to be specific.

  And it was everywhere.

  Before i
t’d just been a simple indulgence on my part.

  I’d wanted her here, in my domain. I wanted her smell to permeate everything around me, stuff that I made a part of my home just to see if she’d like it.

  And mostly, she did.

  When I’d get home from work, I’d go over the video footage of her day. I watched her clean. Watched her sweat. Watched her cheeks become pink.

  Sometimes I purposefully made my place dirtier just to see her work a little bit harder than normal.

  And she always did.

  My favorite days were Wednesdays because that’s when she got down on her knees and scrubbed my kitchen and bathroom floors.

  It was a tossup with Mondays because that is when Wink changed the sheets on my bed.

  Having her scent on my sheets made me happy. Well as happy as I could be without actually having the object of that happiness in the bed with me.

  I’d just slipped off of Mace, my feet meeting the spongy grass that surrounded the outside of my home, when I heard a voice that grated on my nerves.

  “Where have you been?”

  I swallowed hard, trying to keep my temper in check, and turned.

  “Cleaning up your mess.”

  “Seems like you were making a bigger one rather than cleaning one up,” Keifer snapped. “Why were you there?”

  I crossed my arms over my chest.

  “Your brother was there, and you asked me to keep tabs on him and his whereabouts, remember?” I said calmly, even though what I was feeling was definitely anything but calm.

  “I wish you’d move in with the rest of us,” Keifer, the King of Dragons, growled in frustration as he took a look around my house.

  I didn’t bother to answer him.

  It was a constant battle with Keifer and me.

  He wanted me to live at the sanctuary with the rest of them, but I couldn’t do that.

  “You know why I can’t,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “I know,” he said. “It doesn’t change the fact that I would like you to stay there. We’re safer in numbers.”

  I just stared at him, and he sighed.

  “Shouldn’t you be with your wife and children?” I asked, hoping that’d get him to leave.

  My hopes were dashed when he shook his head.

  “They’re at home,” he said. “But my brother’s not.”

  I nodded.

  “Understandable,” I said. “You know what happened?”