The Surprise (Secret Baby Bad Boy Romance)

by Faye, Amy

  The clothes that appeared were familiar, in a way. An expensive suit, probably with an Italian tailor's name on the label, dark enough that she wouldn't have been able to tell it wasn't black without comparing it to a color card.

  He slipped to the forest floor on his knees, and again, he bowed, this time with a body on two legs. Then he turned, and Diana's suspicions were confirmed.

  Alex Blume looked at her with an expression that was too exhausted to be anything but tired. It gave him a sad tint to his face, but the way that his chest heaved told her that there wasn't going to be any way to tell what was and wasn't just a result of exhaustion.

  The hard stare told her that there was something else in his look, too, something that she utterly failed to grasp for a long time. And then, suddenly, she got it. He wanted her to copy him.

  Diana slipped down the tree, her eyes still locked with the giant beast, until she felt the dirt under her butt. Then she slowly leaned forward from the hip until her hair pooled in the grass and she finally forced herself to look away, praying that the dragon didn't decide to kill her after all. Not that it would have mattered, she reminded herself. There would be no escaping if the dragon decided to kill her.

  There was no sound to indicate when the change occurred; no feeling in the air, no weight lifting off her shoulders. No gust of wind. Just a woman's voice, speaking loudly enough that Diana thought that she was listening to a P.A. system.

  "You shouldn't have come here," she said. Diana wasn't sure who she was addressing it to: her, or Alex, or both. She was even less sure how she was supposed to answer, so she said nothing.

  "I was attacked." Alex's voice didn't have that quality. He sounded like he was a dozen paces away, speaking loudly. Which he was.

  "I can see that," said the woman's voice again, amplified still. Diana didn't dare look up to see her expression. "And you thought that I would help you? After all these years? That's terribly cute..." she paused a long time. Too long, Diana thought. "Alex."

  The tone that she said the last name with gave Diana the distinct and unmistakable impression that Alex wasn't his proper name. Diana made a space for that information in her memory. Panic fought into her throat and Diana stifled it as best she could.

  "And you," said the woman. "You came with him?"

  "I don't know what's going on! This is crazy!" Diana's voice sounded like a screech beside the other woman's. It held an otherworldly quality, in addition to the volume, one that Diana didn't want to think too hard about. She didn't want to think about any of it too hard.

  "You should know, Diana," the woman started, and paused. If her purpose was to let Diana try to figure out why the woman knew her name, then Diana used the silence appropriately. "You can't trust this Mr. Blume."

  Diana said nothing. Alex spoke up, though. "Don't listen to her. She doesn't know anything."

  "In my house, you claim this? You know, I still haven't decided what to do with you, 'Alex.' You ought to keep quiet while you're still in my good graces."

  "Why can't I trust him?"

  Diana kept her eyes on the dirt, counted the blades of grass in her field of view, and hoped that she looked sufficiently penitent.

  "Well, for a start... you don't want to tell her, 'Alex'?"

  "I have something you'll want," Alex answered. "If you let us go, you won't regret it."

  "No?... Alright, then. I guess I'll do it myself. Do you know who killed your father, Diana?"

  "He didn't do it," Diana said, her gut twisting with the thought that he very well could have. "That... doesn't make any sense."

  "No? Well, that remains to be seen," said the woman. "Look at me."

  Diana did, and found herself staring at a woman that she'd never seen before. One that stood over her with a slender build, breasts that might have been appealing to a man, hips that would have been appealing to anyone, and most notably of all, not a shred of clothing on her. Her eyes shined gold.

  "What do you want from me?"

  "The same thing that everyone wants," the woman answered. "Certainly the same thing that Alex here wants: Alvin Kramer's horde."

  15

  Alvin Kramer had many things; he had a double-bit axe, for example, that he was always looking for uses for, and a great deal too many saws, but the one thing that Diana would never have accused her father of having was a 'horde.' So to hear someone trying to seriously suggest to her that they were after his 'horde' told her everything she needed to know about these people.

  Specifically, they were crazy. All of them, as crazy as anything. They obviously didn't know her dad very well. If they did then they would know, right off the bat, there's nothing about Alvin Kramer that hordes. He was constantly looking to get rid of things. If they wanted to find out, all they had to do was go to the cabin, which was... she tried to orient herself.

  It wasn't far, just a few dozen miles to the North-East, she thought, if she knew where she was, which she probably didn't.

  "Horde?"

  The sound of her voice was dim and maybe a little bit stupid and she should have sounded less stupid, she hoped, but there wasn't much chance of that happening. After all, if she was going to sound like she knew what the hell she was talking about, the first step was going to have to be knowing what the hell they were talking about.

  Since they were crazy, and more than that, she was also just as crazy as they were, it wasn't going to do a whole lot of good.

  "Horde," the woman said. "Look, this is all so tiring. I can't stand doing this, but..." then she let out a sigh and leaned back against a tree. She looked up at the sky.

  "There's nothing you need to worry about, Diana," said Alex. He had apparently decided to join the conversation after all. His hair was matted to his head from sweat that still formed beads on his forehead. He still took noticeably deeper breaths than should have been necessary. "Just forget about all of this."

  "Good, I think I should."

  "Oh, you definitely should," he confirmed. "Because if you don't, Cyanora here is going to kill you, I guarantee you that."

  "You'd like that, wouldn't you? Finish what you started."

  The conversation between them went on as if she wasn't right there. As if they weren't talking about killing her, killing her father. As if it were perfectly normal to talk about killing people. To make matters worse, Alex didn't deny it.

  "Stop it," Diana said, as the two of them stared. Alex looked over at her immediately. The woman, the one that he kept calling 'Cyanora,' took a little longer, and there was a subtle stiffening in her posture when she did it, less relaxed than she had been before. "I don't see what this has to do with me or my father. Hell, I don't see why I don't just wake up and realize that this was all just a weird, trippy dream."

  Cyanora looked at her, her lips big and voluptuous and pouty even as the expression on her face continued to be a hard stare. Then she spoke. "You're not going to forget this, and I'm not going to kill you, in spite of that. In spite of the fact that I probably should kill you, if I were being smart, to be perfectly honest."

  "Oh, good," Diana said, in a voice that said it was anything but good. "I'm glad you're not going to kill me, at least. That's good news."

  "You're not dreaming, either, I'm sorry to say."

  "That's obviously a lie, though, because just a minute ago, you were both dragons," Diana said. She laid her head back against the trunk of the tree behind her and closed her eyes and used a little force of will to try to wake up. Any second, in the space of a heartbeat, she would kick awake in her bed.

  "That's not technically true," Cyanora's voice said, as Diana willed the voice away, willed the forest away, willed the whole thing out of existence so that she could go back to her bed and back to her perfectly normal life where there weren't crazy people trying to tell her that her father had some kind of horde they were all after.

  "No? Well, good. I'm glad that there's some complexity to my dreams. I was thinking that dreams about getting fucked by billion
aires were getting too simple and straightforward."

  "Because the billionaire you were dreaming about fucking is still a dragon, even now," the woman's voice said. "He's just putting up a front. A fake. We've transformed our bodies to look like yours, which is something that we do to get by in this day and age."

  "Oh, good. I imagine you've got a desk job somewhere? With a body like that, you could land any man you wanted. Never have to work again."

  A laugh cut through the darkness of her closed eyes, and Diana opened them automatically at the noise. "Please, little girl, I don't think that you're understanding. I've lived here for a hundred years or more. I've been here so long that if I wanted to, I could own most every part of this state. Hell, if your boyfriend ever gets around to explaining any of this to you, he might just tell you that is why he came here.

  "So for now, you know nothing, and that's why I'm going to let you leave, and I'll admit that Aleroth did me a favor, getting rid of your father, so I'll cut him a little bit of slack this once."

  "I didn't," he finally started, but the woman, nude and attractive enough to keep even Diana's attention on her, shot him a look that could have burned a hole through his expensive suit.

  "Lie to the girl all you like, but don't lie to me. Everyone knows, he was at the top of your list, and who should show up right before he dies, but you?"

  Alex's lips pressed together to make a firm line across his face, but he didn't say anything else. There was nothing else to say, really. If he was guilty, then lying was only going to dig him in deeper. If he wasn't, well...

  Diana's eyes slipped shut. If he wasn't, then it looked pretty damn bad for him. Maybe he should figure that out before he tried to claim that he was totally innocent.

  There was a noise behind her. The woman's eyes snapped up, and Diana turned to look. An instant later she heard another noise, loud and bellowing and powerful, and a voice snapped inside her head as a sonorous roar shook her ribs. "Time to go," it seemed to say. If she had a place to go, then she didn't know where it was.

  A big clawed hand grasped her again, and she was squeezed and pressed into a sea of rough blue scales and then the forest started to move around her all at once.

  Around her, the forest exploded in flames, the heat unimaginable. She tried to find that limp place of acceptance that she had felt before. Tried to go away in her mind. Something stopped her, and it wasn't hard to figure out what it was. There was something that she had to think about, and think very hard.

  Someone had killed her father. Someone or something. There was no proof that it was Alex; that was pure conjecture. That was something that the woman, the blue dragon that now clutched Diana herself to its chest, had speculated. But there was no proof of any of it.

  The blue was smaller than the dragon that Alex had transformed into, though not by near the difference between either of them and the red dragon. It turned and pitched and rolled as it flew and Diana could feel the rotational forces trying to wrench her out of the big dragon's grasp. She had to pray that it wasn't going to kill her, but something told Diana that they were making an effort not to.

  Otherwise, she told herself, the blue could have killed her when it had the chance. There was nothing that she could have done to stop it, when she was standing there in the forest. One of those blasts of lightning would have crashed down on her head and she'd have been an ex-girl.

  Diana saw something coming from the side; from the angle that she had, she knew that it was likely that she was the first one to see it, and she tried desperately to call out to the blue drake that carried her.

  The words were lost to the air and the wind, though, the speed too much to hear anything at all, which was why the black dragon, small and flying fast with its wings tucked in tight for a rapid dive, smacked into the side of the blue, and that in turn was the reason that Diana found herself hurtling towards the ground with nothing to stop her but the force of broken hopes and dreams.

  16

  In the crystal clarity of the moment before she died, the moment usually reserved for seeing your life flash before your eyes, Diana thought how terribly near they were to the base of the mountain she'd called home for most of her embarrassingly brief life. She took another moment, the space of a heartbeat, to hope that there was something waiting for her after death and that Dad would be there for her, maybe to explain what the fuck had just killed her.

  The blow didn't come from the direction she'd expected, and it hurt more than she'd expected splattering on the ground to hurt.

  Diana had always imagined that falling from an excessive height, hundreds of feet in the air, would feel like nothing at all. She'd fall, her stomach would do several flips like some sort of Cirque du Doleil act inside her guts, and maybe she'd puke. She would scream, but she was screaming already.

  Then, when the earth finally hit, it would be an instantaneous absence of life. She'd go from being a person, terrified and seeing the ground grow below her, straight to being jelly that someone had splattered on the ground. It was a thought that most people probably didn't spend a lot of time on. Diana wished that she spent less time thinking about it. It would have probably made her day better, on average, particularly because there was a nice large, plate-glass window that it seemed any little gust of wind might tip the building over for her to fall out of in the office.

  But as long as she stayed inside the library, where there were no windows at all, she was okay. That was what kept her working there, in spite of the hellevator that made her think the entire way up that it could drop her in an instant. That was what kept her working there in spite of the number '20' that showed on the display in that infernal contraption when she finally arrived at work.

  At least, she had worked in a building like that. She didn't work there any more. As she let her body hurt, let herself scream, she realized that it had been more than a second or two since the hurt had started. Moreover, if she was still falling, her stomach wasn't doing that fucked up flipping it had been doing.

  Maybe she had died, after all. Maybe that brief moment of pain, pain that she still felt as a dull ache in her ribs, had been the first thing to hit, and she'd been immediately transported up into heaven. Diana opened her eyes and immediately closed them again when the wind hit them, hard enough to hurt.

  An impossibly bright light shone in the middle of an open blue sky, and everything hurt more than it could possibly have hurt if she hadn't died. That was what she thought, anyways. But then she felt something pull tighter around her, and in the darkness that surrounded Diana with her eyes closed, she thought that she could smell something familiar. Something leathery and woody and masculine.

  It was a smell that stuck with her, not least because it had clung to her hair and her skin for hours after she'd finished with Alex Blume, and kept her awake and overstimulated and way too fucking aroused after she'd left, all night.

  Her eyes opened, hoping that she'd understand something, that she'd been in some kind of strange seizure and now she was starting to come out of it. It explained the pain in her side, for example, better than anything else.

  She was held in the air, carried under one arm of a dragon like a rag doll. Her leg dangled awkwardly behind them, even as the rest of her body seemed as if it were perfectly satisfied to stick in close and fit into the slipstream around the giant green beast.

  A voice spoke, somewhere directly in her mind. A voice that was quite impossible, first because it was inside her head, and second because it seemed to legitimately expect an answer.

  "Are you alright?" It wasn't Alex's voice, not quite. There was more to it. It layered over itself, some parts deep and others shrill, like someone had run the whole thing through an octave chorus synthesizer.

  "I'm fine," she said out loud. The words failed to reach her own ears, and she knew that the dragon couldn't possibly have heard her, but it seemed to be satisfied with her response regardless. She didn't bother wondering why that could be; there had already been enoug
h craziness going on that she wasn't going to question it. "Where are we going?"

  If she was imagining things, talking to a voice in her head, a voice that she couldn't answer out loud and didn't know how to answer in her head to its apparent satisfaction, then she might as well try to get it to feed her some made-up information, right? There had been enough other crazy things going on that talking to herself seemed like a logical next step.

  "If they're attacking here, then there's no place that's really safe," came the answer. It was obvious enough, and yet it was remarkable how, for a voice that didn't seem to be remotely real, it did a surprising amount to disturb her.

  "Well fuck," she said, as if that was going to help.

  "Well fuck, indeed. We have to find someplace else. Someplace safe."

  "Where on Earth could possibly be safe from... whatever is chasing us? How many even are there?"

  "Too many," he told her.

  If there was ever going to be any proof that it was Alex, then the absolute refusal to tell her anything was going to be it. He was passing with flying colors, so far, as much as she hated it. As much as she normally wouldn't have stood for it. There wasn't much choice, though, and Diana knew it.

  "Your father's territory. Where is it?"

  "I don't understand the question."

  "There's a lot you don't understand. Where did he stay? Where did he feel safe?"

  "I don't know," she said. The air seemed to stop pulling at her; it stopped threatening to rip her limbs right out of their sockets, and her voice actually managed to reach her ears this time. At the same time, they were flying dangerously close to the surface of the earth. It was an illusion, she knew, but she would have bet her life that she could reach her hand right out and touch the grass beneath them.

  "Well, let's start with where he lived."

  "I can't tell you that," she said glumly. "Because I wouldn't even know how to tell someone how to fly there."

  A mighty flap of the great beast's wings and they darted straight up. He turned in a slow arc, still flying fast. But it was slow enough that she got a good look at the mountain.