The Surprise (Secret Baby Bad Boy Romance)

by Faye, Amy

  Diana had a life in the city. She had classes to get back to at some point, if she didn't get eaten before then. She had things to worry herself over. Living in a cabin on the mountain, like a hermit, like her Dad had, wasn't an option for her even if she wanted it, and it wasn't what she wanted.

  The bolt made a satisfying clunk when she finally did get it open, and then she turned the handle, breathed in the familiar scent of noxious fumes, and stepped inside.

  19

  The sickening reality of the entire house didn't change how he felt about it; it was cozy, and it did seem warm, and neither of those things changed that anyone who dared to actually stay there longer than a few hours was going to have a bad time.

  "Grab that painting," he told Diana absently. "Take it into the front room. First job as my collection manager."

  He sensed an instant's hesitation, which he ignored. The painting was important; sufficiently important that he would make an effort not to forget it in his haste to leave this place. But it wasn't the most important thing here.

  Then there was some movement behind them and he felt rather than heard Cyanora come in. He turned to regard her for only a moment before he turned back to the corner, crouched low and examining it with every sense he had at his command, except for scent, which was quite literally the furthest thing from under his command. If he could shut it off, he would, because the information he could get from it was already in his mind. But it would be impossible, and would no doubt continue to taunt him as long as it could manage.

  The blue dragon was as serious as ever, and she seemed to think that there was someone around to be tempted by her body. Someone who didn't know that it was all an illusion that she kept up.

  Still, he had to give her credit for one thing; she didn't make any special effort to look false, per se. She looked to be approaching middle-age in a graceful sort of way, though her breasts had escaped this effect. Someone who saw them, someone who didn't know that she was something very other than a woman who was making friends with the early parts of forty, might have imagined that she looked the way that she did because of surgical implants that were very well-done.

  Now, she was wearing someone's clothes, and from the way that she wore them, he guessed that they weren't hers, and that they weren't magicked into existence. Given the masculine cut, he guessed that they had likely belonged to Keleth. The notion of taking the dead dragon's clothing hadn't even occurred to him, though there was something about it that made him glad he hadn't, even though it meant that he wouldn't have every piece of Keleth's horde, however meager it seemed to be.

  He looked over the corner a little more, though he'd already seen what he needed to see. Or, more accurately, he'd already decided that there wasn't anything to see. Whoever had done it had cleaned very thoroughly. A few scratches here and there, but they'd made a very special effort. Perhaps there was magic at work, but the stink of black magic made it too hard to make a judgment.

  Magic sight had never been a strength of his, either; he could do it, give or take as well as most, but certainly no better than average. If Cyanora wanted to investigate then she was better than he was, but she seemed to have already made up her mind about who was to blame for the crimes that had taken place here. She'd apparently decided that it was him, and needed no time at all to prove it.

  Besides that, she seemed disinterested in making even the remotest serious accusation to begin with. She accused him of killing Keleth with a sense of respect more than anything. The implication was clear in her tone, in her posture, in everything else as well. She would have killed him, herself, eventually, if she thought that she could. He was a low man on the totem pole, in her mind, but only because he was doing something that made no sense to her.

  Giving up his birthright, his claim to any particular power, and particular moving out to the middle of nowhere, a territory that he barely knew, was as good as giving everything up, and Alex knew instinctively that there was no way she would understand that.

  She, and the others, tolerated Alex's strangeness because he had claimed as much power as he could; the only difference between what he did and what they did was where he did it. They did it in the back alleys of the world, pretending that they were important and drawing invisible lines on the map, lines reinforced as much by their own powers as by the recognition that other drakes gave them.

  Alex, on the other hand, had given up much of his territory in order to enter into human society and gain power there, where the humans were forced to watch and admire from afar. Celebrity worship was a bit old hat, in dragon society, but when there were so many humans getting in on the act, who could blame someone who had been around for so long trying to get back in on the action?

  That was how they saw it, anyways, and Alex had no desire to correct their perspective. After all, they might have been right, underneath it all. He could have retreated from society like Keleth had. He could have become a nobody, keeping a little place in a backwoods mountain and a small, poorly-maintained roost on a hill at the edge of town. If he didn't want the fame, he didn't have to take it.

  But he had taken it, and there were probably reasons for that, probably reasons that, if he saw a therapist, and if he educated them on dragon societies and social forms, would have been very interesting.

  But he didn't see a therapist, and if he did, he wouldn't have told them about his place in the world. It would be a fast and easy way to a room with padded walls, regardless of how much he could prove it. He hadn't any desire to get humans thinking about dragons, either way. Aside from the logo of his company, an understated thing that nobody took for anything more than a logo, he had left that world behind.

  Eventually, someone would start to ask why he didn't noticeably age, and he would have to stage a death and disappear. A plane crash would work, he thought; the bodies in those were so horrifyingly mangled that there was little doubt that they'd believe him dead, and he could walk away and disappear for a few years, perhaps a few decades.

  Perhaps, in that time, he would change his mind about all of this. Twenty years was a long time, but it would only get longer from here, and he would eventually move on. Everyone thought it, and he thought it too, himself. But he didn't think about it, because he'd have been a fool to. That was a long time away from now, and it assumed that whoever had come for Keleth wouldn't come after him, as well. That assumption had already proven itself dangerous.

  If Cyanora used her senses, then she made no mention of it.

  "What are you still doing here, Diana?" his voice was low and friendly and she seemed to suddenly realize that he was standing there. Even if she couldn't smell it, the magic was working its way into her mind, he knew, and mingling with other things, as well.

  This was, after all, her home, even if she had left it. This was where 'Alvin Kramer' had lived most of his life, as far as she knew, and it was where he had died. She might have misunderstood her role in a great deal of it, but she was right about one thing, which was that it represented a history that she couldn't go back to any longer. It was gone, now, and it was going to stay gone.

  "What?" Her voice sounded far away; her mind was occupied with something else.

  "Take the painting, wait for me downstairs."

  "This painting?"

  "That painting."

  "Oh," she said dimly. "Okay."

  He heard the sound of an easel shuffling as she pulled the wood and cloth canvas from where it lay, propped against it, and then he heard the sound of her shoes on the wooden floorboards, retreating and heading down the stairs. Alex frowned and rubbed his fingers together absently. He clicked his jaw in a vain attempt to get his mood under control.

  "What do you need?" He wasn't in any kind of mood for any of this, but he was even less in the mood to have Cyanora stand there while he tried to examine the scene of the murder. While he tried to figure out in his mind what they had done and why, and why whoever had done it chose Keleth.

  While he wonder
ed what the murder had to do with the ancient red that he'd seen. He was green, and Cyanora blue. Color wasn't so much a hierarchy, though there were plenty who would disagree with that assessment, but it was a genetic line. Keleth had been red, and proud of it. And now there was an ancient red around, perhaps five hundred years or more older than his old rival, and he was either here to avenge, or he was here for something else.

  Alex's frown deepened as he waited for Cyanora to respond, but he wasn't worried about her attacking him. It hit him dimly, as he felt the blow hit him, that he'd been foolish not to consider it.

  20

  It was hard to kill a dragon, and harder still to do it without a weapon; that didn't mean that they couldn't feel any pain, and it certainly didn't mean that Alex felt no pain. The fact that the blow came as a complete surprise, well, that wasn't any help, either. He was set sprawling on the ground, his balance lost and his feelings hurting more than the place where her foot had connected, in the place between his shoulder blades.

  The second blow was less of a surprise, and less of an embarrassment, but it hurt more. The third that came to join it a moment later made him worry that he might be in for a whole world of hurt before he got her back under control.

  "You son of a bitch," the blue dragon growled at him, her human-looking breasts jiggling as she punctuated every word by putting the point of the boots she'd pulled on between his ribs, hard enough to hurt. They threatened to start cracking soon, in spite of his relatively improved ability to take hits like this, compared to normal people.

  He forced his hands to move, even as they protested against the movement and reminded him how much easier it would be to just stay there and let the hits come. After all, at least then he wouldn't have to expend any energy to continue suffering. Just let the kicks keep coming.

  In spite of his muscles' protests, he caught the next kick and pulled her down and to the ground. If she wanted him dead, she could have done it. The fact that she wasn't trying very hard, the fact that she hadn't even bothered to procure a weapon more effective than a pair of worn, ill-fitting steel-toed boots, was proof enough that she wanted him to suffer, much more than she wanted him to die.

  "Would you stop that," he asked her, in a harsh whisper. He hoped that Diana wouldn't hear them, but the odds were bad. When she didn't appear in the hallway, though, he reassessed his estimation to 'either she didn't hear or she didn't care.'

  Either way was better than having her come up and investigate, especially as she struggled under him and he shifted the weight of his hips to press down on the blue below him.

  It had been a long time since he'd been a dragon in anything other than the back of his mind. He'd tasted it, here and there. Enough to make it seem strange to be in such a small, fragile body. Enough to make it a little bit difficult for him to really feel at home looking like he did.

  Inside, he would always be a dragon, and he would always think like a dragon, but that was true by degrees, and he knew that it had been a very, very long time since he had really well and truly understood the culture.

  "You killed him, you son of a bitch," she breathed. "Why'd you have to kill him?"

  Her eyes were wild with anger, but that wasn't what made him catch himself before he started to meet that anger with some of his own. Her eyes were wet. Cyanora was a petty bitch, in more than a few ways. She did what she had to do, did what she wanted, and took whatever she could, from anyone she could.

  But she was upset about something. About Keleth's passing, apparently. And she wanted him to suffer for causing it. Apparently, he guessed, the reasons that she wanted him to suffer had nothing to do with Keleth's suffering before he died. She was a dragon, after all, and that simply wasn't the way that they were built.

  She wanted him to suffer, Alex guessed, because she was angry at him for making her suffer. He was being punished, in the only way she knew how. But in the end, he was older than her, he was stronger than her, and in their bound human forms, he was bigger than her, to match.

  "What were you to him," Alex asked. His eyes narrowed in a silent threat, one that he hoped she couldn't possibly miss. "Why are you so tore up about his death? All it means to you is a mad dash to take his territory and his stuff, isn't that right?"

  "Fuck you," she spat, and squirmed harder. He held her down under the force of his weight, and reached for the magic that would allow him to rip the truth straight out of her mind.

  It would be harder for him to read her than it would be if he wanted to take the information from a human. Diana was easy to read, as easy as anyone. Easier, maybe, from having something inside her head from a very young age, and apparently having lived there for a long time. But it wouldn't be impossible. Particularly not since he was more than two hundred years her elder. Particularly since they were outside her territory, now, and inside of Keleth's. At least, the land that used to be Keleth's.

  Nothing happened. He reached, and focused, and found himself grasping at nothing at all, as if the black magic that had been done in the room had blocked out everything else along with it. It made no sense, but there was no other interpretation waiting for him, either.

  "What are you doing to me," he growled. He put the meat of his forearm down on Cyanora's throat and pressed his weight hard. Hard enough that he could hear the vague choking noises. "And answer my God damned questions."

  She shook her head, but the gesture wasn't one of refusal. It was an answer to his question. Which one, he didn't know, because she sure as hell couldn't speak out loud, and if he couldn't reach out to the inside of her head, he guessed that she couldn't put anything into his own. He lifted up his arm and she sucked in a hard breath.

  "I'm not doing anything," she said. "I swear."

  "Why not? You want to kick the hell out of me, how hard would it be?"

  "I have to know," she said, her eyes hard and staring up at him. "I have to know why. He wasn't a threat to you!"

  He slapped her, the sound resounding through the room and out into the hall. If she hadn't heard anything before this, then Diana had to have heard that. But if she did, she made no response.

  "What did he mean to you? I'm the one asking the questions here, now speak."

  "I don't have to tell you anything," she said. The fire was back into her eyes. The anger. It burned deep down in her chest, in her very soul.

  "Then what do you see? The spell here. What is it?"

  "You ought to know," she growled, squirming hard again to get out from under him.

  "Well, humor me," he said, his voice hard. "Tell me what you know, because I love to hear it from you."

  "It's all wrapped up around you. You're filthy with it. And it's because you killed him, you mud-hearted son of a bitch."

  He swallowed the insult for two reasons, neither one of them coming to his mind consciously. The first, because he had already gotten what he wanted from her, the information that he needed about the magic. At least, as much as she was ready to tell. As much as she was able to figure out, with her emotions running so high.

  Second, and more importantly, because it meant something bad. Third, and most important of all, was that he didn't hear anything at all around them. There should have been some kind of response from downstairs. Even if she were ignoring them, there had to be something going on. And he heard nothing at all.

  There were other questions running through his mind, too; things that he could explain, but only in an academic sense, after all this time. Whatever was between her and Keleth, she was hurt by his death.

  So why had she acted so unaffected, even a little bit pleased about it? The answer was obvious in its own way, but he didn't feel it, not any more. Not after twenty-five years.

  If she were weak, in front of anyone, then she wouldn't be able to bear the humiliation. Even in front of a human, she was putting up a front of confidence and indifference. Part of him was aware of the emotion, but he just didn't feel it, not in the primal way that he had when he was keeping himself in
a hole in the desert, protecting his territory each and every day, hunting. When he was a dragon, well and truly.

  "I didn't kill him," he growled, low and hard. There was part of him that did understand, though. It was the same part that had kept him from denying the crime up to that point, because he was perfectly ready to take credit if it meant that he looked more powerful in another dragon's eyes. But now there was something more important to worry about. "So shut the fuck up and follow me. I can't hear Diana."

  21

  There was an artist's canvas set at an angle against the back of the couch in the front room, and the same stink of black magic that had pervaded the house since he'd arrived, but there was no attractive dark-haired girl waiting for him. Nor was she in the kitchen, partway visible from the front room. She hadn't escaped to the lavatory, wasn't sitting outside. Wasn't waiting upstairs.

  He sucked in a breath and ran from upstairs out through the door, taking long strides and heading up the side of the mountain, his eyes scanning all around, but more behind than ahead. The further he went up, the further he ought to be able to see, if everything else were equal. But the feeling in his gut was that he wasn't going to find her, no matter how hard he looked.

  When someone makes a snap decision like that, when they make an initial guess without any proof, their mind starts looking for more proof. There are a great deal of similarities between humans and dragons, and this was one of them. There was no reason to suspect that she was anywhere at all.

  Still, he looked, calling out her name. His heart thumped in his chest, his worries starting to catch up with him.

  When there was no sign of her higher, he ran lower. His body ached, his muscles burned, and he wanted to go faster than he could. He skipped down the side of the mountain, his footsteps as uneven as his footing, because if he left his feet on the ground for even a moment he could feel them trying to slip out from under him and send him tumbling head-first down the mountain.