Dragons and Mayhem
Page 19
His eyes, still filled with blue dragonfire, met hers. He glanced at the black, mating-mark dragon on her shoulder which, when she looked down, was still as dark and vibrant as ever.
He touched his shoulder and then pawed his tie, loosening it, and looked inside his shirt at his shoulder. He said, “I didn’t even look at her. Nothing happened. Nothing at all. My mark is still there, too.” He wrapped his arms around Willow and pressed his lips against her temple. “Nothing happened, and we’re still together. I’m free, and I’m yours.”
The delicious fated-mate energy flowed through her from his lips near her hairline and his hands on her bare back. Willow ducked her head, pressing her cheek against his shoulder and inhaling his browned-sugar-and-smoke scent.
They stayed like that, holding each other, for several minutes until Willow realized that she was actually starving to death.
Arawn chuckled as she loaded up her plate. “Dragon metabolism. You’re going to find that you’ll need to eat more to maintain your weight.”
“What?” Willow asked around a deep-fried shrimp. The tail bumped her lip when she tried to talk.
“You’ll see. Come on. There are many more people here for you to meet. Many.”
Arawn pretty much knew half the crowd, at least the supernatural half. Even through the lingering effects of the dragon venom, she could tell that they were a little deferential to Arawn when they spoke to him and just the slightest bit wary.
All except for one guy.
“Arawn!” a man’s voice roared across the crowd.
Arawn turned and cursed before he sighed to Willow, “Whatever he says about me, don’t believe him.” He straightened. “Mathonwy Draco! How the heck are you!”
“Did you finally snap and fry my casino?”
“No!” Arawn yelled back over the crowd.
The shouty guy reached them. He was somehow even taller than Arawn, dark-haired, movie-star gorgeous, and his eyes held the glittering, golden fire of a mated dragon. He laughed, shoving Arawn’s shoulder. “What’s that gaping hole in the kitchen, then?”
Arawn shrugged. “Maybe I fried it a little.”
The guy laughed again and then took a harder look at Arawn’s face. “Did you—”
Arawn pulled Willow forward. “Mathonwy,” he dropped his voice and spoke near the top of Willow’s head, “His Grace, the Duke of Draco,” he resumed his normal volume, “may I present my mate, Willow Sage-Tiamat.”
A feminine gasp from behind the new guy made Willow bend sideways, trying to see around him.
The shouty guy said, “I just so happen to have mine here, too. Arawn,” Mathonwy also dropped his voice, “His Grace, the Duke of Tiamat,” and raised it to normal, “may I present my mate and the love of my life, the Duchess of Draco—”
The guy dragged a giggling woman around from behind him. She wore a glittering, golden sheath gown and was highly familiar.
Willow squealed, “Bethany!” and leaped on her, grabbing her into a hug.
Bethany already had her arms out and swung Willow around. “Willow!”
“—Bethany Aura, but perhaps you’ve already met,” Mathonwy Draco said.
“Oh my goddess, oh my goddesses!” Bethany giggled. “You didn’t even say anything!”
“You never said that your dragon knew my dragon,” Willow said.
The men-dragons looked bemusedly over the girls’ heads while Bethany and Willow caught up in approximately one-point-three seconds on the facts, though the details were going to take all night and several trays of those free glasses of champagne.
As Willow tucked Bethany’s arm into her elbow and they wandered toward the dessert tray—
“Do you not just love this dragon metabolism thing?” Bethany asked.
“Just mated, but I hear that’s why I’m so hungry?” Willow asked her, stuffing a strawberry tartlet into her mouth.
“Try the chocolate eclairs. They’re fab. And you’re going to need to eat a lot or else you’ll get too thin, fast. Want to go out for pizza after the party?”
—they heard Mathonwy, the Duke of Draco speaking with Arawn, the Duke of Tiamat about the Dragon’s Den Casino.
Arawn said, “Willow heard about Bethany’s month-long honeymoon, and now she wants to go to Asia.”
Mathonwy replied, “We’ll need to get someone to cover the casino. The gala opening is in a month. The shows need to start rehearsals in two weeks if we’re going to have the gala opening on time.”
Arawn said, “Cai can take over. We always assumed he’d run the entertainment and shows, anyway.”
Willow asked Bethany, “Who’s Cai?”
“I have no idea,” Bethany said. “I’ve been in France for a month.”
“Yeah, but you had to come back to see to the details for your handfasting ritual,” Willow said, looking at the crowd around them and not speaking too loudly. Naturals could be weird about things.
Bethany caught her hands. “We could have a double handfasting ceremony.”
Willow said, “Oh, I would love that! We always planned a triple one, but at least we two could do it together!”
They hopped around like popcorn for a while. Willow was still just the slightest bit venom-stoned, and hopping was a lot of fun.
Willow said, “I’ll make sure to be back from my honeymoon by then. I mean, that’s a month from now.”
Bethany’s eyes widened, and she gasped. “But if you’re going on a honeymoon, somebody needs to take care of those sea serpents. We’re leaving again!”
“All you have to do is feed them, now,” Willow said. “Hey! We’ll get Ember to do it! If they need some help with the shows and entertainment and stuff, Ember is as theatrical as they come. Didn’t she major in theatre in college?”
Bethany nodded. “Emphasis on musical comedy, minor in technical theatre, for the couple of years that she went.”
Willow nodded. “And if she can handle fire elementals, surely she can deal with some farting sea monster apparitions.”
“What?” Bethany asked. “What do you mean, ‘farting?’”
“Oh, nothing,” Willow said. “I’m sure everything will be fine. I mean, what could go wrong?”
Inappropriate
CAI Wyvern trotted down the hallway of the Dragon’s Den Casino, squinting at his cell phone and swiping his thumbs across the screen to answer the texts that were coming through one after another. Texts and direct messages from four different social media platforms pinged his phone, jumping over each other as he answered them, dozens of them, within minutes.
Just a typical Tuesday afternoon.
Texts from celebrity talent who wanted to perform at one of Dragons Den, Inc.’s many venues, their lawyers and agents who wanted their cut or were trying to convince Cai to book them in different theaters, and venue managers who were complaining that all of the above were calling them, trying to get them to influence Cai’s decisions about who would perform what, where.
White walls rushed by him as he walked, stretching his long legs and trying to get there faster.
Everything needed to be faster. He was booked in meetings straight through until ten o’clock that night with no breaks for meals or even to take a piss. Maybe he could bribe an admin to slip him some protein bars to munch during the meeting with Rhee-Rhee at three.
Cai was booked into a meeting in five minutes with one of the biggest rock bands in the world, Shifter Valentine, trying to convince them to play the DDC arena during the gala-opening week. They didn’t want to play the gala-opening week. They said they weren’t a Las Vegas band, they were an arena-touring band, but Cai needed to convince them to play the damn DDC arena for the gala opening because the casino needed to open big-big-huge, and the meeting with them was eight floors up and started in four minutes, now. Dammit.
The lead singer was a phoenix shifter, so maybe Cai could call on some mythical-shifter loyalty to convince him.
He held his arm straight out and barreled through the door to
the Human Resources Division as he scrolled down on his phone, looking back through his messages. “Smedley! The new sea serpent wrangler is supposed to be here. Arawn told me that if those sea monsters don’t get fed every morning, they start picking pedestrians off the street. Are they here yet?”
The HR manager, Smedley O’Tentacle, a rare and unusual squid shifter, raised his lugubrious gaze to Cai. “I am currently in the hiring process, Mr. Wyvern. Again, I must protest these irregular hiring practices. We are a publicly traded company. We have equal opportunity guidelines and outreach programs for under-represented minorities. We should not just hire any witch off the street at the recommendation of previous employees who are no longer employed by Dragons Den, Inc. I must protest.”
“Yeah, yeah. Your request is noted. When are they getting here?”
Smedley sighed and turned back to his computer screen. “She’s right here. I’m typing her information into our system.”
“Oh, thank the Dragon Lords.” Cai began to turn while he texted Marti D back that she was going to perform in the much larger arena that seated thirty thousand during opening-week-plus-two, not the small and intimate Dragon’s Lair Bar, because they didn’t want a stampede and riot in the casino. Riots were bad for business. He was not going to allow goddamn riots on his watch.
Without looking up from his screen, he said, “There’s been a delivery of three hundred pounds of halibut on ice. When do you think you could—”
Cai glanced up from his phone.
A woman sat in the chair, holding her phone out to the side while she looked up at him from under her eyelashes. Her dark hair curled in luxurious, sumptuous spirals around her pointed face, and her eyes were deep pools of darkness that Cai fell into and kept falling.
The blue tube lights above the woman’s head showered her with glowing light, and the room was so bright that he blinked tears from his eyes.
Cai Wyvern landed on his knees.
His phone tumbled to the floor from his numb hand.
She smiled at him.
He reached out one shaking hand. “Hi.”
“Hello,” she said, her voice like a symphony in his heart.
She shook his hand.
A shiver of magic surged through Cai, a pulse of pure sex and instinctive covetousness that made him want to carry this woman off and dump her in his hoard. “—I’m Cai Wyvern,” he gasped.
She tilted her head. “You okay?”
“Never better.” He looked at his legs and realized he had fallen to his knees and was still on the floor. “Uh, trick knee. I blew it out playing soccer for my college team.”
Cai had not played soccer in college.
He staggered to his feet. “And you are?”
“Ember Niamh,” she said, her voice swelling to a crescendo as she named herself.
“Hello, Ember Niamh. Let’s get out of here.”
Her nose wrinkled delicately between her eyebrows. “I beg your pardon?”
“Lunch!” Cai shouted. “Let’s eat lunch. The union mandates that you get a lunch break.”
Behind him, Smedley O’Tentacle sputtered, “Mr. Wyvern! This is highly irregular!”
Cai spun, his fist clenched and ready to deck the guy. “This is none of your business.”
O’Tentacle’s wide-set eyes bulged from his face, his pupils elongating and becoming bars. “Your eyes! By all the Mighty Many-Armed Ones, your eyes!” He was so disturbed that ink droplets sprayed over the papers on his desk. “Mr. Wyvern! I will not be responsible for this! This is highly inappropriate! Your eyes!”
Cai snatched his phone from the floor and hustled Ember Niamh out of the Human Resources office, telling her, “It’s customary when a new employee comes on board to take them on a tour of the casino and then to lunch.”
Ember turned to him, her eyes sparkling as she laughed. “Goddesses, I thought I’d never get out of that HR office. All that paperwork was driving me nuts. Thanks!”
“A tour of the casino,” Cai said, plastering a wide grin on his face. “Let’s start downstairs in the ballrooms and casino and work our way up. The revolving restaurant on the roof isn’t open to the public for lunch yet, so we can have some privacy to talk over the, uh,” Cai’s brain was not braining, and he had the dumb, “job. Your job. Job.”
“Don’t you have somewhere to be?” she asked him.
Cai sighed, “I don’t remember.”
Ember Niamh smiled at him, and she had a lovely smile that reached her dark eyes and seemed to bloom in her kind and beautiful heart. “I’d like some lunch.”
“Yeah,” Cai said, his whole world falling apart and reforming around this vision who went by the name of Ember Niamh. “Lunch sounds great.”
Sometimes, mating fever punches dragons right in the gut.
Cai Wyvern and Ember Niamh
have a lot to work out,
but they can’t deny the fire between them
in the new PNR from Blair Babylon,
DRAGONS & FIRE.
~~~~~
Want to read about aristocratic billionaires instead? Try the Runaway Billionaires series, which are funny, sexy romps with courageous, loyal men who are so much more than the naughty playboys with jet airplanes and fast cars they appear to be. (3 Books.) CLICK HERE.
Or do you like your billionaires tall, blond, blue-eyed, dominant, and royal? Meet Wulf, a secret Billionaire in Disguise (2 Books.) CLICK HERE.
Do you like your billionaires to rock hard? Rock star Xan Valentine is the lead singer for Killer Valentine, and he has a huge secret. (4 Books.) CLICK HERE.
Want something a little darker? Theo rescues Lizzy from a BDSM relationship gone bad, but they end up in a suspenseful chase through the Southwest to Paris. (4 Books.) CLICK HERE.
Or you can read about a modern-day princess who escapes from her abusive ex by running away with her bodyguard who was her first love, and he never stopped loving her. (5 Books.) CLICK HERE.
~~~~~
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Blair Babylon
~~~~~
BILLIONAIRES IN DISGUISE SERIES
READING ORDER
Here’s the theoretical and chronological reading order:
Working Stiff (Runaway Billionaires #1, Casimir)
Stiff Drink (Runaway Billionaires #2, Arthur Duet, Part 1)
Hard Liquor (Runaway Billionaires #3, Arthur Duet, Part 2)
Billionaires in Disguise: Rae, Complete Omnibus Edition (includes “Rae Falling”)
“An Extravagant Proposal” (A Side Story for Billionaires in Disguise: Rae)
Falling Hard (Billionaires in Disguise: Lizzy, #1)
Playing Rough (Billionaires in Disguise: Lizzy, #2)
Breaking Rules (Billionaires in Disguise: Lizzy, #3)
Burning Bright (Billionaires in Disguise: Lizzy, #4)
“Alwaysland” (Rock Stars in Disguise: Xan, A Prequel)
What A Girl Wants (Rock Stars in Disguise: Rhiannon)
Somebody To Love (Rock Stars in Disguise: Tryp)
Every Breath You Take (Billion
aires in Disguise: Georgie and Rock Stars in Disguise: Xan, #1) (includes Rae/Wulf civil wedding) ~FREE!
Wild Thing (Billionaires in Disguise: Georgie and Rock Stars in Disguise: Xan, #2)
“Skiing in June, A Rae and Wulf Epilogue #1” (Billionaires in Disguise: Rae)
“Kidnapped, A Rae and Wulf Epilogue #2” (Billionaires in Disguise: Rae)
“Rae and Wulf: At the Hospital”
Lay Your Hands On Me (Billionaires in Disguise: Georgie and Rock Stars in Disguise: Xan, #3)
Nothing Else Matters (Billionaires in Disguise: Georgie and Rock Stars in Disguise: Xan, #4)
“Montreux, A Rae and Wulf Epilogue #3” (Billionaires in Disguise: Rae)
The Rock Star’s Secret Baby (Rock Stars in Disguise: Cadell)
“Dream On” (Billionaires in Disguise: Georgie and Rock Stars in Disguise: Xan, Epilogue #1)
“Keep Dreaming”
Santa, Baby (Rock Stars in Disguise: Peyton)
Runaway Princess Bride (Billionaires in Disguise: Flicka)
In Shining Armor (Runaway Princess #2) (Billionaires in Disguise: Flicka)
In A Faraway Land (Runaway Princess #3) (Billionaires in Disguise: Flicka)
At Midnight (Runaway Princess #4) (Billionaires in Disguise: Flicka)
Happily Ever After (Runaway Princess #5) (Billionaires in Disguise: Flicka)