by Zoe Chant
Gunnar sat back in his chair and looked at her with new appreciation. His entire view of her had just tilted on its side. The sweet little bookworm was a dragon mob princess. What a weird world.
"Why didn't you tell me earlier? I thought I had to be so careful around you ..." He laughed out loud; he couldn't help it. "Hell, if you used to be a mob accountant, you could probably teach me a thing or two about the shadier side of the world."
Melody turned pink and looked around hastily. "I wasn't a—a mob accountant! I just helped Dad with his—oh, shit." It was the first time he'd heard her swear. "You're right. I was."
He was full-on grinning now, probably showing every one of his teeth. "I can't believe it. You look so sweet."
"I am sweet!" Melody protested, crossing her arms over her librarian cardigan. That didn't help much; from Gunnar's point of view, it just drew his attention to the curves filling out the soft gray fabric underneath her clamped arms.
"Never said you weren't."
Her blush flamed hotter. "I shouldn't have told you."
Gunnar set down his coffee cup and reached quickly across the table to rest his hands on her arms. Melody reluctantly unkinked her arms and let him take her hands in his.
"I'm glad you did," he said sincerely, looking into her eyes. "I thought we didn't have anything in common at first. But we do. We both like books, even if we don't like the same books. And I don't have to be careful with you, not like I thought. You're tougher than you look. Dragon scales under the skin."
Her coral-rose mouth curved in a reluctant smile. "I'd still like it if you'd be a little careful with me."
The words were demure, but libido stirred in him again. He wanted to lay her out on soft white sheets, not just make love to her in the back room of a bookstore ... pamper her like she deserved to be pampered.
"Always," he promised, reaching to touch her cheek.
Melody leaned her face into his hand like a petted cat; then she blinked, looking out the window behind him. "It's getting dark out there. How long have we been in here?"
"Awhile, I guess." He glanced out at the dark street, lit with iron lampposts that looked like something out of an old photo. "Is there anywhere to have fun around here?"
"Fun?" Melody said, as if she'd never heard of the concept.
"Yeah, you know. Dancing, or ... fun."
"I don't know. Since I got here, I've mostly just been busy with the bookstore. When I have free time, I—"
"—read," he finished for her.
"Yes," she said, blushing again. "There's the biker bar, but that's all I know about locally. Anyway, I guess we should be getting back to the farm before Ben comes to drag us back."
"You want to?"
"No," she admitted, curling her fingers in his hands. Her eyes glimmered with mischief. "What do you think they'll do to us if we stay out past curfew?"
"You want to find out?" He was grinning again. "Ever been to a biker bar?"
"I don't want to go to a biker bar!" Suddenly her eyes lit up. "You know what we can do, though. Remember that thing I said I'd show you after dark? I think it's getting dark enough."
His heart flipped over. In his chest, his bear stirred. "Yeah. I'd love to see that."
Melody left cash on the table, including a more-than-generous tip, and they went out hand in hand into the evening. The sky was still deep blue rather than black, painted with dying sunset colors over the mountains. The air was warm and fragrant.
He expected Melody to go back to the bookstore and her car, but instead they walked down Main Street past a gas station and a closed auto repair place. Beyond that, the town petered out into fields and woods.
Gunnar slowed, clutching at Melody's hand.
"What?" she asked him, looking up at him, startled.
"Fireflies," he breathed.
They were everywhere out here, dancing in the dusk. The edge of the woods was full of them.
"Haven't you seen them before?"
"A few, here and there, in parks, but not often. I'm a city kid, remember?" He stared around in wonder. The town wasn't far—he could hear the traffic on the highway—but it felt like they were completely alone. There were no house lights anywhere in sight, nothing but the glimmer of the fireflies, like a whirling dance of captive stars.
Melody took off her glasses. Without them, her eyes looked huge. "Hold these for me. And ... this." She hesitated briefly before slipping the necklace over her head and placing it carefully into his hand.
He wanted to ask what was inside the locket—as tenderly as she handled it, whatever it was must mean a lot to her—but she was already walking away from him, into the field. "Wait," he called. "Aren't you going to take off the rest of your clothes? I, uh—I can hold them for you too."
Melody turned around. She pulled the pins out of her hair and it unfurled like a black flag, tumbling over her shoulders. "Since I'm a dragon, my clothes shift with me," she said, tucking the pins into her pocket. "But jewelry and accessories don't, unless they're in a pocket. I have no idea how it works."
"That's convenient, though, about the clothes." He tried not to show his disappointment; he'd been looking forward to watching her get undressed.
"I know. It's handy." She clasped her hands in front of herself. "Ready? Make sure no one's coming."
"It's just us," he breathed. She was a vision in the dusk, painted in shades of black and gray and white, surrounded by fireflies. Her hair flowed around her in an inky cascade. He had to talk her into wearing it down more.
Melody bowed her head and closed her eyes.
Her shift was a rippling, flowing thing. She didn't change so much as poured into her new shape. A torrent of silver flowed from her, lengthening into her dragon's long neck and delicate head with two curving horns, expanding into a pair of great wings arching above her back.
Her dragon was silver, with deep gray eyes flecked with gold. As she stood looking down at him, Gunnar felt his bear straining inside his chest, wanting to burst out and hunt with her in the dark woods. He couldn't help thinking what a striking pair they'd make, his white polar-bear fur and her silver scales.
But they hadn't both agreed to shift, and someone had to stay human to deal with passers-by. They were too close to town for Gunnar to feel comfortable shifting. People might catch a glimpse of a dragon and write it off as a hallucination; everyone knew dragons didn't exist. An enormous white bear was a different story.
"Well?" Melody asked, and he jumped. "What do you think?"
"I didn't know you could talk as a dragon! I can't talk as a bear."
She laughed softly. If her human voice was musical, her voice as a dragon was a dozen times more so, different harmonics layered over each other until it was like an orchestra had tuned itself into the approximate cadence of human speech. Her name had never seemed so appropriate.
"Like the clothes thing," she said in that magical, musical voice, "it's another thing we can do that most shifters can't. Unless you're a parrot shifter or something."
Captivated, he stepped forward. "May I touch you?"
"Please," Melody said softly, lowering her long, slender head.
He placed a hand carefully on the side of her face. She closed her eyes in bliss, and he stroked her. She was warm to the touch; somehow he'd expected her to be cool. The skin around her lips was very soft. As he ran his hand along the side of her face, the soft skin changed to the dry, warm texture of her scales. He rubbed under her jaw and felt her pulse beating beneath the fine, overlapping scales on her neck.
"Melody," he said, and she opened her eyes. "You ever take passengers?"
She blinked slowly. "I ... think I could do that. I've never tried. I know my father can."
She folded her legs beneath her, lying down so he could mount easily. After carefully tucking her glasses and locket into the pocket of his jacket, he climbed onto her back, while she twisted her head around on her long, supple neck to watch his progress. She held her wings low to the groun
d, half folded, to keep them out of the way.
"Is this comfortable?" Gunnar asked, settling his legs just in front of her wings. She was firm and muscular between his legs; he tried not to think too hard about that. It was human-Melody he pictured, not dragon-Melody, but in either case, getting a raging hard-on while riding a dragon seemed like a bad idea.
"It feels fine," she said. "You can hold onto my spikes."
She had a row of hornlike protrusions marching down her spine, stopping just above the shoulders where he was clinging on. Gunnar gingerly gripped two of them. "No chance I'm gonna hurt you?"
"I don't think so. I'll let you know."
She stood up carefully and gave herself a little shake. The scales rippled under him like the fur on the back of a cat. "Ready?"
"Ready." He hoped his voice didn't sound as tight to her as it did to him.
"If you fall, I'll catch you," Melody promised. She beat down, hard, flattening the grass in a rippling circle around them.
It took a lot of flapping to get them airborne—Melody herself looked pretty heavy in this form, and Gunnar wasn't a small guy. For a minute or two, he thought they weren't going to get off the ground at all. Then she seemed to find the rhythm of it; he felt the wind catch them, and suddenly they were above the trees, going up in a rising spiral.
Gunnar clenched tighter on her spikes.
"Okay back there?" Melody asked, twisting her head around. It didn't seem to interfere with her flying."
"No worries." It came out breathless; he managed to steady his voice. "You?"
"Just fine."
He could see the town now, the lampposts and the streets they'd just walked down; he could see the flicker of headlights on the highway. Melody continued to climb, her strong downbeats driving them higher in the night sky. Beneath his legs, her muscles flexed rhythmically, holding them both up with seeming effortlessness. He wasn't sure if it felt the same way to fly as it did to swim, but he was reminded of the handful of times, in his urban polar bear existence, when he'd managed to go night-swimming in a lake or harbor. Perhaps someday he'd get to go swimming in the ocean.
The cool night air flowed like water over him. He drew it deep into his lungs. Above them, the stars seemed very sharp and clear.
"Are you comfortable?" Melody asked. She circled in a great wide sweep. "Too cold?"
"No, I'm fine." He looked down past her wings, and slowly his death-grip on her spines began to ease. She was right, she'd catch him if he fell. It surprised him to find that he trusted her to do that.
And I'll catch you too, he promised her silently. Always.
"Do you want to go somewhere?" she asked. "It seems like a shame to come up and just land again."
With the night wind flowing through his hair, Gunnar turned his face toward the distant glow of city lights in the night, and grinned. "Hey, you got to give me a makeover today, and took me flying. How about I take you dancing at somewhere nicer than a biker bar?"
There was a hesitation, just long enough to make him worry, and then he heard the smile in her voice as she turned her head toward the city. "I'd love to."
***
At first they flew over a dark ocean of trees, with the scattered lights of houses below. As the houses and the roads grew denser, Melody angled for the dark, coiling loops of the river cutting through the countryside. She skimmed upriver with her wingtips almost touching the dark water, and came in for a neat landing on a stretch of unlit access road beside a pier. Gunnar slid off her back an instant before she collapsed back to her human form.
"Done this before?" he remarked.
She smiled. "My favorite flying is usually with my father on his estate, because we don't have to hide there. But don't forget, I grew up as an urban dragon. I know all the tricks for flying in the city. It's easier to hide in bad weather, such as rain or snow. But not nearly as comfortable for a passenger. Could I get my things back, please?"
Gunnar handed back her glasses and the locket. "You got any preferences about where to go?" he asked as she fastened the locket around her neck. "Got any favorite clubs or bars?"
She laughed. God, he loved her laugh. "I'm not exactly the nightclubbing type. For that matter, neither of us is dressed for clubbing right now."
She'd left her hair down. Gunnar ran his fingers through the silky black strands. "You want to do some more clothes shopping?" he asked. He'd never thought he might actually want to go shopping for clothes, especially after spending an interminable time at it earlier that day, but now he was picturing Melody in a dancing dress—dark red to complement her black-and-white coloring, or silver like her dragon, hugging her curves and rippling around her when she moved ...
Melody caught his hand and laced her fingers through his. "I think we're fine as we are. We'll set a new trend."
Chapter Twelve: Melody
She was having the time of her life.
Melody had never really been interested in the nightlife scene before. In college, she'd gone out clubbing a few times with Tessa or other friends, as one did. And she'd had dates take her dancing once or twice, and had occasionally gone out for drinks after work with Tessa. But in general, as she'd told Gunnar, she preferred to stay in with a book in the evening.
Now she understood why people liked this sort of thing. For her, it was all about the company.
Gunnar grinned at her and she grinned back as she danced to a fast techno beat, her unbound hair swirling around her. She'd stripped off her cardigan long ago—she wasn't even sure where it had gotten off to, or if she'd accidentally left it behind at the last place, and she didn't really care. A couple of fruity mixed drinks were humming in her system, but not enough to make her drunk, just enough to give the world a soft golden edge and fill her with euphoria.
She had been right that they stood out. Even without the cardigan, she was still wearing her modest button-up white shirt that she was well aware looked like the kind of thing a teacher would wear. Gunnar's crisp new work shirt was, surprisingly, not the only flannel she'd seen all evening—there were a few people around, both men and women, sporting a sort of retro lumberjack look—but it was a whole different thing when combined with work pants rather than skinny jeans and man-buns.
But Melody couldn't care less, and Gunnar didn't seem to care either. In fact, she'd be surprised if he'd noticed anything else in this nightclub except for her. His beer was largely untouched. He only seemed to have eyes for her, and he didn't seem to care if the DJ was playing slow songs, fast songs, or any kind of song that either of them had heard before; he wanted to be out on the dance floor with her.
The song ended and she plunked, sweaty and buzzed and happy, into her seat and picked up her half-empty drink, looking at it under the club's colored lights. Most of the ice was melted. It was hot in here.
"Get you another?" Gunnar asked over the cheerful noise of the crowd.
Melody shook her head. "Not right now. I don't drink much. No sense drinking myself under the table." She leaned forward and smiled at him. "I want to—"
She broke off when Gunnar's face changed very suddenly. He was looking at something behind her.
Her first, panicked thought was Nils?, especially when she looked around to see people on the nightclub floor parting in a wave. Then the crowd cleared enough that she could see her brother storming toward them. He looked absolutely furious.
Gunnar started to get up, noticed Melody was remaining seated, and stayed uncomfortably in his chair as Ben loomed over them, scowling.
"What are you two doing here?" he asked, his voice a little too calm.
"Dancing," Melody said. "As if it's any of your business."
"Actually," Gunnar said awkwardly, not looking at either of them, "it kind of is."
"Yeah, seeing as I'm his parole officer," Ben said. "Bad life choices aside, it's not like I can stop you from doing what you want to do, but I can certainly stop him. And you weren't answering your phone."
"I put it on silent because I
didn't want to be interrupted," Melody said pointedly. Ben continued to loom, failing to take the hint. "How'd you find us?"
"Called in a couple favors from old buddies on the force and tracked your phone. You realize, with Nils out there, how it's going to look to everyone else if you just vanish and don't turn up at the farm after work, right?"
It finally managed to penetrate her annoyance that, underneath his annoyance, Ben looked really freaked out.
"Okay, so it was impulsive," she admitted. "But, look, we're fine, as you can clearly see. We were just going to do some dancing and then come back. I refuse to live my life under house arrest."
Ben pointed to Gunnar. "He is literally under house arrest. You realize that, right?"
Now Melody stood up. The thing that irritated her most was knowing that Ben did kind of, sort of, have a point. "What was I supposed to do, ask your permission?"
"You could at least have told me where you were going!"
"At which point you would have said no, and we'd have fought, and I'd have done it anyway except I'd be mad and wouldn't enjoy it as much. What's the point of that?"
Ben's eyebrows had been steadily climbing upward until she reached the end of her mini-rant. Turning to Gunnar, he said, "I'd just like to point out that she used to never argue with anyone, including me. It looks like she's found her assertive side. Lucky you."
"I like her that way," Gunnar said with a grin that, Melody thought, would probably have looked casual if you didn't know him. He was very tense. Still, she appreciated the support.
"Apparently so," Ben sighed. Then his gaze sharpened, going between the two of them. That was his "detective" look. "You two got awfully close, awfully quick. Tell me, sis, is this just casual dating, or something more?"
