Betrothed to the Dragon (Lick of Fire)

by Kara Lockharte

  I had never been slow by any means. In high school, I had run track and kept up with my running as much as I could.

  After all, running was a skill that might save my life one day.

  And as much as I knew I was fast, I had the distinct sense that despite Hunter’s size and bulk, he could easily catch me if he wanted to. His strides were long, and he moved with an easy quickness.

  He ran with me to the museum and waited for me outside while I ran into the office and grabbed my bag. We walked the remainder of the way to his place, and true to his word, he did live close by. In fact, he lived in the very building I admired every day on my way to work. With ornately carved 1920s art deco eagles with their widespread wings, it was a favorite location for movie shoots, and as a result tourists often lingered in front of it.

  He pointed toward the arched courtyard entrance, which very few buildings in Manhattan had.

  I forced myself not to gawk or stutter in amazement. “Convenient.”

  “It is,” he replied, nodding to the turbaned Sikh doorman who addressed him as “Mr. Hunter.”

  “Mr. Hunter?” I followed Hunter’s lead back toward a set of elevator doors. They opened. Hunter gestured for me to enter before him, so I did. Something about his presence behind me made me automatically press myself against the back wall to make room for him.

  “That’s how they do things in this building.” He stood next to me so close we were almost touching.

  In the tiny space, I was surrounded by more of that strangely delicious scent of his. I trained my eyes ahead, determined not to stare at the fine sheen of sweat that clung to his biceps, which were easily the size of my head.

  He inserted a yellowed metal key in the slot, turned it and hit the PH button. Of course he would be in the penthouse. Where else would he be?

  Apartments in buildings like this were treasures to be held on to for generations. “Has your family lived in this building for long?”

  “Not exactly. It was won in a game of chance.”

  “High stakes.”

  His pirate’s smile spoke of gambling treasures at the flick of a wrist. “No fun playing if it’s not.”

  The elevator chimed, and the doors opened into a tastefully modern and crisp living room decorated mostly in neutral shades of gray and white with a pop of color here and there.

  A song lyric popped into my head: Into the dragon's lair walked the maiden.

  He strolled in. “Relax. I’ll get you my phone and some water.”

  I walked in slowly, following him past the living room toward the remodeled open-kitchen area. It was all silver and gray, as empty and pristine as a magazine spread, save for the phone plugged almost carelessly into an outlet above a counter.

  I took a seat at the bar counter. “You don’t spend a lot of time here, do you?”

  “Is it that obvious? I travel a lot for work.” He unplugged the phone, tapped at it, and set it before me. “I opened my banking app. Just type your email and whatever you think a new phone costs and send it off.”

  “You’re very trusting,” I said, teasing him. “How do you know I’m not going take all your money?”

  Hunter looked me over with that penetrating gaze of his. “I don’t,” he said as if he were testing me. Abruptly he turned his back on me. “The pin is 3752 in case it goes to sleep. I’m going to rinse off and put some clothes on.”

  I tried not to think of him naked in the shower, but the mental image brought a warmth to my skin that was hard to ignore.

  I picked up his phone, and swiped the banking app away. The lock screen appeared, which showed a yellowed image of man with his chin and a woman with his eyes, laughing in a candid shot. It was a digital photo of a physical photograph. I knew from experience that people our age didn’t normally carry around photographs of parents in their youth.

  Not unless there was tragedy involved.

  I had photos of my parents as wallpaper on my phone as well.

  I crossed my legs and typed in the pin. The wallpaper image was replaced by another, this one of palm trees and a white sand beach.

  I stared dumbly at the phone. Who would I call? My roommate was off in Asia somewhere, and my grandmother wasn’t even in the city. The easiest thing to do would be to just borrow some subway fare, which irked me. If family stories had taught me anything, it was to never place myself in debt to a human.

  Not that he would ever know I was anything other than what I seemed.

  I held his phone, trying hard to resist the urge to snoop. Photos? Emails? Contacts? His entire life was in my hands.

  I stared at the image of palm trees. Wait, wasn’t that like a default image? Warily, I swiped through. No apps other than the standard. As devoid of personality as his apartment, save for the lock screen.

  How strange.

  He came back with wet hair and wearing an open button-down shirt with sleeves tight across his biceps.

  He smelled of the most generic soap and shampoo, yet it was totally distracting. I set his phone down quickly. Even though he had handed it to me, for some reason I suddenly felt like I wasn’t supposed to be holding it in the first place.

  I rested my elbow on the counter and perched my chin in the palm of my hand. “What is it that you do again?”

  He set a glass of water in front of me. An ice cube clinked against the glass. “A little bit of this, a little bit of that.”

  I ran my finger around the rim of the glass, ignoring the phone. Time to start calling him on his mysterious-handsome-stranger act. “That is the most informative non-response ever.”

  His lips quirked up in a smile. He leaned, laying his thick forearms across the counter. “Interested in my whole life story, then? Where should I start?”

  I matched his movement, and leaned in closer. “As if you would really tell me.”

  “Well, I can start with my first memory: holding on to a stuffed pink elephant named Fanfan.” The thought of this serious, rugged man clinging to a stuffed pink elephant made me burst into laughter. His face cracked into a smile that irritatingly, made my heart beat faster. My life was complicated enough without meeting a man whose smile would have sirens singing.

  “Did you reach anyone?”

  “Nope. Don’t know anyone’s number. It was all in my phone. Can I borrow some subway fare?”

  He took a sip of water from his glass and then looked inside it, as if the ice were fascinating. “You know, if you need a ride home, I could take you.”

  I picked up my glass and examined my ice just as intently. “You’ll rescind that offer once I tell you where I live.”

  He grimaced. “You live in Jersey, don’t you? Let me guess—Hoboken.”

  I put the phone down. “Now that’s almost insulting.”

  “Hey, some of my closest friends are from Hoboken. Nothing wrong with being from Jersey.”

  I looked at him, and we both burst into laughter again at the same time.

  “Queens,” I said.

  “Well, at least it’s not Hoboken,” he said.

  We laughed again.

  “I’m serious. The car is downstairs, and when the traffic lightens up in an hour or two, I’ll take you home.”

  An hour or two with him. The prospect was tantalizing. With a man this handsome, it was too good to be true. It wasn’t that I suffered from a lack of self-confidence; it was more that I was pragmatically aware of how ordinary and unforgettable I looked, especially compared to the head-turning beauty of my mother and grandma in their prime. For me, in this day and age, beauty was a weapon that could be used to find me.

  Yet he looked at me with those golden eyes as if I were the most captivating woman in the world.

  Perhaps he was one of those humans who could sense magic. Some humans were drawn to it, even if they didn’t know what it was. And despite evidence to the contrary, Grandma said there was magic in my blood, even if I couldn’t use it or manipulate it.

  This was why I preferred being around humans.
They didn’t look at me with pity in their eyes.

  I imagined myself to be Grandma, one of the greatest magic wielders of the shen, always confident and never self-conscious. “If I do take you up on that offer, Hunter,” I said, making my voice linger over his name, “what would you suggest we do for one or two hours?”

  The hum and click of an air conditioner filled the room as it turned on. Cold air blasted me from above. My nipples tightened from the temperature change and I watched his eyes flick to my chest.

  His pupils dilated dark. Heat simmered within me at his response, low beneath my belly. “I can think of a few things,” he said.

  I couldn’t help but swallow. What was I thinking? I wasn’t my Grandma; I had no experience playing this game. I didn’t do the one-night-stand thing with a man I’d just met. Maybe it was the shen in me, but I liked getting to know someone—the chase, the interplay.

  I crossed my arms and shifted to the next stool over, away from the air conditioning. “In the museum,” I said carefully, enunciating the words to show that I wasn’t brain fogged by him. “You said you had questions for me. Here’s your chance.”

  Hunter laughed. He came around the counter to take a seat on the stool next to me. He swiveled the stool toward me, and he was so big, his knees almost touched mine. “Open season on Sophie for questions. I like it.”

  I gave him my fakest sultry look. “Anything you want to know about universal motifs in ancient Near Eastern and East Asian religious artifacts, I’m your girl.”

  His grin was full blown but was as far from his eyes as a desert from the ocean. “I want to know more about the woman with the mouths.”

  3

  I looked at the glass of water in my hand, swirled the water around it, and listened to the ice clink as I unsuccessfully tried to repress the chill I felt. Of all things, he would choose to ask about the menace. The monster that had killed my family and hunted the shen until there were almost none left.

  I swallowed and then forced brightness into my voice. “Yes?”

  “What do you think she represents?”

  “The Chinese, Mayans and Greeks have similar names for her. Devourer. Eater. Mother of Teeth.” I kept my voice as neutral as possible. But inside, my instincts were screaming to change the subject as quickly as possible. “But they are all clear on what she is. Death.”

  “Are there any stories of her losing?”

  It was why I had started studying the Devourer in the first place. I wanted to know if the monster had ever been beaten.

  “The Devourer is death,” I said, remembering a line from an Akkadian poem. “And Death cannot be defeated.”

  His question had hit too close today. I didn’t want to think about it anymore.

  “Your phone,” I said. “Are those two people your parents?”

  He looked away, his long fingers curving around the water glass. “Yes.”

  The ensuing silence was a terrible sort of affirmation. I reached out to cover his hand. He looked at me, and there was a blankness in his gaze I recognized all too well.

  “I never knew mine. I was raised by my grandmother.”

  He let go of the glass and entwined our fingers. His hands were big and incongruously rough.

  “Sometimes it’s better, I think, that I didn’t know them,” I said. “Because to know that love and lose it…” I had become familiar with the kind of pity I saw in his eyes. But from him, it wasn’t as irritating, maybe because he too had been shaped by a similar loss.

  His hand closed tighter on mine, as his voice bent to a more serious tone. “I treasure every memory I have of my parents. As few as they are.” We looked at each other, in this moment of understanding. He slowly stroked the back of my hand with his thumb. “When I was younger, I would sometimes feel guilty for missing them, because I loved my grandmother, and part of me felt like I was being ungrateful.”

  I wasn’t even sure if he knew he was touching me, but his thumb mesmerized me. I struggled to think of a coherent relevant reply. I settled on something about school, which sounded stupid even as I spoke. “Especially every Mother’s and Father’s Day at school when we were forced to make craft gifts to bring home.”

  His thumb stopped as he replied, “I once brought home a card with a tie. We had just come to this country, and my grandmother thought it was a noose.”

  I let out a laugh and reveled in his responding smile. And then I realized we were still holding hands.

  “I have to admit,” he said, “you are not what I expected.”

  My pulse sped up. “Oh, what did you expect?”

  There was a confident, knowing gleam in his eye, as if Hunter knew the effect of his words on me. “I don’t know. I like you a lot more than I thought I would.”

  His words buoyed and punched me at the same time. “I like you too, Hunter.” I knew I should tell him about my betrothal, even if I wasn’t going through with it.

  And then he leaned in, his face above mine.

  “May I kiss you?” he asked as though he were as proper as a lord in Victorian England.

  I knew I had to tell him. I swear was going to.

  “Yes.”

  The moment his lips were on mine, I forgot my objections, forgot the betrothal, and forgot the monster hunting me. All I could think about was Hunter, kissing me. I slid off my stool and moved into the intimate space between his open legs. My hands were on his waist, and through the thin white cloth I could feel the muscular indentations of the V of his hips. His fingers skimmed the hem of my shirt, leaving hot trails on my skin.

  I was already so close to being mostly naked with just a T-shirt and a sports bra, and I knew I should stop because I wasn’t being cautious, because he was a stranger, because of the betrothal, because because of all the reasons and more.

  But his touch was mesmerizing, his mouth even more so, coaxing, beckoning. Heat bloomed within me. I gave in to a reckless urge and fumbled at the buttons of his shirt. I loved the way he startled at my fingertips on his bare skin. He pressed harder against me.

  I turned my head, breaking away from his kiss. “I don’t usually do this,” I said.

  “Neither do I,” he said, a hot whisper licking my ear. His hands slid up my shirt and undid my bra.

  He pulled back and pinned me with that golden gaze. “This is the time to tell me to stop, Sophie.” There was something feral and not quite human in the way he looked at me. I didn’t know who he was, didn’t know what game was being played, and, at this moment, didn’t care. No one had ever made me feel this way before, so hot, so wanton, that I would burst into flames if I didn’t have him now.

  And this might possibly be my last chance to make a choice like this, one that was wholly mine.

  I reached for him and tugged his shirt upward. “If you stop, Hunter, I will hunt you down.”

  He stopped with an almost comical look of disbelief at my terrible pun. It made him seem more human, and ironically made me even want him more.

  I burst into nervous laughter.

  He grinned, his hands on my hips. “You’re going to pay for that.” I yelped in surprise as he lifted me and set me on the bar. Now it was I who spread open my legs as he closed the distance between us. The stone of the countertop was cold against my ass, a delicious contrast to the inferno at my core.

  His mouth was on my ear, as he pressed his hard, male body against me. “I’m going to taste you. Here,” he said, placing a finger on my lips. I licked him and was gratified by a squeeze of my ass, pulling me closer “Here,” he said, cupping my breast. He slid his hand downward, past the elastic waistband, up into the leg of my shorts. “Most especially here,” he said, stroking the damp crotch of my panties. Hot, delicious need surged with his words, with his touch, burning away my common sense. I had just met him; he was a stranger, yet the knowledge, the reckless danger, only made me want to fuck him more.

  “And just when you think you can’t take anymore, I’m going to fuck you so well, you’ll masturbate
to the memory for the rest of your life.” He slid a finger into my panties, stroking that sensitive bud with his thumb. I gasped at the desire in my veins. “Are my intentions clear?”

  “Promises, promises,” I said, as he slipped a finger inside me.

  My sex clenched around him, and he smiled. “Just the truth,” he said.

  Truth.

  He slipped another finger inside me, and I shuddered.

  I gripped his shoulders. I’d never understood the expression dazed with desire until now. I felt drunk, wanton, and if he didn’t fuck me soon, I would die.

  “Hunter.” I put my hand up. I pushed him back, but it was like pushing a wall. “Wait." When he realized what I was doing, he withdrew and eased up.

  It was bizarre, but the absence of him, his touch, made me feel cold.

  My words, which I intended to be calm and measured, instead came tumbling out in a rush as if they were trying to escape. “I have to be honest. It doesn’t really matter, but I want you to know that I’m betrothed.”

  He stopped and looked at me as if I had just smacked him in the head with a bat. “Betrothed,” he repeated.

  My chances with him were evaporating. I said as quickly as I could, “To a man I’ve never met, in an agreement I never made.”

  He raked his hand through his thick hair, taking a step back. “What?”

  I was losing him. I felt a bizarre, terrifying desperation that was wildly out of proportion to how long I had known him. “My grandmother arranged it on my behalf when I was a child. I didn’t even know about it until today.”

  He blinked, looked at me as if he didn’t recognize me. “Today,” he repeated.

  “Just before I gave my talk at the museum.” I forced a weak laugh. “She has the worst timing.”

  “You didn’t know?” he said, almost biting out the words.

  Shit. He was really pissed. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.

  I slid off the counter, my heart pounding and stomach sinking. Better to have it out now, I knew, but still this sucked. I picked my clothes up off the floor, giving up hope of anything ever happening. The realization sunk into my limbs like weights. “I refuse to believe that I’m beholden to any promise made on my behalf, without my knowledge. I am not chattel or property to be bartered.”