Gabriel shook his head. “With a mother like that,” he said to Kelly, “How could I possibly have been expected to grow up normal?”
As they pushed their plates away, an attractive dragon couple who appeared to be in their late twenties strode up to them and greeted Gabriel.
“Kelly, this is my cousin Orion Garrison, and this is his much-too-good-for-him wife, Cadence,” Gabriel said. “Orion, Cadence, this is the woman I hoodwinked into getting engaged to me.”
Cadence rolled her eyes in sympathy. “I know how that goes,” she said, sliding into the seat next to Kelly.
“You do?”
Cadence laughed. “Kind of. I heard about the Fair Maiden thing. That was brilliant. My engagement wasn’t quite that dramatic; basically, I just hid out at Orion’s castle to avoid an arranged marriage, and then whoops, next thing you know I’m engaged, then I’m married and there’s four dragonlings.”
At Kelly’s startled look, she added, “Don’t worry, I’m apparently freakishly fertile. You probably won’t have multiple babies.”
Kelly glanced nervously at Gabriel and scooted her chair away from him. “Four?” she echoed faintly.
Gabriel shot Cadence a reproachful look. “You aren’t being particularly helpful,” he informed her. “I’m trying to convince her not to flee my castle, change her name and go in the Federal Witness Protection Program.”
“She’s known you for a few days and she’s still here.” Cadence shrugged. “I’d say she has a strong constitution. Or terrible taste. Either way, I think you’re good.”
“So other than basically kidnapping a bride, are you staying out of trouble, cousin?” Orion asked Gabriel.
Kelly snorted, halfway hiding it behind her hand.
Orion grinned at Gabriel. “So is that a no? You’ll never change, will you? Well, we’ll leave you to dinner. And congratulations.”
“Call me if you need help with the wedding planning,” Cadence said, handing Kelly a card with a phone number on it. Kelly thanked her and tucked it into her purse.
A few minutes later, a murmur ran through the crowd. Kelly looked up. Everyone was staring at the stage.
The ice dragons had stopped performing. They stalked over to the edge of the stage. The expression on their faces had changed; their eyes were blazing blue with anger.
“Is this part of the show?” Kelly whispered to Gabriel.
Before he could answer, the dragons began blasting Pandora’s family with streams of icy air.
The Maplethorpes leapt to their feet, screaming. Their chairs went flying. Their hair was frozen and dripping with icicles, their faces rimed with frost as they pushed through the crowd and ran for the door.
The ice dragons jumped off the stage, running after them, but the dragons in the crowd, already on their feet, rushed over and blocked them. There were fire dragons, there were ice dragons, there were clouds of steam and screams of rage.
Gabriel grabbed Kelly. “We need to get you out of here,” he said. “You’re not fireproof.” He quickly hustled her out of the front door, keeping a firm grip on her, protecting her from the screaming, hysterical crowd and from blasts of fire and ice. His family was close behind him.
When they got outside and crossed the street, they saw the Maplethorpes were out there, shivering, frantically combing icicles from their hair with their fingers.
“Where’s Evangeline?” Tabitha asked, looking around, worried.
They all looked around, and Kelly spotted her, walking out of the park towards them, alone. Her friends must have run off when everyone had run out of the restaurant screaming. If she had even been with anyone; she’d seemed like she just wanted to get out of the restaurant and sulk.
“Is she really safe out here by herself at night?” Kelly wondered. “What if someone tried to mug her?”
Gabriel snorted. “Please. I’d worry more about the muggers than I would Evangeline. She’d roast them like a pig on a spit.”
The Maplethorpes spotted Kelly and stormed over to her, only to be held back by several centurions who’d just arrived at the scene.
“You did this!” Pandora’s father shouted at Kelly as he pulled icicles from his hair. “You have powers! I’ve heard about you! You’re a witch!”
“I’m an empath, not a witch, and I most certainly did not,” Kelly protested.
Gabriel put his arm around her shoulders. “We should go home right now,” he said to her, and they all piled into their limousine, driven by one of his servants, and headed back to the castle.
Chapter Fourteen
The sun was burning the early morning mists off the grass the next day as Kelly and Gabriel enjoyed breakfast in the rose garden behind the castle. Kelly hid a yawn and gulped another cup of coffee. Lying in her bed alone the night before, she’d drifted in and out of sleep, tormented by highly erotic dreams of Gabriel – and the knowledge that he was lying in bed only a thousand feet away.
Gabriel poured some more coffee from a carafe into her cup.
Damn stupid considerate dragon, she thought to herself, stirring in cream. I hate how thoughtful and attentive he is.
“So, my father checked with his friends in town, and the ice dragons who attacked the Maplethorpes all claim that they have no memory of doing so,” Gabriel said.
“That is weird.” She frowned. “Have they been arrested for assault or anything like that?”
“No, they’re being examined by dragon medics to see if they’d been drugged or bewitched. There’s an attorney representing them. They’ve got a good case to make, in that none of them had criminal records, and they’d never even met the Maplethorpes before. And the fact that they all started attacking the Maplethorpes at the same time seems to indicate that there was some outside influence acting on them.”
“In their defense, if I was capable of freezing the Maplethorpes into jerksicles, I’d be extremely tempted myself,” Kelly said.
She drained her cup of coffee and set it down. Time to get back to work.
Well, here goes nothing, she thought.
She glanced up at the castle. “I’d like to see some more of the castle today. Can we go up top on the walkway between the towers?” Kelly asked. “I want to check out the view.”
Gabriel nodded. “Of course,” he said.
As servants cleared the remains of their breakfast, he and Kelly went back inside and took an elevator to the top.
Gabriel led her outside to the walkway, and they strolled slowly. Kelly took a minute to admire the magnificent view, with the rolling green hills and the colorful patches of flower gardens like a patchwork quilt behind the castle. Several young dragonlings flapped awkwardly through the air near the apple orchard, with mother dragons flying underneath them in case they fell.
How wonderful it would be if my children could fly, she thought wistfully.
Then she opened her mind and began concentrating. She casually wandered along until they were closer to the south tower. Gabriel paused, so she had to stop too. She needed to get closer to the tower if she had any hope of feeling for the ruby.
Gabriel pointed out the fields behind the castle. “See that hill? That was where I learned to fly when I was a dragonling,” he said. “Our dragonlings will fly there.”
“I’m human – I wouldn’t be able to have dragonlings,” she said without thinking. Then she looked at him. “I mean, not that you and I are really getting married and having children.”
“You could have a dragonling through artificial insemination. The dragonlings would be raised in a hatchery,” he said. “That’s how Evangeline was conceived. Her father was human. The only way he and her mother could have children was at a fertility clinic that specializes in dragon births.”
“Where are her parents? I’ve never seen them.”
His expression went dark, and he looked away. “Her father left, and her mother is on life support.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. That does kind of explain her attitude.”
“T
o an extent,” he conceded. “We make some allowances because of it. Maybe more than we should. We don’t want to let her grow up to be an out-of-control, tantrum-throwing brat. Her mother wouldn’t have wanted that.”
She nodded, staring out at the green fields that stretched away far into the distance.
“You’re good with Evangeline. Believe it or not, she likes you,” he said.
A cold wind whipped through the air, and he stepped in front of her, shielding her with his body, and pulled her close to him.
“Sometimes you’re not too terrible,” she admitted, settling up against him.
He bent down and kissed her. The touch of his mouth was firm and sweet and welcoming. Her lips parted beneath his, and he cupped the back of her head and hooked his arm around her waist so he could pull her closer against him. She could feel the steady thump-thump of his heart, and she nestled against him, twining her fingers in the front of her shirt and clinging to him.
But then she pulled away and put her hand against his broad chest, holding him at arm’s length. “What if you do get married to someone and father their hatchlings, and then you steal a jewel and get caught and go to jail for the rest of your life?”
“I’d enjoy your conjugal visits?” he suggested with a wicked flash in his eyes, but she wasn’t having any of it.
“Damn it, do you consider all this marriage talk to be a joke?” she demanded.
His smile faded and his expression grew serious. “No, I do not,” he said.
“What kind of future would you be offering me? The Dragon Elders are just waiting for you to screw up. Your family has a terrible reputation, and you really screwed up with the Dragonsblood. Everyone is watching you now. If you got caught stealing again, a judge would be likely to throw the book at you. Do you have any idea what that would be like for your children?”
“Yes. I’m aware,” he said quietly.
“So can you understand why I wouldn’t want to have children with someone who might put them through that?” she asked.
There was a moment of silence that stretched out.
“Yes, I do understand,” he said finally. “And that’s fair. You’ve seen that we operate a highly successful jewelry store. Nobody in my family has been arrested in a very long time. My father’s probation is almost finished. I’m not saying one way or another whether the Kingsleys deserved their reputation in the past, but I can assure you that now we are on the straight and narrow.”
“Then why did you steal the Dragonsblood?” she said irritably.
He shrugged. “Who says I did?”
I do.
Because suddenly she felt it, moving somewhere just underneath her. Or specifically, she felt a ruby with massive power moving beneath her. She shivered. The rumors were true; it was a supremely powerful gem, and it should not be in the wrong hands.
She could feel hard, angry vibrations flowing from the gem. She turned away from Gabriel and closed her eyes, concentrating, trying to communicate with it. Oddly, she couldn’t – she was blocked. Somebody else was in control of the ruby right now, which meant that she couldn’t probe it and discover what its abilities were.
“Are you all right? You’re turning white as a sheet.” Gabriel’s voice sounded from far away as she struggled to wrest back control of the ruby and failed.
Then she felt a thud that was so hard the stone of the castle vibrated. It came from the south tower.
“What was that?” she asked, and he looked alarmed.
“Come with me, now,” he said, his voice turned harsh.
He rushed her over to the elevator and they climbed in. They went down to the bottom, and then he ushered her out but remained in the elevator. “There’s something I need to see to,” he said, and the elevator door shut in her face.
* * * * *
“So you’re sure it was the ruby,” Teresa said eagerly to Kelly later that day. The two of them were strolling behind the castle.
“Yes, it was weird. One minute it wasn’t there, the next minute it was. Somebody must have been moving it, and they got close enough for me to feel it.” Kelly folded her arms across her chest and frowned. “Of course, Gabriel was with me at the time, so I know it wasn’t him.”
A calculating look crossed Teresa’s face. “You’re certified as a gem empath. That might be enough to get a court order to search for it.”
Kelly had considered that, but she hadn’t contacted the authorities yet.
Was she reluctant because she didn’t want Gabriel to be arrested? Was she abandoning all pretense of acting like a professional? Well, whatever her feelings for the charming dragon shifter were, that wasn’t the only reason she wasn’t turning him in.
“I’m afraid it’s too soon,” she said. “First of all, I can’t be one hundred percent certain that it was the Dragonsblood. It was a ruby, and it was extremely powerful. That’s all I could say for sure right now.”
“Obviously it was the Dragonsblood,” Teresa said, waving her hand impatiently as if shooing away Kelly’s objections.
“Probably. But the only way we’d know that for sure would be if we recovered the gem and had it examined in our laboratory,” Kelly said. In order to be insured, the gem had a tiny identifying number laser-etched into it, invisible to the naked eye, and it had also been mapped using a laser and X-rays.
“We can’t identify the ruby if we don’t recover it.”
Kelly shook her head. “I don’t know where it is right now. It could be anywhere in the castle. If we reported it to the authorities and they decided to issue a search warrant, I doubt they’d ever find it. Then it would be even harder – maybe impossible – ever to get a warrant again. And the Kingsleys’ lawyers would be all over us.”
“And you wouldn’t be able to marry Gabriel,” Teresa said nastily.
Kelly rolled her eyes. “Yes, Teresa, that’s been my secret plan all along. I came here to the valley and disguised myself as the Fair Maiden so I could marry Gabriel. Am I an evil mastermind or what?” But Teresa was already walking away.
Chapter Fifteen
“You’ve been awfully quiet for the last few hours,” Gabriel observed over lunch that afternoon. He’d taken Kelly and Teresa into town to meet up with Cadence, who was going to take Kelly shopping. “You haven’t insulted me once. It’s disconcerting.”
Teresa was sitting at another table with Winthrop, glaring at Gabriel and Kelly, but mostly Kelly. She was ticked off that Kelly refused to notify the authorities about the Dragonsblood. She’d have done it herself, but the notification had to come from the empath who’d sensed the jewel, and Kelly wasn’t ready to take that step yet.
“Okay, you’re a jerk,” Kelly offered disconsolately, picking at her French fries. “You’re a terrible person.” She was depressed to have found out that the Dragonsblood was actually on Gabriel’s property. And she was disgusted with herself for being depressed.
“That’s all you got?” Gabriel scoffed. “Come on. Say it like you mean it.”
“You’re a terrible kisser?”
“Now you’re just lying,” Gabriel chided her.
She glanced up at him with a flash of annoyance. “Why, you smug, stuck-up bastard.”
“That’s a little better,” he conceded. “Oh, there’s Orion. Where’s Cadence?” He frowned at his cousin as Orion walked up to their table.
“Cousin,” he said. “There’s a problem with Kelly. Settle down,” he added as Gabriel stiffened and his eyes turned red.
“Not the best opening to a conversation,” Gabriel said hotly. “Would you like it if I told you there was a problem with Cadence?”
Red scales flowed over Orion’s skin and he let out a stream of smoke from his nostrils.
Kelly leapt to her feet. “Hey!” she snapped. “There’s a little too much testosterone here for my liking, guys, and I am not a fragile China doll that needs protecting. And I suspect Cadence isn’t either. So quit dragoning and tell me what’s up.”
Orion and Ga
briel stood there for a moment, breathing hard and snorting and acting dragonish, and then they settled down, grumbling and glaring at each other.
“I came here to help you, you hot-headed asshole,” Orion snapped at Gabriel. “Pandora’s family swears they saw her muttering incantations right before the attack happened. So now the Principe has a warrant for Kelly’s arrest.”
Kelly moved between Orion and Gabriel before he could say or do anything else.
“Like hell,” Gabriel growled. Other people in the restaurant looked at them in alarm. Some got up from their tables and hurried out of the restaurant, and the waitresses stood there frozen in indecision. Nobody wanted to get caught in a dragon fight; things tended to get heated very quickly.
“Quit freaking the customers out and settle down,” Kelly said to Gabriel. “They won’t be able to hold me long; they’ve got nothing. Whatever’s happening, my agency will hire a lawyer, bail me out, and sue the Maplethorpes’ collective asses off. Not because they care about me, mind you, but because they don’t want to be seen as the kind of agency that employs criminals.”
Gabriel’s eyes blazed with anger. “They’re not taking you.”
Orion held his hand up. “Gabriel, I came here because I didn’t want things to get ugly,” he said. “The Principe could have come here and taken her in handcuffs. If you resisted, it would just start a big, ugly fight between the ice dragons and fire dragons, and it would give Teague an excuse to arrest you too, and it would also be hell on the tourist business here. That hurts everyone in town, not just you. Kelly’s right – she won’t be there long at all. I already have my attorney waiting down at the station. Hazel Jameson. And I’ve contacted several of the dragons I know who were sitting near you at the show, who can testify as to what they saw.”
“You could tell him thank you,” Kelly said to Gabriel as she followed Orion out of the restaurant. Gabriel stayed right by her side, and Teresa and Winthrop scampered after them.
“For cooperating with the Maplethorpes and the ice dragons?” Gabriel growled.
Bride Of The Dragon Page 9
