by Lily Cahill
Although she wasn’t sure she wanted to date Blayze. Maybe see him naked…
No. She wouldn’t be doing that.
“$250 an hour?” Blayze sounded incredulous. “No.”
Ramona leveled a glare at him. Sure, she’d bumped up her hourly rate, but it wasn’t like the Dragomirs and Felicity Valdez couldn’t afford it. They’d pay just as much for someone in New York, and they’d have to cover travel expenses. She was not charging as much as she could, if anything.
Straightening, Ramona motioned toward the door. “If you don’t like my prices, then—“
“Jones, there’s no way you’re only worth $250 an hour. I get paid a hundred times that to show up at a club for a single evening and make them look cool, and that’s not even an actual skill.” He grinned, roguish. “Although, it is pretty fun.”
The words echo throughout her mind. “So you think I’m charging too little?”
“Felicity Valdez is paying you. Dream big.”
She hesitated, studying his face. He seemed sincere enough, but she’d met a boy or two like Blayze Dragomir in her time: handsome, charming, and willing to say the right thing until he slipped out of bed in the middle of the night and never called again.
Still, if he was going to pay her no matter what…
“$300?”
“No way. $500.”
“Why are you negotiating up? That is not how negotiating works!”
He shrugged, a small smile on his face. “I’m bad with money, just ask any of my brothers.”
She laughed despite herself. She didn’t want to find Blayze charming; she wanted to find him just as vile as she had the other night, when he’d repeatedly pursued her after she’d said no again and again. But it was hard when he was here, offering her the job of a lifetime at a price more than double than what she normally charged.
“Alright,” she agreed. She offered him her hand. “$500 an hour. It’s a deal.”
Blayze took her hand, and the second his fingers wrapped around her own in a firm handshake, she felt a sizzle of electricity go up her arm. Ramona took her hand back, head fuzzy with confusion. What had just happened?
For his part, Blayze appeared unperturbed. “Great. So, when do we get started?”
Chapter Three
Blayze
RAMONA BLINKED AT HIM. “WE?”
“Well, I’m assuming you need someone to fill you in on the details of the case.” Blayze got out his phone and scrolled through his emails until he found the one Felicity had sent him. It was encrypted, and he ran a program to unlock the files there.
Details of the case, specifics about Joy’s health during her stay in the hospital, a few profiles on Joy’s known associates, all popped up in front of him. He flipped around his phone so she could see.
“My brother and his lovely girlfriend are stuck in New York for the foreseeable future, so I’m going to be a kind of…liaison, as it were. Wasn’t that clear?” He poured as much charm into his smile as possible. “Welcome to the case, partner.”
“I don’t work with anyone else,” Ramona said, rolling her eyes.
“Maybe you ought to. Getting things done with a partner can be very rewarding.”
He kept his face carefully neutral as she scrutinized his innuendo.
Damien and Felicity had been less than thrilled with his idea about hiring a private investigator to look into Joy’s poisoning. He’d never really convinced them, but he figured this was a ask forgiveness instead of permission situation. They’d thank him if—no, when—Felicity solved the case. He’d finished off his night by wheedling Arryn until his brother gave in and told him he could stay for a few weeks.
It was probably a little crazy to pursue a girl in this way—to stay his trip back to the city, to spend the money to hire her (because Felicity definitely hadn’t agreed to that part, or well, any of it). But he couldn’t walk away from Ramona. He’d never had a woman so summarily turn him down without an explanation before, but it was more than that, more than the challenge of it all.
She was beautiful in a rare kind of way, and she was smart, and he was—interested. Actually interested. In her as a human being, and the kind of things that went on in her head, and all of that stuff he didn’t normally care about. So this seemed like a good way of getting to know her better: either she would continue to intrigue him and he’d try again in a more respectful way, or she’d lose whatever luster she had, and he could move on without wondering what might have been.
He…liked her. He had a bit of a crush. And it wasn’t like Augustus PD was making huge strides in solving Joy’s case. Felicity herself had been ranting about the lack of new information only the night before. This was the perfect solution for everyone. They could figure out what happened with Joy, he could try and woo Ramona Jones, and everybody was happy.
“I need those documents,” Ramona said, choosing to ignore his words. She had gotten it, he knew she had—and yet she was still turning away, giving him the cold shoulder in favor of sitting down at her laptop and logging into her email.
“I’ll send you the encrypted email.” Blayze went back and forwarded it to the address that Ramona rattled off to him. “Password is pete.”
A moment later, Ramona had everything in front of her, and a determined frown on her face. She scrolled through the initial report that Joy had given to the police once she’d woken up from her coma. Blayze walked to stand behind her, hovering over her shoulder as she read.
Ramona closed the window. He was fairly sure she did it just to be petulant.
“I need a few hours to go over all of this and figure out the facts of the case.” She turned to look at him, staring up from her seat in front of the laptop. The morning sunlight cut across her face, highlighting her beautiful skin, and Blayze missed the next few words out of her mouth.
“What?” he asked, shaking his head. “Sorry. I lost my train of thought.”
She quirked an eyebrow at him. “Obviously. Well, give me some time to get a good grasp on what we already know. I’ll call you when I know what the next step is.”
Blayze could hear the dismissal, but he couldn’t think of a good reason to stay. He’d hired her to work on the case. She was apparently eager to do her job—or at least to be paid $500 an hour. He didn’t regret negotiating up. All he had to do was some guest appearances, a few talk shows, and he’d be in the black for a long, long while.
Fame had its virtues.
He snagged a business card from her holder on the table, sliding it into his back pocket. Then he took another one and flipped it over. He snagged a pen from her holder and wrote out his cell number.
“You do that.”
He handed her the card, flashing one last genial smile as she took it from her. It was important that she realize he was more than just the shmoozy jerk from the other night. He could be nice. He could be charming.
She rolled her eyes again, and he thought, well, maybe not.
Winning over Ramona Jones was not going to be easy, that was for sure.
For the first hour, he checked his phone every few minutes. He went back to Arryn’s apartment, which was nearly as blank a canvas as Damien’s had been. Arryn took after their eldest brother too much, in Blayze’s opinion. They needed to brood less, have more fun.
The place was decently big, though. That was a nice perk. The Dragomir boys liked having easy access to a place to shift if they needed to.
Arryn was out—probably at some job, or volunteering? Blayze felt like Arryn had mentioned something the other night, but he hadn’t been paying close attention. He could remember exactly what had been said.
Blayze flipped on the television, but after five minutes, he gave up. Nothing could hold his attention, not when his phone was decidedly not going off.
He flipped back to the documents he had downloaded about Joy’s case. He hadn’t really looked at them before. He’d glanced through them at Ramona’s office, but that was more to show her than for his own be
nefit.
Everyone seemed to think it would have been crazy for a person to try to attack a Valdez heir. Even though the investigation was still open, it was clear that public opinion had already ruled this some sort of tragic accident. Pixie dust cut with something more dangerous, nothing more or less.
Blayze skimmed over the report of her condition, frowning. He wasn’t exactly a private investigator—SVU marathons didn’t count, unfortunately—but he did have some measure of common sense. It wasn’t so uncommon that people in positions of power were attacked.
He thought of his mother and father and felt a pang deep in his heart. He didn’t remember that night well. More than real memories, Blayze had impressions: feeling so tired it was like every limb weighed forty extra pounds, the sudden rush of adrenaline as Damien pulled him out of range of the spell. The fear, the cold, the despair. That last look he’d had of his childhood home as he’d fallen through a broken window, his mother cold and pale and fading as she ushered them through. Her eyes had been wild.
Or maybe they hadn’t. Maybe these were his adult interpretations of something that had happened when he was too small to understand.
Either way, he didn’t like to think about it. He frowned and pushed all thoughts of that night to the back of his mind.
Joy Valdez could have been attacked. It was entirely conceivable that someone would be angry enough at the Valdez family that they would want to take it out on the youngest and most vulnerable person near to their hearts.
It was sad. Joy mostly looked like a girl who liked to have a good time, and as far as Blayze was concerned, there was nothing wrong with that. The tabloids called her a party girl, but he didn’t pay them much mind. She was young and pretty and wanted to have fun—that wasn’t a crime. In fact, it was a situation he could very much relate to.
And then there was the poison that had been used. Vivium mortem was incredibly rare, and the only known cure was dragon’s blood. What were the odds that the child of the bloody coup that killed nearly every living dragon was then poisoned, with the only reprieve being the blood of the very beast her father had made extinct?
It was all a little too neat and tidy, a little too coincidental.
Years on the run and living in hiding could make a person paranoid, but he thought in this instance that it was actually serving him well.
Blayze read through the medical charts. Large swaths of it went over his head, and he had to flip back and forth between the document and Google so he could look up in-depth terms. Her symptoms had sounded horrendous—internal hemorrhaging, seizures. She was lucky she’d managed to survive at all.
It was almost—fate.
Blayze laughed to himself. He sounded as crazy as Damien—all that Timonius and Grizelda fairy tale bullshit about fated love. His brother believed in all of that, that Felicity was the one woman in the world who could truly love him in both of his forms. And Blayze believed that Felicity really did love Damien, at the very least.
But fate? That was crazy. Blayze had three apps on his phone at the moment where he could pull up pictures of girls, send them a flirty message, and be naked with them, all in less than the span of an hour.
Damien could believe in his fairy tales all he wanted. Blayze liked reality. He liked the here and the now, the casual dating and sex, the way he could nod at a pretty girl on a Friday night and make her pancakes on Saturday morning.
His mind went drifted back to Ramona—she was the pretty girl he was interested in right now. Thinking about her not only made his cock stir in between his legs, but it also made the dragon inside of him wake up. He could feel that more savage side of himself, suddenly aware that it’d been a while since he’d shifted.
And if Arryn wasn’t home …
Blayze shucked off his clothes and gave into the power inside of him. His bones shifted and rearranged beneath his skin, which was turning rapidly to gold scales. The process, which was so painful to him as a child, was smooth and quick with years of practice behind her. He felt himself grow larger, and his vision went sharper, his hearing became better. He could hear Arryn’s neighbors fighting, could hear a fly buzzing outside of the apartment. Every sense was heightened.
His instincts felt suddenly more beastly. He was himself, but he was himself plus something more.
He should have done this outside, where he could stretch his wings. A flight would definitely could a ruckus; no one would be able to miss it. Good. He didn’t want them to.
It would have also have just felt nice, though. To soar for a while, clear his head. Even with all the new stimuli—the smell of the burned dinner Arryn’s neighbors were fighting about, the sounds of someone walking by outside—his head was still full of everything he’d read about Joy.
He wondered how Ramona was doing, and then surprised himself by letting out a deep growl.
Even as a dragon, he felt strangely possessive of this woman.
Blayze’s phone buzzed in the pocket of his discarded jeans, and he jumped. He glanced at the clock Arryn had on the wall—it had been almost four hours. It was early afternoon now, and he’d missed lunch. He hadn’t realized how engrossed he had been in Joy’s case.
He closed his eyes and let him imagine himself as a man. His body shifted and changed to match his thoughts—he felt his bones growing short, his talons receding and his fingers sprouting from skin that was no longer the color of gold.
He felt a pang of regret. A few more minutes as his second self would have been nice. Still, there was work to be done, a case to be solved, a detective to be seduced—and he couldn’t do that while wearing his scales.
Back in his human form, he stepped into his clothes and rooted around in his pocket for his cell.
Blayze smiled when Ramona’s name appeared on his screen. His heart kicked a little in his chest, but he ignored that. It was just some leftover reaction to thinking about all of Damien’s ridiculous romantic notions. It happened.
“What’s our first move, Jones?” he asked, answering the phone without preamble.
He could hear her laugh, and then pause, as if chastising herself for laughing. Blayze sank back into the couch, a self-satisfied smirk on his face. She was warming up to the idea of him. Pretty soon she’d say yes to the sex—well, she’d say yes yes yes repeatedly to his ceiling, if he had his way—and he could work this girl out of his system. While figuring out what had happened to Joy Valdez.
Two birds, one stone.
“I want to speak to Joy, but I looked up her rehab facility, and it seems like there’s a moratorium on outside contact for the first thirty days. The admission paperwork that was in that file you sent me said she went twenty-six days ago, so we’ll have to wait a little bit before we go see her.” Ramona sighed, like four days as an interminable amount of time. “I don’t want to hold off on getting started, though, so I think we should head over to that store, see if anyone there can tell us a little bit more about the drugs she bought.”
“Didn’t the police already talk to them?”
“Yes, but you never know. Maybe they remembered something more. Maybe they weren’t comfortable talking to the police. I’d rather ask too many questions than not enough.”
That made sense. Blayze was already standing, heading toward Arryn’s front door. “Great. Meet you there in ten?”
“All right,” she said, and then the line went dead.
Blayze shoved the phone back in his pocket, muttering to himself. “Not much for conversation, are you, Jones?”
He slipped into his shoes and out the door, making sure to lock it behind him. Arryn would kill him if, when he came home from wherever he was, he found the door unlocked. Blayze knew that from experience.
Ramona beat him to the store, despite the fact that his walk was shorter than hers. She was wearing the same outfit as she had when he’d seen her earlier that morning—professional gray slacks, white shirt, black cardigan. The shirt was tight against her generous chest, and he couldn’t stop himself fro
m letting his eyes linger there.
The dull colors only made her dark skin look more beautiful. She was wearing oversized sunglasses and leaning casually against the building, legs crossed, and eyes on her phone as she tapped out a text.
She looked so effortlessly sexy, unaware that someone could have shot a picture of her and sold it to a high fashion magazine. Sure, she wasn’t stick-thin like a lot of models, but he’d always liked it when girls had curves. There was something striking about Ramona—anyone who saw her felt compelled to look twice. Or at least he did.
God, he couldn’t wait to get this woman in his bed.
She glanced up as she heard him approach, automatically throwing her phone in her bag and straightening up. Blayze was strangely disappointed. He liked looking at her when she didn’t know he was watching, when she was comfortable and wholly herself. Even if she was warming up to him, she was still on guard around him. Her shoulders went tight, her face was carefully blank. It didn’t feel like her.
Not that he really knew her, he had to remind himself. They’d barely met. He didn’t know anything about her. And if he felt like he did, he was clearly…projecting. Or something.
“Zeke Maxwell sells drugs out of the back room in his parents’ store,” she said, her tone calm and businesslike.
I am going to make her laugh today, he thought, suddenly determined. Whether she wants to or not.
“Right,” Blayze said. “Everyone knows that.”
Blayze did not mention the few times he had visited Zeke to get a few party favors. Sure, he wasn’t hardcore into the stuff, but there was nothing wrong with a little boost now and again. Especially in Augustus, where the parties were so much tamer. New York City had easier access to—well, every drug imaginable—but he found he was less interested in the stuff there. There was enough excitement in being admired and pursued and, well, famous.
“The police weren’t able to get anything out of him. He maintained that he didn’t deal, and that there’d been some huge misunderstanding.” She shifted her weight, looking puzzled. “The thing is, the police raided this place, and it was entirely clean. No residue that they could find, no paraphernalia, no sign of anything with which he could cook. Nothing.”
