Dragon's Luck: Dragon Shifter Paranormal Romance (Shifter Agents Book 3)

by Lauren Esker

"I know," she said. "And you'll have to take my word for it that I'm fine. I don't think Avery will, but you will, and you can convince him."

  Jack sounded frustrated, but also amused. "Oh, I will, will I? You don't sound like you're in trouble, I have to admit."

  "I'm not. The thing is, in the last few days, I've spread out some very delicate feelers. I really don't need the SCB tramping in and stomping all over them."

  "That's us, the butterfly stompers."

  "Just tell Avery I'm not dead in a ditch, would you?"

  Jack turned serious. "Only if you give me an ETA, and at least some hint of where you are."

  "Where I am is the south Pacific. Yes, really. And I'll be back in Seattle in—" She thought a minute, and pulled a number out of thin air. "Five days, once I wrap up here. How's that?"

  "We'll deal with it, but only if you call every day by noon to check in. If you miss one check-in, if you're so much as late, I'm mobilizing Avery and every other available agent, and pulling out all the stops to find out where in the south Pacific your troublemaking ass is hiding."

  "Jeez, Mom, whatever blows your skirt up. I thought paranoid overprotectiveness was Avery's thing, not yours."

  "It's not overprotectiveness when you've been missing for days. Damn, Jen." His voice cracked. "Do you know how worried we've been?"

  She hadn't, not really. She'd thought the SCB would keep cranking along happily without her. But then she remembered how frantic everyone had been last summer, when Jack had disappeared on a dangerous undercover assignment without a trace. And again when Avery and his girlfriend were kidnapped ... okay, so she'd been the one calling out the cavalry that time.

  Fine.

  Jerks.

  She brushed at her eyes. Stupid tropical allergens. "Yeah, fair enough," she admitted. "And you can tell Chief Stiers that I promise I'll have a full report on her desk when I get back, if that helps keep her from riding you too much about me disappearing like this."

  "I'm sure she'll be riding us plenty, but I'll do what I can, as long as you hold up your end. Check in at noon, remember. That's noon Seattle time, by the way, before you start thinking about using a time-zone loophole."

  "It's like you know me or something."

  "Noon, Cho."

  "Noon," she agreed. "I'm looking forward to getting home, Jack. We have a lot to catch up on."

  ***

  She had no particular reason for giving herself a five-day deadline, except that she figured it was going to be hard to get a flight out of the island's small airport with half the passengers on the ship trying to leave too. And besides, it gave her a little more time before she and Lucky needed to figure out how things were going to end up between them.

  For the time being, they seemed to have decided not to talk about it. Instead they lounged around at the B&B, went swimming, or explored the parts of the island that were easy to get to. It felt as if they had escaped into a little bubble, with the outside world far enough away that it didn't have to be dealt with yet. Jen knew reality was going to come crashing down on her sooner or later, but she had no intention of letting it happen before it absolutely had to.

  In between lazily touristing around the island with Lucky, she went back to the ship to look for the people she still wanted to say goodbye to: Nguyet, Onyeka, and Marius. Deck A had been cursorily cleaned up, but most of the shops were shuttered, the broken windows in the atrium tarped over. She located Nguyet in the laundry facility. Although the other woman's greeting was friendly enough, the earlier warmth between them had cooled.

  "Half the staff has gone already. They're buying out our contracts and offering us a free flight back home."

  "Are you taking them up on it?" Jen asked.

  "Of course I am. I don't want to stay here. There are rumors flying around about people getting killed, other people getting paid off not to say anything ..." She shivered, and looked at Jen with wide, unhappy eyes. "Do you know what's going on?"

  "No," Jen lied. "I'm sorry."

  I've spent so much time around shifters in the last few years, she thought, after a cursory hug goodbye. The handful of normal humans she was close to were mostly employees of the SCB, and knew her secret. She had forgotten the loneliness of her childhood, when she'd had to hide her real self from even her closest friends at school. She had gotten caught up in the shifters' world to the point that she'd stopped thinking about how it looked from the outside.

  Relations between humans and shifters were fraught by nature, all the more so because her people struggled so hard to keep themselves in the shadows, fearing the consequences if their existence was too widely known.

  But maybe Avery is right. He keeps saying we can't keep a lid on it forever. At least if we unmask ourselves, we can choose the time and place, rather than having it done to us instead.

  And yet ... who got to make that decision, when it would affect everyone? There was an American shifter community, of sorts, but it was more like a bunch of little communities; it had no formal organization, no delegates, no international presence. The SCB didn't even represent American shifters other than themselves. They certainly couldn't make a decision of that magnitude for Onyeka and all the rest.

  Well, it didn't have to be decided now, and not by her. She'd already had too much heavy thinking for one day.

  She couldn't find Onyeka on the ship, but she ran into the Lagos shifter by chance later the same day. The town wasn't large, and there were relatively few places to shop. Jen spotted Onyeka at the end of the row of tourist shops, and hopped up and down, waving at her, until she got her attention.

  "I thought you were gone," Jen called.

  "I would be, but right now you can't get a flight out of here for love or money. Everything's booked solid."

  The three of them had dinner together in a restaurant that was located in the beached hulk of an old container ship. Much of the ship had been dismantled and carted away for the scrap metal, and what was left wasn't exactly pretty, but it was certainly striking and unusual, especially draped with strings of lights and paper lanterns that were lit up as the sun went down.

  Lucky opened the dinner conversation with, "You're a cop. She's a cop. I know you two would have spent the whole conversation dancing around it for the sake of your cover stories, so now you know. Proceed."

  "Really?" Jen asked. "What agency?"

  "Interpol," Onyeka said. "Lagos office. You?"

  "Special Crimes Bureau, United States."

  They avoided the topic of Dragon's Tears and the details of their respective investigations. Instead Onyeka talked about Lagos and Nigeria, and Jen spoke of the SCB, in general enough terms not to give away anything classified. However, after her chat with Nguyet, she hadn't stopped thinking about the possibility of building bridges between the SCB and shifter networks in other countries. This seemed like a good opportunity to start working on that, beyond the fact that she liked the woman personally.

  "Oh, hi," Lucky said suddenly. Jen looked up. In the deepening tropical dusk, Roxy Molina had materialized by their table. She was wearing a loose, sleeveless blouse as a concession to the climate, and carried a drink with an umbrella in one hand. Her surviving bodyguard flanked her.

  "I thought you'd left," Jen said.

  "I hoped you'd left," Lucky muttered.

  Roxy smiled thinly and pulled out an empty chair, sitting without being invited. The bodyguard took up a station behind her, leaving as much space as possible between himself and Lucky. "I don't leave business unfinished."

  "I'm pretty sure our agreement was for the duration of the game," Lucky said. "Which means it terminated when the game blew up and the ship caught on fire."

  "There are still a few small matters." Roxy rested her elbows on the table and steepled her fingers. "First of all, I promised you a generous severance package if you competed for me to the best of your ability but didn't win. As far as I can tell, you held up your end of the bargain, so I plan to hold up mine."

  "We don'
t want your money," Jen said.

  Under the table, Lucky kicked her; she kicked him back. "Pay no attention to her. She's a terrible negotiator. Of course we want your money."

  Roxy held out a hand without looking. Her bodyguard placed a card in her palm, and she slid it across the table to Lucky. "This can be used for a one-time-only withdrawal or transfer from this account, up to the maximum in the account. The last four digits are the PIN. In a week, or sooner if you use the card, the account will be closed."

  Despite her misgivings, Jen leaned closer to peer at it as he picked it up. It looked like a normal credit or debit card. "How much is in the account?"

  "You'll find out when you put it in an ATM," Roxy said.

  Lucky pocketed the card. "Well, if that's taken care of—"

  "Not so fast. There's also the small matter of the reason why I was on the ship in the first place, and certain information that may have come to light regarding you."

  Roxy had been ignoring Onyeka throughout the conversation, but the Lagos cop was listening intently. If she'd been in her shifted form, her ears would have been pricked.

  "Matters of necessity," Lucky said. His voice was calm, but Jen, with her hand on his leg under the table, could feel him vibrating with tension. "What happens on the boat, stays on the boat."

  "My family bankrolled you, Lucado, and we've dealt with you fairly. But I'm not going to walk away from the tournament without something to show for it. Not with the source of the drug so very, you might say, close." She fixed her gaze on him; Lucky looked back with a flat, dangerous look in his eyes.

  "Oh, come on," Jen broke in. "You just spent several days on a cruise ship with a representative sampling of major crime families from most of the Pacific Rim countries ... and further afield," she added with a nod to Onyeka. "And nothing to do all day except schmooze. You really expect us to believe you didn't come out ahead, on connections if nothing else?"

  Roxy looked mulish.

  "You're barking up the wrong tree anyway," Lucky said. "I'm not in your business and don't want to be. I can't get you what you're after."

  "Really? What I'm seeing here is that you've decided to make deals with Lagos instead of us." Roxy shot Onyeka a poisonous glare.

  Onyeka raised her hands and let them fall. "This is a dinner between friends. Nothing more."

  "Friendly advice," Lucky said. "You saw the consequences of what Angel can do. Right now you're probably trying to convince yourself it wasn't really like that, it was really just hallucinations and mass hysteria, like people are saying. But you know the truth, so you can guess what I'm capable of. We're on good terms, Roxy, you and I. Let's leave it at that."

  There was a sudden, startled noise from Roxy's bodyguard. He made a grab for something that hit the ground with a clunk. Blanching, he crouched and recovered his weapon.

  "Wow, what are the odds of your guy just dropping his gun like that," Lucky said blandly. He leaned forward, and his face hardened. "Don't mess with me and mine, Roxy. We had a mutually profitable business deal, but now it's over. Don't keep pushing, because I'll push back."

  Roxy stared at him. Then, her face set in stone, she pushed up from the table, turned on her heel, and marched off. The bodyguard, after a single panicked look at Lucky, hurried after her.

  Lucky let out a long breath and took a drink of his slushy, melting margarita. The salty rim of the glass clattered against his teeth with the slight tremor in his hand.

  Jen leaned on his shoulder. "Nice."

  "Tell me that again after I change into dry pants."

  From across the table, Onyeka gave them both a long, searching look. "The drug—" she began.

  "I can't make it," Lucky said, his voice harsh. "Only one among my kind can. And she's completely out of touch. I don't know where she is. Let's leave it at that, please."

  Onyeka gazed at him for a long moment; then she merely nodded and steered the conversation to a new topic.

  After they had amiably parted ways, Lucky and Jen walked home hand in hand. Jen caught herself jumping at groups of drunk tourists stumbling out of bars, and looking behind her into the shadows, until Lucky seized her and pulled her in for a long kiss. "Don't," he murmured against her lips.

  "I wouldn't put it past Roxy—"

  "To do what? Worst comes to worst, I'll just shift and scare the crap out of her. Besides, I don't think she's the frontal-assault type, or even the sniping-from-the-shadows type. She's more the kind that plays a long game and finds a way to get even ten years down the road."

  "Comforting." Jen patted his pocket and withdrew the card. "You think it's safer to toss this?"

  "Without at least finding out how much is on it?"

  There was a small convenience store near their B&B, a little frame building with a slightly affected palm-frond roof, which sold cold sodas and other incidentals. It also had an ATM. Light spilled out into the tropical night, indicating it was still open.

  Jen hung out in a position that casually blocked the view of anyone passing by, while Lucky swiped the card and punched in the PIN. They both stared at the result.

  "That's a lot of zeroes," Jen murmured after a stunned moment, glancing anxiously over her shoulder.

  "And we had to swipe it in a convenience store ATM," Lucky muttered. "Even if it'll let us withdraw more than the maximum, how much cash can the machine have?"

  "Do you really want to walk back to the B&B with our shirts stuffed with money?"

  "I'm good with that plan."

  Jen looked at the screen again, with all its lovely zeroes. "She also said we could transfer it. I'm not about to put that much in my bank account, but ..."

  But she could easily take enough to pay off her car and her credit card bills, and put a nice down payment on a condo. A little windfall, not enough to raise eyebrows with the IRS or accusations of corruption at work, but the sort of money that might have come down from a relative's inheritance, say.

  As opposed to where it actually came from: the Molina family's drug trafficking.

  She looked up and met Lucky's eyes. He wore a rueful smile. "If it were up to me," he said, "I'd take the money and run. But that's not how you operate, is it?"

  Jen shook her head. "I can't make that decision for you, though. It's your life. I won't stop you if you want to take it."

  Lucky thought about it. Then he punched in some numbers. The machine made its shuffling noises and spit out a neat stack of local currency.

  Lucky took the slim stack of bills—about $100 in U.S. currency, from Jen's understanding of the exchange rate—and grinned at her. "For all we've gone through, the least Roxy can do is buy us a couple of souvenirs, and maybe a pretty dress for you. I noticed you had your eye on those little wraparound things in that store on the boardwalk."

  "I think it was more like you had your eye on me in those little wraparound things."

  "Details."

  Jen broke one of the bills buying them a couple of cold Cokes. Lucky dropped the card in the trash on their way out of the store.

  ***

  The last person Jen hadn't yet managed to say goodbye to came to see her at the B&B, in the middle of an argument with Lucky on the veranda.

  "I still don't know what I'm going to tell the SCB about you," she said, pacing in the short space between a flowerbed and the shaded table where Lucky was halfheartedly trying to read a book.

  "I'd really rather you didn't tell them anything."

  "I know, but what am I supposed to put in my report? If I leave out all the dragon stuff, it'll be three paragraphs long!"

  "Lie," Lucky said.

  "I can't just turn in falsified reports. Tweaked, maybe. I'm an old friend of the moral gray area; hell, I live there most of the time. But outright lying to my supervisor about something this important goes right through the gray area and into straight-up wrong."

  "Hey." He caught her hand as she went by. "Your personal life is none of their business. You don't have to explain anything. You're allo
wed to have a life outside the SCB. Just date me. It's not that hard."

  "Even if I don't tell the SCB, I don't know what I'm going to tell my friends."

  "Tell them it's none of their business."

  "But they'll want to know. They'll be curious." For shifters, What do you shift into? was the equivalent of the standard college-freshman What's your major? icebreaker. Even if it was a little too personal to ask any random stranger, a friend would certainly wonder.

  "Why does any of it matter except what you and I want?"

  "Because it does!" She didn't know how to get through to him. "It's more than the SCB. It's my friends. My family. My world doesn't consist of just you and me, Lucky. I wish it did, but ..."

  I'm not like you, she wanted to say. And couldn't, because she didn't want to hurt him. But she could see why it was so hard for him to understand. Lucky had been on his own most of his life. He couldn't see that she wasn't the same.

  Maybe she hadn't realized it before, either.

  "Jen ... am I getting into a relationship with you, or the SCB and everyone you work with?"

  "I can't untangle myself from them, Lucky. It's not that easy."

  They stared unhappily at each other. It was probably a mercy that their host's oldest daughter came onto the veranda just then to announce a visitor. Marius followed her, ducking his head through the low doorway. He was dressed down, for him, in a polo shirt and slacks, instead of his usual two-piece suit.

  "Marius!" Jen held out a hand; he took it. "I thought you were gone."

  "Not yet, but I finally managed to pull sufficient strings to get a seat on a flight off the island this afternoon. I didn't want to leave without saying goodbye."

  Since she was already up, Jen ran to get the three of them drinks. When she came back—carrying two frosted glasses, while one of Tuva's little girls self-importantly carried a third—Marius had taken a chair across from Lucky; the two were chatting amicably.

  After the child left, Marius tipped his head in the direction she'd gone. "I saw a couple more kids in there. Cute family. So they're all ... eh ..."

  "What, you didn't think our kind of people had kids?" Lucky asked, but there was no heat in it.