Despite the assortment of intimate apparel scattered about him, his gaze touched her in a place so deep, she hadn’t known it still existed, and she hated like hell that it did.
The longer the eccentric stranger stared, the harder his stone-carved features became, until they sharpened to severe angles.
Never mind the sledgehammer breaking him, he could break the hammer with that look.
She, however, refused to surrender beneath the power of his gaze, though dashing up the stairs, locking the door, and nailing it shut sounded good, if only to annihilate the physical response scorching her. She pried her gaze from Weirdzilla’s and raised her chin. “Take my bra off your head. You look like a perv.”
He seemed surprised to discover her beguiling bargain up there, but after he removed it, he examined every red lace flower and finger-traced its shape, as if he’d never seen one before. With a fist in one of the cups, he frowned as if doing a math equation. Then he raised the bra by its straps, the points of the cups facing him, looked at her with a question in his eyes, then gave her a double take—her breasts, the bra, her breasts. That final look came with a lingering perusal and a stroking nod of approval, both of which made her nipples rise like cheerleaders at halftime, drat the girly traitors.
McKenna’s heart raced. Her hands began to sweat.
Mr. Tall, Dark, and “Do Me” raised her bra as if to fit it to her contours. And, click, she saw comprehension dawn. He grinned.
She lost her knees and grabbed the stair rail. “What, assclown? You couldn’t find the door, so you made a new one?”
He sobered. “Define assclown.”
McKenna sighed. “I apologize. I’m being rude. You broke my wall”—and penetrated my defenses—“so I acted out.”
“Out of where?”
“Out of pissed off, damn it. Your invasion is going to cost me.”
“I don’t know my own strength sometimes.”
“I’d call that an understatement. Take a running leap, did you?”
“More like a thoughtless step.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Vivica sent me. I’m here for the interview.”
“You’re not hired!”
EIGHT
“Good,” her intruder said, assessing his situation. “This place is dangerous.”
McKenna tried not to let her jaw drop when Bastian Dragonelli, cold-day-in-hell employee and major studster, exercised the muscles in his quarterback shoulders to push against the coal chute and pull his tight, linebacker butt free. Then he rose like a warrior in a cloud of ancient coal dust.
Stretching to his full staggering height, he held her with his gaze as he squared his shoulders to a breathtaking span—like Lucifer, sighting prey and spreading his charred wings.
Dark. Disreputable. Depp without his pirate ship, but taller, broader. More dangerous.
Delicious.
The silent hunk lowered his chin to keep his head from an intimate encounter with a raw oak ceiling beam and stepped her way. “Vivica said you would interview me. She said I work cheap. You need cheap. I am also strong.”
McKenna glanced at the hole in her house. “I can see that.”
“So hire me.”
“You just gave me the impression you didn’t want the job.”
He raised his chin—and swallowed his pride, she thought. “I need it.”
Glued to the spot, three stairs from the bottom, she found herself standing nose to nose with the sex dream and tried not to fold under his hypnotic gaze. Good thing panic called for self-preservation. “I don’t know you. You broke into my house. No, you broke my house!”
His physical strength, and the smile in his eyes, if not on his face, brought her to her senses. She took a minute to observe the paradox, giving him as bold and greedy a scrutiny as he gave her. Forbidding as he appeared dressed all in black, his leonine mane, an overlong tumble of sooty waves, humanized him.
“Did you use an eggbeater on your hair this morning?” she snapped, annoyed with herself for her speeding heart.
“On my way here, it started raining,” he said, his voice low, gravel-rough, and as physically stroking as his gaze.
She wondered how it would sound as a whisper in her ear.
Mercy, McKenna, get a grip. “Don’t touch the electrical wire in front of you, then, or you’re a goner, wet or dry.”
In the way every stubborn male listens to a smart female, the studster wrapped a hand around the end of the live wire and took the zap. But with some kind of bizarre inner force, he stood up to it.
The wire pulled from his hand, stood in the air, and burned itself up like a stream of gunpowder, electricity zooming back the way it came. When the wire vanished at the breaker panel—Zap! A crash and flash, and the lights went out.
“Good thing it’s still daylight,” he said.
“Do you know how much an electrician costs?” But with his smile, attraction zapped her like the electricity through that damned wire, which pissed her royally. “Unless you’re the jolly dumb giant, or you were shot from a cannon at gunpoint, I’m gonna sue your sorry ass, mister!”
The idiot’s eyes widened. “You do fight.”
“You find me amusing?”
“I find you breathtaking.”
“Blind and dumb.”
“What is dumb?”
“You are, buddy, for coming on to me after adding to the cost of my renovations. I don’t buy flattery. I’m no frail female, and I do own mirrors.” A small one. To pluck her brows.
“I like fight in a woman.”
McKenna stepped back, resenting her traitorous body and the warm tingles headed to all the wrong places. “Holy smackeroonie,” she said. “You can probably walk through the kitchen wall, no sledgehammer needed. Or you can look at the wall, hard, and it’ll fall at your feet.”
Hell, he could walk through her, topple years’ worth of walls, and leave her in a crumbling mess.
Don’t let him stay, her sane self warned. This man is his own ammunition. “You can’t—”
“I’m sorry about your wall,” he said in all sincerity. “But I can fix it.”
McKenna saw now what she’d missed when she lost her bones. Dimples. Oy vey Maria. “Walls, plural,” she snapped. “Foundation wall, there.” She pointed behind him. “Bedroom wall, that way.” She thumbed his gaze toward the right.
Emotional walls. In here. No mention necessary.
But if he could do the job she needed him to, at the price she offered, she might be able to ignore his studlyness, if it weren’t for the scars that added beast to his mirage of male perfection.
Must be a mirage. After all: he is man, hear him run.
He bowed. “Bastian Dragonelli at your service.”
“McKenna Greylock,” she said, her hand disappearing in his firm, secure one, while an unwanted sense of peace filled her.
Time stopped . . . for an infatuation hallucination.
NINE
Despite her warring emotions and spinning head, Bastian Dragonelli’s knowing smile nearly knocked her on her ass the way that live wire should have knocked him on his.
Did he sense her haywire reaction?
What reaction? She never fell for a handsome face, remarkable or not.
Okay, so rejection had done a number on her. Her deadbeat grandfather had flown the coop. Her dad died young. Not his fault, precisely. And the few guys she’d liked, well, they wanted skinny. Then she let down her guard for an honest, “baseball and apple pie” face—Huntley—and all he wanted was her land.
No, she wasn’t a woman who played “the game.” Not anymore. Giving up her invulnerability and showing emotion would be like grabbing the hot end of that wire.
The squeals and snorts of piglets near the hole in her foundation injected a shot of reality into a bizarre unreality, which allowed her to relax and breathe again.
“Hey,” Dragonelli said, turning to the piglets. “Snacks! I’m hungry.”
Before sh
e could tell him he didn’t have a right to be hungry in her house, unless she hired him—if she hired him—an owl flew in through the gaping hole and landed on the house wrecker’s shoulder.
“Is that yours?” she asked.
Dragonelli eyed the small, bold, brown-and-white owl. “No. Is it not yours?”
McKenna shook her head. She may not have inherited the family’s magick, but she had a healthy respect for animal totems. Owls were tied to wisdom. So if the little guy chose Dragonelli, did that mean she should? Of course, owls were also tied to seduction and fertility, not at issue here.
“I don’t know what to say. They don’t normally go near people.”
“I’m not . . . people,” her intruder said, stroking the owl, which emitted a hoop, hoop, hoop sound. “Winged creatures,” he said, “they like me, whether mocking or blessing me. In ancient Rome, it is thought that to place an owl feather on a sleeping person is to learn their secrets. As a night bird, the owl symbolizes the darkness within us, the place where we hide our secrets.”
“Have you been talking to Lizzie?”
“Vivica. I have been talking to Vivica. So do I get the job as your handyman?”
Loaded question. McKenna envied the owl stroked by that hand. Look at her, drooling over a man who just cost her a fortune. “I already said you’re not hired.”
“You don’t know what I can do.”
She swiped coal dust from her clothes. “I think you’re a bit too clumsy to be working with tools.”
“Like the one you threw at me?”
“I didn’t throw it. I dropped it.”
“Define clumsy.”
Smart-ass. “You broke my foundation!”
“You nearly broke my head.”
“I could sue,” she snapped.
Bastian’s shrug ruffled the owl’s feathers. “What do you do here?” he asked, “that you need a handyman?”
“I’m turning the house into a B and B. You know, a bed-and-breakfast?”
“Breakfast is a meal,” Dumb as a Stump said, doing an equation as difficult as bra identity. “And a bee is an insect.” His damned violet eyes widened. “So you eat bees, here? In bed?”
English, not his first language. Takes things literally. “Tell me why I should hire a man who put a gaping hole in my house.”
“I have read two books about shingling a roof.”
“Except, you couldn’t find a roof or a front door, if your life depended on it. Weren’t you lost in my woods for half an hour?”
“I admit it, I am directionally challenged. Vivica says I understand direction better as the crow flies. My feet, they get lost on roads that go sideways when I need to go straight.”
“Why didn’t you ask one of your groupies how to get here?”
“Groupie?”
“The women following you.”
“Those chirpy things? Annoying, hungry creatures. I shooed them away. Hire me and save me from them.”
“Charm will get you tossed out on your ass.”
“Define charm.”
TEN
Bastian followed McKenna Greylock up her stairs, watching the sway of her hips while trying to keep his eager hands from cupping her fine bottom. Being near her, inhaling her woman’s scent, he remembered something he had forgotten as a dragon, a truth that came rushing back to him for the first time since breaching the veil. As a man, he had loved women. The shape of them, their tastes and scents, the way they felt beneath him, above him, gloving him.
No woman, since his arrival earthside, had stirred either that buried knowledge or this strong physical response in him.
He had loved women centuries before. He loved them still.
McKenna Greylock made him remember bits of his life as a man. She made him want.
She made him want her.
He ached to press his face to her hair, feel its texture beneath his hands. Like so many other parts of her, he wanted to touch.
Halfway up the stairs, the owl flapped, dropped a feather, and flew out the way it had come, hoop-hoop-hooping all the way. Bastian pocketed the feather and returned his attention to McKenna. She smelled of joy flowers and doughnut crumblies. One, a happy smell from his island home, and the other, a new sweet scent he had come to appreciate here.
While he took in every curve of her extraordinary body, the shape of her made him want to taste. At a nod from him, Jock air-tested her with yellow smoke.
She passed, praise be, so his guardian dragon snuffle-puffed a cloud of red celebratory smoke. A whoop of joy filled Bastian’s lungs, but he refused to release it. He saw McKenna as a fortress he must breach, which he should keep to himself. But breach her he would, and make her glad he did.
A pleasant development, this need to breach, however embarrassing.
Killian had definitely failed to dethrone him. She may have altered him, but she had not broken the stiff object attempting to point McKenna’s way beneath its firm denim confinement.
Dewcup, the faery pain in his unscaled rump, distracted him—which might be good, given the embarrassing size of his man lance.
The faery sniffed and nosed her way into every small thing in McKenna’s house. Good thing his employer could not see the impolite pixie getting stuck nose-down in a drinking glass, after slurping the dregs from the bottom.
Bastian picked up the glass, held it behind him, turned it upside down, and shook it to release the imp while he pretended to admire the cooking room. No, the kitchen. McKenna spoke to someone on something like a phone, though her big speaking piece hung on a wall, rather than being kept in her pocket or in her ear like a bug.
Bastian admired her every move. She had hair the color of the red fire moon and a body with a shape that called to his lips and fingertips, both tingling with a necessity to touch. Following behind her made him quiver with all kinds of desires.
Around her, his broken man lance functioned remarkably well. Uh, perhaps too well. He held the glass in front of him. Empty.
He turned, whisked the dizzy faery off the floor, and pushed her into a tight-necked glass jug. Escaping would keep her busy and out of his hair for a while. She said hair made the softest beds.
He hated that most about Dewcup, getting her out of his hair.
Dewcup screeched for being stuck. “May your lance grow so long that you trip on it and break your ear wings!”
The faery, he could ignore. McKenna Greylock, he could not take his gaze from. Her defensive demeanor worried him a bit, as if she were an army of one who refused defeat. Which must have to do with her quest that he would make his own . . . in the event he had found his heart mate, which he believed he had, though he saw no sign of a crowned dragon.
McKenna hung her speaking piece on its perch and turned to him. “Okay, Steve is willing to teach you how to fix the foundation, which means that I get to remove the coal chute from my to-do list. He’ll also tell you how to repair the wiring, fix the plumbing, replace the roof, and so forth. If I hire you, you’ll have to sleep up here for a while, because the downstairs bedroom was supposed to belong to the help.
“Always, and I mean always, remember this: I give the orders and, evidently, I do the errands, or lose you to the wilds of Salem.”
She boldly pushed a finger against his chest, and Bastian remembered a day as a dragon when he would have taken a bite out of an aggressor for such disrespect.
“You,” she said, poking him as she spoke the word. “You are the grunt. Nothing more. No opinions. No taking the lead. Jack-of-all-trades, master of nothing and no one, especially not me. Got it, Buster?”
“Bastian,” he said. “My name is Bastian.” She must be his heart mate. Her spirit and fight called to him as strongly as her heart. As strongly as her body, though he did not yet know her quest.
She looked at him with her winged brows raised, and he found himself moved again by her beauty.
“Your eyes are violet,” she said.
“They’re dragon-elli eyes. Dragonelli. All
my brothers have eyes this color.”
“It’s in the genes, then?”
“No, that is my man lance in my jeans. I am sorry if it distracts you. It is a bit out of control today.”
ELEVEN
Unfortunately, McKenna started at that spot on his jeans, beneath which his lance danced, the more ardently given her admiration.
When her head came up, her cheeks were stained island-sky pink. “Not jeans,” she said. “Genes.” She spelled the word, placed a hand on her hip, and raised her chin, as if to keep from yielding to her curiosity and taking another look. “It’s that literal thing, again, isn’t it?” she asked. “Congratulations on the big bazooka, by the way. I take it you live large?”
“Bazooka?”
She cleared her throat. “Stop distracting me. Go back to the basement and wait while I get a tarp. We need to cover the hole in the foundation.”
Bastian tried to define tarp as he went back downstairs. He hoped McKenna had a computer so he could look things up as needed. After seeing her at Works Like Magick, he had taken as many lessons as he could stand until he abandoned Vivica’s mainstreaming learning series to take this job. Vivica called the series her “canned lessons” because she had designed them herself, utilizing all forms of technology. They were brilliant, he was sure, but McKenna, she was . . . magick.
While he waited for her to bring the tarp, he figured out the puzzle of the wall and began to replace each hard red block, and each clunky chunk that fit between, to close the hole he made when he overleapt his mark.
He fit the pieces together as well as he could, including the attached trough, which he would think might be for horses to drink, if it were not inside the house.
He shrugged when he finished. True, the wall could not stand a tumble through the veil, but it would keep animal snacks out.
When McKenna joined him, she carried something flat and blue under her arm and two small foreign objects in her hand. “Here,” she said. “You said you were hungry. Have a Creamsicle before we start. Oh, you already started. Great. A little mortar and we’ve got a temporary fix. I guess you’re hired. No, wait. You’re hired on a trial basis. Two weeks. If I like what you do, we’ll make it permanent.”
Naked Dragon Page 4
