by Amelia Jade
Maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing after all. If playing along could help secure the investment in the lab, then she wouldn’t mind. More money meant they could progress faster, and she could cure her father before it was too late.
If they ever found a working solution in time. With every passing day, that seemed more and more unlikely, but who knew what they could do with Kase’s donation, depending on how big it was. It would have to be sizeable for the board to allow him to come visit the lab, she knew that much. He was the only potential investor who had come by since it opened. That was telling in itself.
The question that remained—could she live with herself, knowing she’d gone along with his advances just to secure money for the lab? It reeked of selling her body. With her size and shape, that was something Michelle had never thought of. It simply had never occurred to her, but now that it did, she felt faint revulsion at the idea, despite her reasons for doing so. No, there were some limits she wasn’t willing to cross.
“What do you suggest we do to fill the downtime?” Kase rumbled, leaning back onto a desk, showing off his thick arm muscles as he supported his upper body with them. It was quite a lovely display.
“I could catch up on the work you pulled me away from earlier,” she suggested, trying to maintain her cool.
He’s so hot. What if I just do it for me? Just use him to get what I want. Is that such a bad thing? If the lab happens to benefit at the same time, great, but man, what a score sleeping with him would be.
The idea of doing this for herself, simply to say she had, and maybe, just maybe, to throw a bit of his medicine back at him later on, appealed to her much more. After all, she could stop flirting with him any time she wanted. It would be easy to cut Kase back out of her life.
“Work sounds so boring. There’s got to be something else to do around here. There are no security cameras; we could definitely have all kinds of fun.” He paused, letting the intent behind his words sink in fully before continuing. “Like a prank. We could prank someone.”
They both knew damn well that pranking someone wasn’t what he had in mind. But it was a good idea, and Michelle decided to run with it. “Yeah. Let’s prank Jacob.” She remembered his comment from earlier about “enjoying” her lunch with Kase. Yes, this would be the perfect revenge.
“Okay, what do you have around here that we can use to prank him with?” Kase pushed off the desk, his shirt pulling tight across his core as he stood upright, momentarily distracting her from her evil plans as he came close.
“Uh.” She stumbled. This was the hard part of pranking someone. Actually coming up with it. “I don’t really know. This isn’t my strong suit, you know. I’m not much of a practical joker.”
“Me neither,” Kase admitted.
“But he deserves it.”
“Why?”
“For teasing me earlier. Didn’t you hear him?”
Kase started to shake his head, then stopped. “Oh, that line about enjoying lunch, complete with undertone?”
Her cheeks grew heated at the bluntness of his statement. “Yeah, that.”
“I don’t have any ideas with such short preparation,” Kase said after thinking it over. “But I’m sure between the two of us we can come up with some sort of prank to get him with, don’t you?”
She smiled. “Yeah. Yeah. We should dream up something a little more complicated.
“Right. Totally.” Kase sat back against the edge of her desk, no more than a foot away from her. “But that still leaves us with what to do in the meantime, you know? There’s nobody else here for me to talk to besides you, and I’ve already taken my opinion of you.”
“You’re not really going to talk to everyone else, are you?” she asked.
“You bet I am. Have to make sure that the people working here are all good people.”
“They are,” she said defensively. “I hired them all myself. I vouch for them.”
Kase studied her for a moment. “Good enough for me. Come on.” He grabbed her hand and, for the second time that day, hauled her along after him while ignoring her protests.
“Where are we going?”
He didn’t reply, just led her along through the desks and into the row of labs at the back of the building.
“What’s back here?” she asked.
“Privacy from your coworkers walking in on us,” he said, turning and pulling her in close.
Michelle’s lungs worked overtime to keep up as blood surged through her body. The sudden proximity to Kase had her heart beating frantically, a dull roar in her ears. What was she doing letting him get this close to her? Only yesterday morning he’d been a piece of her past, and now he was about to kiss her.
That revelation brought her back to the present. He was about to kiss her. Fingers hooked under her jaw, lifting it. Her vision ran up his stomach, over his chest, across his jaw, and finally ended at his lips. Soft. Warm, and oh so deliciously manly.
She remembered their last kiss, outside her house. Memories of how her body reacted to him flowed swiftly through the currents of her system, opening veins and allowing parts of her to swell and grow heated.
“Kase.” She spoke softly, lest anyone hear them, even though she knew the office was empty. They were completely, utterly alone. Nobody would interrupt them. It would be up to her to stop this from happening, and it didn’t look like that was about to happen.
He bent low, all of it happening in slow motion. Michelle gasped, but instead of pulling away, she arched into him, pushing up onto her tiptoes in an attempt to close the distance faster.
With his eyes already half closed, Kase didn’t anticipate this, and her sudden upward momentum threw off his estimate of how far down he had to come, and their noses bashed together painfully.
“Ow,” she yelped at the same moment he hissed in a combination of anger, surprise, and perhaps pain.
“Are you okay?” he asked, stroking her head to remove stray hairs from her face.
“Physically? Sure,” she said, wrinkling her nose and giving it a pinch to try to reset it to normal. “Just a sting. I’m just horribly embarrassed,” she admitted, trying to look away.
Fingers like steel held her jaw tight, keeping it from moving anywhere but back to look at him. “Don’t think about it,” he ordered. “Just go with it.”
“With what?” she asked hoarsely.
Kase thankfully didn’t give her the trite ‘this’ answer, which would have been far too cheesy for her to handle. He did, however, demonstrate with action. Once more he dipped low, and she rose to meet him without thinking.
Their mouths crashed together, and moments later her hands flung around his neck as he grabbed her by the waist and pinned her against the glass wall of the nearest lab. She moaned into him, overcome by the raw power he’d just demonstrated. Michelle was no lightweight, but he held her aloft like a piece of paper.
Gripping the back of his head, she ran her hands over the short, almost buzz-cut-length hair, loving the way it felt sliding underneath her fingertips, sending tiny shivers down her arms. Kase liked it too, because his growl vibrated her entire face in the most wonderful way.
Their lips parted in unison, as if reading each other’s minds, her tongue playfully running over his, darting and dancing with abandon as she slowly gave up control while also giving in. It was just as good as she remembered from before. Being with him, like this, made her entire body burn, aching for more. She wanted him to touch her everywhere, not just her outer legs, where he held her aloft.
Time had no meaning in their embrace. She didn’t know how long had passed, nor did she care. All that mattered was Kase, and how he felt, how his lips tasted and how hard every muscle in his body was while pressed firmly against her.
Neither of them heard the snick of a shoe hitting the ground until it was too late. Someone coughed. They both turned to see Jacob standing nearby. “You two need some privacy,” he said with a masterful grin, and jabbed at a button on the wall.
Later she would argue that it was a yelp of surprise, while Jacob and Kase would argue that she screamed. It didn’t really matter, because Kase shouted as the wall behind them suddenly gave way. Turns out it was actually the door to the lab, and Jacob had opened it, spilling them into a room.
“Down,” she said, and Kase set her on the ground. Glancing at the clock, she winced. “How the hell did we just lose thirty-five minutes?” she complained. “That’s impossible. We were there for maybe five.”
Kase gave her a restrained smile. “Time flies when you’re having fun?” he offered, not being much help.
“I can’t believe I did that,” she moaned, running her hands back over her head, trying to wrangle any stray hairs back into her already unruly ponytail.
“I should go,” Kase said, tugging his shirt down and adjusting his pants to hide the erection she’d had pressed against her for the past thirty-five minutes.
“Okay, I’ll—”
But he was already out of the door to the lab and headed back through the offices before she could say any more.
“Bye?”
Jacob came and leaned on the doorframe. She snapped her fingers at him, stopping his mouth from opening any further. “Not. A. Word,” she snarled, and brushed past him.
Instead of heading back to her desk, she walked deeper into the building. She was such an idiot! Everything was now more complicated because she’d had to go and kiss him, more concerned with getting revenge on him for something that happened five years earlier than she was with ensuring the smooth-functioning of the lab and getting the funding from Kase.
Hopefully she hadn’t cost them too much.
Chapter Eight
Kase
His shriek echoed out into the mountains, ringing back to him over and over again, until it finally faded into the distance.
Kase spread his giant wings, moving higher into the sky, toward the peak of the mountain. The huge chromium membrane wings flexed and rose constantly, the ground spiraling away underneath as he flew around the mountain while ascending it. The top was covered in clouds, but he didn’t let that stop him.
Eventually, the ledge he’d carved into the top came into view, and he swooped in for a landing, folding his wings in at his side as he dropped into the stone outcropping. He often came up here at night when he needed to think, or to be alone with his emotions.
Tonight was one of those nights. After getting home from the lab, he’d gone into the woods to take out his anger. Dead tree after dead tree fell to his quicksilver axe, the trunks exploding under his mighty blows. On some it only took him a single powerful chop, while the bigger ones took a few more. In the end, though, they all came down.
After an hour of that, he went back and started hacking the downed trunks into smaller pieces that he could haul back to his house to split. Eventually darkness had fallen on him, and he’d returned to the house briefly, only to take to the sky and head for his favorite roost.
Kase was pissed. Violently so, even now after hours of hacking away at dead wood that couldn’t fight back. There was nothing else for him to take his rage out on now, though, besides himself, and the more he’d worked himself into a fury, the more he had begun to feel himself slipping away.
Up here he could concentrate on the calm. On peace and tranquility. The clouds obscured his view of just about everything, allowing him to sit back onto his powerful haunches and ignore the world below.
“Come back, they said,” he snapped, mocking his friends with a high-pitched whiny voice. “It’ll be good for you, they said. See your mate, she’ll keep you sane, they said.”
He snorted, not for the first time wishing he were a fire dragon and could just burn something with his power. What I wouldn’t give for that right now.
Of course, if he were a fire dragon, he wouldn’t be fighting for his sanity and trying to prove to the world that he could make do on his own. If Kase were a fire dragon, he’d be happily mated to Michelle. They might even have a child or two by now, if he hadn’t been forced to distance himself from her.
He was a quicksilver dragon, though, and there was no point in dreaming about what might have been. No, he needed to focus on reality, and the reality was, he’d fucked up big time. All he should’ve done was what he’d told Molly to put in her letters to Michelle. That he was there to potentially invest, and he needed to spend time with her and the other members—though mostly her.
Instead of keeping it business, however, he’d gone and inserted himself back into her life, after so rudely ripping his way out of it all those years earlier. How she could even begin to think of forgiving him baffled Kase, but he put it down to the power of two mates, and their ability to overcome just about anything.
“You’re an idiot,” he growled, eyeing the snow-covered slope below him. Although he wasn’t an Ice dragon, the coolness was just as home to a Quick as it was their frigid brethren. Unfortunately, it couldn’t numb his pain.
Kase was hurting, because he knew that he would have to do it all over again. He couldn’t stay with Michelle. Although he didn’t believe he needed her help to fight himself, he couldn’t risk putting her in harm’s way. Which was precisely why he was pissed. By letting himself not only flirt, but kiss her, he’d pulled her right back into his own personal hell.
There was no way she would ever forgive him for what he knew he had to do.
Wings flapped in the night sky. Kase looked around alertly, taking a moment to pinpoint where the sound was coming from in the clouds. The mist made it harder to track the movements, especially when the owner of the wings decided to glide for a bit to stay silent.
Suddenly, there was a flurry of sound and a pitch-black shape came hurtling out of the sky to his right. Kase launched himself off the edge of his roost, wings spread wide as he dove at the same angle as the slope, trying to pick up speed as the other dragon sliced through the space he’d just occupied.
“Relax,” came Jerrik’s voice from above.
Kase pulled back on his wings, suddenly angling up even as they began to stroke powerfully, bringing him back up to level with the platform. A gigantic shadow of pitch black occupied almost half the ledge, yellow eyes looking out at him, dancing with laughter as he came back in to stand on the other side, hissing to show his displeasure.
“What the hell are you doing here, Jerrik?”
“I’ve been tracking your movements today. You spent a lot of time at the lab, and then you came home and haven’t stopped moving. When you shifted, your signal was lost.” He stopped talking for a moment. “There’s probably something to be said about that, you know. I should tell some of our scientists. Maybe they can come up with an explanation of just where our clothing and anything on us goes when we shift.”
“They’ve tried,” Kase muttered. “It’s like nothing happens to it. It just sits there. Wherever “there” is. No sensors have ever returned data. Do some research.”
“My, you’re testy today,” Jerrik said, laughing. “What went wrong?”
“Everything,” he snarled, quicksilver dripping from his jaws to spatter against the rock below, hissing and popping as it melted the stone. “Now speak your piece and then leave.”
Jerrik ignored the outburst. “I wanted to come remind you that you’re confined to my territory, Kase. You can’t leave.”
“Why does everyone think I’m becoming senile?” he complained. “I’m not an idiot.”
“This mountain is technically not in my jurisdiction,” Jerrik said with a shrug.
“My house is right down there.” He pointed with a wing toward the base of the next mountain over.
“And the divider runs right between these two mountains.”
“Well too fucking bad. This is my roost, which you’re so impolitely occupying, and if I need to come up here to be alone, I will.”
“I’m not here to arrest you. Just reminding you not to go anywhere else without my permission. You stay here until you’re judged fit to
return to duty, Kase. Got it?” Until then, Jerrik had been friendly and conversational. Now his voice hardened, and he spoke with the authority of the Magistrates.
Kase knew better than to fuck with that. “Yeah, I got it. Like I said, I’m not an idiot.”
The onyx dragon didn’t reply, just slipped from the edge and disappeared into the clouds below, where even Kase’s ultra-sharp night vision couldn’t pick him out. In frustration, Kase spat a gob of quicksilver down the mountain. It was extremely unlikely to hit Jerrik, but miracles had happened before.
He didn’t bother to listen for a response. Already his mind was shifting to what Jerrik had said. He was stuck here. I’m on fucking probation. What a joke!
If he had to stick around this area, though, he wasn’t going to be able to stop himself from seeing Michelle. Whether by choice or the pull of his dragon, he would end up seeing her again, he knew that. And every time he did, he would put her in more danger. Only once he’d fixed himself, could he begin to consider bringing her into his life.
So if Kase couldn’t go anywhere, that meant Michelle had to go. It pained him to have to do this, but it was for her own good. His mate needed to be kept safe at all costs, and being in the same vicinity as him was most certainly not a way to keep her safe.
Carrying the heavy burden of responsibility, he pushed off from the ledge and dropped into the clouds like a stone. Angling himself away from the slope he fell just far enough to keep from impacting it, but otherwise he simply went down, without bothering to slow himself.
Once he cleared the clouds below, he angled to the side, making a beeline for his house. He barely slowed himself down, hitting the ground hard, accepting the pain as part of his penance for what he was about to do. It was the absolute least he deserved. Death would almost be more preferable.
Shifting, he went inside and sat himself at his computer, typing up a letter. His fingers moved slowly and methodically, but they never stopped. It only took him one draft to say what he needed to say. He printed it, and also emailed a copy to Molly, so she would know what was going on.
