Mated to the Dragon

by Kayla Wolf

  “I've got a bad shoulder. Dislocated it when I was a kid,” she was explaining, raising her voice over the clattering of the various objects she was moving around in the cabinet she was rummaging through. “It's popped out a few times since then, and Dad always says to wear a sling for a few days, so I keep one around... ah!”

  The sling she extracted triumphantly looked a lot sturdier than his – made from some kind of pliable blue fabric, it had an adjustable strap. They were an ingenious species, he had to admit.

  “Very kind of you.”

  “Well, I'm not using it. Touch wood,” she added, slamming a hand down onto the kitchen cabinet. “So you may as well. Geez, I really can't get over how fast you've healed.” She helped him remove the torn scraps of shirt, and, wrinkling her nose, deposited them in a small bin in her kitchen then washed her hands in the sink.

  The sling was much more effective than his attempt had been. Alexander flexed his hand in the sling to test the impact on his collarbone. “Much better. I will return it to you soon.”

  “You'll need it for a few months at least, dude.”

  Alexander hesitated. How much honesty was wise, in this situation? She already knew more than he was comfortable with – having witnessed the speed of his abrasions healing. She couldn't know the full extent of his injuries, so it was possible that his broken bones had escaped her – in which case perhaps she would accept that he hadn't been as badly hurt as he had been. Just a regular human man with some regular human injuries.

  But then again, she had been brave. Bravery should be rewarded with trust. At least a little.

  “A few days, perhaps. As I said – my family have accelerated healing qualities.”

  “You don't intend to go wandering off into the night right now, surely? How far away do you live?”

  He hesitated. “Several thousand miles.”

  She laughed. “You know, I kinda guessed you were from out of town. Do you have somewhere to stay?”

  “No. I had intended to find a place, but —”

  “— you got jumped in an alleyway by some punk rejects. Fair enough. But it's late. Stay here. At least tonight.” She hesitated. “You gave me a pretty – significant list of injuries earlier today before you passed out. I don't know how accurate it all was, but I'd feel better if you stayed here at least a little while.”

  Ah. He had told her. What could he do? Claim to have lied or exaggerated? But something about that didn't feel right. She had realized how quickly he healed – but she hadn't reacted with shock or horror. Simply accepted who he was, without prying for more information. He glanced out of the window – there was a light rain falling, and the world looked suddenly very cold and uninviting, especially compared to the cozy living room he was standing in, and the small woman who had returned to her sofa, and left enough space for him to sit beside her. Perhaps there was something to be said for accepting alliances where you could find them – for allowing problems to be solved for you.

  “If I am not intruding,” he said, formally, “I would be grateful for your hospitality. But I won’t bother you for long.”

  She laughed, then patted the couch cushion in an unmistakable gesture of invitation. Feeling oddly shy, he walked over to join her, settling himself nervously onto the somewhat lumpy – but soft and accommodating – beige sofa. “You're an odd fellow, Alexander. Where did you say you were from?”

  He hesitated. “It is a very long story. Perhaps better suited to another night.”

  “Fair enough.” She was looking up at him, and there was a flicker of something in her eyes that he couldn't read. For the first time, his rustiness with human facial expressions chafed at him. He wanted to know more about this human. Perhaps she could even help him on his quest, in some way – well, help him more than she'd already helped by saving his hide from those shifters in the alleyway. Briefly, he regretted not giving her more information about where he'd come from – it was a reasonable enough question, after all. But she was chattering on about the story being told by the glowing box she was watching, and he allowed himself to be drawn into that comforting lull instead.

  Yes, she had welcomed him into her home without knowing the first thing about him. Yes, he was doing her a disservice by not giving her more information. But there would be more time for talking later, he assured himself, trying to quiet the pang of guilt in his chest.

  Chapter 8 – Lisa

  They had a brief dispute over who was sleeping where – the strange, shirtless man wearing her old sling solemnly refused to take her bed, even though he was comically oversized in comparison to her apartment-sized couch. Lisa had to walk between rooms several times, demonstrating the comparative size and comfort of the bed, before Alexander would accept that he would be sleeping in her bed while he stayed here and that was that. It was almost funny, bossing him around – she got the strangest feeling that he wasn't the kind of guy who tended to take orders from anybody. Well, that was fine by her. It only made the victory all the sweeter.

  In the morning, she poked her head into her bedroom to check on him before she headed to the office for her morning of appointments. He sat up blearily, his hair messy, and she pointed him to the bathroom to clean himself up if he so desired. Clothes were a bit of a problem – she had a few oversized hockey jerseys that she'd hoped would fit him, but it became rapidly clear that what was cutely huge on her was barely going to fit over this guy's shoulders. What was he, some kind of athlete? No regular person had muscles like that just for show – or at least, nobody who wasn't a bodybuilder, and for some reason, she just didn't get that vibe from him. If Alexander had muscles, she suspected, it was because he needed them.

  But what for? Clandestine alley fights? She'd resisted the urge to interrogate him further about the state she'd found him in or the people he'd been fighting with, but it had been a struggle. He didn't seem especially forthcoming about himself, though there was clearly something going on. But she was willing to be patient. She'd signed on for this whole ridiculous situation now, and while there was still a good chance it was all going to blow up horribly in her face, she'd decided she was going to play her part in this strange little story. And her part was helping him. He wasn't the kind of guy who got injured very often, mysterious super-healing powers and all – and she was more than happy to help him get back on his feet. If that meant giving up her bed for a few nights, so be it. She was just that benevolent a person. Call it her good deed for the year.

  (Besides, it definitely didn't hurt that he was easy on the eye – especially once he'd sorted his hair out, and with all those bruises and grazes gone from his torso. She may have been intentionally single, but she wasn't blind.)

  It was kind of nice, playing house with Alexander, even though he was a strange guy and no mistake. On her way home from work that first day, she picked up some takeaway from her favorite Indian place on the corner. Unsure whether he was a vegetarian, she got him a lentil curry for safety. When she got in, keys jangling in one hand and the takeaway dangling from the other, she discovered him sitting on the sofa, absolutely riveted to the screen. He'd somehow figured out how to turn Netflix on, and he was watching —

  Clearing his throat, he hastily turned the television off and rushed over to her, blocking her view of the screen and formally thanking her for bringing dinner. She let herself seem to be distracted and pretended as though she'd forgotten altogether about the Netflix incident. The guy clearly didn't know about the “Continue Watching” feature. She was willing to bet he didn't know about the phone app, either. While they ate (he was delighted with the lentil curry, though he assured her, laughing as though she'd made the funniest joke in the world, that he wasn't a vegetarian) she casually extracted the replacement phone she'd picked up that afternoon, installed the Netflix app and logged into her account.

  That was weird, she thought. Why was he so worried about her finding out that he'd been watching a kids' movie? It was one she really liked, too – not her favorite, bu
t definitely top ten. She almost brought it up just to prove she was cleverer than him but thought better of it. Men were weird about their egos. Let him have his secret kids' movie favorites. God knew she'd watched Beauty and the Beast about fifty-seven times more than was really appropriate for a woman almost in her thirties.

  The days passed. It made her feel vain and silly, but she couldn't for the life of her figure out if he was into her. There was definitely a strange energy in the apartment – they were about the same age, both attractive (Lisa wasn't vain about it, and her focus had always been on other things, but she knew she was a physically desirable woman) and in close quarters. She certainly found him attractive, in his odd way – he was a foot taller than her and carved out of solid muscle, not to mention those gorgeous eyes, that chiseled jawline, that mop of dark curly hair she just wanted to comb her fingers through... and usually, in situations like this, she got at least some signals from the person in question regarding whether or not they felt similarly about her. Looks that lingered a little too long, excuses found to touch or brush close in confined spaces... it was a language she spoke fairly fluently. It had come in handy for her work, too. One of her clients, hopelessly besotted with a woman she worked with, casually mentioned noticing when the girl in question had changed her shampoo.

  “How do you know?”

  “Oh, she's always getting in my way in the break room.”

  “On purpose?”

  “N— no? She's just clumsy, I think —”

  “Didn't you say she was a martial artist?”

  Lisa had groaned and thumped her head against the table. Weeks of work with this woman trying to micro-analyze every work communication her crush had sent her, and the poor girl was all but throwing herself at her in the break room every day. Lisa had set firm instructions for her client to ask the girl out within 48 hours or she'd be dropping her permanently. She'd received a very shakily typed text message 47 hours later – “sshe saidd yess!!!”

  Anyway, she was fluent in the language of attraction, even from a distance, so it was extremely frustrating that this man seemed to belong to a different species somehow. He was absolutely inscrutable, that was the thing. It was as though he'd learned body language in another country, or on another planet, or something.

  On Friday, she stopped in for an end-of-the-week drink at a favorite cocktail bar in the city with a few girlfriends – fellow freelancers, for whom Friday night was just a technicality. If you weren't working all seven of the days God gave you, you were likely to go under, that had been Lisa's experience – though she worked very hard to carve out at least a few hours on Sunday mornings for some well-earned lazy time. This was her other indulgence – cocktails and gossip. And maybe her tongue was a little looser than it should have been thanks to a rather well-made raspberry daquiri, and maybe she mentioned a certain gold-eyed man of mystery and was met with rapt interest – after all, she was Lisa Harrison, the Single One.

  “I don't want to marry him,” she objected when Yasmin was halfway through an in-depth analysis of whether their children would also have golden eyes.

  “Hit and run?” suggested Annie with a sly twinkle in her eye. She was happily married with a toddler, but she loved living vicariously through her friends.

  “He's at her house, Annie, she can't exactly ghost from her own apartment.” Ella, ever-practical, always a problem-finder. And a problem-solver, to her credit.

  “Sure she could,” Yasmin said, grinning. “Come stay with me for a couple of weeks.”

  They delivered her to her doorstep with joking threats of coming upstairs to see the man in question – but rolled on down the road soon after, their laughter following her up the stairs to her apartment. She was drunker than she'd intended to be after two cocktails – stress, perhaps, and not much in her stomach to start with – and she giggled to herself as she dropped her keys twice trying to open the door.

  There was Alexander, halfway across the living room floor with a look of concern on his face – he'd clearly been coming to help her with the door. She giggled again at that, and his expression relaxed.

  “I was worried. You are later than usual.”

  “Oh, sorry. Stopped for drinks. Friday night,” she explained – and there it was again, that polite blankness of his. As though he didn't know what Friday night meant, but was happy to take her word for it. That was what she got from him, instead of clear signs about whether or not he wanted to sleep with her. Aggravating. Emboldened by the frustration – and by the cocktails – she took several deliberately provocative steps toward him, entered deeper into his space than she usually did, and craned her neck back to look up at him.

  “You're ridiculously tall, y'know that?”

  “Perhaps it is you that is ridiculously short,” he rejoined, easily enough. The warmth of his body against her was accidentally intoxicating, and she realized with a lurch that she'd gotten herself into fairly hot water here. The lights weren't on in the apartment, but the glow from the streetlight outside her window was enough to illuminate his golden eyes, closer than usual, gazing down at her with a pensive expression.

  “Lisa,” he said, and his voice sent shivers down her spine. Damnit.

  “Alexander,” she responded, challenging. “Do you not know where the light switches are, is that why it's so dark in here?”

  “I don't know what a light switch is,” he said, voice low and intense, and if the situation hadn't been so tense, she'd probably have spluttered laughter at that. As it was, she just – nodded. Of course, he didn't. And maybe it was because she was drunker than she thought she was, but she staggered a little and felt his hands settle just lightly on each of her shoulders, steadying her. Warm hands. Huge, on her small frame.

  “Hey, you've taken the sling off!”

  “Yes. All mended.”

  “Does that mean you're leaving?” She'd meant to sound arch and playful – instead, she just sounded forlorn. Damn. A smile quirked the edge of his lip.

  “Do you want me to?”

  She looked him straight in the eye. “Not tonight.”

  When he kissed her it felt like the tide coming in – the force of him seemed to rush over her, deceptively powerful, knocking down defenses she'd thought were ironclad and leaving her clinging to him, demanding, pulling him down closer to her and deepening the kiss as his arms curled tightly around her and hers crept up his huge chest, up his neck, and – finally, luxuriously – dove into that magnificent mane of dark curls, as soft and luscious as she'd imagined them to be. God, he was an excellent kisser. They broke apart after a minute – or an hour, hard to tell – and his breathing was rough, and his breath was hot on her skin, and his gold eyes almost seemed to glow in the low light of the apartment and she knew if she didn't get his shirt off right now immediately she was going to die.

  “Lisa —”

  “Come on,” she breathed, caught him by the wrist and tugged him backwards towards her bedroom door. He followed, a little hesitantly, and she closed the door behind him and flattened him against it again, fingers working quickly – if a little clumsily – on the buttons of his shirt. She exhaled. “God, how are you real?”

  He chuckled at that, a low, unbelievably sexy sound. “I am as real as you are.”

  “Good. Come here.”

  This time he curled his arms around her waist and hauled her off the ground as though she weighed nothing. She wrapped her legs around his waist, kissing him hard as he carried her across the floor to the bed, only breaking away when he lowered her to the mattress. He kissed her hard again but didn't seem satisfied with that – his mouth travelled across her cheek, into the hollow of her ear, sending shivers up and down her entire body as his breath ghosted across the sensitive parts of her throat, his lips following, tracing. His hands moved on her hips, firm but careful. Something strange in the way he touched her, something reverent – as though her body was somehow unfamiliar, something brand new to be explored, mapped, studied and understood.
<
br />   Well, she'd be happy to teach him.

  She was so distracted she hardly noticed that he'd tugged her dress over her head, and was eyeing her bra with some consternation. Most of her one-night stands were all too eager with that particular piece of the puzzle. His fingertips ghosted across her shoulders, and tugged at the straps of her bra, almost like a polite request for its removal – grinning, she pressed her shoulders into the bed and reached around to unclasp it at the back. What a gentleman.

  He pulled the now-unclasped bra from her body with a slight furrow to his brow – had he never seen one before, she wondered with some amusement? Thankfully, what was underneath it proved to be of much greater interest than the garment itself, and she bit back a moan as he caressed her breasts with his careful fingertips. That beautiful dark hair of his was unruly now, falling across his face and hiding those gorgeous eyes from her. Unacceptable, really. Something ought to be done. So she buried her hands in his hair again, pulling it out of his eyes, guided him lower, impatient but using a light touch.

  He almost seemed to be teasing her – he'd stopped at her hipbone, and was pressing careful kisses to the surrounding area. She groaned as he ran his tongue along her hip flexor, frustratingly close to where she wanted him – she felt him curl his fingers around the waistband of her panties. Which ones was she wearing today? The sexy ones? She hoped so – not that he seemed particularly interested in black lace or translucent fabric at the moment. Good. If only he could be persuaded to be interested in what was ever so slightly to his right —

  And then in one swift motion Alexander pulled her panties down and buried his face between her legs, and for what could have been five minutes or ten years, Lisa couldn't think about anything at all.

  Eventually, he kissed a path up her body again – she buried her hands in his hair and pulled him up to her and kissed him hard. She could feel the length of him pressed against her and as he tugged her towards him, she got control of her senses for long enough to push him away, just a little.