by Juniper Hart
She groaned. Why does everything have to be so complicated?
She spotted one of her guards wandering by the beach with an assault rifle in hand. He was one of the basic grunts, not like the ones that had silver bullets for putting down werewolves—or the ones with the copper ammo for dragons. Hale hadn’t quite ever said it, but he had made sure that everyone knew Terran was not welcome there.
“Hey!” she called at the guard. “See anything?”
“Everything’s clear, ma’am!”
She scowled. Moron.
Then again, it was unfair to expect them to catch Terran. After one of them had spent entirely too long studying her body while she was tanning, she’d asked Hale to make sure that nobody just sat and watched the beach. They had shifts, and Terran had planned it so that he could slip in between them.
Cassia was bored, but Hale put a lot of restrictions on her under the guise of keeping her safe. Cassia figured it was more about control than safety, but she lived a good life and didn’t want to complain. Hale was very successful, and Cassia wanted for nothing.
Well, that wasn’t exactly true. She was given every material possession she’d ever wanted, but what she didn’t have was a purpose. She had always loved children and dreamed of being a mother. Apparently, that wasn’t in the cards. She volunteered with children, but Hale asked her stop because it took up so much of her time.
She gave it up to make him happy, but soon realized it was at the expense of her own happiness. Hale encouraged her to organize fundraisers, which he suggested would bring her joy. Cassia discovered the fundraisers really just provided new networking opportunities for Hale. Besides, the fundraisers weren’t the same as working directly with the children. She gave up organizing fundraisers and took up the lifestyle of being a kept woman—laying by the beach, reading, attending parties, and going shopping. Being rich was nice, but her lifestyle left a big hole in her heart.
Hale always said, “If you own a successful business for long enough, eventually you’re going to start making money.”
In Hale’s case, he’d owned a very successful company for almost a thousand years. Of course his company changed names over the centuries. Although he was extremely wealthy, one of the richest men in the world, he had to keep a low profile. If he became well-known, people might start to question why he never aged.
On the other hand, Terran also had wealth, but he also had a literal kingdom.
She remained in her comfortable lounge chair a little longer before she decided to go inside her house. She had bought the house in the South of France thirty years prior, and although it was only her summer home when she purchased it, Cassia had made it her full-time residence because she fell in love with it.
Her home was recently remodeled by an interior designer she had seen on HGTV. It was ultra-modern, with floor-to-ceiling glass windows that gave her a breathtaking view of the ocean. She had once wanted a cozy mountain getaway, but the mountains always reminded her of Terran, so she opted for an oceanfront home.
She brought her drink into the house and set it down on the counter. She could see a couple more guards wandering around outside, watching for something.
What are they looking for? Evidently not dragon princes.
She would need to talk to Hale about increasing security, but not because of Terran. That…that she would keep to herself. If Terran could get in, that meant other people could get in as well.
She grabbed some cardstock and her artist pencil and went back outdoors to sit down at the white marble table that gave her a nice view of the Atlantic and other beautiful homes along the coastline. She could hear her hot-tub bubbling pleasingly and wished for a feeling of serenity to come over her. She was in a beautiful location, had a slight buzz from her vodka soda, and had every material possession in the world that one could want. But she couldn’t get Terran off her mind. As long as he was in her thoughts, she would have no peace.
She put the pencil tip onto the paper. And then did nothing. She tried to get her brain to work, to get the pencil to move. Despite her best efforts, she couldn’t muster up any inspiration. Normally, the creative process was easy for her. She was an excellent artist—she’d had many lifetimes to perfect it, and she spent most of her free time either drawing or gardening. She shaded nothing mindlessly.
Terran thinks Hale is a killer. The thought was innerving, and she couldn’t remove the feeling that there was some truth to his accusation.
She reached for her phone and entered her passcode. Unlike Terran, she changed her passcode regularly and would never pick numbers in a sequential order. It was habit. She had the attention span of a gnat, so she got bored with anything after a little while. Her phone was no different, except for cases. She got attached to cases and felt bad for throwing them away. She had no particular allegiance to passcodes.
She pulled up Hale’s number. It had a couple hearts off to the side. She tried to push the button and hesitated. What was she going to say?
Hey, sweetie! Hope your trip is going well! Say, you wouldn’t just happen to be behind the murder of the Chancellor, would you?
She pushed the button and turned on the speaker.
Ring. Ring. Ring.
“Hello?” Hale answered from the other side.
She smiled. They hadn’t talked in a while, and she missed him.
“Hey, babe! How’s the trip going?”
“Good,” he said with just the hint of unhappiness under his smooth voice. “How are you doing? Is there something you need? I’m really busy right now.”
“Well…” she looked at the ankle bracelet that she had set on the table. “No,” she said. “Not really. I just miss you. When are you coming back?”
“Tomorrow morning,” he replied with a slightly annoyed tone to his voice. “You know that. You feeling okay?”
“Yeah…”
“Huh.” He didn’t sound convinced. “I’ll fly in first thing in the morning. I might even be there for breakfast.”
“You’re in London, right?”
“Yes.”
“Hey, you didn’t just happen to swing by New York, did you?”
There was a pause. “No. Why?”
“Oh, just curious! I thought you could swing by that macaroon place on the Upper West Side if you had some time. You know those are my favorite.” She hoped her story was convincing. “Maybe we can go there together later in the week.”
“You hate New York.”
“True. But I love macaroons,” she replied. She was not Terran. She was terrible at investigating. She was also a terrible liar. “Okay. Well, I’m tired.”
“Get some sleep. I’ll be back tomorrow. Sound good?”
“I guess,” she replied. “Love you.”
“Be home tomorrow,” he told her and hung up.
She glanced at the timer. Thirty-seven seconds. That’s all it took to simultaneously comfort and panic her. Thirty-seven pathetic seconds. She tried to calm herself down. She was getting herself all worked up, probably for nothing. Hale would fly in the next day. He could explain everything.
Right?
Cassia couldn’t help remembering the first time that she had met Terran. Back then, she had been a regular young woman that thought humans were the only things out there. She had expected to have a regular life, meet a man she loved, and eventually die.
Regular life? Nope. Man she loved? She thought she’d found it with Terran. Eventually die? Not likely, unless she got killed. Immortality could be cut short.
Terran came to her village with two other men, who she later found out were leaders of his army. Cassia’s father had owned a small inn, and Terran needed a place to stay for the night.
He was there to unwind from the pressures of being Keeper of the Mountain and asked for a simple meal. He couldn’t keep his eyes off her. She felt an immediate—almost supernatural—attraction to him, and she later found out the feeling was mutual.
The men he traveled with stared at her
intimidatingly and made it difficult to get close to him until his meal was ready. She swallowed hard and sauntered over to him, all without taking her eyes off his taut body and emerald-green eyes.
She couldn’t be blamed that she wasn’t paying attention. Or that she caught her foot on the rug that she had insisted was going to trip someone someday. Or that she lost her balance. It might, however, have been her fault that she accidentally tossed the entire contents of his meal, and his drink, onto his chest.
“Oh no!” she cried “I am so sorry!”
Terran stood up, accidentally hitting a picture on the wall and knocking it off. In a moment, the men he was with grabbed her and shoved her up against the wall, bending her arm behind her back painfully.
“Ow!” she yelped. “Ow! Please let me go. It was an accident.”
Terran pulled his guards off. His shirt was soaked, letting off steam. “Let her go,” he ordered. “Now!”
The hulking guards moved away from her like buildings, like her tiny frame stood any sort of threat towards Terran. “I am so sorry,” she told him. “I tripped. I did not see the rug and—”
“It is fine,” Terran replied.
He scowled, understandably, then looked at her with a reassuring smile, as if telling her she was forgiven.
“Please allow me to clean your shirt.”
“Do not worry, miss. I am fine,” he assured.
The next morning, Terran asked her father for her hand in marriage. Cassia did not know his true nature at the time. All she knew was that she felt drawn to him and could not resist his proposal. Terran had given her family a comfortable life for the remainder of their years. For that, she would be forever grateful.
In the present, Cassia smiled. Back then, everything had been so simple. That was before their great loss. Terran had been everything a girl could want. She truly thought everything would be perfect for all of eternity.
She still wasn’t sure why she didn’t give Terran another chance. He tried, hard, to get her back. He’d apologized and begged for her forgiveness. She had probably been stupid to ignore him. She tried to shut off all feelings for Terran, who she deemed responsible for her pain.
She slipped the anklet around her ankle and latched it tight.
Why not? Just because she wore it didn’t mean she was turning her back on Hale; it just meant she was keeping her options open. Even if a danger wasn’t related to Hale, it was nice to have Terran on call. He was a tremendous ally, and it comforted her to know he was nearby.
But that didn’t mean she was interested in pursuing a relationship with him! She was happy with Hale. The dream of living with Terran, as sweet as it was, lived in the past with a more naïve, younger version of herself.
If she had a box of dreams that had never come true, the box would be empty except for that one life…
She was rich. She was beautiful. She’d been skydiving, scuba diving, and had been in the deepest depths of the earth with Terran in his palace. She traveled around the world and even had several homes that spanned the globe. She’d met famous people throughout her lifetime and knew many secretes that would never make it to the history books.
She was living the dream. At least, that is what she kept telling herself.
She sighed. She’d keep the anklet just in case she needed it for whatever reason, not necessarily against Hale. He’d be flying in the next morning. When he came in, she could get to the bottom of the whole mess with the Chancellor’s death. She wouldn’t dare tell him that Terran had shown up.
Was it bad that she was hiding things from her boyfriend to protect Terran?
3
The next morning came entirely too soon.
She had slept like a log. The funny thing about Cassia was that she slept very soundly, but she flopped around like a beached marlin while doing it. She didn’t feel herself stir, but she did stir. Back when she was first with Hale, she had awoken to find out that she’d whacked him across the face accidentally in one of her movements in the night. It had been funny because he wasn’t hurt. Every time she thought of it, she laughed out loud.
He, however, did not find it so humorous.
Her phone alarm woke her up. She was lying in her king-sized bed in her expansive bedroom with the cool sea just outside the windows. She couldn’t see any guards, but she knew they were there. They always were.
She tried in vain to maneuver from the middle of the bed to one side and attempted to slap the snooze button. Her hand hit something, all right, but it turned out to be a glass. The glass fell off and shattered.
“Ugh,” she groaned, lurching up. “No… Why? I want to sleep at least another hour,” she said out loud to no one in particular.
Her phone kept screaming at her until she shut it up. The broken glass lined her wooden floor where she would normally step out onto with her bare feet. She grimaced. No chance of that now. Part dragon? Yes. Glass-proof? Nope.
She crawled out the other side of the bed to avoid the glass. She was a tiny little thing. Part of her had expected that when she became pregnant and gained the power to shift into a dragon, she would somehow get taller so she’d look less adorable and more dragon-like.
As it was, she stayed petite and nowhere near intimidating. She’d found almost no difference in her old human self and her halfling self, other than that her fingernails grew like crazy. She had to trim them every couple days just to avoid ripping holes in all the furniture. That and her skin was strangely warm all the time.
Terran had told her it was because of the heat inside, but she had no idea. Once, she’d had a car crash and went in for an x-ray to make sure everything was okay. She’d been hurt before, but never so severely. As an immortal dragon, she healed quickly, but she figured it was worth the effort to make extra sure that she was okay instead of just assuming everything had healed. She should have known better.
The doctors had been utterly confused about her test results. Her blood tests came back inconclusive, and her x-ray looked totally wrong, like they’d x-rayed an animal with a high fever. She never went to the doctor again.
She scooted around the glass, trying to get dressed to make it to the landing strip on time. She slipped her sleepwear off and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. She stared at herself, hard, for a second or two.
After a second, she mock-licked her finger and pressed it against her butt, making a hissing sound with her teeth.
“Damn, girl, you look good,” she told herself in the mirror.
Sometimes she gave herself emotional support. She’d done it ever since she was a kid, back when she wasn’t beautiful enough to have anyone tell her, so she’d had to make up for everyone’s lack of compliments by complimenting herself. Old habits never die.
“Ma’am,” someone said from outside her door.
Cassia turned beet red. One of the guards had been standing there. She’d always had the worst luck. She always caught yellow lights a second too late, always managed to mix her words up at big events to make herself look uneducated, and always was that girl to spill something on someone’s shirt. She didn’t know why. She was a great athlete. She’d was great at sports, so it wasn’t a lack of body control that led to her bad luck. She was simply accident-prone.
“Uh, yes?” she replied.
“The car’s ready.”
“Okay,” she replied, clearing her throat. “I seem to have broken a glass in here. Maybe you could send someone to clean it up?”
“You broke a glass?” came the reply. “Where?”
“It fell off my nightstand,” she replied. “Just…” she groaned. “Just get someone, please?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
His shoes moved away from the bottom of the door, so she went back to changing. She wanted to look good for Hale. She hadn’t seen him in a while, and she wanted him to be impressed. She had several outfits in the running. All she had to do was decide.
She’d narrowed it down to a sleek red dress with a slit along the
right thigh and a little black dress that showed off her killer body.
Little black dress.
That phrase always amused her ever since people started using it. It was even some dictionary’s word of the year: LBD. Back she was born, people weren’t so strange. They didn’t have cutesy little acronyms. She was rather fond of saying it: LBD. It sounded naughty.
She held up the two dresses to herself. The red dress was hot and sexy, and it seemed to say, “Come hither.”
On the other hand…the LBD was nice. It fit her like a glove and somehow isolated all her good features. The only problem with it was that it was practically impossible to move in. She was convinced that fashion had always existed to prevent women from moving. Paired with a nice pair of heels to make her look taller, she’d feel sexy in either dress.
Finally, she decided to go with the red dress. Go big or go home, right? It was colorful and bright, just like her personality, but it also felt like it gave off a dangerous vibe. It had a certain don’t mess with me feel to it with the exposed shoulders and confident design. She pulled it on and checked herself out in the mirror.
She glanced back at the door. Nobody was there. She looked back at the mirror, twisting to see her legs under the formfitting dress.
“Hale, you are a lucky man,” she said.
“Hello?” said someone from the door, a woman this time. “I’m here to clean up the glass.”
Cassia didn’t move. She just threw back her shoulders dramatically and groaned, closing her eyes like it would help. Of course. Of course someone had walked up in the half second it had taken her to look away from the door and back at herself. Luck would have it no other way.
“Yes,” Cassia sighed. “I’ll be out in a second.”
She pulled on some heels and opened the door to reveal several members of her guard: two behemoth men and a petite woman sniper.
Cassia was familiar with her guards; she always felt odd getting protected and watched at all hours by strangers, so she’d gotten to know them. The two guys were actually Russian brothers, who were also werewolves. They had given up a career of wrestling after one of the men, Igor, had suffered a career-ending knee injury when he was cut with a silver knife. Now they were both in private protection, and they were some of the best in the business.
