The Dragon’s Surrogate: A Paranormal Romance (Shifter Surrogate Agency Book 5)

by Layla Silver

  My beautiful Maia. Reaching across the space between us, I twined my fingers with hers. Maia gave a soft sigh, squeezed my hand, and fell asleep.

  I didn’t even try to wake Maia up when we got to her place. I just unbuckled her seatbelt, scooped her up, and carried her inside. The stairs were out of the question. Even if they hadn’t been too steep and narrow for my comfort, gods only knew what she’d left lurking on them in the dark. Instead, I took a left inside the front door and navigated carefully through the shadows to the couch. Settling her on the cushions, I gently lifted her head and tucked one of the throw pillows her grandmother had embroidered under her head. Untangling her purse strap from around her, I set it on the floor. I slipped her shoes off next, leaving them beside her purse. Then I grabbed the thick, heavily-worn quilt she kept thrown over the back of the nearby chair. Tucking her in, I pressed a kiss to her forehead and straightened. Unable to help myself, I did a circuit of the house, making sure everything was safe before I let myself out. My fingers itched to lock the door behind me, but I knew better. Gods forbid one of her parents popped over in the morning. A locked door would raise piles of questions Maia didn’t need.

  Back in my car, I gunned the engine, blowing down the highway, my thoughts scattered. Irritation thrummed through me at Maia’s family and the stress they caused her. This wasn’t the 1950s. She didn’t need a family to validate her. My annoyance shifted, turning inward as my mind refused to let go of the idea of having twins. Twins were exceedingly rare in dragon circles, but not among coyotes. With medical intervention, there wouldn’t be any reason we couldn’t have any. Two perfect babies that looked just like Maia, and one of them just for me. Damn it.

  The ride stretched out, quiet and lonely without Maia’s presence beside me. My brain kept switching topics like a faulty radio randomly hopping channels. By the time I got home, my mood had soured to a dull weariness. It was a little after 2 a.m., and I just peeled my clothes off, threw them over a chair, and fell into bed.

  Sleep refused to come. After an hour of tossing, turning, and punching my pillow into different but equally useless shapes, I finally just got up. Pulling on a pair of silk sleep pants, I headed down to my home office. If I wasn’t going to sleep, I might as well get some work done.

  Behind my massive antique ebony-wood desk, I dropped into my chair and opened up my email. The first one in line was a code question, and I was grateful. It happened to be a topic that came up regularly, and I had the relevant line of code memorized. I punched out a concise but professional answer—complete with the code citation because it never hurt to show off a little.

  Next up was a more complicated question. I didn’t mind. With my brain slowly settling into work mode, the details helped me shed my frustrated feelings and reorient. One of the things I loved most about running my own engineering consultancy agency was the puzzles. The creative, sometimes even bizarre things my clients wanted to do while building or expanding their homes that needed one-of-a-kind solutions. Solutions that still managed to meet code and stay within some kind of feasible budget. Admittedly, though, ‘feasible budget’ was a relative term. Anyone hiring me had to start with pretty deep pockets. By 4 a.m., my vision was starting to blur, and I reluctantly saved my work and rubbed my eyes. I needed to sleep. Maybe this time, my body would cooperate. As I was getting up, the last new email in my inbox caught my eye.

  Squinting against the bleariness, I clicked it open and skimmed it. It was from the Walthams, a power couple I’d assisted with planning a renovation a few years ago. They’d bought an older house on a gorgeous piece of land and had completely redone it.

  Will, the email read. We need your help again! I’m sure you have a waiting list, but we’re on a time crunch, so charge whatever you need to, but we have to have you. We need to add a third floor to the main house. We just found out we’re having twins! We’ve attached a full list of everything we’ll need—a nursery, a playroom, living quarters for the nanny, an extra laundry room. The usual. Shoot me a bill for your retainer when you get a minute, and I’ll wire the money over. Can’t wait to get started!

  A nursery. Twins. I walked away from the computer, bone-achingly weary. Trudging up the stairs to my room, I wished fleetingly I was the one having twins. I’d turn my life inside out for a chance at that crazy, bubbly happiness that seeped off the Walthams even through email.

  Maia, I thought, flopping face-first into my mattress. I buried my face in my pillow. I could call Maia in the morning. She’d promised to think about our pact. She had valid concerns, but I had faith in us. We could make it work. Please, I thought bleakly. Please, let her see the possibilities when she isn’t drunk out of her mind.

  It was a slim chance, but I clung to the fragile hope as I slipped into dreams.

  Chapter 5 – Maia

  When Mason was two, Stone bought him an entire set of children’s drums. They were fire-engine red and came with giant soft mallets. Every whack of a mallet against the drum produced a throbbing boom that reverberated straight through to your bones. The kids loved them.

  I imagined the entire set stuffed inside my head, all of my nieces and nephews pounding on them like they’d consumed their weight in Red Bull. The image did nothing to ease the jarring, pulsating pain in my head or the roll of my stomach, but it was slightly more tolerable than remembering how thoroughly smashed I’d gotten at the club. Huddled in a ball, I willed myself to go back to sleep. As weird and disturbing as my dreams had been, they were infinitely preferable to dealing with the pain and humiliation that had dragged me awake.

  My stomach rolled again, more violently this time. I tasted acid and scrambled off the couch. Lurching and disjointed, I nearly killed myself getting across the room and into the downstairs powder closet. The sun stabbed my eyes, adding a fresh screech of pain to the pounding throb in my skull. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I hit my knees in front of the toilet and proceeded to empty my stomach.

  Somewhere, my phone rang. I ignored it. I was much too busy praying that I wouldn’t vomit my brains out along with the contents of my guts. Although maybe if I did, my head would hurt less.

  Finally, shaky and shivering, I flushed the toilet and staggered to my feet. Leaning heavily on the pedestal sink, I washed my hands, splashed water on my face, and rinsed out my mouth. Patting my face dry, I squinted at my bloodshot eyes in the large oval mirror. I looked like hell. It was appropriate, really, given how I felt, but this vision of myself was new and unwelcome.

  I’d never gotten completely trashed before, much less out in public. My cell rang again, and again I ignored it. I kept one hand on the wall as I unsteadily made my way toward the kitchen. Digging around in the back of my cupboard, I unearthed the tin of Hangover Cure Tea I kept on hand. It was my mother’s personal recipe, one she perfected when Stone and Ford were teenagers. My mother may not have approved of drinking, but she hated moaning, whiny, hungover teenage boys haunting her kitchen even more. She considered the tea something of a compromise.

  I always kept a tin around, though I’d never used it for myself before. The mixture was pungent and slightly sweet as I scooped it clumsily into a tea ball. Praying silently that my mother would never find out, I filled a mug with water from the tap, stuck it in the microwave, and hit a few buttons. Goddess help me if she ever found out I’d made one of her tisanes with unfiltered, microwaved water. She might disown me on the spot. When the microwave beeped, I dunked the tea ball in the now-steaming water and breathed in the scents of red ginseng, ginger, prickly pear, and borage as it seeped.

  When my phone went off yet again, I cursed and stalked toward the sound. I found my purse on the floor beside the couch with my shoes. Fishing out my phone, I glared at the screen then punched the button.

  “What do you want?”

  “You are alive. I was starting to have doubts.”

  Will sounded entirely too awake, and I rubbed my eyes with the fingers of the hand not holding my phone. “Regrettably,
” I agreed.

  “Oh. Hungover?” he asked sympathetically.

  “Dying would hurt less,” I informed him, walking back toward the kitchen, bleary-eyed and miserable. “Why are you calling me? Shouldn’t you be asleep?”

  “It’s 11 a.m., Mai.”

  Grunting, I put the phone on speaker so that I could leave it on the counter. I climbed stiffly onto the free patch of countertop beside it, retrieved my mug, and took a deep swig. Please work, I thought. Please, just this once, and I swear I’ll never get drunk ever again.

  “Mostly, I’m calling to make sure you’re still alive,” Will confided. Was that actual concern in his voice? “You were dead to the world when I left last night.”

  “I survived.” I sighed and took another sip. “I kind of wish I hadn’t, but I did.”

  There was a sympathetic hum from the phone. “So, this isn’t a good time to ask if you thought about what I said?”

  I glowered at the phone. “The only thing I have thought about in the 15 minutes I’ve been awake is how absolutely shitty I feel and what I can drink to feel even remotely human.”

  “Oh, Mai.”

  I could almost hear him shaking his head. But the tea might actually have worked, because the next words out of my mouth were, “what did you say that I was supposed to be thinking about?”

  “We talked about our pact,” Will said cautiously. “You know,” his tone turned teasing, “about how we’re getting old and should have a kid together. Through natural means or otherwise.”

  Oh. Right. That. Gulping down the last of my tea, I hauled myself off the counter and set about making coffee. I clearly wasn’t going back to bed, and only caffeine would make the rest of today tolerable.

  “I don’t know.” Stuffing a pod in the coffeemaker and hitting buttons, I pulled open the fridge for cream. “It’s a good pact, and I do want a kid. I know you do, too.” Vaguely, I was aware that no thinking was involved in this conversation. I was just rambling stream-of-consciousness thoughts to Will because he’d asked me a question, and I trusted him.

  And possibly because I was still incredibly hungover.

  “Are you worried about being pregnant?” Will asked, curiously. “Or about what your family will say?” His tone soured a little on the last words, though he tried to hide it.

  “It’s just … there are so many risks.” Pouring cream into the frother and shoving the carton back in the fridge, I propped my elbows on the counter and closed my eyes. “You know crossing shifter types is sketchy business. There’s no telling what we’d get. A coyote, or a dragon—or neither! We just wouldn’t know.” I dug the heels of my hands into my eyelids. “I can’t raise a dragon shifter by myself, Will. Not in my family. You know how they are. And a coyote …” I shrugged, even though he couldn’t see me. “Your parents are wonderful, but what would they do with a coyote grandpup? And what about us?” Picking up steam as my worries poured out, I tipped frothed cream into my thick coffee. “Once people have kids, they pick them over everything, Will. What happens if we decide we have different philosophies when it comes to raising kids, and you have to pick your kid over me? Or if our kids decide they want two parents, and you marry some socialite to give your kid a mother, and she hates me?”

  Picking up the phone and my giant earthenware mug, I carried both back to the living room as I talked. I sunk into the nest of blankets still on the couch and dropped the phone beside me. “I don’t want to give up you for a kid.”

  “That,” Will interrupted flatly, “is not how this works.”

  “You don’t know that,” I pointed out, swallowing a large portion of my coffee. I could all but feel my veins widen with the first shot of caffeine, the pain in my head abating marginally. “And even if we could promise each other nothing would change, the legal end of things must be a nightmare. I can’t even imagine.” I gulped down more coffee. I could hear the wheels turning in Will’s head in the silence.

  “All right,” he said after a minute.

  I smiled, wincing as it inexplicably made my head throb again. I knew that tone. Will was in engineer problem-solving mode.

  “Your points are fair,” he admitted. There was a scratching—he was making a list, I’d bet, in his refined, elegant handwriting with a pen that cost more than half my wardrobe on handmade paper his mother had gifted him. “How about this? I’ll talk to Elton and get some details—about the legal bit and whether there’s any way to control for shifter genes, all right? If he says the agency is equipped to help us with that stuff, we make an appointment and go see them. No pressure, just investigation, right? And if they can’t, well, we scrap the whole thing and write it off on being young and stupid when we made the pact. Agreed?”

  I hesitated. “Yeah,” I said reluctantly. “Okay.” I blew out a breath. “It can’t hurt just to get information, can it?”

  ***

  By the time Azalea and her kids came over that afternoon, I no longer felt like death warmed over. A shower, a second dose of hangover cure, and half a pot of coffee had me looking and sounding human enough that I could laugh when they tumbled in, all noise and energy.

  “Aunt Mai!” Eden bounced in a circle, her dark curls wild around her shoulders. “Can we make crafts? Can we? Can we?”

  “Me!” Cedar demanded, lifting her pudgy arms and leaning out of her mother’s grip toward me, imperiously.

  “I wanna play with the sand!” Brant interjected, throwing himself at my legs and clinging tightly. He looked up, his huge brown eyes bright and hopeful. He was going to be a shameless heartbreaker, that one.

  “Well,” I said, taking Cedar from Lea and propping her on my left hip. “Why don’t we do both?” I looked down at Brant. “The sand table is all set up on the back porch.”

  He whooped and tore toward the back of the house.

  “If we get the food coloring and some jars from the kitchen, we can make sand art,” I told Eden. “I think I’ve still got that hot pink stuff Nanna used on your birthday cake.”

  “Ooh! Come on, Mom!” Eden grabbed Lea’s hand and started dragging her toward the kitchen. “We have to find the pink! And some purple. What goes with purple?”

  “They just came back from their father’s.” Lea shot me a grimace over her shoulder. “Margot gave them sugar for breakfast.”

  “It was Lucky Charms,” Eden agreed, her expression almost maniacal with delight. “It had marshmallows, and they turned the milk colors!”

  “Uh-huh,” I said bemused. Cedar cuddled into my shoulder, and I pressed a kiss to the top of her head.

  Tyler, Lea’s on-again-off-again significant other tended to work weird hours. He did his best to be home the entire time his kids were visiting, but when he got called in unexpectedly, his sister Margot covered. Margot adored the kids, but she’d never met a boundary she could hold, and they happily walked all over her.

  “You’re still our favorite Aunt, though,” Eden informed me seriously as she dug through the small bin her mother had retrieved off a high shelf. “You’re the bestest.”

  “Because I have pink food coloring,” I joked, watching her scrutinize two nearly-identical shades of purple before decisively putting one back and lining the other up next to the coveted pink.

  “And cartoons,” Eden reminded me, rummaging in the bin again and coming up with stained, half-empty bottles of green and yellow.

  “Right.” I might have signed in to Will’s digital accounts once or twice to access their favorite shows that no one else had access to. He hadn’t complained.

  Cedar stuck two fingers in her mouth, her eyelids drooping as Azalea and I helped Eden find bottles, funnels, and lids. Then we all trooped out back to where Brant was already elbow-deep in the sand table I kept for the kids. It had three sections—one with pristine white sand, one with black volcanic sand, and one in the middle with mixed sand. Plastic toys in primary colors littered the floor around the table, and Lea nudged them out of the way with her foot as she helped her daughter get
set up.

  Of course, as soon as he saw the project, Brant wanted in on it, too. It took another ten minutes to get them sorted out and started, but then Lea and I were able to retreat to the other side of the porch. Settling onto the porch swing, I rubbed Cedar’s back as she dozed. She had a lower sugar tolerance than her siblings, and it wasn’t a stretch to guess she was crashing from the morning’s sugar binge.

  Azalea tucked one foot beneath herself and settled beside me, one watchful eye on her children. “Seriously, Mai.” She shook her head at me. “I know you hate it when mom says it, but you really should have kids of your own by now.” She gestured at her sleeping daughter. “I’ve been trying to get her to settle since I picked her up! Five minutes with you, and she’s out like a light!”

  “I’m not sure that says much for my personality,” I teased.

  “Stop.” Lea rolled her eyes affectionately. “You know what I meant.” Her brow furrowed. “Don’t you want to be a mom? You’d be great at it!”

  I thought about Will and the research he was doing. I wasn’t ready to bring that up. Not yet. I loved my sister, but she was physically incapable of keeping a secret. Unless I wanted to have the discussion with my entire family and half the town, I needed to sit on it a while longer.

  “It’s not like there’s a hurry when you’ve all got kids I can steal,” I said, diverting the question. “Now come on, tell me about school. You said something about a hot guy in your economics class?”

  Lea’s face lit up and, keeping her voice low enough that the kids wouldn’t hear, she launched into a bubbly description of this semester’s classes. At 24, she was older than the average college sophomore, but having Eden so young had set her back academically. She was just starting to catch up and loving every minute of it.

  We gossiped, the kids periodically interrupting us for help with their sand art masterpieces. By about the three-hour mark, it was clear the older kids were running out of steam. I told Lea not to worry about cleaning up and helped her herd the kids and their newly made treasures out to the car. I got Cedar in her car seat, then collected kisses from the other two.