Her Dragon Professor

by Jasmine Wylder

  Sure enough, Roberto called the hand, winning a big chunk of Park’s money and all of Sienna’s. Well, it was the casino’s money, but it still stung Sienna, just on principle. She had a bit of a competitive streak. Cedric shot her a condescending smirk and topped it with a smarmy wink. Sienna shuddered and looked away, lest her dominant wolf blow her cover as a submissive airhead.

  Half an hour later, after being processed out of the tournament by staff and handing over her credentials, Sienna punched in a text message to the head of the Windsor security team, telling him she’d make her way to his office within the hour. She wanted to make sure none of Cedric’s bear buddies were tailing her after the weird looks he was giving her just before her elimination.

  Stopping in the bathroom, Sienna wasted no time in removing her costume. The itchy blonde wig came first and she almost sighed aloud in relief when her own chestnut locks fell free from the pins and bun it’d been subdued in. The thick-framed, cat-eyed glasses were next. They were purely for show (all shifters had phenomenal vision) and played into the sexy librarian look Sienna was going for. Finally, she leaned over the sink and used the warm water and a makeup removing towelette from her messenger bag to remove the buckets of foundation, contouring and highlighting powder, and fake lashes from her face.

  She was a fan of makeup like the next girl, but when she did jobs like this, she layered on the war paint until she reached level Kardashian. It was a lot of effort and far out of her comfort zone, but it did its job in making her look incredibly different from the fresh-faced look she usually favored. Beside her, Sienna’s phone buzzed and she frowned as she recognized her twin brother Sage’s number. It was the third time he’d called her in the last 24 hours and more likely than not, he wanted to talk about their family. Her best guess was that their oldest brother Samuel wanted Sienna to return home to their old pack.

  There was no chance in hell that was happening, and Sienna silently promised her twin, the only family member she bothered to stay in touch with, that she’d call him back tomorrow. Or the next day. Soon.

  Just as she was rearranging her items back into her bag, the bathroom door burst open and a looming blonde man who looked like he could have wandered off the set of a Viking documentary with his long ponytail and braided beard walked in. He was flanked by two goons in dark suits and ear pieces.

  Sienna blinked in surprise at the intrusion.

  “Well, hello, Fallon,” Sienna frowned at the huge mountain lion shifter. “I said I’d be over to your office in a minute. What’s the rush?”

  A small smile quirked on the man’s otherwise serious face.

  “I have patience issues and if those assholes are cheating again, I want their balls on a platter sooner rather than later,” he said. “What’ve you got for me?”

  Sienna looked around the bathroom and raised an eyebrow, hoping Fallon got the hint that she found having a serious work conversation in the women’s restroom was a little undignified.

  The head of security wasn’t moved, raising his own eyebrow and insisting she download all her information now.

  Taking a deep breath and remembering the handsome paycheck waiting for her, Sienna began to talk.

  Chapter Two

  Brody pulled a large hand through his dark hair and let out a long sigh. They’d lost the young woman’s scent. Again.

  “Shit,” his Beta, Sage, spat. He’d obviously lost the trail, as well. “This isn’t good, Brody.”

  Brody didn’t need to answer. As the Alpha of the Boulder pack, keeping his wolves safe was his top priority. The fact that Liesel had managed to disappear without a trace last week while out with her friends had his wolf pacing inside him, clawing to break free and find the female in case she was in trouble.

  The women had come to this bar and met up with a group of friends—shifters of all species. Her friends had told Brody that Liesel had been drinking and dancing most of the night, nothing out of the ordinary. When the bouncers had called last call, however, they couldn’t find Liesel anywhere. For six days now, Brody and Sage had followed every clue they could strangle out of other club goers and it’d all led to nothing. While his sentinels, the enforcers of his pack, scoured a 25-mile perimeter for signs of Liesel, he and his Beta interviewed anyone they could find to talk. And it’d all been a dead end.

  Dane, one Brody’s sentinels and a self-proclaimed IT junkie, was upstairs with the club owner reviewing new footage they’d been able to download from the security cameras. Minutes later, as Brody and Sage were getting ready to leave, Brody’s cell chirped in his jacket pocket. A text from Dane telling him to get back to the pack’s lodge in a hurry.

  Moments later, they were on the highway heading past the Boulder city limits to their pack’s land. It was a huge sprawl of lush green forests with a very imposing, very electric perimeter fence that discouraged any interlopers—human or shifter. It’s just how Brody liked it. He and his wolf were hypervigilant and a bit overprotective. But if it kept his pack safe, Brody could care less what other people called him.

  On the Boulder pack land was a main lodge where Brody lived and scattered throughout were smaller lodges equipped with every modern convenience a person could want. The Boulder pack was relatively small, just eight males, three females, and one mated pair so far, but eventually their numbers would grow. Wolf shifters needed mates to stay grounded and centered as they aged. Wolves were tactile creatures and lived in packs for a reason. Because his pack was relatively new, Brody understood that soon enough his wolves would look beyond the casual hookups they were known for and start looking to settle down once they encountered their mates.

  But Brody? Not him. Mating wasn’t in the cards for him. He was too guarded. Too untrusting. He loved sex as much as the next guy—probably more, actually, and kept plenty of willing females’ numbers in his phone. But his bed mates understood long before the clothes came off that he wanted nothing more than mutual pleasure from them. And he was known for giving as good as he got, a fact that made he and his wolf more than a little smug.

  Bounding up the stairs into the main lodge, he met Dane at the giant marble kitchen island where he was posted with his laptop, waiting on them.

  “What’d you find?” Brody posed the question before he sat on a stool next to the massive blonde wolf shifter.

  “Grainy video,” Dane said as he clicked through tabs on his screen. “But I think we caught images of her dancing with a shifter.”

  Sure enough, as Brody squinted at the dark photo, he could make out Liesel’s tall figure and pale blonde hair and behind her, as she danced, moved a massive man with dark brown curls hanging in his face. Dane played the video and Brody watched as Liesel danced, mostly unaware of the man dancing behind her, until he moved his giant hands up and down her arms. Brody didn’t miss the look of confusion on Liesel’s face—she didn’t know the man, that much was obvious. She settled in soon enough, though, and got back to dancing.

  “Almost an hour of this,” Dane said finally. “Eventually they head to a corner of the bar that’s just out of sight and we never see Liesel on camera again.”

  Brody’s chest was heavy with concern, but at least it was something. Somewhere to start. He took two screenshots of the video and sent them to a friend of his on the local sheriff’s department for a little help.

  Two hours later, after a tense meal that the mated female Georgia had made for them all, Brody got the call he’d been hoping for.

  It was Chet, the deputy.

  “Bears,” Chet said with a growl. He was a wolf shifter from the nearby Canyon pack. Chet’s Alpha, Grayson, and Brody had a solid alliance and generally, the packs looked out for each other as much as they could.

  Brody bit out a curse and slammed a fist on the table.

  When he hung up the phone, Brody told the assembled sentinels what Chet knew. A bear den had moved through Northern Colorado recently and stopped in Boulder, Colorado Springs, and parts of Denver before heading west. They all kne
w what that meant.

  “Las Vegas,” Sage said. Brody nodded.

  If Las Vegas was known as Sin City for the human population, shifters had made the town Debauchery Town for themselves. Any sort of trouble could be found, and often was, for the right price. If the bears had gotten their hands on Liesel and any other number of females and kidnapped them, chances were they were headed to Las Vegas to find buyers.

  The rage seethed up Brody’s spine at the thought of Liesel and the other females Chet had mentioned missing in danger. It was a wolf’s nature to protect and he’d let Liesel down.

  “We headed to Vegas?” Jai, one of the pack’s sentinels, asked.

  Brody hated Vegas. Nothing good had ever happened in Vegas as far as he knew.

  “It appears that way,” he said in growl. “It’s going to be like looking for a damn needle in a stack of needles, though.”

  The others nodded in agreement.

  “We could call my sister,” Sage said quietly and all eyes shot toward him.

  “What sister?” Jai asked with a sly grin, despite the circumstances. Sage had mentioned a twin sister before, but he never talked much about her or the rest of his family back in Wyoming.

  “My twin sister Sienna can find anything,” he said, and Brody didn’t miss the note of pride in his voice. “I’ll call her and we can head out and see her tonight.”

  “What pack is she with?” Jai pressed, a glint in his eye.

  Sage swallowed hard and narrowed his eyes a fraction before answering.

  “None.”

  The air dropped a few degrees. Lone wolves were rare and they were usually outcasts. Brody never trusted lone wolves. He moved to speak, but Sage held up his hand and cut him off.

  “Look, I know you, Brody. And I respect your thing against lone wolves, but that’s not Sienna,” he said. “We had a rough time of it in Wyoming. Sienna had it worse than I did and you remember what kind of shape I was in when you found me. She’s got trust issues now and she’s finally found a little peace in being anonymous in Las Vegas.”

  All ears perked up now. This was news to the pack. Brody knew about the sister, but he hadn’t known she was living as a lone wolf. He exhaled slowly.

  “I’m not asking her to join the pack,” Sage said. “I’m just saying that if you want to find out whether a new bear den has arrived in Vegas, if you want to know if there’s some shady shit going down out there, then you might want to talk to her. She gets paid to know these things for the more powerful shifters out there. It’s what she does.”

  Brody’s mind was at war with itself. Under no circumstances would he normally allow his pack to have anything to do with a rogue shifter. But these weren’t normal circumstances—one of his own was missing and in danger and chances were, this Sienna character might be able to find some information for him.

  Would he be putting his pack in danger in some way if he let this outsider in on their troubles? The thought niggled at him. He’d be damned if an outsider caused trouble. He’d rip their throat out before he let that happen.

  “Fine,” he said at last. “But if I feel like we’re being played, I won’t treat her different from any other threat, Sage. I don’t care if she’s your sister.”

  Sage nodded.

  “It’s not like that, Brody,” he added. “You’ll see. Sienna is something special.”

  Brody couldn’t help the snort that followed. Loners? Special? That’d be the day.

  Chapter Three

  Sienna stumbled sloppily as she made her way from her friend Theresa’s Mustang up the walkway to her condo. She’d been out celebrating the end of another successful assignment with the closest thing she could call a friend. Theresa knew nothing about shifters or the world that Sienna came from, but she’d been a lot of fun to party with when they both worked at the dive bar together, so Sienna had kept in touch with her after quitting.

  Theresa didn’t really know what the hell Sienna was celebrating, but if Sienna kept buying the tequila shots, she’d been game.

  Theresa zoomed down the road and Sienna squinted at her phone. 3:42 in the morning?

  “Shit,” she said with a slur. “Tomorrow’s gonna hurt like a bissssh...”

  Her head was already swimming. Alcohol wasn’t good for shifters. Their metabolism could burn through it relatively fast, but too much (like the amount Sienna had pounded back tonight) would make for an extra painful hangover in the morning.

  It took Sienna four times to get the right key in the lock and when she turned it, she pulled a little too hard on the key to remove it from the knob. The key broke in two, leaving half of it still in the lock.

  “Motherfucker,” she cursed, looking at the nub of a key left on her keychain. With a shrug, she kicked the door closed behind her and stumbled back into it, trying desperately to steady herself against it before attempting the journey to her bedroom in her four-inch heels.

  She looked down at her feet in the darkness and frowned. Heels were a bad idea. Bending over and swaying terribly so that she had to grab the door before toppling over, Sienna pulled the strappy stilettos off with a grunt, snapping the straps in two.

  “Hated those shoes anyway,” she murmured before letting out a long, overdue sigh when her feet flattened out against the cool tile. “Feeeeeels soooo much better.”

  Her newly freed feet felt so good to Sienna, she figured that getting out of her skin-tight jeans would probably feel twice as nice as losing her shoes did. She fiddled with the button on her zipper and hissed as it slid down, freeing her curves from the punishing denim.

  “Yassss,” she moaned as she kicked her feet out of the jeans. Moving slowly down the hallway, knowing she was leaving a trail of shoes, broken keys, her wallet and phone, and now her jeans, Sienna began singing to herself as she rounded the corner to her kitchen in search of a preemptive Gatorade to help combat tomorrow’s shame and hangover.

  “I stay out too late…got nothing in my brain…that’s what people say…mhh hmm…yeah, that’s what people say…mhh hmm…”

  Sienna forgot the next line, so she skipped ahead to the part of the Taylor Swift song that she did remember. Bouncing her hips along to the music in her head, Sienna kept at it.

  “…’cause the players gonna play play play play play…and the haters gonna hate hate hate hate hate…baby, I’m just gonna shake shake shake shake shake…shake it off…shake it OFF!”

  She made a face as the refrigerator light blasted her eyes with harsh light.

  “Shit, bro. No need to blind a girl…settle down…settle down,” she muttered at the appliance before grabbing the drink she was looking for. As she stood and put her hand on the handle of the door to shut it, Sienna froze. There was a new scent in her condo—two, no three new scents. How’d she miss that? Out of instinct her claws shot out of her fingertips and the hand that’d been holding the Orange Gatorade punctured the bottle, sending the sticky liquid all over her arm and the floor below.

  Damnit. That was her last full bottle.

  She closed her eyes and took in the scents again and relaxed just a fraction when she recognized one of them as her brother Sage. But who were the other two?

  Before she could form another thought, the living room light flew on and she found her brother staring at her, standing a few feet in front of the couch. Worse, two strange men were standing on either side of him looking at her like they’d just seen an alien. Lucky for Sienna, she was too drunk to cringe just yet. Instead, she frowned.

  “Sage?”

  He took in her appearance and immediately looked down, apparently wanting nothing to do with seeing his sister in her lacy underwear and half-unlaced black corset top. The two massive shifters with him weren’t so obliging or easily shamed. The blonde one with the gorgeous surfer tan and careless curls smiled openly at her and waggled his eyebrows. The dark-haired wolf opposite him stared at Sienna with narrowed, assessing eyes that were a deep and bottomless shade of velvet. When her eyes met his, it felt like the
bottom of Sienna’s stomach dropped to her feet. Not wanting to back down from whatever just happened, she tried to keep her eyes on his. Until Sage’s voice broke through her stupor, of course.

  “Where the hell are your pants, Sienna?!” Sage thundered at her, his cheeks redder as the seconds passed.

  She gave a goofy grin and broke the staring contest with Grumpy Wolf before looking over at her brother, the fear of being attacked by intruders in her underwear long since passed. With the hand free of the dead Gatorade bottle, she vaguely motioned down the hallway.

  “Over there with my shoes. And my eyelashes,” she slurred. “I broke the key in the door, too. My bad.”

  The blonde shifter stifled a laugh. Sienna blinked a few times as the floor beneath her started to sway.

  “So, are you guys staying the night?”

  Sage nodded and before he could say anything, Sienna spoke over him.

  “Yeah, whatever. Blah, blah, blah…and all that,” she said as she walked out of the kitchen and toward the living room. Sage backed up. “I need to go to bed, like, right now. I can chew your ass out tomorrow after I’m done puking. Don’t wake me up, motherfuckers, or I’ll gut you.”

  With that, Sienna marched past the three males in her living room and stumbled toward her bedroom, slamming the door and falling face first onto her bed.

  Sienna was snoring before her third breath.

  ***

  She didn’t remember hiring a jackhammer to work in her bedroom this morning. And yet, there was a violent hammering happening in her skull making her grit her teeth and pull her pillow tighter over her head.