by Haven, Rose
“Oh, that would be so creepy coming from anyone else,” I said to myself, typing the number immediately into my phone and smiling in a way that Mama would describe as ‘twitterpated’. I was twitterpated, alright, and I didn’t regret it for a second. I glanced over at the canvas still set up next to the bed. I would call Daiki later that day, I decided, and ask him out on a real date. One that didn’t involve muggers or home invaders.
I still had some time before classes that day, so I rolled out of bed and wrapped myself in a fluffy dressing gown. I ran my fingers through my messy hair and stepped up to the canvas with its half-finished outline of Daiki’s back and wings. A soft blush rose on my cheeks when I remembered the way they had beat lazily while he’d ground into me.
Taking up my charcoal, I sat on the edge of my bed and set to work finishing the outline.
THE END
Dragon Romance
Heat Wave
Book Two
Lucile Wild
Dragon Romance: Heat Wave
Chapter One
When Terry led me into the abandoned warehouse I was skeptical. She’d promised me a gallery opening, not a horror movie. But she’d just led me through the narrow doorway and into the darkened basement.
“You’ve gotta embrace the unexpected, Dorothy,” she said. My name isn’t Dorothy. It’s Skye.
I’d only known Terry a week – for all I knew, her idea of ‘unexpected’ involved murdering country girls and stashing their bodies in abandoned warehouses. I was thinking that maybe I should quickly text Daiki and see if he would come and pick me up. But then we stepped into the basement and I felt my jaw drop.
“Nice, right?” Terry said, watching my reaction.
I nodded dumbly. The basement of the abandoned warehouse was crowded with people speaking in hushed whispers and clutching glasses of bubbling champagne. Blue light cast their faces into an eerie, dull shadow. But what it did to the paintings was another matter entirely.
There were three paintings on each of the four walls, uniform in size. The images on the canvas seemed to burst with vibrant fluorescent color. While the crowd looked washed out, the paintings seemed to blossom under the blue light.
“Black light,” Terry said.
I wondered if she could read my thoughts. “Pardon?”
“She paints with blacklight-reactive ink. That’s what’s making the paintings glow like that,” Terry pointed at the nearest one. It was a picture of a little girl in a white dress, dancing alone. “When it’s just regular light, or daylight, the pictures look kind of grim. Put ‘em under a blacklight, and suddenly it’s a party.”
I wanted to reach out and run my fingers over the paint, but I knew that it was a terribly inappropriate thing to do to another person’s work.
“It’s amazing,” I said. The image of the little girl would have looked grim. She had her back turned to the artist, with her head tipped so that she could see the viewer out of the corner of her eye, and her hands fanned down as if she meant to fall to the ground. But with the blacklight paint, she looked as though she was getting ready to take flight.
“I know, right?” Terry said. “This is art, whatever Professor D-Bag says.”
I laughed. Terry and I went to the Art Institute in Manhattan, but neither of us had been impressed by our professor. He’d made a bad impression when he’d told the class that painting shouldn’t be considered art and was a waste of time. I’d watched that lecture unfold with my lips pursed like I’d swallowed a whole lemon. Terry had sought me out not long afterwards.
We couldn’t be more different, Terry and I, but we’d bonded over our mutual dislike of pretentious art teachers. Terry had been raised in New York and had more piercings and tattoos than I had fingers and toes. Today, she’d dyed her hair saffron, and she wore a long vintage dress which made her look like she’d just walked off the set of Grease. I’d been raised in small town Texas by two very protective parents. I tossed my brown hair out of my face and ran my hands over my long skirt, glancing around at the room and all of the sophisticated gallery attendees.
“Relax, Dorothy, you look fine,” Terry said, snagging two champagne glasses from a passing waiter and handing me one. She had promised to take me shopping in a week or two when she got some time off work.
I’d tried champagne once at my cousin’s wedding and hated it, but I took a sip anyway. I already stood out because of my boring hair and childish clothes. I needed to fit in somehow.
Terry gazed around the room before offering me her arm. “Shall we?” she asked.
I took her elbow and allowed myself to be pulled around the room, staring in awe at the way the artist had rendered her subjects. They looked so bright and alive.
“So how’s it going with that guy?” Terry asked as we walked. “Daiki, right?”
I felt a blush creeping up my cheeks. “Really well,” I said. “We’re having lunch tomorrow.”
I first saw Daiki outside of my apartment window rescuing a girl from a mugger. He’d lit his arm on fire and had used it to burn the man’s face. Later, we had met at his grandfather Ichiru’s Japanese restaurant. Then he’d saved me from a mugger without his fire powers. Daiki was a masked vigilante, which was something I’d thought could only exist in comic books, but he might as well have been a superhero. After some investigation, I realized that he couldn’t possibly be human. He was a shapeshifter; a dragon, from a long lineage.
It made me giddy to think about Daiki. We’d enjoyed an evening in each other’s company about a week ago, but hadn’t had the chance to see each other since then. But we’d texted. And flirted. Sometimes when I heard my text-alert tone my heart would flutter like I was in high school again. Terry had noticed my little smiles whenever I’d get a text. She figured out pretty quickly that it was about a boy.
Man, I thought. Daiki was twenty-three.
I still hadn’t entirely wrapped my head around the concept of magical creatures being real, but I’d decided that I wanted to get to know Daiki better. I wanted to understand why I felt so drawn to him, why I felt that jolt of electricity every time we touched.
“That’s great,” Terry said. “Let me know if you need someone to give him the shovel talk.”
“The shovel talk?” I asked.
“You know: you hurt her, and I’ll beat you to death with a shovel. That talk,”
I threw my head back and laughed, causing a few gallery attendees to glare at us. Terry didn’t seem to mind though. She laughed with me.
“That probably won’t be necessary,” I said. I squeezed her elbow. “But thanks, all the same.”
“Just say the word, Dorothy.”
We completed a lap of the gallery, taking in all of the beautiful art. Then, we took another lap. And another. When we’d finally decided that we’d soaked in everything that we could, we paid our respects to the artist – a frail-looking older woman with tattooed lipstick and blacklight paint on her eyelids.
As we left, I wondered out loud where I could get some blacklight paint. The portrait of Daiki that I’d been working on would be spectacular with some fluorescent fire. Terry mentioned an art store she frequented in SoHo, and we fell into a discussion about the best types of charcoal to use for sketching. We didn’t bother trying to hail a cab.
Chapter Two
Terry and I headed to my apartment first. It was closest. As we walked and debated the various styles and brands of charcoal, I felt the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. I glanced backwards and noticed three men following us.
“Yeah, I saw them too,” Terry said, noticing my sudden distress and pulling me closer. “They’ve been following us since the gallery. Get your phone out and dial 911. Don’t ring, just have it ready.”
I did as she said. Daiki had told me that this area was actually pretty safe by New York standards, but I seemed to attract the bad elements. With my phone gripped tightly in my hand, I tried to continue our conversation with the steady thump, thump of footsteps behind u
s.
“Skye!”
I jumped and spun around. Daiki was behind us, ducking out of an alley and stuffing a black wad of material into his pocket. His clothes were black too. I realized he must have been running around looking for muggers before he’d spotted us.
“Daiki,” I said, trying to sound pleasantly surprised and not so relieved that I could burst. I had a sudden urge to run my hand over his cheek and kiss him. I restrained myself. “What are you doing out so late?”
The men trailing behind us paused when they saw Daiki – who was tall, well-muscled, and moved with a kind of feline grace. I knew that, with his powers and strength, he could take them all easily. I just hoped that they wouldn’t try to test him.
“Oji-san forgot to turn the stove off at the restaurant,” he responded easily. “What about you?”
“Just coming back from a gallery opening. This is Terry,” I added, gesturing to the girl next to me, who was running her eyes over Daiki’s face like she was trying to decide whether to beat him to death with a shovel or not. “Terry, this is Daiki,”
They shook hands. “Nice to meet you,” Daiki said. He glanced over his shoulder at the three men who were still lingering behind us. “It’s getting cold out, why don’t I walk you ladies home?”
“That’d be great,” Terry said, relaxing beside me.
Daiki held out his elbow for me to take, like Terry had, and together the three of us walked down the street. I glanced back to see the men turning away with their shoulders hunched.
“They’re leaving,” I said quietly. Terry and Daiki both nodded. “Thanks for your help,” I added to Daiki.
He grinned at me. His dark, olive-shaped eyes turned up at the corners. “No problem,” he said. “I’m just glad I saw you,”
I knew what he meant. He tended to stick to the neighborhood around his grandfather’s restaurant, but he’d been known to travel further when there wasn’t anyone in trouble closer to home. I didn’t know whether it was destiny or just really good luck, but I was so glad that I’d chosen to live where Daiki liked to ‘work’.
We walked together in silence, moving at a pace just a touch faster than walking. Terry had a rather blasé look on her face, as if this sort of thing happened to her all the time, but she did keep a pretty tight grip on my hand in her elbow. When we arrived at my apartment building, I turned to Daiki.
“Thanks so much,” I said. I thought about giving him a hug, but then I was afraid that it would be awkward if he didn’t hug back – or went into the hug from the wrong direction. This was the first time we’d properly seen each other since the night we’d shared almost a week ago. Instead, I stepped forward and quickly pecked his cheek. I felt the now-familiar jolt of electricity when my lips touched his skin. When I pulled away, he looked surprised but pleased. “Would you mind walking Terry home, too?”
“Hey, it’s cool – I can –”
“It’s no trouble,” Daiki said quickly. “Really,”
Terry hesitated for a moment, then nodded. “Okay, thanks,” she said.
“I’ll see you at classes?” I asked.
Terry nodded. “I’ll see if I can get my hands on some of that blacklight paint. What colors do you want?”
I glanced at Daiki. “Red,” I said. “And yellow. Thank you.”
I watched Daiki and Terry leave the alley before closing the door against the brisk Manhattan evening. Once inside my apartment, I set my purse down on the kitchen table and poured myself a glass of water. Then I went into my bedroom and let my eyes linger on the half-finished portrait of Daiki. It showed his back and his outstretched wings, but most of it was still a charcoal sketch.
I walked through the bedroom and into the ensuite bathroom, staring critically at my reflection in the mirror over the sink. My freckled cheeks and pointed chin stood out first, and then my long, curly brown hair and wide forehead. I wondered what I would look like with a fringe. Or a pixie cut. I gathered my hair up into the nape of my neck and tried to imagine what it would look like if I cut it all off. Then I got my sketch pad and some charcoal.
I’d loved art since I was a little girl and my daddy bought me a set of watercolor pencils for my birthday. I don’t think my parents ever expected me to take it seriously – they certainly hadn’t imagined that I would travel all the way to New York to go to an art school when, by their reckoning, I should have stayed in Round Table and gotten a degree in teaching or nursing. That was what good country girls did. I’d managed to convince them to let me go to New York, but I knew that they were just waiting for something bad to happen so that they could drag me back to Texas. That was why I hadn’t told them about the muggings in my neighborhood, or the fact that I was maybe-sort-of-dating a mythical creature.
My parents were very conservative. Never mind that Daiki was a dragon – they’d throw a fit if they knew he was Japanese.
Staring into my reflection, I quickly sketched the basic outline of my face. When that was done, I began sketching out a pixie cut which was longer at the top and short in the back and sides. I worked at it until my hand started to cramp. When it was finished, I shook my hand out and held my sketchbook up to the light to examine it.
“Not bad,”
I yelped and nearly fell into the bathtub, but Daiki’s strong hands reached out and caught me. I felt the low thrum of electricity run through me at his touch. I always felt that when we touched. He’d called it an ‘empathetic link’, which some special humans had with shifters, but he’d refused to elaborate on what that was or why it only happened with him and not with his grandfather.
“You scared the bejeezus out of me!” I said.
“Sorry,” Daiki said. I could tell that he was fighting a smile. “I didn’t mean to offend your bejeezus,”
I swatted his arm and straightened up. “Doofus,” I said, but I couldn’t keep the fondness out of my voice.
Daiki reached over and adjusted the sketchbook in my hand so that he could see it. “What’s this?”
“I’m thinking about cutting my hair,” I said. “What do you think?”
He looked at it for a while. Then he looked at me. “I think you’d look pretty no matter what.”
I looked down at the tiled floor and smiled, “Well, aren’t you sweet?”
He was surprisingly sweet, I thought. He’d dated a girl in Chicago a couple of years before, but she’d betrayed his trust, plastered his secrets over the internet, and almost gotten him and his grandfather killed by hunters. He had every right to be jaded and cynical, but he wasn’t. When he fought muggers, he was all power, but when we were alone or when we were texting he could be nervous, excited, and even silly. I liked that about him.
“How long have you known Terry?” Daiki asked.
I shrugged. “About a week, why?”
“She said that if I hurt you, she’d beat me to death with a shovel,” he replied. He grinned at me. “I like her,”
I shook my head and made a mental note to give Terry a talking to the next time I saw her. It was all well and good to keep your friends safe, but not if it meant scaring off their maybe-sort-of-boyfriends.
“How did you get in here, by the way?” I asked.
“Oh, you left your window open.”
“Some would call that breaking and entering,”
“I’ll knock next time,”
I hummed in approval and leaned up to kiss him like I’d wanted to earlier. He wrapped his arms around me and kissed me slowly. I felt the electricity purring between us. When our touches were quick, like when I’d kissed him on the cheek before, the electricity was almost harsh. But now, when we were kissing lazily, the electricity burned contently.
Daiki ran his hands up my back and brushed them through my hair, which still hung loose. I shivered. We held on tight to one another, pulling each other closer. Then Daiki pulled away.
“I like kissing you,” he said.
After the last time we’d kissed, I’d gotten the impression that he deliberatel
y held himself away from people because he’d been hurt so badly. He’d given up a lot after that relationship: his home in Chicago, his half-finished degree in engineering, and his pet cat, who’d been left behind in the family’s haste to disappear. I was glad that he was allowing himself to trust me – at least a little bit.
“I like kissing you too,” I said.
“If we don’t stop now, I won’t be able to,” he said. I wondered why that could ever be a bad thing and he must have seen the confusion on my face because he went on: “I just – I really like you. I want to do this properly.”
“Do you think we went too fast?” I asked, feeling a weight falling into my stomach even as the words ‘I like you’ made me giddy.
He shook his head. “No, I don’t regret the other night,” he said. “I’d just like the chance to get to know you properly,”
I realized that he planned to date me – to court me, even – and I wanted to sing. But I didn’t. I’d been told my singing sounded an awful lot like cats having their tails pulled.
“I like you too,” I said. His smile could have lit up the whole room.
“I should go,” he said, and I realized that we’d been smiling at each other for several minutes.
“Have a good night,” I said.
He turned away from me, smiling, and crossed the room to my bedroom window. With a small wave, he launched himself out and flew off into the night.
Chapter Three
I woke up the next morning to the sound of someone pounding on my door. I checked my watch – it was 6:17. I rolled out of bed, wrapped a dressing gown around my shoulders, and slumped over to the front door.
“Who is it?” I called.
“NYPD,” a woman’s voice called back.
I blinked and opened the door. There were two people there. A black woman in a suit, her hair pulled tight into a practical bun at the base of her skull, and a Hispanic man with a shaved head. They both held police badges.