by Amelia Jade
Twin stud earrings twinkled back at him in the daylight from her left ear, and he knew it matched the other side. The diamonds were small. Too small for someone of her beauty, he decided. An idea formed in his head. Aimee had never said that this shopping spree had to be only clothing.
“What’s that smile for?” she asked. “You look entirely too confident of yourself.”
“I am a dragon. I have no reason to be anything but confident in myself. I am my own master.”
Although he believed the words, part of his delivery had been monotone, to ensure that Aimee knew he was just having fun, aware of what he was saying.
“We’ll see.”
He frowned, wondering just what she was taking him to see that had her so positive it would have an effect on him. For just a split second the confidence in his own invulnerability wavered.
“We’re here.”
He looked up, reading the sign tacked onto the front of the single-story building set fifty feet or so back from the road.
Crossroads & Crosshairs.
“What is this place?” He didn’t recognize the little symbol on the sign either. It was a black object that looked like an L turned on its side, but with a lot more detail.
“A range,” she told him. “You need to obey the rules here, okay? None of the normal ‘your rules don’t apply to me, ho ho ho’ stuff, got it? If you can’t do it for yourself, do it for me.”
He frowned. “Okay.”
From out behind the building came a series of sharp bangs, the noise coming rapidly, causing him to flinch as he looked around for the source.
“That’s the outdoor range out back. It’s okay, it’s safe.”
“If you say so.” Now he was positive he wasn’t going to like what he was about to see.
Aimee dragged him inside, waving to the man behind the counter at the back of the store. “Hey Tom, how are ya?”
“Hey Aimee, good to see you!” he boomed back.
Tom was a middle-aged man with a large expanding gut and a mustache that impressed. Rhys walked up to him and took the proffered hand. “Rhys,” he said in return as Tom introduced himself.
“She dragged you here?” Tom asked, his voice making it sound like they were talking secrets even though Aimee was standing next to him.
“Indeed. I’ve never been to a range before. She thinks it will be a good learning experience for me, though I doubt it.”
Behind him Aimee snorted and he saw Tom smile. Turning abruptly, he caught just a glimpse of the face she’d been making behind his back before she put on her best innocent look.
“So adult of you,” he said dryly.
Aimee laughed and rubbed his shoulder, her touch sending sparks of excitement through his chest. “You’ll get over it big guy, I promise.”
He busied himself looking around as she organized whatever it was she intended to do with Tom. There was a wide variety of the objects. Judging by the signs everywhere he assumed they were called guns. He also saw signs for something called pistols, which seemed to be the smaller versions, and rifles, which were longer objects. His eyes spied a sign called “Ammo Rack,” and the various shelves filled with boxes and brass objects. His brain started putting things together, just as a moving picture flashed up on one of the large versions of her cell phone mounted to the wall.
It showed someone putting some ammunition into one of the pistols, and then aiming it at a piece of paper twenty feet away. His eyes rose slightly as the objected rocked and the paper shredded as objects impacted it.
“Come on,” Aimee said, coming up behind him. Put these over your ears like this, and wear these over your eyes.” She showed him how, and then tugged him along through a set of doors, and then another one. Almost immediately he was assaulted with noise, his acute hearing picking up everything despite the muffled effect of the ear protection she’d given him.
There were ten separate stalls on the right, five of which had people. A number of bangs would come from each one, before the occupant set down a pistol on a tray. Aimee took him to one, and then had him stand and watch as she used the pistol on the target in her stall. When she brought it back, he noted that all the holes were in the red circle at the center.
After that she took him outside where others were using larger guns, the rifles. The booms were slower, but much louder out here. There were more stalls, but the targets were much, much farther away this time. Some of them ranged out hundreds of feet into the distance. Once again Aimee took him to a stall where Tom supplied a gun. Aimee did something to it, pulled it up to her shoulder and the gun rocked her back a step as it went off.
She did that several more times before setting it back down, careful to keep the end of it pointed at the targets at all times.
They went and thanked Tom and left. During the entire thing he hadn’t said an entire word.
“Those guns fire bullets made out of metal. The pistol I was using fires them with a speed of around twelve hundred feet per second.”
He tried to process the fact, but she kept speaking.
“The rifle, the bigger one. It’s closer to three thousand feet. Per second. The rifle I fired is a single shot. The military, the fighters, they have weapons that can reach four thousand feet per second, and do seven hundred or more bullets per minute. Those are just the ones that are handheld. You can get into bigger versions that fire much faster. Thousands of rounds a minute.”
“What is the point you are trying to make?” he asked sulkily, knowing the answer and not appreciating the way she’d driven it home with such a fierce hammer.
“That you aren’t invulnerable to humans anymore. Our technology has caught up and surpassed you. In a normal situation? Yes, of course your strength and speed allow you to overwhelm us.”
He turned away, but she grabbed his shoulder and spun him back, forcing him to look and listen to her.
“I’m not doing this to be some sort of bitch, Rhys. You need to trust me on that.”
“Then why are you doing it?” he snapped, his bruised ego getting the better of him.
“Because I don’t want you to do something you’ll regret. If you cause a scene, or do something that otherwise reveals your true nature, then people are going to come after you. They will have weapons like that, and they will do whatever it takes to capture you, or even kill you.” She looked away suddenly. “I don’t want that to happen.”
“This is why you wanted me to, as you put it, stay low?”
“Yes. If they find you, they’ll want to experiment on you, to try and figure out a way to gain access to your abilities for themselves.”
He expelled air from between his lips.
“What?”
“It would appear that we’ve found something else that doesn’t change.”
Aimee stared at him for a moment before she wilted. “Oh Rhys. I’m sorry.”
He waved her off. “It has nothing to do with you, Aimee. You have been nothing but kind and patient with me. I guess I had just hoped that after all this time, maybe I wouldn’t be regarded as a freak or an oddity.”
She pulled him in to a hug.
“I wasn’t trying to make you feel unwelcome,” she said, her voice partially muffled as she spoke into his shoulder. “I just didn’t want them to take you away.”
He heard the hesitation in her voice, wondering if she meant to add “from me” to the end of it, but stopped short of actually saying it.
“It’s okay,” he rumbled, striving to find his confidence and stoke it once more. “Kings and shamans and others have been trying to capture me for centuries. They haven’t succeeded yet. In the past I was able to outmuscle them because their weapons were weak. Now it would appear that I shall have to use another part of me if I hope to succeed.”
She stepped away from him and looked him up and down, pausing just below his waist.
“Not what I meant,” he said with a roll of his eyes. “I meant my brain.”
“I know. But I thought you
wanted to succeed.”
He clapped a hand over his heart. “You have wounded my pride m’lady.”
Aimee giggled. “I doubt it. It would take a lot more than that to damage something so large.”
“You aren’t going to let it go, are you?”
She shook her head. “Nope, not until I get my promised shopping spree.”
He glanced at her, then patted his pockets skeptically.
“Is there a problem?”
“Yes. I seem to have forgotten my gold back in my cave…”
“Oh my God,” she exclaimed, snorting with laughter. “Tell me you never actually used that line on a woman?”
He looked away and her laughs doubled in strength. “That’s priceless. I wish I could have been there to witness such a monumental failure.”
“It was not pretty,” he admitted. “The king…I forget what his name was now, was quite unimpressed with me.”
“I bet. Good thing I can tell when you’re telling the truth or not.” She took his hand again, something he was beginning to enjoy immensely, far more than he’d expected. “Let’s go, we’ve got to cash some of that in before the banks close.”
Banks. Another term he wasn’t aware of.
“Is there a way for me to get up to date with all of the things I’ve missed?” he asked as they started walking back toward town.
“Oh, of course. You’re going to love the internet. Especially once you find all the porn.”
He frowned. “What is porn?”
Aimee just laughed gaily, pulling him along even harder.
Chapter Twelve
Aimee
She pushed open the door to her apartment with one hand, holding the two medium-sized bags in the other.
“Well, that was a successful trip, I must say,” she said, eager to take another look at her prizes. “Don’t you think?”
Behind her Rhys turned sideways to make it in through the door, his hands, wrists, and arms all supporting straps to various bags filled with items.
“I miss the days when it was acceptable to hire someone to follow me around and carry all these things,” he moaned.
“Oh, don’t be such a whiner!” she said, pointing to the section of floor where he was to gently deposit her items.
“You spent everything we had. I gave you three bars’ worth of gold, and you spent it all,” he said, more awed than upset.
“I’ve never been able to go so buck-wild before,” she confessed, feeling embarrassed about the complete and utter lack of restraint she’d shown after he had handed her the three bars to get changed over into proper currency. “I’m sorry for spending it all.”
He waved it off. “I’m not overly concerned about the number. It was more the speed with which you spent it all. After all, you’ve seen what I’ve got.”
“Point of fact,” she said absently, pawing through a light-blue bag filled with tissue paper. “But I actually haven’t seen what you’ve got.”
She buried her head in the packages several seconds later as her words registered home, followed by a polite cough from Rhys. Aimee thanked her stars that he too clearly had no idea how to react to her sexual joke.
“Also,” she said, her head whipping around to meet his gaze as she changed the subject. “If you ever, and I mean ever tell any of my coworkers about this, I will find you, and make it very, very painful for you, right before I bury your ridiculously tight senior-citizen ass back under that mountain and steal all your gold. Got it?”
Rhys nodded tightly, pretending to take her threat very seriously. “I get it, though I don’t understand. What is the problem with telling them?”
She frowned. “Look at it all. It’s so girly. They can’t ever know that I’m actually super girly when I’m not around them.”
“Uh, why would they not know that?” he asked, bewildered.
She stood up and took off her winter jacket and gestured at herself. “Seriously? Look at me. I’m way too tall, I have no boobs, a small butt, and quads that could make an ice skater jealous. My shoulders are more square than a carpenter’s tool, and my hips definitely do not qualify as child-bearing. Tell me again what there is about me that screams ‘girly’?”
Aimee took a deep breath as she finished, trying to calm herself. Where the hell had that outburst come from, she wondered.
“Sorry. I don’t know what came over me.”
“I don’t see it that way,” Rhys said roughly a few seconds later. “Not in the slightest. You are purposefully insulting yourself and not seeing what others see. Why is this?”
“Don’t try to tell me that women back in your age didn’t have issues with self-esteem, because I know that’s bullshit. I’m pretty sure at this stage of the game it’s ingrained in our DNA, a genetic trait that we pass down to others.”
Rhys didn’t reply right away, and she knew she was correct.
“I won’t deny that. But beautiful women have been misjudging themselves for as long as I’ve been around, and then some.” He looked up, his eyes focused elsewhere. “One of the must beautiful women I knew was actually a forge worker. She worked the bellows, most days. She would be covered in dirt and grime, and always wore cheap garb, because it would get ruined. Because of this, she thought she was ugly. Unattractive and unwanted by any man.”
Aimee watched him speak, wondering where the story was going.
“I told her one day after work that I thought she was beautiful, and she scoffed at me. ‘I’m not pretty. What are you, drunk?’ she said. ‘Look at me,’ she scolded. So I did. I told her what I saw.”
Rhys stepped forward, and her mouth went dry as his bright blue eyes refocused. On her.
“I told her I saw the beauty that she missed. Anyone gets used to something if they see it all the time. So they don’t see how height is a trait desired by some, especially those even taller.” He stood up straight as he took another step toward her. “They miss how their eyes twinkle and dance with laughter when they’re happy, or darken with thunder when a storm rolls in.” He came even closer. “They don’t see the respect others have for them, when they clearly put a lot of effort into the way they look. That their legs are long and shapely in many a desiring way.”
Aimee tried to swallow, but her throat was too constricted.
“Or how their long, golden-blonde hair catches the sun’s light as it dances while she walks.”
Rhys was right in front of her now, and he lifted a hand to her face. “Or how their smile can make a heart flutter.” He smiled at her, and suddenly she understood.
“Oh.” Her voice was little more than a squeak of noise, but it was the best she could manage.
“You looked amazing trying on those clothes,” he growled, his anger at her self-hatred showing through at last.
He reached into one bag and dragged out a mesh top. “I must admit, I have no idea how the hell things got so depraved when it came to clothing, but that doesn’t change the fact you looked fantastic in them.”
“You do remember that I wear something under this, don’t you?” She reached out and snagged the shirt away from him.
Rhys’s lips twitched as he fought back a smile. “Yes. But do you recall that for me seeing ankles is a big deal? Compared to that, this is scandalous for everyday wear. The only place you might see something like this is—” He chopped the sentence off as fast he could, but the look on his face indicated he was well aware it was too late.
“Oh, do go on,” she purred. “This ought to be good.”
“Please don’t make me say it,” he pleaded. “I spoke without thinking.”
“And this is your penance.” She crossed her arms, lifting her chin at him slightly.
When he did speak the words came out quickly and mumbled.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch that,” she said, acting like a cat who had just trapped a mouse, moving in slowly for the kill. “Could you repeat yourself?”
Rhys looked absolutely pained as he spoke again. “I said
the only place you might see something like that is the whorehouse.”
“That’s what I thought you said.” She was just teasing, and he knew it, but it was fun just the same.
Their flirting had been increasing over the course of the day as they spent more time together. To the point that when they were done shopping—which only happened because the mall closed, the nerve!—she had driven him back to her place without thinking twice. Now that he was here, combined with the way he had touched her face earlier, Aimee was beginning to feel some tension between them.
“I think you’re going to be rather stunned by the general acceptance of nudity and sex these days.” She paused to think. “Perhaps not in this country—we’re full of notorious prudes—but the world has generally decided they are not wholly taboo topics anymore.”
Rhys winked. “I doubt that I will find this development, ah, hard, to deal with.”
She felt her cheeks flush as she giggled in response to his innuendo. That was the second time today he’d blatantly referenced something like that, and despite her best efforts, her curiosity was starting to get the better of her. After all, so much else about his body was superhuman. It was only natural that she would be curious about his, ah, stamina, wasn’t it?
“Good.”
“Does this mean that I should be prepared for you to start walking around naked?”
Aimee shook her head. “I wouldn’t get your hopes up on that happening anytime soon.”
All at once her insecurities came crashing back, and she turned away, burying herself in her prizes once more. It had all been a joke, hadn’t it? He was just teasing with her. It’s not like Rhys would actually want to see her naked. There was nothing feminine about her, except the body parts. None of the looks. She appreciated his compliments, but they were only there to help her feel better.
Even as she found herself drowning in self-doubt, the gentle touch of his fingers on her face came back to her. Deep down in the darkest depths of her mind, a flare of brilliant white hope flared.