by J. K Harper
He held Gabi's swimsuit top up in front of him as if it were a prize. For just a second, he thought as he looked at the determined set of her chin, her furiously questioning raised eyebrows, and the pure fire sparking out of her eyes, maybe he was just waving a red flag front of a lady bull who was about ready to charge him.
He had to admit the thought kind of intrigued him. As did everything else about the gorgeous, mysterious spitfire he had just claimed.
Damn it all to hell.
After another moment, during which it was clear she wasn't about to budge, he redirected. "For starters, you just gave away your own proof.”
Indignantly, she snapped, "I did not! How dare you try to trap me into telling you the truth about the wreck," she added, voice huffing.
Despite himself, Kai started to chuckle as he shook his head at her. It took Gabi a split second to realize she’d done it again. With a rosy flush of anger rising in her cheeks, she marched toward him. He couldn't help but admire the gorgeous bounce of her breasts, the soft curve of her belly, the beautiful swell of her hips as she charged directly up to him, glaring. "Damn it. You'd better tell me the truth yourself, and right now," she demanded, drawing up just short of him. "You already knew who we were when you saw us in the bar, didn't you?" Her mouth suddenly dropped open even as her eyes narrowed at him. "Wait a minute. Did you seduce me to find out about the shipwreck?" Her voice sputtered again. “You tried to trap me with sex! With amazing, mind-blowing sex!”
Despite his own churning upset inside, Kai couldn't help the swell of satisfaction that she'd admitted it had been great sex. Seemed like Gabi wasn't remotely a wilting little flower. No, she was like a beautiful, thorny, fully blooming rose. Proud, gorgeous, and more than capable of both defending herself and protecting her feelings.
He knew exactly what that felt like.
"Look," he started, raising his own eyebrows at her, still holding her swim top in the air above them, out of her reach despite her one swipe at it. "You certainly don't understand the story here. In fact, you wouldn't even believe a quarter of it so—"
“Oh, really?” she snapped. Damn, she was pretty when she was mad. “Try me. You might be surprised. I believe in a lot of things most people don't.”
Kai paused for a long time, regarding her carefully. She appeared to be listening closely. Inside, he waged another brief battle. Somehow, though, it felt utterly natural to tell her. Perhaps it would shock her into admitting how it was possible she had touched his treasure. Narrowing his eyes a bit, he regarded her closely. She had to know about dragon shifters. She simply had to. How else could she possibly have been able to break an unbreakable spell?
Fine, then. In for a penny, or a gold nugget, in for a pound. Or for an entire treasure.
Looking straight at her, he said, “Yes, that was me you saw down there. At the Santa Maria.” Gabi's mouth dropped open at his stark honesty. He went on, keeping his voice steady. “That was me. That dragon you saw? That was me, Gabi.”
Gabi stared at him with as much slack-jawed stupefaction almost as if he'd shifted into his dragon form right then and there.
“I was there because I was there checking on my treasure. In the spot it's been kept for centuries now. Untouched, undisturbed, and safe. Safe until you and your team came along, that is.”
She had the grace to flush. Opening her mouth to respond, she never had the chance. An enormous splashing sound behind them yanked Gabi's gaze away from him to the waters off the bow of the boat.
"What was that?" she asked, even as she leaned her head around him to look at the water. Kai automatically turned as well.
Just in time to catch a glimpse of an enormous dark shape slicing through the ocean water beneath the boat.
"Holy shit," Gabi breathed. If he'd been looking at her, he was pretty damn sure her eyes would be bigger than her face. "That's much too large to be a shark, but it's moving way too fast to be a whale."
Abrupt fear smashed through Kai as he suddenly realized what was about to happen. "Hang on!" he yelled, throwing himself sideways to tackle Gabi and bring her shrieking to the deck of the boat.
"What the h—" she started to yell, just as Kai braced himself over her while he reached out to grab onto the railing.
Something enormous smashed into the side of the boat, rocking it violently. The assault would've sent them both tumbling along the deck if Kai weren't tightly holding onto Gabi and grabbing the railing with his free hand. She screamed in shock, her luscious body rigid with terror beneath his.
"Brace yourself," was all he managed to get out before another gigantic crash smashed against the boat. The impact shoved the hull straight out of the water, bringing up the prow nearly straight into the air as if they were being hauled up on a pulley. Gabi gave another strangled scream, although he heard a backbone of strength beneath it that oddly pleased him even as he tightly held onto her.
Protecting her from the other dragon that was attacking them.
For an impossible eternity that was only a split second, the boat seemed to hang in midair, the prow still tipped toward the sky and the stern sinking beneath the water. Then it slammed back down, entering the water with an enormous shudder and splash. Kai's chin cracked against the deck of the boat and slammed Gabi's head into his hand where he safely cradled it.
He hissed with rage as he felt his fingers break from the force of keeping her head from slamming against the deck as well. Adrenaline shot through him in a panicked bolt as he wondered if she'd also broken something. She was human, and therefore far more fragile than he. He could heal himself as long as he could shift within an hour.
A female yell that was more scared and outraged than pained sent a wave of relief over his body despite the throbbing in his hand. "Are you okay?" he still asked, urgency as well as a cold splash of water smacking into his face as waves slammed over the deck from the force of the impact making his voice more warbled than usual.
Warbled. No. No.
With the sudden, sickening sensation, he realized what was happening. "No!" His voice shouted in futile protest even as the deep warbling sounded stronger in his voice.
Gabi tensed from startlement beneath him, but she was about to do worse than that.
His dragon, fully aroused and abruptly raging out of his control, was rising within him. The shift was about to come over him, and for one of the very few times in his life, he knew he couldn't control it.
His dragon knew that not only were they being attacked, but that he had to protect Gabi. No matter what the cost, he had to protect the woman he had just claimed as being his.
~~~
Gabi's body was probably going to hurt later on, but right now she felt little more than a sort of numbed shock. Mostly because she didn't know what the hell was going on.
And because Kai, who was looking at her, had the strangest expression on his face. His eyes seemed to be getting lighter—no, the green flecks had returned, and they were getting brighter. He pushed away from her, his expression slipping from his own shock to something darker.
Something primal.
“Kai?” she whispered, hearing the tremble of fear in her own voice and hating it. “What's happening?”
Being on his sleek sailboat, out in the calm, sunny day, still stark naked after some of the best sex of her life—okay, undeniably the best sex of her life—and still in shock from both the really brief conversation about the shipwreck as well as the fact that something had just violently bumped the boat, like a monster out of Jaws or something, was all so incongruous that she couldn't quite wrap her mind around it. The bizarre clarity of what she knew had to be shock was making everything around her crystal clear.
Including the fact that Kai's eyes were—changing. She was still close enough, sprawled on the deck of the boat. Her hair tangled over her eyes before she frantically shoved it away so she could see him more clearly. Chest heaving, she stumbled up onto her feet to stand. The pupils in his eyes were—getting longer. Elonga
ting. The green was overtaking the black velvet of his irises, until all she could see were emerald green eyes that seemed to whirl around a long dark pupil.
Like the pupil of a cat. Or of a—
Gabi's breath heaved out of her as Kai took a step back from her, abruptly crouching down as he spread his arms out to his sides at the same time. He looked like he was about to take flight.
So fast that she was almost certain her eyes deceived her, a shimmer rippled along Kai's frame. A shimmer of indigo, sapphire, streaks of alabaster flitting through and making the entire thing seem like a dream.
Or like the shimmer and ripple of water over the hide of a dragon.
“Oh, my god.” The words barely slid out of her, more breath than sound. Her thoughts slid out of her as well, leaving only a babbling, senseless chatter in her head.
And a slow, almost reverent feeling of beautiful vindication as Kai's form abruptly grew up and out, merging so quickly from that of a man to that of a dragon that Gabi's eyes couldn't catch the exact moment of transition.
Impossibly huge, the dragon—Kai—hovered just above the deck of the sailboat. Iridescent blue-black shimmered down along his ridged spine, while his underbelly shone a pearly-white and cerulean. His wings flared open, the thin membrane between the joints a pale blue that seemed to match the ocean behind him. She recognized him from the other day, far down beneath the sea by the Santa Maria.
Kai had been the one there that day. He had seen her by the shipwreck. The still-working part of her mind filed that away for the moment. The rest of her simply stared at him now.
Green eyes split by vertically-shaped pupils stared at Gabi, brimming with full human intelligence.
He was the most majestic, glorious thing she'd ever seen in her life.
“It's true,” she whispered as she stood there, tiny and naked and defenseless against the enormous winged dragon in front of her. “Abuela was right. The stories are real, and you're part of them.”
Her voice sighed through the quiet air as she just stared, utterly captivated by his magnificence.
Then all hell broke loose.
Chapter Thirteen
Kai regarded the beautiful tiny human as his wings slowly, quietly kept him hovering above the deck of the boat. She was perfect, she was amazing, she was his.
His.
The knowledge roared through his entire being, dragging up memories and sensations. He braced himself for remembered pain. There was only the merest whisper of it. Satisfied that he was right, that she was indeed his, he opened his mouth and roared his exultation.
Gabi opened her mouth right along with him and screamed bloody murder as she stumbled backward, tripped, and fell back down on the deck.
Idiot, Kai cursed himself, snapping shut what he knew was his fearsome jaw and huge, sharp teeth. Then he looked at her more closely. She was staring, screaming his name, and pointing.
But she was pointing behind him.
Whirling in midair, his wings pinioning with a snap as he turned, he was unprepared for the lunge by the iron-grey dragon that shoved them both over the boat from the force of impact. He caught sight of Gabi's open mouth and her fierce eyes. She was already scrambling up, lunging after them, yelling words he couldn't catch, although he heard their courageous vehemence.
As if she thought she could help. Like a fierce warrior dragon queen of old, fearless and daring. His tiny, bold human.
Both enlivened by that thought and enraged by the unprecedented attack, Kai whirled again on the other dragon, making them both tumble from the sky toward the ocean below. With an enormous splash, they entered the water, immediately sinking beneath the surface as they locked in battle.
As a water dragon, Kai immediately had the upper hand. The ocean was his element. The grey dragon was a classic dragon, better suited for battle in the skies. Even so, their struggle was stupendous. Water churned and frothed as they slashed at one another, spinning and whirling beneath the waves, snapping with opened jaws and roaring bellows that echoed under the sea.
He was sure all nearby life fled in terror as two epic monsters of the sea fought. Hoping they weren't creating tidal waves that sloshed the sailboat anew, he slowly but steadily led the other dragon away from it, tumbling through bubbles and once or twice arcing straight up into the air above the water to then perform a death drop down on the other dragon. Briny ocean water filled his nostrils and mouth again and again, adding to his deadly joy in the suddenness of being able to fight.
To expend even more of the tightly-bottled energy that had leashed him for too long, no matter what his more pragmatic human side might think. Foolish, he huffed, eyes narrowed on his target.
The fight was short-lived. Classic dragons could hold their breath underwater for a long time—but they couldn't actually breathe underwater as Kai could. With a sudden wrench, the grey jerked himself out of Kai's slashing grasp and shot up to the surface. Kai followed faster than thought, but when he broke into the air, lunging out with his wings spread and angrily flapping sheets of salt water everywhere, the other dragon was already a length away. He turned his head back toward Kai, hissing. “This isn't over, Long. Your treasure has weakened now beyond safekeeping.”
Bellowing with rage, Kai made as if to pursue. The grey gave a deliberately insulting whap of his tail in the air, creating a sharp crackling sound like a bolt of lightning. Then he bolted northward, his wings pistoning hard as he attained full flight speed. His mocking huff, the equivalent of dragon laughter, floated back in the stillness of the day, leaving an ugly film on it.
For a long moment, Kai hovered in the air, his own wings beating the air with lingering adrenaline and fury. The grey had vanished into a speck on the day's bright horizon, but it didn't matter. Kai knew who the other dragon was and what his unanticipated attack meant.
Because Gabi somehow had broken the spell on Kai's gold hoard, the wards had partially crumbled. The dark dragons of the world, those noxious ones who preferred stealing established hoards over either creating or legitimately inheriting their own, had sniffed it out and were beginning to move in.
From a day that had started so well, it was spiraling into one far less than stellar.
Kai looked back down at the sailboat. Gabi, his tiny, fearless human, stood at the prow, hand shielding her eyes as she stared up at him. He noted she was still naked. Smiling to himself, he glided back over to the ship, dropping down to hover over it as he shifted back to his human shape.
Gabi sucked in a quick, audible gasp as he thumped back onto the deck on two human legs and strode over to her. Her strong, gorgeous face, still half-shocked yet also filled with vitality, and deliciously naked body filled all his senses.
“So,” he said as he stopped about an inch away, soaking in her heady scent while his fight endorphins still ran high. He shrugged. There was nothing more he could conceal, as far as the truth about his kind was concerned. “Now you know the truth. The next move, Gabriela,” and he bent his face toward hers to more deeply inhale her sweetness, “is yours.”
~~~
Gabi's entire body still zinged with the aftereffects of tremendous physical joy, followed by horrific shock, followed by a ferocious sense of passion. Passion to save him. To cheer him on. To support him in whatever way she could.
The only thing she really couldn't do was help him fight a dragon. Seeing as how he himself was a dragon, and she was just a human. A human who'd just realized how incredibly tiny and vulnerable she was in comparison to him as she'd witnessed his amazing other self in all its gigantic, amazing presence.
Wild excitement shot through her again as the reality of the situation threatened to explode inside her. The legends and stories were real. Really real.
Kai was really a dragon. In the flesh. Witnessed by her own eyes, which meant—
Wait a minute. She snapped her gaze out over the water, then toward Catalina Island rising in the distance.
“Hold on,” she said before she even knew what wou
ld tumble out of her mouth. “There's no way other people didn't see what just happened. You're huge! And so was that other—dragon.”
She whipped back around to look at him again. He kept his gaze on hers, silent and watchful. Still so sexy it about made her wet again, even after all the insanity of the past few moments. “The stories my grandmother always told me are true,” she said. Part of her tingled with enormous delight at that fact. “How is it that no one has ever seen you before? Or any of your, uh, kind?” She tripped over that part, suddenly uncertain. Who and what he was, who and what his kind were—all those were things her abuela had always told her about. All the stories Gabi had heard from her since she'd been in the cradle.
They were all real.
Kai's face was still watchful as he answered, although she saw the slight tug upward of the corner of his lip. “We cloak. It's a shifter thing. No human can see us in our dragon forms.”
“But I saw you,” she immediately replied. “Both of you. I'm pretty sure I'm human.” She raised an eyebrow at him. “And what the hell do you mean, 'cloak'?”
Kai's stance remained easy and open. She suddenly realized he was giving her ample space to come to terms with everything she'd just seen and experienced in the space of what felt like about thirty seconds yet also felt like a lifetime's worth of sudden, deep knowledge.
She hardly knew him. On the surface, she wasn't foolish enough to trust him. Yet on some more authentic, deeper level, she did. She sensed without a doubt that he would never hurt her.
The real question however, was if he'd ever lie to her. The guilty flush rose through her as she realized she'd been the one lying to him. Well, not precisely lying. Keeping secrets.
Secrets.
The gold nugget.