by Zoe Chant
The Billionaire Dragon Shifter's Baby
By Zoe Chant
Copyright Zoe Chant 2016
All Rights Reserved
Amy McCullough had already put in a double shift when she arrived at one very familiar apartment, twenty minutes before midnight. She visited a lot of people’s homes as a social worker, but she’d been to this one, which served as a short-term emergency foster home, every day for the last week.
She didn’t really have anything official to do here tonight, but she couldn’t resist coming here anyway, even though she was exhausted. Today had been her last day on the job before she went on temporary leave. Her supervisor, Marnie, had called it please don’t get completely burned out and quit leave. In the last two years Amy had seen plenty of others take similar breaks. Some had become permanent, some not.
She loved her job—God knew kids in trouble needed someone looking out for them—but it was grinding her down. Lately Amy felt like she needed someone looking out for her.
She felt a little like crying just thinking about it, but she shook off that thought. She was a grown woman; she had a family she could go visit starting tomorrow. She was a lot luckier than the little girl she was here to see tonight.
As if the thought had woken her, Amy heard a familiar crying through the door. Baby Jane Doe was awake and, as usual, unhappy.
Amy tapped at the door. She didn’t want to use the bell in case she woke one of the other three kids under the age of three who Jamila and Pete were fostering right now. The sound of the crying baby came closer. When the door opened, Amy was greeted by the sight of Jamila cuddling a tiny, flailing, furious baby.
She gave Amy a silent look of relief and held the baby out to her even before Amy could step inside. Amy didn’t hesitate. She took Baby Doe and cuddled her close, pulling her grandmother’s necklace out of the collar of her shirt as she did. The heavy gold pendant fascinated Baby Doe. Sure enough, she curled her tiny fist around it and snuggled into Amy’s chest, magically soothed.
“Please tell me you’ll stay long enough to give her a bottle,” Jamila whispered. “She’s been crying all day.”
Amy nodded quickly, feeling a pang of guilt. She—or at least her grandmother’s necklace—had had better luck than anyone else soothing this particular baby since she entered foster care. Baby Doe had been getting more and more difficult to comfort all week, as if she knew her chance at finding her family was slipping away.
At midnight, this unnamed baby, given up by her mother already, would turn thirty days old. That had been the family court judge’s deadline for tracking down her father.
The mother had told the police officer she gave the baby to that she’d met the father at a party; she’d lost his phone number and didn’t know how to get in touch with him, but his name was Teo Gray. The judge had decided that they ought to make an effort to find him, just to cover all the bases, on top of the routine process of confirming that the surrendered baby didn’t match the description of any babies reported missing. The week’s wait would also give the mother time to change her mind and come back for the baby.
Amy had contacted, or attempted to contact, dozens of Theodore, Teodor, and Teo Grays (and Greys) in New York and New Jersey. Some she’d never been able to get hold of. The rest had insisted—often loudly and furiously—that the baby couldn’t possibly be theirs. It wasn’t actually a surprise; Amy had enough trouble getting people who were indisputably parents to be responsible for their children sometimes. Of course no one was going to just answer their phone and take responsibility for a baby he’d never heard about before. Amy didn’t regret trying, though. Baby Doe had deserved the chance, however remote it was.
After tonight, Baby Doe would move to long-term foster care to wait out the rest of the three months before she would be eligible for adoption. Amy would pass her off with the rest of her caseload, and she wouldn’t have any more reason to visit Baby Doe and cuddle her.
For now, though, Amy was here and the baby needed to be fed. Amy followed Jamila inside and quickly settled in on the couch with a bottle. The baby drank hungrily, still clutching Amy’s necklace to her cheek. Amy forgot everything else for a little while—all the rough situations she’d dealt with today, all the things she’d be leaving undone while she went on leave. She even forgot the way her feet hurt.
For now there was just Baby Doe and a bottle and Amy. For now neither one of them was alone.
Amy closed her eyes just for a second. When she jerked her head up, blinking away a half-formed dream, the bottle was nearly empty. Baby Doe had fallen asleep in her arms. Amy glanced at the clock and winced.
It was five minutes after midnight. Amy was officially on leave, and Baby Doe was a month old and still didn’t have a father.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” Amy whispered, cuddling the baby closer. “I—”
Amy’s phone vibrated in her pocket. It wasn’t just a text. It was the insistent continuous buzz of an incoming call.
She thought about not answering; it was after midnight, so she was technically on leave. But her handed-off files hadn’t necessarily been handed off to anyone just yet. It might be an emergency; Baby Doe wasn’t the only one who had no one but Amy looking out for her.
Amy shifted Baby Doe to one arm and pulled her phone out. The number displayed looked vaguely familiar. Amy picked up and tucked the phone against her ear while she shifted the baby up against her shoulder and started rubbing her back firmly.
“Hello, this is Amy—”
“I know you said I had to call by the 27th,” the unfamiliar voice on the other end said. It was a man, and he sounded frantic. “I know it’s after midnight but I literally just got your message—my phone was off and then I was on a plane, and—please, please, tell me I’m not too late.”
Amy blinked.
Baby Doe burped. Loudly.
“Hello?” The man said. “I didn’t get that, are you—”
“Hello,” Amy said, getting her brain back online. “Is this Teo Gray?”
“Yes, sorry, I didn’t even—yes, I’m Teo Gray, you called me, you said—you said I have a daughter.”
Amy stared at the wall, her grip on Baby Doe tightening instinctively. “I said a woman surrendered a child and named Teo Gray as the father. Do you... have reason to believe that could be you?”
“I, uh,” Teo Gray laughed a little. “Yeah, I have a few reasons. You don’t know the mother’s name?”
“She surrendered the child anonymously, which is legal before the child is thirty days old,” Amy explained. “Are you—sir, are you saying you think you might be the father?”
“Yeah, I—I was away for a while, what if she tried to call me and give me the baby, and she couldn’t find me? She probably tried that, something must have happened and she couldn’t find me—shit, why did I—and God, now I’m late. Please, please tell me it’s not too late? Can I come and get her? Do you still have her? Can I talk to her?”
Amy looked down at Baby Doe, who was looking up at her with startlingly pale gray eyes, quiet and solemn. “Sir, she’s a newborn. She can’t talk to you.”
“I know, I know that, I just—she should hear my voice, at least. I just want to tell her I’m sorry and I’ll be there as soon as I can. Please, please, just tell me I’m not too late.”
Amy glanced at the clock again. As far as the paperwork was concerned it wouldn’t make a difference, but...
“Sir, the reason I gave you that deadline is that once a
child is thirty days old, they can’t be surrendered. If you acknowledge the child as yours at this point, you can’t give her up.”
“If she’s mine, why would I ever give her up?” Teo sounded honestly baffled. “I just—if I could just see her, I’ll know for sure. If she’s mine—I’ll do whatever I have to, I’ll take care of her. Please, can I see her? I know it’s late, but I’m—I’m getting in a cab now, can I meet you somewhere?”
Amy couldn’t have this guy—whichever Teo Gray he was, Amy had left half a dozen messages—coming to Jamila’s apartment. The office was closed. But she’d done enough of this stuff at the police station, and it was the safest possible place to meet a stranger...
She stood up and found that Jamila was standing in the kitchen doorway looking hopeful.
“Okay,” Amy said, grabbing her purse. “Meet me at this address.”
***
Teo stopped short when he glimpsed his reflection in the glass doors at the front of the police station. He actually looked at himself, running a hand through his messy dark brown curls. An hour ago he’d thought it looked good, carelessly disheveled: I’ve been too busy partying to get a haircut for the last couple of months.
But suddenly he needed to look like an adult. Suddenly he was responsible for someone.
His eyes were too wide in his reflection. The streetlight reflected off the pale gray and looked uncanny. He forced his expression to something normal.
An hour ago his life had been changed forever when he checked his voicemail after touching down in New York. I’m calling for Teo Gray. A mother surrendering her baby daughter under the Safe Haven law has identified the father as Teo Gray—
He’d had to listen to the message four times to take it in, and by then it had been after midnight, and he’d nearly missed his chance.
An abandoned baby girl—his baby daughter—was in this police station. For a week now she’d been waiting for someone to come and claim her, like a lost—lost—
Lost treasure. Nothing could be more precious, not his entire hoard. Teo had known it as soon as he heard the message, even before he worked out all the possibilities for how she could be his.
There were a somewhat embarrassing number of possibilities. He’d gone to a lot of parties last winter, and he’d had a lot of fun. He thought he’d been careful, but condoms weren’t perfect, birth control wasn’t a hundred percent, so... so this baby could be his. Was probably his. He always made sure women knew his name, just in case they needed to know later. He hadn’t thought it would be this much later, but...
When he went inside, when he saw the baby, he would know if she was a dragon. But he was already sure somehow that she was his, and he couldn’t bear not to be with her. He needed to have her tucked away safely; she was more precious than gold.
He’d never had anything important in his life. He’d never had to worry about anything, or protect anything. It was a strange sensation, like he’d been wandering without a map his whole life. Suddenly there was a compass inside him, pointing to this door.
He hesitated another second, straightening the collar of his shirt. He touched the strap of the messenger bag that was all he’d traveled with from Istanbul. It was all he ever carried, and no one really seemed to notice that he took it practically everywhere. It contained enough bits of gold to be a comfort, since he was almost never home in Gray’s Hollow, where most of his hoard lived. It was only in the last year or two that he’d even realized he was doing the dragon equivalent of carrying a teddy bear everywhere.
But he didn’t let anyone—hardly anyone—call him Teddy anymore, and as of an hour ago he was done with running around like a jet-setting party kid without a care in the world. He definitely wasn’t ever doing another week-long cruise around the Mediterranean with his phone turned off, getting drunk with whoever showed up to jump on the yacht on a Tuesday morning.
Teo squared his shoulders and lifted his chin. He reminded himself that he was a dragon, and everyone in his way was merely human. He summoned centuries of Dragomir authority to his back.
God, he should have called one of his brothers.
But this wasn’t something he could say over the phone, and they were all out of reach of dragon speech here in New York. Gus and Ilie and the twins were at home in Gray’s Hollow. Even Ilie couldn’t reach this far in his human shape, and he was human an awful lot of the time these days. Laurence, who had stepped in to get Teo out of trouble from time to time, was God knew where.
Teo was on his own, and his daughter had been all alone for a week since her mother gave her up. No more stalling. He was going to go rescue his baby. Now.
He pushed through the door and headed for the desk to tell them why he was there. He was passed from one desk to another, talked to a uniformed police officer and then a detective and then a lieutenant. He showed identification in the form of a battered, salt-stained passport and explained himself again and again before they finally took him back to see the social worker he’d talked to on the phone. It seemed to take forever, but it also seemed like no time at all before he was led back to a little interview room.
He heard a baby—his daughter—crying.
His whole body responded somehow without him thinking about it. He darted past the police officer, yanking open the door of the interview room. The social worker was standing just inside.
She was struggling to hold on to the baby, who squirmed and flailed in her arms. The baby was letting out a siren wail and reaching toward Teo with one hand while her other tiny fist was clenched around a glint of gold. She was clutching the social worker’s necklace.
Teo reached into his bag, grabbing for gold. Up until halfway through his cab ride it had been a formless lump of almost perfectly pure gold, so soft that it had long since been molded to his grip just by squeezing. He had always liked to hold it on long plane flights; the journey from Istanbul had left the skin of his palms faintly gold-flecked from rubbing it.
But he had realized on his way here that he needed it (along with the metal of a handful of spare change from five different countries) to be something else now. He needed a gift for his daughter. The little dragonet needed gold of her own.
“Mr. Gray.” The social worker pitched her voice apologetically over the baby’s cries. “This is...”
Teo reached for her. She was so small, just a month old, but he could sense her angling toward the gold he was wearing. He had a gold watch and a bracelet, two chains around his neck, and the present he had made for her, dangling from the fingers of his left hand. He gathered her up before she could break the social worker’s grip, cuddling her firmly to his chest.
Thank God for the practice he’d gotten with his niece, Elena. He kissed the top of his daughter’s head. There was no doubting she was his, this tiny miserable dragonet, gold-starved and lonely. He tugged the chains out of the collar of his shirt, letting her grab them and stuff them into her mouth.
“Mr. Gray,” the social worker said, reaching out, but the baby had gone quiet, a shocking contrast to the screaming. She snuggled into his chest and mouthed at her tiny fist wrapped in gold.
“I was the same way, sweetheart.” Teo rubbed his nose against her silky hair. “Cried and cried if I couldn’t have something shiny to play with. You’re a Gray, all right.”
The baby had a fuzz of bright chestnut hair and round pink cheeks. He supposed she must be about the right size for a month-old baby, but she was so, so small.
Can you hear me, baby girl? She should have been hearing dragon speech from before she was born. She should have known his voice already, but all they could do was start now. Daddy’s here.
She looked up at him, blinking wide gray eyes. Her eyelashes were wet with tears, and Teo wanted to cry himself, or punch someone. Except he was the one who should be punched for leaving her alone so long.
“Hello there,” Teo said out loud.
He held up the little gold anklet he’d made for her on the way here, alloyed just enough t
o hold its shape. Each link of the anklet was a flower with its stem curled around the next. Her eyes went to it, fascinated. He slipped it over the little white sock on her foot, rearranging it so it would touch her skin. She wriggled happily in his grip and then relaxed, seeming content.
“That’s my girl. That’s yours now, sweetheart, just like you’re mine.”
The heart of your hoard, little dragon. Guard it well.
He felt her greedy, wordless delight pushed back at him. It was a baby’s first try at dragon speech, and tears came to his eyes for real this time. He wiped them away quickly and looked up at the social worker with a smile.
“When can I take her home?”
The social worker was staring at him with very wide, very blue eyes. What was her name? Teo hadn’t registered anything before he had the baby safe in his arms. Her mouth opened and closed without a sound, and Teo noticed that she wasn’t wearing lipstick. Her lips were very pink. They looked naked without anything hiding them from Teo’s gaze.
He felt a weird, intense pull toward her. He looked back down at the baby in confusion, then back to the woman in front of him. This couldn’t be what it felt like.
He knew the social worker had said her name. He’d heard it in the message enough times, but that hadn't been the part he was paying attention to. Something with an M?
“What’s—” Teo looked down at the baby, frowning. “Wait, what’s her name? You never said.”
“She doesn’t have one,” Ms. Something-with-an-M-maybe said gently. “Her mother didn’t give us one for her. If you’re her father, that will be up to you.”
“I am her father,” Teo said firmly. No one was taking his baby away from him now. He looked down at her again, feeling awed in the face of something so tiny and precious. How could he name her?
But she was his now. It was up to him. Everything was up to him.
He tried frantically to remember good names. He thought of where he’d been less than a day ago, looking up at a dazzle of gold in Istanbul’s grandest museum.