Oh, My Dragon

by Lani Lynn Vale

  She blinked at me.

  “You can see what’s inside me right now?” she asked.

  “If I was touching you, yes,” I said. “I can also see DNA outside of the body. Meaning, the other night when you asked me how I knew that guy wasn’t in your apartment, I really knew. I could see his DNA trail lead in only one direction, away from the body.”

  “By DNA you mean…what?” she asked.

  I smiled.

  “Skin cells. Hair. Saliva. Semen,” I said. “Not that those last two were present that night. But I could see exactly where that man went.”

  She nodded, her hand twisting around in her hair.

  “That’s kind of fantastical,” she said finally, looking at me. “I’m going to take a nap. I need to think about this.”

  I nodded.

  “There’s more to tell, isn’t there?” she asked as she stood.

  I nodded.

  “Okay,” she said softly. “Tell me later.”

  “You know where you are sleeping?” I asked her. “Where to go?”

  She looked at me like I was stupid.

  “I clean this house three times a week. I think I can find an empty bedroom. Try not to trash your house while I’m not watching you,” she ordered.

  With that she left, leaving me with a smile on my face.

  One that quickly melted away at the thought of her being in my house napping and not in my bed.

  Yes, her being in my house while I was here should be fun indeed.

  Chapter 4

  It’s a beautiful day to leave me alone.

  -Ian’s secret thoughts

  Ian

  “Who ate your bowl of sunshine this morning, thundercloud?” Wink’s annoyingly sweet voice asked from somewhere.

  “Tired,” I muttered, opening my eye only enough to glare at her before closing it again.

  And I was tired.

  I’d spent half the night patrolling over the sanctuary, and the other half fighting with that stupid fuck, Farrow. Not to mention, when I did finally get a chance to go to sleep, thoughts of the woman two doors down from my room left me in a state I wasn’t fully willing to examine.

  “Are you just getting in?” she asked as she looked at me warily.

  I nodded. “Patrolled.”

  I shuffled to my bedroom, having only gotten up two minutes before to answer a call about Farrow from Keifer.

  Now I was heading back to my bed.

  For at least a solid two hours. Hopefully three.

  I didn’t have to be at the meeting Keifer had demanded until twelve. If I went to bed right now, I’d get three hours and nine minutes.

  That gave me fifteen minutes to get ready and go.

  Wink had different ideas, however.

  “You were supposed to talk to me this morning,” she said at my back, following me into my room.

  I felt her heated gaze on my back and nearly smiled when I lifted my shirt up and off my head.

  She squeaked and shuffled, causing me to actually smile this time.

  “What are you doing?” she asked worriedly.

  “I’m getting back in bed for a few hours before I have to be at Keifer’s place,” I answered, starting on my belt.

  My hands felt like sausages, though, as I fumbled with my belt.

  I was just about to say fuck it and go to bed with them on when I felt dainty hands push mine away.

  “When’s the last time you slept?” she asked me, undoing my belt with comical ease.

  “When you put me into a medically induced coma for two hours,” I said.

  She snorted.

  “I thought it more of a ‘passing out’ on your part, rather than a ‘coma’ on my part,” she said defensively.

  I shrugged and unbuttoned my pants, thankful that they were old and worn in; meaning I didn’t have to struggle to get them off.

  I fell face first into the bed, rolled my head to the side only enough to set my alarm, and instantly fell asleep.

  I completely missed the fact that Wink stayed in the room with me and watched my every breath for nearly ten minutes.

  In fact, she’d come to check on me multiple times while I’d been asleep, something I realized within two minutes of my alarm.

  I groaned and rolled over, staring up at the ceiling with bleary eyes.

  I blinked rapidly, trying to clear the fog.

  “You up?” she asked. “Can I go with you to wherever you’re going?”

  I nodded and rolled to a sitting position.

  “Yeah,” I muttered darkly.

  She snorted and tossed something at me, and I opened my eye only enough to see it was my phone.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “It’s been ringing on and off for about two hours now,” she said. “I took it out of here after it rang the first time. You really needed the sleep.”

  I glared at her.

  “Thanks,” I muttered dryly, rolling over and forcing feet to the ground.

  My eyelids felt like they were glued to sandpaper as I shuffled my way into the bathroom.

  It never even occurred to me that I was naked until I heard Wink’s swift inhalation, followed by her muffled gasp.

  Causing me to find my first smile that morning.

  “Put some coffee on, would you?” I yelled over my shoulder.

  My sides were heaving with contained laughter as I did, looking down at my dick.

  I might need to tell her that I sometimes shed my clothes in my sleep.

  “Mmmkay,” she whispered breathlessly. “Coffee. Yes. Okay. I can do that.”

  She wasn’t moving though, which caused me to turn around and look at her.

  Her eyes immediately dropped to my crotch where my morning erection stood proud and strong.

  Mostly, the erection had everything to do with her waking me up, though, and nothing to do with it being morning.

  “Coffee?” I asked her.

  She tore her eyes away from my cock and stared at me in complete confusion.

  “Coffee?” she asked.

  “Coffee,” I confirmed.

  She blinked, then understanding dawned as a blush stole over her face.

  “Yeah. Coffee,” she said. “I can do coffee.”

  I rolled my eyes and turned to the bathroom, slightly more awake this time.

  But that slight burst of energy quickly wore off once I’d taken care of my morning wood in the shower, leaving me feeling even more drained than before.

  “You really are out of it. What are you doing?” she asked, watching as I dunked another cookie into my coffee. My tenth one.

  “Drinking coffee and eating a cookie. Why?” I asked.

  “Is that what’s always at the bottom of your coffee cups?” she asked, leaning forward to watch what I was doing.

  I shrugged. “Maybe.”

  Honestly, I couldn’t tell you if I left a mess in the bottom of my coffee cup or not. I barely ever finished the coffee.

  Normally, I would get my fill on cookies and put the cup into the sink. It was rare if I ever finished it.

  Even rarer if I ever washed it.

  “Is it that hard for you to rinse it out once you dump it?” she asked.

  I shrugged.

  “I pay you to clean up after me. Why would I bother to do something so menial as that?”

  She narrowed her eyes at me.

  “Did you just call my profession menial?” she asked carefully.

  “No,” I said, standing up and taking one last sip of my coffee before I dumped it into the sink and sat the cup in the basin. “I’m calling me doing it menial. I have a hundred other things I need to be doing every morning, and rinsing my cup out is menial compared to the other things I have to do. Such as go see why the fuck Keifer’s been calling me all morning.”

  She narrowed her eyes.

  “It takes, literally, five seconds of your time to rinse the cup,”
she said, picking the cup up, rinsing it, and then placing it back in the sink. “It takes about ten seconds longer to place it in the dishwasher, or even better, to fucking wash it and set it out to dry in the drying rack.”

  I shrugged.

  She narrowed her eyes.

  “You’re not expecting me to continue cleaning, are you?” she asked.

  I stopped my forward progress to the door and turned.

  “If you don’t, someone else will have to come clean,” I told her honestly. “So that’s completely up to you.”

  She threw her hands up in the air in exasperation.

  I turned before she could see the smile that overtook my face and started walking.

  I’d nearly made it to the door when a thought occurred to me.

  “You really want to come with me?” I asked as an afterthought.

  Something came and went over her face, and she shrugged.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  I smiled.

  “To the sanctuary,” I said.

  ***

  “This is like that place on Jurassic Park, where they kept all those birds,” she said.

  “The aviary?” I guessed.

  She nodded.

  “There’s a shield surrounding the sanctuary that protects it from view, satellite and human alike,” I explained, taking my own quick glance around.

  Seeing it through her eyes, I could see where she got that from.

  The entire place looked like it had a glass dome over it, and although it allowed anything that was supposed to be there to pass easily through it, anything that wasn’t didn’t get the same pass.

  The grounds were large and sprawling.

  There was about thirty manicured acres that the house—and I say house loosely because it was more of a mansion on steroids—sat on. On the backside of the house, there was a large pool that any of the dragon riders were free to use if they so wished it.

  And then there were the dragons.

  They were anywhere and everywhere.

  Wherever they wanted to be, they were.

  “But, I can see it,” she interrupted my contemplation of the grounds.

  I nodded. “You and I share a bond.”

  My explanation obviously distressed her.

  Her mouth thinned. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  She fingered the handprint at her throat, and I found myself doing the same.

  “We’re going to have to talk about it sometime,” I told her none too gently.

  She shrugged.

  “Then, when the time comes, we’ll talk. My nap wasn’t long enough to process this situation. So, for now, we’re not going to talk about it. Got it?” she stated.

  “Oh, snap,” the thick Cajun voice belonging to Jean Luc, bawled. “She’s feisty.”

  “Doesn’t matter if she’s feisty. She’s an outsider. What’s she doing here?” Derek, Keifer’s adviser and another dragon rider, growled.

  We both turned at the same time, and Derek, as well as Jean Luc, inhaled sharply.

  It didn’t take a genius to figure out that they’d seen the handprints on both of our throats, causing the two of them to make the connection.

  “Oh, mon loup. You’re so screwed,” Jean Luc said succulently.

  I ignored the both of them and grabbed Wink’s hand and urged her through the door.

  “Are you sure I’m allowed in here?” she asked worriedly. “They didn’t look too happy to see me.”

  “If you weren’t allowed in here, you wouldn’t have made it through the shield,” I muttered.

  She yanked on my hand and I stopped, turning to look at her in exasperation.

  “You’re telling me I could’ve not made it through?” she asked.

  I shrugged.

  “If you weren’t supposed to be here. But you’re with me, so you are,” I said, not understanding why she was getting so upset.

  “I think you need to tell me about this bond,” she said suddenly.

  I sighed.

  “When we get back to my place later tonight, we’ll talk,” I promised her.

  “And where’s your dragon, if you are actually a dragon rider?” she challenged.

  I pursed my lips.

  “Mace thinks it’s funny not to be there when he knows I want him to be,” I told her. “He’s an asshole.”

  Am not, Mace’s amused words drifted across my mind.

  Wink gasped and said, “Who was that?”

  “That was Mace,” I answered. “And, like I said, he shows up on his own timetable. Sometimes not at all.”

  “Well, that doesn’t seem very fair,” she muttered. “You’re not very nice.”

  I lifted a brow at her.

  “Mace, not you,” she promised, holding up three fingers for the equivalent of ‘scout’s honor.’

  “Who are you?” a woman asked, startling us both.

  I turned to find Blythe, Keifer’s wife, standing there, staring at us worriedly and with more than a little bit of curiosity.

  Then her eyes traveled down to our necks, and her eyes got wide.

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered. “You’re mated!”

  “Who’s mated?” Keifer asked as he came into a room, a baby in the crook of his arm.

  “Awwww!” Wink said. “That’s the cutest baby I’ve ever seen!”

  My eyes drifted over to Wink.

  “Have you seen a lot of babies then?” I asked her.

  Keifer snorted but Blythe, offended that I somehow insulted her child, huffed in annoyance.

  “I’ll have you know, Ian, that my child is the cutest baby I’ve ever seen,” she insisted.

  “What about your other baby?” Brooklyn, a beautiful brunette that was tall and willowy, asked.

  “She is also the most beautiful. And, I like her, too,” Blythe said, tossing a smile over her shoulder.

  Keifer snorted.

  “You just like her best because she doesn’t try to tear off your nipple while she’s eating,” Keifer said.

  “There’s that, too,” Blythe affirmed. “Now, are we forgetting that there’s a stranger in our kitchen?”

  All eyes turned to me and Wink.

  Wink shrunk into my side, so far so that she hid her face behind the meat of my arm.

  I moved it up and over her shoulders, pulling her into my side.

  “This is Wink,” I said. “Wink, the brunette with the big tits is Blythe.”

  Keifer hissed while Blythe blushed.

  Wink pinched my side.

  “Ian, that’s not nice,” she admonished.

  I noticed she didn’t disagree with me, either.

  Blythe’s tits, already large before, had nearly doubled in size. I was sure that Keifer was living the dream.

  “Well, you do have big breasts, Blythe,” Brooklyn said.

  “The brunette with the long legs is Brooklyn. She’s mated to Nikolai, who’s likely at the helm of his computer upstairs,” Ian said.

  “No I’m not. I’m right here,” Nikolai said, pulling his glasses off as he walked into the room and hooking them around his shirt collar. “You’re new.”

  That was directed at Wink.

  “She is,” I said.

  “What happened to your neck?” Brooklyn asked, coming closer.

  The baby in her arms, the girl, turned her head and looked at me, and I winked.

  “What was that?” Keifer asked.

  “What was what?” Brooklyn asked, stopping.

  “That wink you just did,” Keifer said. “What are you doing, Ian?”

  “Ian hasn’t ‘done’ me yet!” Wink said indignantly. “He’s been a perfect gentleman!”

  I rolled my eyes skyward.

  “He’s not talking about you doing your man,” Blythe said softly. “He’s talking about that wink that just passed between Ian and my daughter.”

  Wink looked up at me, then bac
k at the baby in Brooklyn’s arms.

  I just stared at them all blankly, not bothering to explain.

  I’d perfected it over time, and I could now hold a stare with Keifer and not even blink.

  I wouldn’t have blinked with anybody else, but Keifer was the king after all. He expected people to bow down to his excellence and all that shit.

  Me, I didn’t think he was any better than the next guy.

  He hadn’t really proven to me that he was, anyway.

  At least not to me, personally.

  I respected the power he held inside of him, though, which was the entire reason I bowed down to him as the alpha and king.

  If he did something to lose that respect, though, I wouldn’t have any problem kicking his ass to the curb.

  “You’re not going to tell any of us, are you?” Blythe asked.

  I smiled then.

  “When she wants you to know, she’ll tell you,” I said.

  And she would let them all know soon.

  She’d relayed that information while she was still in the womb.

  “That’s helpful,” Keifer muttered. “Your psychological bullshit isn’t needed right now, Ian.”

  “Then why did you ask me to come over here for a meeting?” I asked, shrugging and turning to leave.

  Wink held on to my hand like a landline, following closely behind me without me even telling her to do so.

  “Stop,” Keifer said. “I did have a reason for asking you over here.”

  I sighed and turned, leaning my back against the wall beside the backdoor.

  “So get it over with. Ask me,” I ordered.

  Keifer’s eyes narrowed.

  “You do realize that I’m the King here, right? If I want to take all day, I can damn well take all fucking day,” Keifer growled in annoyance.

  Wink’s hands tightened on my forearm as she read the hostility in the room.

  Good. She would need to pay fucking attention if she was going to be with me.

  And she would be with me.

  Not only had fate made it so, but I’d wanted her for so fucking long I couldn’t even begin to count the days.

  It’d been two years and some odd months since she’d started cleaning my house, and I’d known for at least a year that she was my mate.

  I’d let her be, though, knowing she’d be safer away from me.

  As long as I didn’t touch her, we’d be okay.