The Surprise (Secret Baby Bad Boy Romance)

by Faye, Amy

  It was only after they'd come to a stop that the second part arose. The heat came hard, and as hot as anything that he'd ever felt, and there wasn't going to be much time before there was a big hole, at least the size of his head, that had been burned straight through the side of the vehicle.

  Alex turned and looked at Diana; she was wild-eyed and panicky, but he could deal with that later. There were other things he had to deal with right now.

  "What was that?" Her voice sounded like she was ready to start sobbing, and it told him everything he needed to know at that moment about her mental state. She was close to panicking, first, and second, she had definitely seen the dragon, even if had been far too late for her to react to it in any meaningful way.

  Alex turned and looked to the opposite corner of the car, hoping to check on the old man. He was nowhere to be found, except that there was a hole where the passenger side door should have been, and a spatter of red where something had been thrown up against the windshield. He grit his teeth together, and decided what needed to be done, a moment before a second blast of heat like being stuck inside of an oven hit.

  "I need you to close your eyes and hold onto me very tightly," he growled. She listened, thank God, because if she didn't then she was going to find out that it hadn't just been an idle suggestion.

  He dropped the transformation and leapt into the air, flying hard. He gripped her as tight as he could with his front legs, but kept the grasp loose enough that he he hoped, however impotently, that it wouldn't do any lasting damage. If it did, then all of this would have been for nothing. A waste.

  He could hear the sound of screams from the ground, and could hear the low, rumbling bass of the beginnings of a dragon roaring, and then overtones layered on top of it until the sound covered the whole spectrum of noise, and threatened to pierce into his skull.

  And again, he dove, hard. The air pushed back at him, tried to force him to slow, and Aleroth, no longer Alex Blume, pulled his arms in tight, pulling the human against him. She was light, even for a human, and barely added a third of his own weight to the flight, but that still made it that much more of a challenge to maintain his speed as he leveled out and started to move as fast as his body would propel him away from the scene.

  It would have been easier, he thought bitterly, if he'd already been able to claim this domain as his. But with the territory up for grabs, he wasn't in his element, and there was no roost near enough that it could save them from the attack.

  He pushed the thought out of his mind, where it sat along with the limpness of Diana's body in his clawed grip, something to be worried about as soon as he had a way out of this. There would be plenty of time to mope about how things hadn't worked out the way that he'd planned when they were both out of it and alive.

  The answer wasn't one that he enjoyed, not even for an instant, and there was going to be a price paid for taking it. But if he had to pay it, then he would do so, gladly. He turned north, every aching muscle screaming out as he pulled the air as hard as he could with his long, powerful wings, unconcerned with who might see.

  There was no time to be worried. Just a few short miles to the North, and he would cross an invisible line. There was no guaranteeing that it would save him, of course. There was no guaranteeing that anything would save him, short of a bolt of lightning striking his enemies down.

  There was a good chance, though. There was a better chance that, if the drake behind him had dared to attack in broad daylight, then they would pursue past the lines of territory. Beyond that, the question became whether or not there was any chance of retaliation, for him and for his pursuer.

  It wasn't much, but it was something, and something had to be enough now. There wasn't much other choice than to do it and hope that things went better than he expected them to. After all, if he didn't, then what was the alternative? To die horribly, consumed by gouts of flame?

  He wasn't going to do that. Not when he had treasure right there in his arms. He wasn't brilliant, but he was hardly a fool.

  The line edged closer. He dared, for a brief moment, to let his head slip out of the most optimal line of wind resistance and looked around behind. The drake was on his tail, sure as could be. At this speed, there was no danger of flames overtaking him. But the big beast was closer than he had been, and in the moment that Alex took to look, he gained speed even more.

  Aleroth was many things, and he certainly was faster than the average young dragon. But he wasn't ancient by any stretch of the imagination, and he was out of practice with quick flight. Out of practice with escaping. And worse still, out of practice with fighting.

  The dragon behind was bigger than him, stronger than him, older than him, and worst of all... faster. It was a deadly combination. Another mile down, and only three more to go. He wouldn't be caught before they hit the threshold, which was all that he could credit his confidence to. If they made it across, they were in occupied territory.

  If Corinth, for some reason, didn't respond, it would be an embarrassment. A humiliation. A grave insult. It would have ensured that he remained alive, as well, which was the only reason that a dragon would endure such a thing. But not Corinth, not under normal circumstances, and Aleroth relied on knowing that he wouldn't.

  There was a palpable change in the air when he hit the threshold. He didn't need to wonder about the exact line. Dragons could sense it. 'You've entered the wrong neighborhood now,' it seemed to say. If the circumstances were any different, then he would have. But as it stood, he'd entered exactly the right neighborhood.

  Sure enough, the drake on his tail didn't slow for an instant. He was near enough now that Alex could already imagine the feeling of his beak punching through his scales, the feel of his teeth biting in to the tender flesh beneath. The feel of claws ripping him limb from limb. He ducked lower, dodging the tops of trees, and when a satisfactory-looking clearing appeared in the midst of them he pulled his wings in, turned, and went screaming through the brush and slammed bodily into the ground.

  But he cushioned the blow for Diana, and he'd made it into the blue's territory, and that was all that he could hope for as the terrifying, massive, ancient red bore down on him.

  13

  Diana Kramer hadn't died when she'd ridden a roller coaster for the first time, in spite of herself. She'd gone limp, and if she were as made up of jelly as she felt, she would have gone flying out at the first opportunity. It had been a mistake, and not one that she'd repeated, in spite of the "fun" that she'd had.

  She wasn't screaming through the sky at a pace so quick that she thought her skin was going to pull itself right off her bones. She wasn't held tight to some sort of giant... well, her eyes said it was one thing, but her brain said that her eyes must have been wrong. It had been a long time since she'd felt the dissonance so strongly but the brain usually won in the end.

  She was on a roller coaster, and imagining what it must be like, for the straps to instead be arms wrapped around her. Some part of her subconscious mind had written in strange arms, something like a bear's arms, or a demon's, or something.

  Well, if it were all her imagination then she ought to at least call it what it looked like. A giant, flying lizard? One that had breathed fire? That didn't leave a lot of room for wondering what she thought she'd seen.

  She thought she'd seen a damned dragon. Since dragons weren't real, she had to have seen something else. Presumably it was a large bird, of some kind, which explained the wings and the flying. The rest was just a flight of fancy.

  Maybe it had been brought on by the stress of losing her father. Maybe it had been brought on by the stress of losing her job. Maybe it had been brought on by the stress of sitting in a car with a man who was clearly missing several screws.

  A man who was extremely attractive, she had to admit, and if he wasn't obsessed with her and apparently her father, she wouldn't have had one problem with the attention that he was paying to her. It was more of a tone problem than a real issue of not want
ing him to look her way.

  Whatever it was, she was living in a fantasy land, now. She'd lost the time between the car and the roller coaster, and filled in the gap with a fantasy scenario of a dragon burning a hole in their car, of Alex transforming into another dragon.

  She twisted her head a little bit to look up at his green scales, shimmering in the light. The only proof she needed that it was all fake was that the dragon behind them didn't breathe out any flame. If he were a dragon, he could breathe fire. If he could breathe fire, then he would have done it again, and they'd be burned to a crisp.

  The air whipped at her, and she felt as if she were going to slip out any second. No matter how rock solid everything felt now, she knew, any minute there was going to be some kind of gust of wind and she was going to be carried, hurtling, towards the earth and then she'd be splatted out like a bug.

  Well, that was, of course, if any of this was real. But since it wasn't, her arms didn't make any real effort to grip. When the coaster's train pulled into the station, her endorphin rush would wear off and she'd be able to finally calm down and see things rationally.

  And then the ground started to move faster below them, and it started to get bigger, and she didn't know what was going on except that they shouldn't have been getting bigger. The whole fantasy was fine specifically because so far, it hadn't involved splatting on the ground.

  The world got bigger, bigger, and bigger. The trees looked big enough and close enough now that she was worried that they would thwack her leg if she let it dangle any lower. She pulled futilely up, hoping to avoid it, though it was probably more than ten feet away and there was no real danger.

  And then everything went completely topsy-turvy, and she got a look back at the red dragon, as big as a city bus and careening towards them, the trees under his belly whipping hard, beneath his notice.

  When she had ridden the roller coaster, the one time, it had been on a dare. The coaster went up five hundred feet before it dropped her, almost straight down, and then went back up for more.

  She'd gone limp, let it try its best to throw her at a thousand miles an hour into the concrete below. But to her credit, something she'd always been proud of, she hadn't thrown up. It had sapped every bit of her, but she hadn't vomited, and that was all that counted when she wasn't even sure that she could get on the thing, never mind handle it.

  The feeling of impact an instant later, though, took her stomach and wrung it out, and there was no stopping herself. Every muscle between her stomach and her mouth heaved and her stomach violently upset its contents into the grass below as she rolled off of the thing that she'd landed on.

  At the edge of her consciousness she could see it moving, whirling and wrapping its body around her. Then one of those big, dragon arms, arms that she knew she had to be imagining, dug a claw into the back of her shirt and pulled hard, and she pulled off of her feet and into a thicket of trees behind it, her upset stomach emptying itself in a line of sick and disgusting.

  Diana felt weak, shaky. Her body barely wanted to move, which was good at that point, because whatever was happening, imagined or not, she couldn't have stopped it.

  A great shadow spread over the ground around them. A strange, vaguely musical sound threatened to overwhelm her, and again sent her dangerously close to vomiting as the sound rang through her body. And then, all of a sudden, as the red huffed and prepared to spray them, she didn't doubt for a moment, with a gout of flame that would end her day in the worst way possible, something blue smacked into the red drake.

  It wasn't as big as the red, not by a long shot. But the way it hit was like a cruise missile, and it was the size of a fighter jet. The noise that the blue let out as it landed, as it skittered and turned and came around for a second attack, puffing out its chest, threatened to pop her head like an overfilled balloon.

  Lightning screamed down from the sky and met a bolt that seemed, to all the world, to have originated from the blue drake's mouth. The sound was so loud that she felt it more than she heard it, and it was the last thing that she heard for a long time.

  Then the green and the blue took turns at odds, turning the red round and round, claws digging in and tearing. If the blue appreciated the help, then there was no sign of it. It took as many swipes at the green dragon as at the red, but the difference in danger was clear from the beginning, and neither was ready to commit to attacking anything other than the massive red, as big as the other two put together.

  And then as another crack of lightning smacked into the red, so bright that it blacked out her entire vision, it let out a bellow that Diana saw rather than heard, and took off screaming into the sky.

  The blue took off only a second behind. The green, on the other hand slumped to the ground. Diana, for her part, kept pressed against the trunk of one tree, her eyes wide, and her body feeling an electric tingle that she didn't like or want to think too hard about.

  One thought ran through her mind, on near-constant repeat. A thought that she didn't want to think too hard about, regardless of what happened next, because the only answers she could find were absolutely insane.

  What the fuck happened?

  If everything she'd seen was all in her head, why was it that as she tried to snap her fingers right by her ears, she heard nothing at all?

  If it wasn't all in her head, then what the fuck could that possibly have meant for her? What could it have possibly meant for her entire understanding of reality? Her body tingled and hurt and she stayed pressed against the tree trunk until something dark and blue and glittering almost wetly in the sun, descended on the green dragon that had carried her all this way.

  Then it landed and that sonorous roar came out again. The volume must have been extreme, but she made it out only softly, as if it were miles away. It regarded the green, circled it with a gnashing of teeth, and Diana thought that perhaps, she was about to watch one of these dragons die.

  And then the blue seemed to notice her, and fixed her with a stare, and Diana realized that there were much more immediate concerns for her to be worried about.

  14

  When a car-sized killing machine that only exists in fairy tales bares teeth the size of your arm, you tend to have strange reactions. Diana's reaction was to press herself flatter still against the tree, hoping that it wasn't going to notice her. As if it hadn't already.

  "Don't, uh... don't do anything crazy, now," she said out loud. If it hadn't noticed her before, she would be sure to draw its attention by talking. But she stayed pressed against the tree and as still as possible, like a squirrel that had frozen in the middle of an open field. The irony didn't seem to be immediately obvious.

  The blue drake let out a shriek, shrill and loud and considerably less sonorous than its previous two roars. The sound actually made it through the veil of silence, which was a surprise and a half, she had to admit. But the ringing that replaced the muffled silence wasn't any more welcome.

  Diana sucked in a breath. "I... God, I must be crazy. Please, just don't kill me. I don't know what's going on!"

  The green, positioned between the two of them, shifted and stood, panting like it was exhausted from the flight and the battle. For a moment, she thought that it might prove itself to be too weak, too tired, and it would slip back to the ground. But it didn't.

  The blue shrieked again, her shoulders dipping down like a threatening dog. The gesture didn't leave her wondering what it meant. The green seemed to react immediately, though. His own shoulders, too, dipped. His head went with them, his upper body pressed into the ground, his thick and powerful rear legs remaining straight.

  The blue let out a third shriek. This one was quieter, and for a moment Diana thought that there was some chance that her hearing was going again. And then the blue relaxed into a position that might have looked relaxed. It flexed its long wings and fit them in behind.

  If Diana hadn't seen cats make a very similar pose, she might have thought that it had very suddenly decided that there
was no danger at all. The tail, though, stiff and nearly straight back, told her what she needed to know. The blue was worried it might need to pounce at any moment, and it was making sure that it wasn't going to be caught out.

  But it wasn't going to attack right then and there. At least, that was what Diana hoped. It was a ready position, and if they were both very lucky then she might make it out. The green, if it made the way out, was probably good for her as well, but since all of this was some kind of fever dream, she wasn't exactly too worried if things didn't work out well.

  The green, too, relaxed, and then whipped its long neck over to look at her, let its gaze fall back onto the blue, and let out a cry, the quietest one yet.

  There should have been birds here; rabbits, maybe, or squirrels. Something. Hawks were far from uncommon, and this would be prime hunting ground. The fact that no bird calls answered the cacophony told Diana that this was perhaps not something she wanted to be present for.

  The blue's posture, though, and the way that its gaze fixed on her, kept Diana fixed in place. The blue didn't react to the roar, at all. She guessed that it was some sort of communication going on, but if it meant anything then Diana was in no position to say what it could be.

  Then the shape of the massive dragon in front of her shifted, her eyes seemed to blur out, and there was a man in front of her. A man wearing very little. The clothes shimmered into existence afterward, but not before she got a good look at that body.

  It was big and broad, with light-colored hair and a tight, narrow waist. He wasn't thickly muscled, at least not as far as Diana was able to discern, but that didn't stop him from looking good. In fact, if anything, it made him more appealing, svelte. A crisscross of scars worked their way across his back.