“Mmmm?” a voice rumbled out of the softness of the bed and the dark air.
“Do you feel any differently?”
“Sleepy,” he mumbled.
“No, differently.”
“My skin’s sore where the mating mark was driven in.”
“About me. After the love potion, do you feel any differently about me.”
“No,” he whispered, his fingers finding and stroking her jaw. His thumb ran over her lips. “You’ve always entranced me. You’ve always been the one I wanted. There’s something between us that was stronger than what the universe had planned. We just needed your magic to break the bond of fate so I could be free. But I’ve always loved you so much. The love potion didn’t change that.”
~~~
In the dark, Arawn’s deep voice whispered, “Willow, are you asleep?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
The warmth of his body enveloped her. “What did your stepfather do? Was it just yelling like that?”
“Yeah,” Willow said, cuddling into his embrace.
“Did he do anything else?”
She shook her head. “It was just shouting. A lot of shouting.”
“Shouting like that?”
“Yes.”
“Shouting at you like that?”
“—Yes.”
“I think Tiamat burned his ass.”
Tiamat, huh? Not Dark Other?
She giggled. “I’m supposed to tell you that you shouldn’t have done that, I think.”
“Want me to do it again?”
“—No.”
“Come on. Let me scorch his butt again. No one will even know it’s me.”
“I’m pretty sure you’re the only giant, blue-fire-breathing dragon I know.”
“They won’t even see me.”
“How are you going to do that?”
His voice lowered to a bass rumble. “Lurk outside.”
“People would notice a huge dragon lurking. We noticed the sea serpents lurking in the fountain.”
“No one can see a black dragon in the dark.”
She twisted in his arms. “And then what?”
“Then a bolt of blue fire shoots out of the sky and scorches his butt.”
“That doesn’t sound like just a butt-scorching.”
“I can make it just a butt-scorching.”
“It sounds like you’ve lurked and scorched before.”
“There was alcohol involved.”
“You? Arawn the Serious? What did you do?”
“Have you heard of a music festival called Burning Man?”
“No way.”
“There’s music, dancing, and fire. Dragons love it. Half the New Wales Den goes.”
“Do tell.”
“Well, I drank too much,” Arawn admitted. “Mathonwy and Cai egged me on.”
“I cannot believe I’m hearing this.”
“And the Burning Man, which is a huge bonfire sculpture in the middle of the field, hadn’t been lit yet. So, I staggered behind a tent, transformed, and took off into the dark. It was night in the middle of the desert. No light pollution. The stars were brilliant, but the moon was down. The darkness hung in the sky. No one could see a black dragon flying over the crowd in the dark. I hovered above the Burning Man sculpture and lit the bonfire and the night with a massive plume of blue dragonfire.”
“You’re kidding!”
“Then they saw me.”
“Well, yeah!”
“It was all ascribed to drugs, of course. There was an announcement not to drop the brown acid. It was bad. People were seeing dragons.”
Willow nodded. “Yeah. Naturals would think it was drugs.”
“Mathonwy video’d it. He’s using it to blackmail me. That’s why I took this job. Drunk video.”
“Drunk video,” she repeated, settling back down to sleep. “I wanna see it.”
“I hate what a jerk your stepfather was to you,” Arawn whispered. “I hate what he must have said all those times.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t hang out around there much anymore. It doesn’t matter.”
“Seriously, just a little lurking. Just a little scorching when he least expects it. Tiamat enjoyed it. He’s vindictive, and he’s been absolutely in love with you ever since you fed him halibut and rubbed his tummy. He keeps slithering around in my head, giving me ideas about setting your stepfather’s car on fire or burning the word asshole into his lawn.”
“Can I ride him while he does it?”
Arawn brushed his lips down her neck. “Tiamat enjoyed that, too.”
Willow muttered, “I’m not saying no.”
Denial
THE inspector stood in the commercial kitchen in the Dragon’s Den Casino, surveying the wreckage.
The cabinets were splintered. The steel countertops and shelves had melted into odd, drooping shapes. The back wall was a ruin of blasted bricks and steaming molten metal. The fire sprinklers had saturated everything.
The government inspector asked him, “Are you sure it was a gas explosion, Mr. Timmit?”
Arawn smiled innocuously at him. Yes, he still used the alias Aaron Timmit whenever he had to deal with naturals. His university degrees were in that name, and he had two sets of business cards. “An enormous blue fireball that melted steel and exploded brick, and then a billowing darkness rising into the sky? What else could it have been, a dragon?”
They both got a good laugh out of that one.
“Well,” the inspector said, “we’ll need to inspect any other kitchens constructed by the same contractor.”
“Luckily, there aren’t any,” Arawn said. “The restaurant that had been going to open here insisted on using a particular construction company that didn’t touch anything in the rest of the casino.”
“Are there any other gas leaks that you know of? I smelled some mercaptan out front.”
Mercaptan is the sulfurous chemical added to natural gas so you can smell a gas leak. “The fountain doesn’t have gas lines running into it, so it’s not a gas leak. Its pool has an algae or bacteria growing in it that’s producing the smell. It had a disgusting algae problem last month, but we cleaned that up. We’ve got just one more little thing to take care of in there.”
Six rather big and scaly things, actually.
“Have you tried bleach?” she asked.
Not unless they wanted six tons of rotting sea serpent meat on their doorstep. At the very least, the serpents did appear to be vibrantly healthy, though gassy. “We’ll give that a shot.”
“Excellent,” she said, poking at the demolished bricks with her toe. “That’ll make the rest of the inspection easy. I imagine we’ll have it done in an hour.”
“Great,” Arawn said. “I doubt this restaurant will be ready for the soft open in two days, but I’d appreciate it if you could put an inspection on your schedule for a week before the gala opening in a month.”
“Sure,” the inspector said. “Not a problem.”
Later, Arawn and Willow had a good laugh about it. After all, natural humans will always believe something was a “gas explosion” or a “weather balloon” rather than try to wrap their uninitiated minds around the idea that a dragon with a woman clinging to its back tore his way out of a casino and flew into the desert afternoon.
Put A Lid on It
WILLOW and Arawn were lying on the wide, king-sized bed in the penthouse on the day before the casino’s soft open. They’d pulled the curtains, so the room and bed were dim.
He was running his fingertips down Willow’s naked back while she checked her phone. He was sort of tickling her spine and butt, but it was so soothing.
Far below the penthouse’s wide window at street level, a piece of construction equipment repairing the kitchen wall made a rude sound.
Arawn said, “Oops, did a sea serpent get in here?”
Willow giggled. “I don’t know what to do about those guys.”
“They certainly appear healthy. Their sc
ales are glossy and thick. They’re racing around the pool—”
“—Jet-propelled by their farts—” she muttered.
“—and seem to be having a glorious time. It’s hard to tell when a dragon is laughing, but I think they are.”
“Great. Now if I could just get them to stop stinking.”
“Too bad you can’t feed them something like baking soda to soak up the smell or just put a lid over the fountain.”
Willow looked up from her phone and turned to stare at her mate, who had pressed his lips to her spine.
When his eyes met hers, the glittering blue fire that flowed through his eyes was so bright that it cast a soft light on the backs of her thighs under his fingers.
She asked, “Do you have another kitchen I could borrow?”
Five hours later, they were once again flinging halibut spiked with a magical potion at sea serpents.
Arawn looked a little blue like he was trying not to breathe. He asked her, “When is the deodorizing potion supposed to take effect?”
“Just keep feeding them!” Willow yelled, grabbing a fish by the tail and swinging it around like the hammer throw at the Olympics before launching it across the pool. “We’ve only got three fish left!”
The scarlet sea serpent leaped out of the water, again turbo-boosted by the fart-jet in its butt, and snapped the potion-laced halibut out of the air.
Arawn heaved the last one in, and the green serpent chugged it down. “Okay. That’s it. Now what?”
Willow watched the fountain.
A breeze sprang up, blowing some of the sulfurous stink away from them and toward the Las Vegas Strip.
People walking out there seemed to sniff the air and walk faster.
The fountain bubbled just as much, with long trails of effervescence following the dark shapes swimming under the water, and yet—
Willow sniffed the air.
Arawn asked, “Is it better?”
“I think so,” she said.
After a few more minutes of waiting, they agreed that, while the sea serpents were emitting the same amount of gas into the bubbling, foaming fountain as before and the basin still appeared to be at a vigorous, rolling boil, the gas was less noxious.
Their eyes stopped stinging.
They could breathe without coughing.
People on the Strip stopped pulling their shirts over their noses and throwing dirty looks their way.
Willow said, “I think it’s working.”
“Time for Phase Two,” Arawn said. He hefted a copper cauldron onto the side wall of the fountain. “Do you want to do the honors?”
Willow shook her head. “It weighs over a hundred pounds. I can’t lift it.”
“Bombs away, then.” Arawn tipped the copper cauldron over the edge of the basin.
Oily fluid spilled out, catching the sunlight and shining with rainbows.
It spilled into the fountain, but the liquid floated on the water, forming a thick layer of sweet-smelling oil over the surface.
“There it is,” Arawn said. “There’s your lid. Hopefully, that’ll keep those sea serpents from tooting their nasty gas at the guests during the soft open tomorrow.”
Willow was pretty pleased with herself.
Both the de-stinking potion and the oil potion that had sealed the fart-stink in had worked perfectly.
Maybe Willow was getting the hang of this witchcraft thing.
Maybe she wasn’t so hopeless after all.
Arawn slid his arm around her waist and kissed her temple. “Come on. They’re fine. Let’s go home.”
The Dragon's Den Casino
WILLOW Sage wore a long, black, beaded gown to the soft opening of the Dragon’s Den Casino, a gown that had appeared in the closet of the penthouse that afternoon. Arawn had been grinning all morning with a goofy I’ve-got-a-secret smirk that was infinitely adorable.
The dress was held up by spaghetti straps over her shoulders, and her right one crossed over the delicate dragon marking that had appeared on her shoulder while they’d been in that cave with the wide bed.
Another tattoo-like marking on Arawn’s shoulder matched her dragon where he’d pressed his skin against hers, smothering the dragonfire and bonding them.
“Do dragonmates always wear clothes the color of their mate’s dragon?” she asked Arawn, feeling the silk and seed-pearl-sized beads of the dress between her fingers.
He leaned sideways and took a long, scorching look at her in the mirror. She could practically feel his eyes roving over her skin under the dress. “Sometimes. I think you need more jewelry, though.”
“I think this is plenty.” He was fastening a sapphire and platinum necklace around her neck. She was already wearing the matching earrings, bracelet, ring, and hairpins. A tingle shivered down her spine from where his fingers brushed her neck.
“I’m glad you like it. I did buy you a little something else, though, just a diamond and gold set, for some other time. Maybe after we get home tonight. Gold will look nice with your hair, and on your skin, and dangling off your ears. And there’s a ruby and gold set that I saw in one of the jewelry stores here that would look good on you. It would set off your pink highlights.” He dropped his head to her shoulder, nipping her neck.
His bite wasn’t nearly hard enough to break the skin, but Willow could have sworn her head spun, nevertheless. She must be getting a Pavlovian response to dragon sex venom.
Indeed, as his arm snaked around her waist, pulling her against his strong chest, she wanted to rip that tuxedo right off his skin, and he was toying with the gown’s spaghetti strap on her other shoulder like he had impure intentions, too. His breath flowed down her skin, just a little warmer than a natural man’s breath.
“We are never going to make it to the casino if you don’t stop doing that,” she told him, letting the words sing-song in her mouth as she leaned back against him and closed her eyes.
“I don’t care,” he replied in the same sing-song, but lower, sexier, and with his lips caressing her neck.
“I thought you were going to find that Mathonwy Draco friend of yours and tell him that you can’t oversee the casino for the next month because we’re going on a honeymoon.”
“Oh, yeah,” Arawn whispered. “That.”
An hour later and freshly showered, Willow and Arawn emerged from the elevator and walked into the casino. Everyone there was an invited guest, of course, and ranged from minor celebrities to social media influencers to journalists and politicians.
Basically, some people who wanted to be seen at an exclusive event and some people to do the seeing.
Willow walked among them, clinging to Arawn’s arm and holding a glass of champagne that was wholly unnecessary because her head was still swimming from dragon sex venom. “This is pretty.”
“I’m glad you think so,” Arawn replied and introduced her to yet someone else, whom she grinned at and greeted. The middle-aged couple held themselves with a serenity that Willow admired.
“Llewellyn and Bronwyn, this is Willow Sage-Tiamat, my mate.”
He took her hand in his, and that wonderful, sexy, fated-mate shiver ran from where their palms pressed together and throughout her whole body.
The man, who sported a short, white beard and an almost military haircut, smiled at her. “So very nice to finally meet you,” he leaned in and whispered, “Your Grace, Duchess of Tiamat.”
Oh, yeah, right. Duchess. That was Willow and everything. Duchess. Duchessessessess. It made a funny sound when you said it like that. “So nice to meet you, too!”
The woman, Bronwyn, also shook Willow’s hand. She appeared to discreetly examine Willow’s eyes and the dragonmark on her shoulder under her dress’s spaghetti strap. Her smile warmed. “It’s so very nice to meet Tiamat’s mate. I had been worried about him for some time.”
“Welp, you don’t need to worry anymore! I’ve got him now!” Oh, Lords of Magic, Willow was very giggly.
Bronwyn’s smile widened, and she
seemed to be refraining from chuckling. “And I’m so very glad to meet you. We’ll talk later, in a half an hour or so.”
They swanned off into the crowd toward one of the champagne servers.
Arawn said, “We should talk about who they are at some point.”
“Are they your aunt and uncle or something?”
“Not exactly, but it’s not important right now. Maybe I shouldn’t have envenomed you twice tonight. I have many more people to introduce you to, my effervescent little mate.”
And he did.
They were walking toward the buffet because Arawn had decided that Willow needed some food in her stomach—although she wasn’t sure how that was going to affect her metabolism of dragon venom that had been injected directly into her bloodstream—when a couple brushed by them.
Arawn had seen the tall, lithe fae on a collision course and steered Willow around them.
In the tightly packed crowd, the woman dragged her voluptuous body past both of them, practically rubbing over both Arawn and Willow like a cat in heat. “Oops, sorry!” she said as her bright blue eyes met Willow’s. Her satiny, dark hair curled luxuriously around her face and shoulders.
The last time Willow had seen that half-fae woman, she’d been holding a baby on her hip, and a thin cord of fate had connected her to Arawn.
The woman’s husband, a fae who leaked fae-magic as he walked, led the woman by her hand into the crowd.
Arawn tugged Willow toward the shrimp and canapés on a long, cloth-draped table.
She grabbed his arm. “Arawn!”
“You need to eat,” he said. “I know it feels like you don’t, but you do. That’s the venom. You haven’t had anything since breakfast.”
“No, that was her. That woman who pushed by us was the woman I saw when I did the scrying for your fated mate.”
He paused, frowning. “Who?”
“That woman! The brunette with the hourglass figure in the blue gown that matched her eyes.”
He glanced over the crowd. “I don’t remember—”
Willow saw realization dawn on him.
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