“Here? Why not San Antonio?”
“A large concentration of paranormal beings inhabit the Atropos area. It made sense to set up a bureau there instead. Plus, the real estate is cheaper.”
“I had no idea. I didn’t see anything in the business directory.”
“Just the way I prefer it.” Warmth and humor infused the older man’s voice, setting Javier at ease. “Nah, to be honest, the branch office is new. I don’t even have a staff yet, only the property. You’d be one of my first trainees. So, interested?”
“Hell yeah!”
The older shifter laughed again. “Glad to see you have some enthusiasm about it. It’s my pet project, something I’ve been wanting to get off the ground for a while now. I’ll be in Atropos next week visiting a friend, and if you have time to spare, we can talk about it in person.”
“I have a two-hour break during lunch on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I could meet you somewhere close to the campus.”
“Great. Tuesday will work out fine. You pick the place and shoot me a text, and I’ll foot the bill for lunch.”
“I will, thank you.”
He lowered his cell and marveled over his good fortune. The moment he set it down, the phone lit up again with the contact information of a classmate.
“Hey, Jared, what’s up?”
“Just making sure we’re still on for Monday night. Movies and food at your place, right?”
“Yeah, all set. I’ll have pizza and drinks ready when you all get here.”
“I still think you should move in with me, dude. You’re way out there in, hell, I’d never even heard of Atropos.”
“Thanks, but I like it out here.” And a certain green-eyed beauty lived only steps away, so it would be counterproductive to move away from her into the city. “So, if I don’t catch you between classes, then I’ll see you out here.”
“Sounds good, man. Later.”
Javier tossed his phone aside on the couch and grinned. Little by little, his life was changing for the better. As much as he loved the island of his birth and missed his few friends there, getting away had been the best thing for him.
A weekend at home allowed Yasmin to make sense of her changing world. After the first positive, she’d sent Gillian to the store for a second test, but the next day’s result returned the same verdict.
After the initial shock, she’d spent hours silently raging at herself. Then she’d sat at her computer to research everything she could about babies and childbirth. For a time, she’d planned nursery designs in her head—even imagined how the baby herself would look while growing increasingly disturbed by the stark certainty of that realization.
Her mother was Circe reborn in the modern world, a goddess with a tendency to make the occasional prediction. Was it possible the same divine gift had manifested in her?
Going through the normal routine of classes on Monday had been almost surreal. Her thoughts wandered away from the lessons to the life growing inside her and to the man who had made it possible. By the day’s end, after they had returned home and enjoyed tacos for dinner, she’d worked up the nerve to go and tell him.
Amaya popped her head in through the open bedroom door and smiled. “Hey, I’m making a DQ run. Want a blizzard or something?”
“Nah, I’m good. I’m actually about to head next door.”
“Javier next door or parents next door?”
“Javier’s.”
Amaya bit her lip and stepped into the room. “Want us to go with you?”
“No, I have to talk to him alone. But thanks.”
“All right. In that case I’ll pick you up a salted caramel truffle blizzard and put it in the freezer. You know, for later.”
“You’re the best.”
Twenty minutes later, Yasmin crossed the yard to Javier’s door and spied two unfamiliar vehicles in the driveway. He had company. At first, she hesitated and lingered on the stoop, but a surge of courage opened the screen and rapped on the door. The door opened before she could knock a second time.
There he was, the sexiest man she’d encountered in all of her twenty-two years, clothed in a fitted T-shirt and jeans that probably hugged his ass. Despite its perfection, his squeezable butt wasn’t the part of him she’d loved the most. What she wanted—what she truly missed—was his arms around her and the gentle thunder of his heart beneath her ear as they drifted to sleep each night. She’d fallen in love with that sound.
The gentle chatter of his guests reached her from the adjacent living room, their voices nothing more than a low hum blurred by the anxiety ramping her pulse to a frantic tempo.
“Hey.” Javier flashed her one of those winning smiles that always made her ovaries pop like kettlecorn. Had apparently made her ovaries pop like kettlecorn. Geez. “Saw you walking over. What’s up?”
“We need to talk,” she said in a clipped voice.
Javier cocked a brow. “Okay. Did you wanna come in and have some food?”
“In private.”
“Right this moment, or can it wait until later? I have some friends over.”
“I noticed.”
Fuck, she sounded like a bitch. Fear had a way of twisting into her insides and coiling around her guts like a burmese python constricting a rat.
“Sorry. It’s just… I need to talk to you in private.”
“You can come in, you know. I don’t bite.” Javier stepped back, making room for her to join him. He glanced to his left at the gathering in the living room. A guy and two girls, one of them slim, blonde, and beach-tanned despite the gray winter skies, occupied a black leather sectional. The aroma of pizza wafted out and explosions boomed from surround-sound speakers. Yasmin recognized the movie playing on the giant curved television, an action-packed horror flick from Drakenstone Studios. Astrid’s father was a big movie producer out in Hollywood.
He’d barely been inside the house for a month and he’d already pimped it out like MTV Cribs.
“Hey, guys, I’ll be right back,” Javier called over.
“Want us to pause?”
“Nah, I’ve seen this before. My friend’s dad made the film.”
Brows rose, a brief flicker of curiosity, but then the guy and his apparent girlfriend tuned into the movie again. The pretty blonde, a chick on their school’s cheer team, bit her lower lip and watched Javier until he guided Yasmin out of sight.
Had she interrupted a double date? The anxiety she’d already felt became a crushing weight on her chest. She’d missed her chance. In the days since that evening over pizzas, Javier had moved on with another woman.
And she had no one to blame but herself.
Numbed, she followed him upstairs and into the master bedroom. An Oriental rug covered the middle of the wooden floor and an immense four-poster bed sat against the wall with matching nightstands and a dresser. Framed photographs of island landscapes and beautiful underwater coral formations hung on the walls. Those had to have been shot by his mother. If her stomach wasn’t a queasy mess, she would have stopped to admire them.
When he closed the door behind them, her pulse jumped to the approximate racing speed of a Kentucky Derby thoroughbred. Javier studied her face, and when he spoke, it was in the gentle tone a man might use when speaking to a small child or a wounded animal. A scared kitten. “Is this private enough? What can I do for you, Yaz?”
She reminded herself that the easiest way was to rip it off like a Band-Aid. All she had to do was say the words—if she could get them past her tight throat.
“Yasmin?”
“I know this is a shitty time and all, seeing as how you’re on a date.” Javier crossed his arms, but he didn’t say a word. “But you and I need to have a very serious discussion.”
“Is this about me kissing you?”
“Yes. I mean, no.”
“Then what’s on your mind?”
Yasmin swallowed back the urge to throw up. “I’m pregnant.”
He stared at her. Then he cracked a smile and
dropped his hands to his sides, eyes bright with amusement. “Okay. Ha-ha. Good one. If you’re looking for more of the plantains my mom sent, they’re downstairs on the table. You don’t have to pretend to be pregnant for me to feed you.”
Plantains. The mere mention of food twisted her stomach and churned sour bile to her mouth. She darted past him for the bathroom but didn’t make it more than a step past the door. The little bit of oatmeal she’d managed to get down after class came up all over the tiles, and then she stumbled the remaining distance to the toilet and dry-retched.
Javier ran after her, but he drew up short and hung in the doorway with both hands on the frame. From her peripheral vision, she saw his concerned green eyes watching her.
Damn. In her imagination, she’d dreamed up the ideal confession where she shared the news while retaining poise and dignity. Instead, she dissolved into a gross mess in his bathroom.
“Whoa. Hey, are you okay?” He maneuvered around the slop on the floor and stepped in behind her. The weight of his hand settled on her shoulder, lifted, then set back down again on her back.
She retched again, eyes filled with unshed tears. It was worse that he was there to witness her sickness.
“I… The hell. You’re not joking. You’re really pregnant?”
“Yeah,” she croaked after she was done. Flushing the toilet, she twisted around and sat with her back against the wall, head tilted back and eyes closed until she caught her breath. “Pregnant. It’s a thing that happens when a man and a woman have sex. Maybe you should add a biology course to your schedule,” she said in a weak voice, attempting a smile as she cracked one eye open to look at him.
“I know how it works,” he snapped back, even growing a little taller, like a bird fluffing his feathers. Then the irritation faded, and the worry returned to his eyes. “But we’re not even compatible. Dragons and other shifters don’t have babies. Hell, no shifters of different breeds can have babies.”
And he was right, technically. Since the body chemistries didn’t match, the sperm usually expired before reaching the egg of an incompatible female. And when pregnancies did happen between different cat shifters, it usually ended in miscarriage with exception to a few liger shifters. But Javier wasn’t a cat. He was a dragon, and that gave Yasmin all of the reason in the world to fret.
“I guess my body bends the rules since I’m a witch demigoddess or whatever. Mother Nature must have decided I don’t count as a shifter.”
“But you are. I’ve seen you shift. I—” He groaned into one hand. “Fuck.”
Watching his mixed expressions wound a tight knot in her chest. Yasmin couldn’t exactly blame him either since she was still trying to wrap her head around the idea. Javier flexed his hands a few times before raking them through his hair.
He crouched down to meet her at eye level. “What do you want to do?”
She broke eye contact first. “I’m not here to ruin your date or make it all about me. It just seemed like you should know.”
“Right, and I appreciate that,” he said, not at all dry or sarcastic. She hated that his voice could sound so damned soothing.
“And obviously, I won’t be giving the baby up or anything, but…” Half an hour of rehearsal in front of Amaya and Gillian hadn’t prepared her for the real thing. She faltered and stumbled over her words a few times before finally biting out, “Look, I’m not asking you to do anything, but if you want to be involved, that’s okay. If not, no hard feelings. I’m not forcing you into a bond because we have a kid together though. That’s not what I’m asking you to do. I mean… you have a good thing going on here now. School and… friends.” Friends who were definitely less wishy washy and petrified of the future than her.
He waited out her speech in silence, expression neutral as stone until she ended her rant to gulp in thirsty breaths. “I’m sorry for whatever I did to make you think I wouldn’t want to be involved, Yaz. Are you sure?”
“You di—” The words died on her lips the moment she realized they were a lie. The truth was that she hadn’t been sure if he would be interested in a child, given his lazy past, but his hellish school schedule contradicted every preconception she’d had of him.
The idle dragon from the island was not the go-getter in front of her now.
“I did what?”
“I’ll clean up the mess in here. You, uh… you should get back to your d—friends.”
His brows did that dubious raise again, and when she turned to hunt around for toilet paper to wipe up her mess, he seized her by the arms and plucked her from the bathroom, straight into his chest so he could enfold her in his arms.
“They can wait,” he whispered into her hair, hugging her close.
The tension melted from her at once. Being in Javier’s arms alleviated some of the terror pounding furiously inside her chest and affected her more than any magical sedative.
Gods, it was what she’d wanted all along, wasn’t it?
Burrowing in close, Yasmin turned her cheek against his chest and listened to the powerful, methodic beat of his draconic heart. Even as a human, it was slow, tranquil. The scent of pine and sweet woods pervaded her senses, accompanied by an earthy masculine aroma, and every other smell she’d associate with hiking in the pristine wilderness.
When he squeezed her tighter, she managed to blink back her tears, but only just. “I haven’t told my folks yet. I don’t have to tell them it’s you.”
“I’ll go with you to tell them, but only if you want me to.”
“You don’t have to do that.” As good as the hug felt, she gently extricated herself and stepped back. “I’m not in a rush anyway. I figured I’d wait until I have a doctor appointment and everything is, you know… safe. It’s… I’ve read horror stories about the occasional interbreeding between some cat shifter species. I want to know the baby is going to be okay. Since… you know.”
The awkward atmosphere returned, marring the tender moment. Javier’s gaze slid to the floor, and his throat bobbed in a tight swallow before he murmured, “Can I come with you when you go?”
“Do you really want to?” The moment the words left her lips, she wished she could take them back.
“It's my kid. Am I supposed to shrug it off and forget that? What the hell, Yaz?” He clenched and unclenched his fists. “I know I was a dumbass before, but goddamn, it’s like there’s this wall between us now, and no matter what I do, you just keep adding bricks to it.”
She blinked, then perplexity gave way to irritation and flushed heat through her face. “I’ve been building a wall? Javier, you have classes all day and no time whenever we’ve asked you over. At least not for me and the girls.”
“I came over last week.”
“To eat!” Her anger flared hot, surging through her until her entire body quaked. “So, go the hell downstairs to the friends you apparently do have time for.”
“I don’t want to hang out with them,” he bit out. “I want to hang out with you when you’re not using Gill and Amaya as some kind of buffer between us like I can’t keep my dick in my pants on my own. Yeah, I fucking kissed you, but I wasn’t trying to hit it for a quickie. I wanted to spend more time with you.”
“Then maybe you should just ask me out!” The words exploded from her before she could hold them in.
He quieted for a moment. His shoulders didn’t drop, but his gaze averted to the window where the fading hints of sunlight shone orange against the bedroom floor through the slatted blinds. “I wanted to,” he admitted before shooting her an uneasy smile. “It was going to be my reward for making it through midterms.”
“God, you’re such an idiot,” she muttered, exhausted from the whole ordeal. “I’m going home to lay down. You should get downstairs before your friends come up to rescue you. Sorry for interrupting, I know you don’t have much free time.”
“You can lay down here if you want, and I’ll ask them to leave. I mean, we were just eating pizza and watching one of Saul’s recent pr
oductions.” He put both hands in his pockets and rocked on his heels a few times. “I heard cuddling helps morning sickness.”
“I—” She stopped herself, exhausted with pushing him away and even more irritable with her own treacherous body. “Okay, I’ll stay, but don’t run them out. Go watch your movie, spend time with your friends, and I’ll lay down. Deal?”
“Okay.” After moving in close enough to brush his lips against her forehead, he stepped outside and shut the door behind him.
Once he was gone, Yasmin returned to the bathroom and cleaned up the mess. Snapping her fingers whisked the vomit away to the deep woods where some wild animal would likely find it. A little air freshener covered up the smell.
Then she borrowed his toothpaste and used her finger to clean out her mouth. Once she felt less like a hot mess, she sent a quick text to Amaya to prove she hadn’t been eaten by the dragon and laid down.
Leave it to Javier to have a fancy mattress. It cradled her like a hug, dipping in the right spots and staying supportive in others. She burrowed in the blankets that smelled like him and closed her eyes, wondering what the hell she was going to do next.
Chapter Fifteen
Javier stood outside his bedroom door with his back pressed against the wall, willing himself to breathe despite the sour tang of vomit still in the air. Movement began beyond the wooden door, and then the hiss of a Lysol canister covered it with lemon oils.
He’d told her not to worry, that he’d do it, but the news had put him in too much of a flustered state to remember before he hurried outside.
All he’d wanted to do was drag her against him again and hold her tight. That’s what he should have been doing, not preparing to entertain his small but growing circle of friends.
Being a smart man, he knew better than to follow through with his desire. Yasmin had offered a compromise, been willing to stay, and he’d be a fool to enter again when it would only spark another dispute between them.
What the hell had he done to make her distrust him so much and think so little of him? Although he thrived at college and blossomed under the pressure of his immense course load, didn’t Yasmin realize she’d been the catalyst to make him realize how much he wanted—no, needed—to succeed?
Bitten by Magic: Agents of SAINT: Book 1 Page 12