Thrilled (Dragon Mates Book 2)

by J. K Harper

  Those flashes of green in his otherwise velvet brown eyes sparked more brightly at her words. Gabi saw his pulse thump in his throat. Again without thinking, she let her hand reach across the table. She lightly touched her fingers to the side of his throat, feeling the jump of his pulse as she slowly ran her hand down over his collarbones.

  She wasn't sure who was more surprised by her bold action.

  Kai drew breath to speak, but before he could, her phone vibrated on the table by her arm. Gabi's heart skipped a beat when she saw the demanding name on the screen. UTEI.

  Underwater Treasure Exploration, Inc. A commercial treasure hunting company.

  The company she secretly had been working with.

  Her breath suddenly stolen by agitated nerves rather than aroused anticipation, Gabi flicked her eyes up to Kai, then back down the phone. Shit. There was no way they would be calling her, on today of all days, unless—

  "Kai, I'm so sorry.” The words dragged out of her. “I have to take this. It might be an emergency." She stood, grabbing up her insistent phone at the same time and not letting herself look back at him. She might not be able to walk away from the man with intense eyes and an electric reaction to her otherwise. "I'll be right back." She hurried away from the table, opening the little gate that led down to the main patio.

  Only when she was away from him did she swipe her thumb to answer as she headed straight toward the far end of the patio. Away from Kai and any other prying ears as she took the phone call that might possibly end her career—but also save her grandmother's life.

  * * *

  Kai watched Gabi's beautiful ass move at a smart pace away from him to take her mysterious phone call. Genuine concern had flashed across her face when she looked at the caller ID. Kai sipped at his drink, savoring the exquisite taste as his mind and body roared around one another in a bizarre, mildly upsetting confusion.

  She was stunning, she was funny, they clearly had enormous chemistry, and she still knew something that he had to learn from her. Those things were all true things. Yet something else flared beneath it all as well. Something deep inside him, in a place that felt caught between his stomach and his chest. The dark, usually welcoming pit of his shadowed inner sanctuary was suddenly shifting. Threatening to toss him off balance.

  He wasn't sure what to make of it. He definitely knew he still didn't like it.

  After only a few moments, Gabi came back across the patio to their table. Her expression had changed, and she didn't sit down. Damn it. Kai stood up, already knowing his potential evening with this gorgeous woman was over before it barely started.

  Her eyes darted uneasily, but her voice sounded genuine. "I am so sorry. I—have to go.”

  Concerned, he asked, "Is everything okay? Is it your grandmother?"

  Gabi's face clouded briefly. She shook her head. "No. Something else in my world of crazy."

  By her nervous, clipped tone, Kai sensed he wouldn't get far if he pushed her.

  “I promise you,” she added with sudden fervor, those cinnamon-brown eyes abruptly locking on his, “this isn't some kind of weird thing where I asked a girlfriend to call so I could get out of this. I would so much rather stay here with you."

  Despite his concern for her obvious trepidation, Kai couldn't help a smile. He could easily tell she was telling the truth. Beautiful Gabriela wanted to stay with him as much as he wanted her to. "I know that,” he told her. “I believe you."

  He said the words very casually, honestly meaning them as a reassurance. But they came out with such unintentional conviction that both he and Gabi were drawn up short. Surprised at his own emphasis. Gabi looked at him, the beautiful golden brown of her eyes studying him with blatant curiosity and a touch of regret.

  A long, odd moment held them. It was one of those moments in which the background mutter of the people in the bar faded away. One of those moments in which all Kai could sense was the wild, exquisite scent of this beautiful woman. Like an intoxicating mix of sweet jasmine, the bright snap of ginger, a fresh ocean breeze, which, along with the low, comforting throb of the ocean in the distance, gently pulsed around them both.

  As if in an acceptance of the two of them.

  Together.

  With an abrupt, fierce shake of his head, Kai said in a deliberately lighter tone, "Another night, then.”

  Gabi looked at him for another long second before she suddenly whipped up her phone again. "Give me your phone number." Her voice was firm.

  Damn. She was something, all right. He rattled off his digits, watching her long, pretty fingers move as she tapped his number into her phone. She kept going for a moment, then looked back up at him with a quick smile despite her slightly worried eyes. He felt his phone buzzing in his pocket and grinned back at her. "That's you?"

  She nodded. “Yes. Call me, Kai. Tomorrow. I'm on the island for the rest of the week."

  She unknowingly echoed the words of the tipsy blonde barfly from earlier. But this time, they meant a hell of a lot more to him.

  With that, Gabi turned as if to walk away. Then, with the mercurial yet decisive flash that he was beginning to sense was part of her exuberant nature, she suddenly turned back to him, stepped forward, and reached her hands up to pull his face down to hers. Startled, he let it happen. Her lips touched his in a light kiss, quick and gentle. Even so, there was a definite zing. A sweet yet wild connection between them. One that stirred his dragon yet again into thrumming with something aroused.

  Something possessive.

  He knew she felt the connection too, because she jumped. But when she pulled back, she was smiling.

  "Tomorrow." Her eyes were suddenly serious again, but this time it was a seriousness born of desire. Then she turned and walked away, her beautifully sassy hips swaying beneath that skirt, her dark brown hair tumbling loosely over her bare shoulders as she left the bar.

  Kai allowed a slow, pleased smile to slip over his face. He'd do more than call her tomorrow. She didn't know it, but she carried a slight residue of his gold with her. He'd felt it ever since she walked into the bar. She didn't have the gold piece that she picked up from the shipwreck with her, but it was somewhere nearby. When he was this close to his gold, it called to him like a beacon. So attuned to it he was, as well as definitely to her, he knew that if she was either on the island or in the ocean tomorrow, he would be able to find her.

  Much more intrigued than he normally would have been at the thought of seeing a woman in the daylight, after an evening unfortunately not spent tangled in her luscious, beautiful limbs, he caught up the bottle of champagne and headed back inside the bar to drop it off at the party of academics who still unknowingly held all his own secrets in their own hands.

  6

  The gold nugget weighed heavily in Gabi's left hand as she nervously twisted her phone around in her right hand. Stopping short in front of the window on the east end of the room, she looked toward the lightening sky over the California coastline. Normally, she enjoyed the quiet and stillness of early mornings before the bustle of the day began. Considering that she had had about three hours of sleep the night before and that she was about to take another step in the terrible scheme she had agreed to, it was a wonder she was even standing.

  In addition, there was the fact that she'd seen a freaking water dragon swimming under the sea less than twenty-four hours earlier.

  And then there was Kai.

  Images of wickedly sexy brown eyes teased and danced in Gabi's head as she pivoted on one foot and began pacing back the length of her room. She'd spent maybe half an hour with Kai last night, yet she hadn't been able to stop thinking about him, to the point that she'd had trouble getting to sleep.

  Despite I look forward to seeing a lot more of you very soon being all he'd said in a text he'd shot her not ten minutes after she'd left the bar last night, she'd been left hot and bothered as she tossed and turned later in her bed, imagining his sexy mouth doing all sorts of things to her body before she finally
fell asleep.

  Wicked, nefarious, oh so delicious things.

  There was also the other thing. The thing looming in her head even more strongly than sexy, intriguing, strangely compelling Kai. The one thing worrying her stomach so sick that she hadn't been able to continue her evening with him after the very brief yet quite unsettling phone call.

  Shaking her head, turning on her heel to once more pace in the opposite direction, she flipped her phone around her hand and glanced down at the screen again.

  Let's see it. Otherwise the deal is off.

  The message seemed to glare up at her.

  A car door slammed somewhere outside, causing Gabi to jump a little bit. Her nerves were tight.

  The phone call last night from the head of UTEI, the commercial treasure hunting organization, had been chilling. Despite the casual greeting, she'd sensed instantly from the man's voice that he knew. Somehow, he knew that she'd found the ship and thus its treasure. He had asked point-blank where she was in the process. When she'd started to fumble out an answer, caught so off guard by his phone call as well as Kai's unexpected attentions, he made the tsk-ing noise that often caused her blood to run cold the other times they'd talked. Calmly, he'd said, "Ms. Santos. We know you found it. What I need to see is proof that the gold is there. First, a photo of it. Then the coordinates, as we agreed. Or don't you remember our conversation?"

  Gabi had shivered slightly despite the relative warmth of the evening. She'd said that she wasn't near the gold right then but that she would send him a photo of the nugget later that evening. In fact, she'd put off sending them the evidence of the find, even though she could have done so as soon as she'd gotten back to her little living quarters yesterday afternoon. She was half afraid they'd start moving on retrieval before the crew had time to properly document the site. As much as she needed what she would be getting in exchange for revealing the wreck's coordinates to UTEI, she still dreaded the actual steps she needed to take to get to that outcome.

  She dreaded looking at the truth of the fact that she was doing something awful, no matter how critically important her reasons.

  "See that you do. And I suggest you ensure that happens very soon, Ms. Santos," he'd said in that same eerie, calm voice before disconnecting the call. She'd had to take a minute to compose herself before going back to the table and Kai, but it didn't matter. Her potential evening with the sexiest, most interesting guy she'd met in a long while had been shot all to hell.

  She was crazy to ever have taken up with UTEI. But it was too late now. She had no choice but to go through with it. Looking at the sparkling little gold piece in her palm, she carefully closed her fist around it. Removing it from the shipwreck had been necessary. Taking a photo of it with the expedition camera had been out of the question. All photos were logged. Instead, last night she'd texted the treasure hunting outfit a photo of it taken with her phone, adding that she didn't have the exact coordinates for the wreck yet. That would have to wait.

  A day's grace before she took the next step to disturbing the biggest archeological find in a century—and the next step to saving her grandmother's life. Clenching her fist to help steel her resolve, she nodded decisively to herself. No. She didn't have another choice. And she wasn't going to back down just because the guy she talked to was kind of creepy.

  Today, she was going back down to the wreck. Down into the gorgeous, glorious, mysterious ocean. Thinking of that, she deliberately allowed her thoughts to shift from the ugly yet necessary scheme she'd gotten herself into over to the other elephant in the room.

  Or rather, the dragon in the room.

  Casting a quick glance at the time, she turned on her laptop and fired it up. Stepping back across the room to its little kitchenette, she poured herself a mug of coffee before returning to her laptop and curling up on the small easy chair that she'd dragged over to the east-facing windows so she could watch the sunrise each morning. The beautiful pinks and pale oranges banding the horizon weren't quite enough to make her smile as they usually did. Small lines furrowing her brow, she took a sip of the coffee before putting it down and skimming her fingers over the computer keys to find the site she was looking for.

  “Gotcha,” she murmured to herself as she found it just where she'd left it in her bookmarks.

  She'd been in grad school, getting the importance of source citation pounded into her head as a necessary step along the path of legitimate research, when on a lark one day she had searched the global hive mind for local ancient legends. While the Los Angeles area wasn't exactly ancient, it had history that went far beyond the hundred-odd years of Anglo settlement. Along with her best friend Lacey, who'd already decided that she was fascinated by old California history, she'd begun the habit of doing informal research. It was something just for fun between the two of them, in which they would each try to find some of the more obscure or sometimes even ridiculous aspects of local history.

  Including the wild legends and tall tales brought into the general melting pot of the area by the many different cultures that ended up settling here.

  Spurred by her grandmother's unwavering belief in the old ways, the particulars of which she'd never really shared with Lacey, Gabi had found herself drifting toward searching for legends about otherworldly types of things. Things like magic, witches, even silly things like vampires and werewolves. Even people who could shift into animals.

  Such as dragons.

  From the time she was a tiny girl, Gabi's abuela had entertained her with highly detailed stories of dragons that swam in the oceans, bathed in the mountain lakes, flew in the skies overhead, and sunbathed on the heated sands of the deserts that sprawled out past the city. She'd told her that these creatures had fantastical, magical powers that made them invisible to human eyes. Only very special humans could see them on occasion. She'd told her granddaughter that she herself had been one of those special people, a long time ago. But something had happened to end it, and she'd stop seeing dragons. Even so, she'd never forgotten them.

  "There are mysteries no one understands or believes even exist, cariño," her grandmother would tell her while Gabi listened and popped yummy conchitas or some other favorite treat into her mouth, feet dangling from the kitchen chair as she watched her abuela make dinner. "But that doesn't mean they aren't real."

  Abuela had never stopped believing. She never wanted Gabi to stop believing either.

  Gabi's father, who'd also grown up with same stories, always dismissed them. He humored his mother, and didn't mind her clinging to her silly old beliefs, as he sometimes called them. But he didn't really like that Gabi enjoyed those stories.

  That deep in her heart of hearts, trained scientist or no, she believed them.

  "Well, you were right. It's all true, abuela," she whispered to herself as she brought up the site she had found several years ago and started looking for a particular article. "Dragons exist. And I can see dragons, too." The scientist in Gabi was mocking her right now, demanding she go through the appropriate stages of scientific inquiry. To not simply believe in what she'd seen with her eyes. But the little girl in her refused to not believe it. And here, on the web page in front of her, she found the words she'd been looking for.

  Another person's tale of seeing water dragons in the ocean. Of the shimmering blues and greens and whites on hides that matched what Gabi had seen yesterday. A story about a dragon that could turn into a man, or a man who could turn into a dragon. A story about an entire class system of them, along with other creatures, that existed side by side with humans. Blissfully unaware of such things in their world, people rubbed shoulders with dragon shifters, as the article called them, every day and never knew it.

  An entire amazing world that supposedly existed alongside the one Gabi knew to be real and normal. A world filled with such myths like the ones her grandmother had been telling her all her life.

  Staring at the very sensible, not remotely crazy-sounding words of the article, ignoring the painting of
a dragon on the side of the page that clearly had been lifted from some art history book somewhere, Gabi took another thoughtful sip of her rich dark brew. When she first began showing Lacey these things, her best friend had laughed and dismissed cultural legends like those, saying while they were important to the storytelling tradition, obviously they weren't actually real. Gabi had shrugged and not mentioned them again. Her best friend in the world was even more logically minded than she was, having been raised in a fairly no-nonsense family. No, aside from people like whoever was behind this website—which of course none of the WHOIS information would tell her—the only person in the world right now who would believe what she had seen was her grandmother. She would have to wait until she got back to the mainland and she could speak to her abuela herself. Perhaps by then she would have more time for her thoughts to settle, as well as her emotions.

  And by then, she should also be in a much better position to help her grandmother with the biggest battle of her life.

  As she closed her laptop and rose to carry her coffee mug to the sink, Gabi's phone began ringing to the tune of her latest favorite song. Her heart stuttered for a second, caught between concern that it was the UTEI contact again and the silly hope that sexy Kai was on the other end of it. When she looked at the caller ID, however, her heart skipped a beat in genuine fear. She frantically swiped the phone on.

  "Mateo? What's wrong?"

  Her younger brother's voice instantly replied, "Nothing, sis, relax. Sorry.” He sounded genuinely contrite. “I didn't mean to scare you by calling so early. Abuelita's fine.” Mateo sighed. “But hey, mama wants to make sure you'll be here Sunday night for dinner. She's inviting someone she wants you to meet."

  Relief sweeping her body that abuela was okay, Gabi's next feeling was irritation. Her mother, old-fashioned to a fault, was determined to save her daughter's soul by finding her a much more suitable husband than the first jackass Gabi had foolishly hitched herself to when she was 19. She knew it was only because her mother loved her, but it still drove her crazier than anything. Because all the adult Santos children still lived in the greater Los Angeles area, the whole family tried to get together for dinner twice a month. Over the years since Gabi's divorce, her mother had proved herself meddlesome, always inviting the sons, nephews, cousins, grandsons, third cousins fifteen times removed, whatever it took, of her friends from church and work to be there when Gabi was present as well. As long as they were Catholic, single, and seemed relatively sane, she did her best to shove them in her youngest daughter's path.