Naked Dragon

by Annette Blair

  This could mean trouble, Bastian thought.

  “Uh, you wanna move it before my kids see it?” Lizzie asked.

  Bastian picked it up and put it in his pocket. “Shout if you need me for the children. I have good hearing,” he said and headed toward the side of the big house, the side facing the old harbor, around to the addition out back.

  Furniture filled the addition’s front yard, its doors and windows open. There, he found the spirits talking and laughing, some inside, some out, a first-ever family reunion of the centuries.

  He cut through the crowd, accepting congratulations, though not sure why, and found McKenna cleaning house while talking to her mother and grandmother, her dad to the side, supervising every move.

  Bastian saw their relationships more clearly now. Men who married into this clan took the lead in such an unremarkable way, their women didn’t realize they were doing it.

  “Bastian, you’re up!” McKenna said. “Telephone Steve and Lizzie at home and ask them to come over today, will you? I want to show them their new home.”

  “I don’t need a telephone. They’re sitting out by the lake waiting for you to get home from running errands. I’ll get them.”

  “Thank you.”

  Bastian stopped McKenna’s father outside. “Sir, can you teach me that French lullaby McKenna loves, in the event that I have babies to rock and sing to sleep someday?”

  McKenna’s father, eternally young, looked over at his daughter with love in his expression. He cleared his throat. “I’d be honored.”

  Bastian made his way back to the lake, remembering what Lizzie said about Steve not being able to go in the water. He could fix that.

  A few minutes later, Bastian pushed Steve’s chair toward the back of the house, the children hitching rides, while Jock and Dewcup entertained them.

  A good, uplifting sound, a child’s giggle.

  “What’s this?” Steve asked as they rounded the corner facing the addition, but he wasn’t talking about the milling spirits because he couldn’t see them.

  “Oooh,” Lizzie said, “it’s the haunted, forbidden addition. Never opened . . . until today. McKenna? Are you in there?” Lizzie questioned him with a look. “She can’t be in there.”

  “Can’t she?”

  McKenna popped into the doorway, beaming, dress dusty, nose smudged. She never looked more beautiful. “Okay, don’t freak,” she told her friends, “but Bastian found a volume of the family history I never saw, and guess what? This place isn’t haunted. Everyone has misunderstood for years but we never knew. So, anyway, I wanted to say, welcome home.”

  “What?” Lizzie placed a hand on her baby belly, soothing her little ones, telling them, and herself, that everything would be fine.

  “McKenna,” Steve said. “I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t have to move here if you don’t want to,” McKenna explained. “The house only has one bathroom, and that’s old, but we can update. Three bedrooms upstairs and one down, a good-sized living area, and it’s yours. The family record says it’s sixteen hundred square feet. Think you can live in a house this size?”

  “We’re crying about losing twelve hundred,” Lizzie said, a bit like a sleepwalker.

  McKenna shooed her invisible relatives aside. What must that look like to Steve and Lizzie? “Come in and look around.”

  “Mama, who are all these people?” Whitney asked, but Lizzie didn’t hear her.

  McKenna whipped around to him. “You let the kids go in the water?”

  He pulled her aside. “They’re kids. They’ll forget. Children see spirits easily, but they’ll learn to stop because it’s not accepted, or the magick from the water will wear off, whichever comes first.”

  “At least you weren’t in the water with them.”

  “My feet were, but I was asleep. I didn’t know Lizzie had let them go in.”

  “Great.”

  Bastian lifted Steve’s chair up the steps to set him down in the forties living room. “You can tell me what to do to fix it up for you,” Bastian said.

  “McKenna,” Steve said. “While this is enormously generous, weren’t you planning to sleep in your basement after you opened the B and B? I should think you’d want these rooms for yourself or for paying customers. We can’t mooch.”

  “You’re the contractor who gave me a rock-bottom price to renovate my house, because I might lose it. You were saving me. Keeping a roof over my head. I don’t know how that’s gonna work out, but as long as I have a roof, you do, too. I won’t accept no for an answer. While you’re getting better, you’ll continue telling Bastian how to fix the place. He’s already finished the roof, painted six bedrooms, helped me spackle the rest, and painted the inside trim.”

  “He’s fast,” Steve said.

  McKenna raised a brow his way. “You don’t know the half of it.”

  “What do you want me to do here, Boss?” Bastian asked Steve.

  “No,” Lizzie said. “Stop trying to change the subject. We can’t accept the house.”

  McKenna looked around. “It’s old, I know.”

  “It’s bright and has a water view. Age is not the issue. Self-reliance is. The house’s age only makes it homey and charming. But, McKenna, Steve and I, we pay our own way. We’ll find a place we can afford. That’s the end of it. We won’t take charity, not even from you.”

  “Become an employee of the Dragon’s Lair, then.”

  Lizzie placed a hand on her back, belly forward. “I’m listening.”

  FORTY-ONE

  “I’d like to hire you as the Dragon’s Lair’s cook, Lizzie. I’ve thought this through. Get Steve’s mother to come mornings for the kids while you make breakfast and lunch for my guests. You said she likes to get up and out of the house every day.”

  “Mom does,” Steve said.

  “I plan to offer dinner at a separate charge to my guests. You can cook that, too, after the kids are in bed. Heck, LizBeth, you went to cooking school; you might as well make the Dragon’s Lair famous for its chef as well as for its enchanting bedrooms.”

  Steve slammed the arms of his chair. “Damn it, I want to carry my own weight. I hate the thought of Lizzie working when I can’t.”

  “You’ll be our full-time consultant. Bastian will be your arms and legs.”

  “You’re going to get better, Steve,” Lizzie said, but Bastian didn’t think Steve believed it, or he knew better and hadn’t shared the news with his wife yet.

  “Steve, let’s go for a walk,” Bastian said, “while McKenna and Lizzie talk. Without getting an answer, he picked up Steve’s chair and put it back outside. “Lizzie,” Bastian called back, “it’s settled. I will pack and move everything. Take a look around the inside. I will paint the children’s rooms however they want.”

  Whitney and Wyatt cheered as he took Steve outside and back to the lake. Bastian sat on the bench to face Steve. “First, let me clear up a mistake. I am not gay.”

  Steve cupped the back of his neck. “I wouldn’t want to disappoint you, so I’m glad to hear it.”

  Bastian raised his hands and held them palms up for Steve to see. “In these hands, I have a gift for healing. Wyatt told me how much you hurt so I placed my hands on your knees to help heal them, and later, with Whitney’s help, I tried to ease your headache.”

  “You did?” Steve sat forward. “You did.”

  “I would like to think so. Now you come clean with me. How much better do the doctors say you are going to get?”

  “They say that if I don’t have a series of surgeries, I might be in this chair for some time, if not for the rest of my life. With no health insurance, the surgeries are out for now, but I didn’t want Lizzie to know until after she has the babies. I’m not paralyzed, but I am in pain.”

  “Do you believe that I have healing skills?”

  “Bastian, no one can change the truth of what the doctors have told me. And pardon me for being crude, but I hurt in places where I don’t want
your hands.”

  “Want to go for a swim?”

  “Do I look like I can swim?”

  “I can carry your chair into the water.”

  “What’s the point?”

  “Mine is a whole-body healing power that is carried through water like . . . electricity.” He would settle for a half-truth for obvious reasons. “Some might call it magick.”

  Steve shook his head. “So if I’m in the water with you, I might heal? Do you really believe this crap?”

  “You can do it without believing, for your family. Let me take you into the water for a little while every day and see what happens. I will tell Lizzie it is therapy, which it is, in its own way.”

  “So you’ll exercise my legs in the water, like my therapist used to do when I had health insurance?”

  “Yes, and I will hold you in your chair in deeper water.”

  “This isn’t so bad,” Steve said, as water covered him. “It’ll keep me cool, anyway.”

  “It will warm up from my body heat. Sorry, it can’t be helped. Tell me,” Bastian said, swishing Steve’s chair through the water. “How many roofs have you shingled?”

  “A hundred, maybe.”

  “How many have you fallen from?”

  “None, but the second I stepped on the last one, I went flying.”

  “Where can I find this house with the slippery roof?”

  Bastian didn’t know how long they’d been talking in the water when Lizzie came out to the kitchen porch, hands on her big belly. “Spaghetti and meatballs?”

  “Let’s go,” Steve said. “Whitney, Wyatt, dinner,” he called to the children beneath the tree. “Your favorite.”

  “Yay,” they shouted, running toward the house, Dewcup, Jock, and Jaunty behind them, Jaunty wearing a dress, and flowers in her tissue-box hat.

  Steve questioned Bastian with a look. “Whitney must have had a tea party, but her stuffed animals don’t usually fly around under their own power like that.”

  “I can explain,” Bastian said as they left the water. “Later. What are we eating?”

  “The nectar of the Italian gods.”

  “I am familiar with Italy, Rome especially, and the Roman gods, but I have never heard of spaghetti and meatballs.”

  FORTY-TWO

  McKenna set the table for their celebratory dinner while the men dried off and changed clothes. It had taken Lizzie half the afternoon to stop being stubborn and accept Caleb and Esther’s house and the job as the Dragon’s Lair cook.

  When McKenna’s phone rang, she answered in the way she’d been doing since she went live with her website. “The Dragon’s Lair. Innkeeper speaking.”

  This time, finally, pay dirt. “Yes, we have rooms available for Halloween week. How many?” She did some quick math. “As a matter of fact, we’ve had a cancellation, and we can accommodate a party that size. A week, yes.” She made a crazy happy face at Lizzie, settled the price and the down payment, one night in advance per room, something else Steve set up on her website for her.

  When she got off the phone, she screamed and screamed, Lizzie smacking her with a dish towel. “What? What?” Lizzie snapped. “Tell me.”

  By then Bastian and Steve had returned to the kitchen.

  “I booked a family reunion! Lizzie and Steve, I hate to be a pesky neighbor so soon, but can we sleep at your house out back starting on October twenty-sixth? There’ll be no rooms for us here. Ack!”

  The kids jumped up and down with her. Lizzie applauded. Steve’s eyes looked suspiciously bright, and McKenna would remember Bastian’s grin forever.

  As everyone served themselves salad, they made a time-table to finish work on the house, including scraping and painting outside. “Bastian, you have to paint the third-floor bedrooms sooner rather than later,” she said. “We’ll need them for our full house. Steve, do you think the elevator you put in when Gran was sick is up to code?”

  “It was then, but I’ll check for recent code changes.”

  “Third-floor bathrooms. You boys up to doing some plumbing?”

  Their excitement carried them to the main course.

  McKenna challenged Bastian to a spaghetti fork-swirling contest, but he accidentally shot spaghetti across the room and it stuck to the wallpaper.

  A giggling Whitney bet Bastian two meatballs that he couldn’t slurp spaghetti as fast as she could.

  Sauce splashed him, and his eyes blinked against it, but he kept going, despite the laughter. He lost. “No fair. I had a never-ending noodle!”

  McKenna dabbed at his face with a napkin. A man. She had a man in her life. And paying guests. And she’d spent time with her mother and father, and Gran, again. Her heart was so full, she was afraid it couldn’t be true. “A toast,” she said, raising her milk glass. “To family.”

  Lizzie nodded. “Family to come home to, the Dragon’s Lair, and plenty of guests.”

  “Family,” Bastian said, clicking her glass, his gaze stealing her breath.

  The prospect of running the B and B suddenly seemed less frightening with a family to share the tasks. Having Lizzie, Steve, and the kids around would also help ease the tension between her and Bastian.

  Maybe they needed a time-out. Last night in the water had been something wild.

  “McKenna?” Lizzie said, trying to tug the empty plate from her hand. “Where did you go?”

  “Oh, sorry. Overwhelmed, I think.”

  Lizzie winked. “If Bastian watched me the way he watches you, I’d be overwhelmed, too. Go for a walk. Steve will help me with the dishes.”

  “Where’s Bastian?”

  “He took Whitney and Wyatt to bring Toffee an apple.”

  McKenna walked in the opposite direction from the barn and into the woods for a bit of time to think. She’d awakened before Bastian this morning, glad she wouldn’t have to face him before she went looking for her family.

  He had become so much handier than a handyman, a magnificent hunk of sex and sensuality who cured her loneliness.

  She was already too attached. Could she chance lowering her walls and getting hurt again? Even a sturdy farm girl like her could reach the breaking point. It would hurt more when this man left.

  With Bastian, everything seemed grander, yet more fragile, more brazen, more sensitive, sensational, the whole man/woman thing exaggerated. More physical.

  More anticipation. She had a habit of glancing at his package, imagining it through one of those mirrors in which things seemed larger than they appeared. Or was that closer than they appeared?

  Either way, yikes, and bring it on. The titillating threat spoke with a come-hither voice, husky and hopeful. Oh, the promise in that dragon voice.

  He said he wouldn’t hurt her, but he most assuredly would, him being so beastly, and so “lay me on the table and take me now” gorgeous.

  As if her angst called him to her, Bastian fell into place beside her, keeping pace, respecting her silence, stroking her arm with a finger, admiring a flower here and there.

  She could almost hear her heart pick up speed. Without warning, he took her hand, clasped their fingers together, and continued beside her in silence.

  “I’ll phone you in the morning,” Lizzie called from beside her van, Steve and the kids inside.

  McKenna waved. “Have a good night. Thanks!”

  “Congratulations!” the four Framinghams shouted as they drove away.

  McKenna turned to Bastian. “Paying guests!”

  He caught her up and twirled her. When he stopped, he kept his arms around her. “Ready to investigate Steve’s accident?”

  “How?”

  “I have the address and the owner’s name, but Steve said nobody ever sees the owner. Apparently she’s a shut-in.”

  “Playing sleuth makes me nervous,” McKenna admitted.

  “You do not have to come, Kenna.”

  Oh, she wanted to come, all right. “Can you read my thoughts or emotions?”

  “Not yours. I never came across
a set of emotions so tightly guarded as yours. I read every dragon on the island, Vivica, Lizzie, Steve, but not you.”

  “Thank the stars.”

  “McKenna, I think we both want a closer physical connection,” he said baldly, and rather accurately for someone who couldn’t read her, “but right now we need to think about getting Steve his insurance money.”

  They were thinking along the same lines. “Right, let’s go jump a roof.” Holy mother of pearl, even that sounded sexy.

  “Afterward, maybe I can jump you?”

  Oy vey Maria. Yes.

  They held hands as Bastian continued through the woods.

  “Why don’t we take my truck?” she asked, pulling him up short.

  “We can approach the house more quietly if we’re walking. It is not far.”

  “Says the directionally challenged dragon boy.”

  He faked a smile, though his eyes crinkled at the corners. “You take the address, then.”

  Given Bastian’s stride, McKenna had to hurry at first, until he slowed so she could keep up. Did this make her like the women who followed him? Probably. “No, don’t turn here,” she said. “Keep going straight.”

  He looked back at her and scooped her into his arms. “Tell me when you catch your breath,” he said, without breaking a sweat, which couldn’t be said for her, hot and getting horny with her bottom now bouncing off his remarkable package.

  “You are a distraction, McKenna Greylock.”

  “Glad to hear it, but I am also the map in your head. Turn right.”

  “Thank you.”

  “If you didn’t stick your dragon lance out there, my hips wouldn’t keep bouncing off it.”

  “If your hips weren’t bouncing off it, my lance would not be sticking out half so far. I like it. I wish we were headed for a bed of any kind.”

  “How many kinds are there?”

  “A bed of flowers, sweetgrass, clover, a cozy cave, moss in a forest, or a bouncy human-type bed.”

  She had never imagined making love in all those places, and now this man—from whom she should run—made her want to experience all of it with him.