Cai needed to shut up. Blathering on about the capacity of ballrooms wasn’t flirting.
Yet, he continued, “We can accommodate almost any desired color scheme.”
“Really?” Ember ran her finger down his arm. “Any color scheme?”
Cai nearly jumped out of his skin at the electricity of her touch, and he wanted to spin and shove her up against a wall to kiss her. Instead, he said, “Just about anything. We have a lot of napkins and tablecloths, plus extras for layering.”
“Napkins, you say? That sounds fascinating.”
When he glanced down at her, the snap of humor in her dark eyes confirmed that she was teasing him for saying so many stupid things.
Yeah, well, she was making him feel stupid. Ever since he’d seen her in the HR office, his entire brain had felt like he’d shorted out an important circuit. Common sense, maybe. Or self-control.
“It’s important to have options,” he said.
“Yes, it is.” She ran one fingernail, painted a fetching shade of maroon, down his suit jacket. “It’s so important to consider all your options.”
He turned toward her. “Yes, it is.”
“I like to consider all the different ways that I could do something before I do it.”
His knees nearly buckled again as all the different permutations of their two bodies crashed into his mind. “Do you?”
“Oh, yes.”
She ran one finger down the lapel of his suit jacket, almost to his waist, and he did not draw a breath until her fingertip stopped scratching the fabric of his suit and shivering against his skin underneath.
Then, he sucked oxygen because he’d nearly passed out.
“Yes,” she said. “I do.”
Cai needed to sit down. He was going to faint. Fainting was rarely considered good flirting.
He walked a few feet around the table they were standing near, pulled a chair away from the table, and flopped into it.
She cocked her head, her dark hair falling around her shoulders, and he wanted to run his hands through that gorgeous fall of her hair.
Also, he needed to stop thinking about the word cock because his was twitching in his pants.
Cai leaned back in his chair, his long legs stretched out in front of him. He pushed his foot under the tablecloth, making his polished loafer disappear under the white linen and creating an efficient barricade across narrow space between the tables.
He gestured toward a bunch of shelves that held many napkins of different colors. “There are samples of the various linen colors in that shelving unit over against the wall. You could walk over there and take a look at them, if you’re really interested.”
To get past him, she’d have to step over his legs, straddling his hips, which was the entire point of him sprawling out in the aisle like that.
If Cai were trying to get fired for sexual harassment, he wasn’t doing a very good job of it. The shortest path to the shelving unit led the other way around the table, away from him. He was blocking an aisle that led the long way, which would add a good ten feet of walking distance if she tried to go that way.
Ember glanced at Cai out of the corners of her eyes, a sultry glance that made his blood race through his body, and she looked over to where the shelves held the napkins.
Cai said, “We won’t be using the ballroom for a month, not until the gala opening. But if you want to see them, they’re right over there.”
“Aren’t you coming?”
“I’m comfortable here.” He stretched his legs a little farther to emphasize his point.
Ember said, “I think I’ll take a look at the napkins, just to see what colors they have.” She slung her purse on the table where it thumped, and she began walking directly toward Cai.
Oh, so the little witch wanted to play, did she?
Cai watched her approach, his head dropping back as she stood over him.
He hadn’t expected this. He’d completely expected her to take the short route over to the napkins or else to declare that she didn’t really care.
And now, somehow, Cai and this gorgeous, leggy woman were playing a game of sexual harassment chicken.
Ember stared straight into Cai’s eyes like she was daring him to leave his legs where they were.
Cai could take a dare.
Cai always took the dare.
He retracted his left leg, digging his heel into the carpeting and making an even higher barrier for her to climb over, if she dared. He wove his fingers behind his head, elbows out. “The napkins are right over there.”
Ember didn’t look away from his eyes. “Yeah, I’d like to see them.”
That fantastic, cocky woman bent her knee and lifted her leg, swinging her thigh over his legs like she was mounting a horse.
Cai had a hard time keeping his eyes directly on her gorgeous, dark, fathomless eyes because he knew that her skirt must be riding up her legs. He would dearly love to see more of those long, curvy legs that seemed to go on forever.
But he watched her eyes, and she didn’t look away either.
Cai unlaced his fingers from behind his head and grabbed arms of the dining room chair he was sitting in to hold on for dear life.
Her thighs slid over his hips, rustling the fabric over his naughty bits and sending all kinds of delicious impulses from the many nerve endings in his dick and balls to the rest of his body.
Ember leaned toward him as she shifted her weight, her lips hovering perhaps an inch from his, and a puff of mint and fresh air caressed his lips.
Cai clenched his fingers around the wooden chair arms, resisting the imperative to run his fingers up her bare thighs and under her skirt.
He wondered if, perhaps, she might not be wearing panties.
A crack zipped through the air, and the chair arms splintered in Cai’s fingers.
Just like that, Ember lifted her other foot over his legs, and his ordeal was over.
His wonderful, wonderful ordeal.
If Ember wanted to play, Cai could find all sorts of opportunities for her to play with him. He was an expert at this kind of game.
She walked over to the case—swinging her luscious hips as she walked, the hem of her skirt fluttering above her knees—and perused the many colors of napkins, all the color options for weddings or handfastings or bar mitzvahs, while Cai brushed wooden shards of splintered wood from his fingertips and pant legs. Oops.
He swallowed hard, trying to think of something to say. “Are there enough napkins for you?”
Oh, wow. That was particularly stupid.
He said, “I mean, there are a lot of napkins—”
She refolded the blue napkin she was playing with and tucked it back on a shelf. “Why, yes. There are enough napkins for me.”
And then she strolled back toward him.
Good Lord, was she going to give him another abbreviated lap dance?
Because if she was, he was going to sit there and let her.
She approached.
He tried not to leer at her. He may have failed, but he tried to keep his grin as non-creepy as possible.
When she stood next to him, she squinted at the arm of the chair where he’d crushed it a little. “Was it like that before?”
He shrugged. “That sort of thing happens sometimes.”
Ember twiddled her fingers over the damaged chair arm.
Wooden splinters rose from the floor and the seat of the chair. One even tugged itself free from Cai’s pant leg.
They coalesced around the arms of the chair, and with a healthy zap, the chair was as good as new. The varnish shined in the overhead chandelier light.
He grinned, surprised. “Hey, thanks! I promise I’ll go easier on the furniture in the future.”
She smiled at him and said, “Oh, I think you can be as rough as you want.”
Had he heard that right?
Cai slowly looked up at her and raised one eyebrow.
The beautiful, little witch was gazing down at him whe
re he sat with a perfectly innocent smile. He might have believed her comment meant nothing, except for the mischievous sparkle in her dark eyes.
Cai said, “I’ll keep that in mind.”
She just kept smiling at him, her dark eyes never wavering from his.
This sort of flirting was entirely inappropriate for the workplace. If Math or Arawn had been there instead of Cai, either one of them would have found someone else to work with Ember or reprimanded her for behaving in such an unprofessional manner.
That thought didn’t even occur to Cai.
Cai was an event promoter in the entertainment business, and as such, he dealt with musicians and the hangers-on around them every day. Musicians, themselves, were often carrying a load of emotional baggage that explained their unquenchable need for arenas full of people to love them every night. Most of them needed affirmation for everything about themselves—the attractiveness of their faces, bodies, eyes, and souls—and they flirted with Cai or anyone else who would pay attention to them to fill that desperate need.
Ember’s flirting felt different, however.
It seemed playful, yet earnest, and less like it was from a place of damage.
He liked everything about it.
And her.
Yeah, he liked everything about her.
Ember caught her lower lip in her white teeth, and Cai managed to stop himself from groaning just in time.
She said, “Should we go look at those big, slithery sea serpents?”
He was not allowed to say something horny back to her, he reminded himself. While they were in public, she was the player, and he was the plaything.
When the bedroom door closed, that would all change, of course.
Cai said, “They’re in the fountain out front. Right this way?”
The Serpents’ Stench
EMBER sashayed out the front doors of the casino and out into the hot, Las Vegas sun, her enormous purse filled with glass and metal vials swinging from her shoulder. Her bag dragged her shoulder down, but she was used to it.
Cai strolled beside her, seemingly unperturbed, as they crossed the wide, cement courtyard toward the silent pool with its supposed sea serpents. “Carry that?”
“No thanks.” Her elementals liked being close to her. Irritating them could be dangerous.
The bright desert sunlight touched Cai’s strong cheekbones and square jaw with glints of silver. His dark-green eyes caught the sun like gems. She thought she’d never met a dragon shifter before, because if she had, she certainly would have remembered the dark green diamond glitter in Cai’s eyes that flowed inward and sparkled in the sunlight. It was like emerald fire completely filled his irises.
His dark hair had gotten ruffled, maybe when she was dang-near giving him a lap dance and he had been staring into her eyes like she fascinated him. Watching his amazing eyes had entranced her, and she’d had to shake it off a little while she’d been staring at the napkins without really seeing them.
Maybe dragons could hypnotize their prey like cobras were rumored to be able to do.
That would certainly explain why sensible Bethany and wallflower Willow had married dragons practically right after meeting them.
Yeah, those dragon shifter guys had probably hypnotized Bethany and Willow into marrying them.
Well, Ember was forewarned, and forewarned is forearmed. Cai Wyvern wasn’t going to hypnotize her into marrying him.
Because she wasn’t interested in marrying him.
Even if his eyes were absolutely beautiful and when he looked at her, her legs wobbled.
She walked on, determined to get this job and prove she could do it, as she wasn’t quite sure whether or not she had been hired.
Beyond the switched-off fountain, a low construction barrier separated them from the crowd of people thronging the sidewalk as they made their way from casino to casino along the Strip. A few turned to glance at Ember and Cai, but most people hurried past, eager to reach another casino so they could lose their money sooner than if they had dawdled. The other casinos jangled with bells and the clink of tinkling slot machines as they vied for the marks’ cash. Even in the noontime sunlight, lights flashed on the other casinos, catching Ember’s eye as she ambled toward the fountain’s basin as if she actually belonged in a chaotic, worldly place such as Las Vegas.
Ember still didn’t feel comfortable in a dragon’s den of iniquity such as a casino or anywhere in Las Vegas. The whole place was brimming with dark magic, from the air elementals that had been forced into servitude and were pretending to be dust devils atop the King Solomon’s Mines Casino down the street to the charm spells that emanated from the sliding glass doors of every casino in the city. She didn’t even like to look at all that, especially the bound air elementals. They made her want to climb up there, ask them if they wanted to be there, and offer them a nice bottle to live in.
If Ember’s mother had seen the black magic and filth of this place, she would have first had a screaming panic attack and then dragged Ember home by her hair. There was no white magic at all in this vice-ridden city, let alone the “clear” magic Ember’s mother insisted on. Her mother had composed long lectures and diatribes that Ember had heard every day of her life, and even now over the phone every morning, about the temptations of shadowy magic that would rebound bad karma to plague Ember and damn her soul to the Dark Place for all eternity.
Ember shook her head as she walked, trying to shake loose the earworm of her mother’s voice describing the horrific effects of negative karmic rebound. She didn’t need to think about that. She wasn’t doing anything wrong.
Even if her mother thought she was.
When they reached the sea serpent-infested fountain, Ember settled her hands on the warm stone wall surrounding it and leaned over. “I don’t see any serpents.”
“Apparitional sea serpents,” a warm, male voice whispered near her ear.
Very near her ear.
When she turned, he was standing right beside her, also leaning over the pool. He was so close that he could have rested his chin on her shoulder. If she’d leaned toward him, she could have kissed him. Instead, she watched the molten emeralds sparkle in his amazing eyes. The sunlight made them even more startling, with the green fire flowing in his irises.
But he was right there.
Huh, she had begun to think that Cai Wyvern wasn’t interested in her at all.
She smiled at him. “Apparitional sea serpents, then.”
When Ember had crawled over Cai on her way to the napkin display, she had inhaled his cologne and his masculine scent drifting from the open collar of the white shirt he was wearing under his suit jacket. She’d barely been able to refrain from burying her face in his neck to get a better whiff of the subtle, rich scent. Every cell in her body had strained toward him, trying to breathe it in.
But then, standing in the warm sunshine by the serpent fountain, she could barely smell it because something else hung in the air.
Ember made a show of sniffing the air above the fountain. “What’s that weird smell?”
Cai said, “A friend of mine said that before he arrived, the interim staff had allowed algae to grow in the fountain to the point where he thought they were going to have to mow the pool. It might still have a whiff of that odor.” He sniffed. “It does seem a bit musty.”
Ember’s nose tingled inside. She leaned over the black water farther, sniffing. “It doesn’t smell like algae. It smells kind of like methane or something. And oil or something is floating on the surface.”
Cai had his phone out and was frowning at the screen. “Yeah, Arawn said something about the oil acted as a lid for something, but I don’t know why you’d want to put a lid on a fountain, anyway. That’s kind of not the point of a fountain.”
Ember leaned over the low retaining wall, peering at the iridescent colors floating on the surface of the pond.
A shimmer of magic—not dark magic but not clear magic either—drifted across the surfa
ce.
The weak waver didn’t quite look like a protection spell. The glimmer floating above the water almost looked like binding spell, one that was probably tied to a potion.
Willow was a potion witch. This spell must be hers.
But why would Willow float a protection-based binding spell on the surface of the fountain? That couldn’t be healthy for the sea serpents. Neither lizards nor amphibians would like it, and they would probably stay under the surface unless they absolutely had to breach it to breathe or feed.
The poor things.
Ember unzipped her purse—a long, ripping sound that seemed to go on for five seconds—and rummaged around inside: frosted-glass vial of an air elemental, black-metal bottle for an earthen one, bright pink wallet, a thick glass bottle for a fire guy, a couple of slightly crushed tampons with the wrappers beginning to rip, until she found what she was looking for.
In her palm, the crystal decanter sparkled in the sun.
Cai leaned over. “What’s that?”
Ember said, “I’m an elemental witch. It’s kind of like being an elemental whisperer, like a horse whisperer. I can commune with the spirits of the air, earth, fire, and water, plus some rare sub-species, and work with them. I’m just going to have this little guy take a lap around the pool and tell me what’s going on under the surface.”
She removed the stopper from the bottle and poured the water elemental into the pond.
The stream of water skipped over the surface, bouncing off the top of the potion-spell, and finally torqued itself into a little waterspout to drill through it.
The water elemental plunged into the water and zipped through it.
Ember could hear its shrill squeal as it leaped right back out of the water, made a beeline for its bottle, and dove inside. “Jumpy? You okay?”
The bottle shivered in her hand, and a splash of nasty-smelling water slopped out and over her knuckles. “Ew, Jumpy. What is it?”
A squeak from the bottle transformed in her ear and became words in a raspy, little voice, Nasty. Don’t like.
Ember tapped the plug back into the vial and looked up.
Dragons and Fire Page 4