by Zoe Chant
"Nonsense, you look amazing. You'll turn heads everywhere we go." He could already picture the look on every face when he entered the room with her on his arm. No one else could boast of a mate so glorious. He would be the envy of every dragon alive, and he would make sure that Loretta knew how cherished she was. No woman would have ever been lavished with such wealth.
The attendant came back with a pair of glittering gold shoes that matched the dress, along with some hair ornaments and strings of small, shiny beads. It was all very pale and tawdry compared to the splendor in which he would dress her, when he had the chance. If only he'd thought to have Maddox bring a tiny fraction of his hoard in the limo ... but it was necessary to make do, and so he and the attendant adorned her hair with the beads, until small gold and silver stars winked in the lush red curls.
"Do I look ridiculous?" Loretta asked in a small voice, turning her head as she tried to see her own hair.
"No star could shine more brilliantly than you," Darius said. He handed his credit card to the attendant. "You have done very well. We shall pay for these and she will walk out of the store wearing them."
The attendant gave up on objecting, and wordlessly took the card.
***
Maddox was leaning against the limo, reading a newspaper. He scrambled to open the door when they came out of the store, Loretta clinging to a handful of skirt as if she was afraid of stepping on it.
"You look real gorgeous, miss."
"Thank you, Maddox," Loretta said, mustering a smile for him.
She seemed pensive on the drive to Harrington's. Darius couldn't think why. They had begun the process of replacing her shoddy things with beautiful, expensive things, as befitted a dragon lord's mate. Surely she couldn't want to go back and live in the squalor he'd seen.
Thoughts of the run-down apartment building squirmed inside him. It was shameful that it had been allowed to fall into such a condition. How many other properties in his portfolio had been reduced to a similar condition? He would be firing the property management company at his earliest convenience and inspecting the other buildings he owned. His professional pride was on the line.
Perhaps, in a way, Rodan Sharpe had done him a favor.
Of course, he'd also nearly killed Darius's mate. For that he would, naturally, need to die.
Maybe Darius would thank him first, before tearing him apart with his claws ...
"Penny for your thoughts," Loretta said.
"Oh, just thinking of business matters." He turned to look at her. The beads glistened in her hair, and afternoon sunlight through the limo's smoked window caught glints of fire from her curls.
The urge to touch her, so ruthlessly in the department store, rose up in him again, and this time he reached out to run the backs of his fingers across her jaw. She leaned forward, drawn by his touch, and her lips met his, opening to admit him to the heat of her mouth.
There was a soft, electronic hum that made Loretta flinch. "Don't worry," Darius murmured against her mouth. "Maddox raised the privacy shield."
"You have a ..." She glanced up at the smoked glass partition now separating the rear of the limo from the front. "Darius, this is just too much. I feel like I'm in a movie. None of this feels real."
"You deserve all of this and more," he promised, and leaned in to kiss her again, sampling her lips with his.
She gasped against his mouth, and Darius trailed kisses down her neck to the bare shoulder he'd yearned so deeply to touch. Her skin was just as soft as it looked, and tasted as good as it smelled ...
The limo stopped. "I think we're there," Loretta said breathily, her fingers tangled in his hair.
Darius forced himself to draw back, getting himself under control. Loretta's eyes were dark with arousal, her hair tousled. "Should you wish to go somewhere else, my love, you need only ask."
"I ... oh ... no, don't tempt me ..." She took a deep breath and started patting her hair down, trying to fix the beadwork. "I really am hungry. I need to get something in me other than sugar. A burger or something sounds great."
"How about a steak of the finest marbled beef, seared to rare perfection?"
"Er ... that would work too, I guess."
She left the limo on his arm, but glanced behind them. "What's Maddox going to do while we're inside?"
"He'll wait," Darius said.
"But what if he's hungry too? Maddox?" she called. "Would you like us to bring you a takeout box?"
Maddox paused in the act of closing the door, looking briefly baffled. "What?"
"Just tell us what you want from the restaurant and we'll have them box it up to go, okay?"
"That's not how it's supposed to work," Darius muttered, embarrassed, as he subtly tried to tug her with him. She planted her feet and stood her ground.
"Boss?" Maddox said, somewhat helplessly.
"Oh, fine, whatever, give her your order, if it makes her happy and stops her causing a scene."
"It's not a scene, it's called being a decent human being. Maddox?"
"Oh, I don't know, a steak or something, I'm not picky." He was blushing up to his crew cut.
As they went inside, Darius murmured, "That is not how it's supposed to work. I don't starve the man. He's paid—very well, I might add—to wait with the car—"
"He's a human being, Darius," she whispered back. "Or ... whatever he is. But the point is, he's a person. It doesn't seem fair to expect him to wait around like a dog left in a kennel while we eat in a nice restaurant and he's outside."
"That's what he's paid for! —Reservation for Keegan," he said to the maître d', switching from an exasperated whisper to smooth tones of command.
"Yes, but that's the problem, isn't it?" Loretta whispered as they crossed the floor through a restaurant that was nearly empty at this early hour, the tables stark in their white cloths. "People don't exist for your convenience, even when you pay them to pretend to. Is Maddox dating anyone? What does he do for fun?"
"Are we really going to spend our entire dinner talking about my employees?" Darius whispered back, exasperated. He reached for her chair, but Loretta dived in, caught the chair back, and pulled it out for herself.
"You don't know, do you?" she whispered back, plumping herself down in the chair and hitching it in with her legs, which caused the entire table to rock.
The maître d' had assumed an incredibly bland expression. "Your waiter will be with you in a moment, sir, ma'am," he said, and fled.
"You are causing a scene," Darius murmured. He took his own seat and reached out to straighten the rose in a bud vase that had nearly tipped over. At least the table didn't have a candle on it; she might have set fire to the tablecloth.
Loretta flushed and looked down at her hands in her lap. "I'm not tryin' to," she murmured. "I just want you to maybe stop and think about somebody else for a change."
Darius huffed at the sheer unfairness of this accusation. "I just bought you a dress fit for a queen, and took you to the best restaurant in town. What is that if not considerate?"
Loretta leaned forward across the table, making it difficult for Darius to concentrate on her words when there was an entire luscious expanse of cleavage thus revealed. "Throwing money at people isn't the same thing as being considerate. You didn't even ask if I wanted to come here!"
"I most certainly did ask. I asked if you wanted to go somewhere else, and you said no."
"After you'd already made the reservations! I couldn't just mess up your plans by canceling—Oh, gosh, thank you," she said, shifting with a visible effort to smile at the waiter as he placed their menus in front of them.
Darius sat back in his chair and waited impatiently while the waiter poured ice water into two wine glasses and blithered about specials. He was thinking. Specifically, he was having a tiny nagging thought that she might have a point.
But he'd asked if she wanted to go somewhere else and she'd said no!
"It would have been no trouble," he said more calmly when the wai
ter had left. Loretta was looking down at her water glass, toying with the stem. "I know I can ... how shall I put this ... come on a little strong sometimes ..."
Loretta choked on her water.
"... but you can always say no."
"But ..." Loretta began. "If we cancelled last minute, wouldn't they charge you a fee or something?"
Darius merely stared at her uncomprehendingly. "So what if they do?"
She frowned at him. "Okay, maybe money means nothing to you, I keep forgetting that, but they probably had to boot someone to find us a table, so we'd already inconvenienced somebody. It just makes it worse if we don't even take the reservation. And then the restaurant has an empty table—"
"I'm sure they'd fill it promptly from their waiting list, if that's what you're worried about—"
"What about the person whose table we're sitting at? What if they were looking forward to this dinner all week, and then they got a call from the restaurant and found out that they're going to have to have their special anniversary dinner or birthday dinner next week?"
"I'm sure," Darius said dryly, "that they will cope with the disappointment." When she still looked distressed, he decided to offer a compromise, even though he still suspected she was manufacturing objections just to try to make him feel guilty. "If it bothers you so much, I can obtain their name from the restaurant and pay for their meal. Or a nice night out anywhere else in town. Will that do?"
Loretta rubbed her forehead as if she was getting a headache.
"Darius, listen. You can't just tromp through life knocking people out of your way and then shoving fistfuls of money at them to make up for it, if you even notice that you did it at all."
"It's worked well for me so far," he couldn't help saying.
"Has it?" Loretta asked. "Are you happy? Fulfilled?"
"I am perfectly happy," he snapped.
Liar, his dragon grumbled at him.
Shut up, you interfering reptile; no one asked you.
"Do you have friends?" Loretta asked. Her eyes had grown suddenly soft and sympathetic. "Do you have anyone at all you can talk to? Anyone you can call up if you need a ride or a place to stay?"
"When would I possibly have need of such a thing? I can buy a new car or pay for the finest hotel room anytime I want it." And he'd worked hard to make sure he had that.
"What if you had no money?" Now her voice was quiet and full of something he had a horrifying feeling was pity. Pity, directed at him. "What if you didn't have the mansion, or your nice cars and servants? Would you have anyone, anyone at all, you could rely on?"
Those words should have bounced off him as if from steel plate. Certainly they should not have gone straight down to his core, where a lonely long-ago dragonet missed his family, his clan, with a pain like poison running through his veins ...
He was barely aware that he was now standing up, his rumpled napkin (and he hadn't noticed either, until now, how he'd been folding and unfolding it) falling from his lap to the floor. He was not that child. He had built himself a new clan from scratch, dragged himself out of those humble beginnings and built a fortune, a family, a life. How dare she imply that the life he had built was not good enough!
"Darius?" Loretta asked, her voice faint. She looked shocked.
"Order whatever you like from the menu." His voice came out shaking with the effort it took to control it. "I shall return when you can ... when you can speak in a civilized fashion."
He strode away, hands clenched into fists. He heard her call his name at his back, but he didn't stop, marching into the spacious men's room. The attendant looked up from folding towels. Darius swept past him into a stall and closed its gleaming faux-marble door.
He had ... perhaps not thought this plan through, he thought, looking around and realizing he was now trapped in a men's room stall, with nowhere to sit as his legs trembled and threatened to give out ... except the toilet, which might be a cut above a typical restroom stall toilet, but was still a toilet. And he couldn't leave without having to go past the attendant. He couldn't leave the restaurant without having to stomp past every person in it, and Loretta.
It was a metaphor for his life, he thought, and sudden, half-hysterical laughter bubbled up in him. He had trapped himself neatly with his own fit of temper. He was trapped in a restroom stall by his own choices.
Trapped in his life.
He leaned against the wall of the stall and pressed his fingertips against his eyes until swirling patterns burst in the darkness.
Loretta was right. She was right, damn her. His life was lonely and empty. His children had barely wanted anything to do with him until recently, and even now things were strained with them, because he had been a terrible father and driven them away. His ex-wives hated him. He had business associates and employees, but did he have a single person in his life who would spend time with him without being paid for it?
Maddox ...
... is there because I pay him. I never pretended otherwise.
Darius drew a long, shaky breath.
Very well, he thought at himself, and he reached into the well of inner strength that he'd used to drag himself from the ashes of his old life once before, back when he was a child and he had lost everything and everyone he'd ever loved. You deserved that. Deal with it. Now you know the nature of the problem.
What are you going to do about it?
Chapter Ten: Loretta
Loretta stared nervously after Darius after he stomped off. His face ...
She'd been prepared for anger. She actually thought she probably had it coming. She'd always been a mouthy broad, and she knew she'd gotten carried away. It was just so frustrating, the way he stomped all over people around him without even noticing he was doing it. She just wanted to make him see it, for his own sake if not for everyone else!
But she hadn't expected for her words to strike like an arrow through his heart. He'd turned as white as if she'd shot him. For an instant, she had thought he was going to burst into tears.
She still wasn't entirely sure that he wasn't crying in the restroom, as impossible as it was to imagine.
Should I go after him? she wondered anxiously, worrying her fancy cloth napkin between her fingers. What if he doesn't come back? What if he goes out the back? What if—
"Miss? Do you need another minute?"
Loretta looked up quickly and put on a smile for the waiter. "Yes, I think—oh—no, no, I'll order now."
She opened her menu, which she hadn't even looked at. Right now the idea of eating felt like pushing a lump of sawdust into her stomach. But she couldn't bear the idea of just sitting here with nothing but her own thoughts to keep her busy. This, at least, gave her something to do.
It was all she could do not to choke at the prices. She could buy a whole week's worth of KFC bucket meals for what it cost for just one of these things. And "things" was right; she hardly recognized half the items on the menu, and she hadn't eaten more than a quarter of them.
She'd had chicken cordon bleu one time, in a plastic tray from the frozen foods section at Kroger's, and she remembered it had been pretty good, so she ordered that. At least she was confident it wouldn't have anything weird like goose tongues or snails in it.
"And what would the gentleman like?" the waiter asked, and the lump of sawdust in her throat choked her again. She'd forgotten that Darius had to order too!
She almost asked the waiter if he could go away and come back and get the other half of the order later ... but then she thought, no. Darius had picked out the restaurant. He'd picked her dress and made plans for the evening, all without consulting her. No matter how sorry she felt for him, maybe turnabout was fair play, after all.
"The gentleman," she said slowly, scanning the menu and trying to think of something Darius-like. "The gentleman will have ..." She didn't want to order something for him that he'd hate; he didn't deserve that. There was a difference between being accidentally inconsiderate and deliberately mean. What had he sa
id in the limo? A steak, that's right. And he'd said rare, hadn't he? "He'll have the prime rib. Rare."
"Very good, ma'am. Anything to drink?"
"Do you have beer?" she asked hopefully.
When Darius finally came back from the restroom, she had settled her nerves with a few gulps of beer from the fanciest beer glass she'd ever seen, and she had ordered a glass of red wine for him after asking the waiter what went best with steak. (She was still proud of herself for remembering that people who ate in fancy restaurants liked to consider what kind of drinks went best with whatever they were eating. The only thing she usually paired with a nice steak was a Bud Lite from a cooler full of crushed ice.)
Darius didn't look like he'd been crying, she saw with vast relief. He also didn't look mad. He sat down quietly across from her.
"I'm sorry," they both said at once.
Loretta burst into a laugh, mostly from relief, while Darius smiled wanly.
"I was over the line," she said. "I shouldn't have hit you with all that. Especially on an empty stomach. It's like my mom used to say, never have a heavy talk when everybody's got low blood sugar—"
"No, you were right. And sometimes I need to hear uncomfortable facts even when I don't want to. I think perhaps the thing that is most lacking in my life, Loretta, is someone to tell me the truth." He reached for his wine glass automatically and then looked startled to see it there.
"Oh, right," she said, embarrassed. "I ordered for us both. I hope you like rare prime rib."
"Exactly what I would have ordered for myself."
She wasn't sure if that was true, but at least he didn't seem upset.
"Is this evening truly not to your liking?" Darius asked quietly.
"Well, the company's good," she said, smiling.
"But the dress, the restaurant ..." His sincerity was, she found, harder to deal with than Darius in full insufferable mode. "I only wanted you to have the finest things."
"And I appreciate that!" Impulsively she reached across the table and seized his hand. Her fingers slid between his larger ones as if they were meant to be there. "I know you meant well, really, I do. That's why I feel bad about snapping at you earlier. It's just ... this dress ..."