by Lola Gabriel
Finally, Mitchell felt his orgasm starting to recede, leaving his limbs heavy and content. He and his dragon were sated. He slipped out of Lexi and took a small step backwards so he could look at her face. She smiled up at him, and he leaned down and kissed her. Their kiss this time was less desperate, slower, and more sensual. It was the kiss of two hearts that had been awakened by each other.
8
Lexi looked across her desk at Mitchell. What had just happened between them should never have happened, but she realized now that she had known from the second she set eyes on Mitchell that it would. That they would end up here.
Even now, knowing that she should have stopped him when he kissed her, and certainly after that, before she let him make love to her, she wanted to feel his tongue on her again. She felt a sharp longing go through her, wanting him. She shifted in her seat, and Mitchell looked up from his dinner and caught her watching him. She didn’t look away, and when he smiled at her, she returned his smile, allowing herself to stay in the moment, in the fairy tale, for just a few seconds longer.
She knew they had to talk about this. She had to apologize for allowing herself to act so unprofessional, and she had to let him know this could never happen again, but it would be hard. It would have been hard, almost impossible, to resist Mitchell in any situation, but here, with his kisses still fresh on her lips, it was going to be even harder.
“I’m sorry,” she forced herself to say.
“I’m not,” Mitchell said. He grinned at her. “And I don’t believe for a second you are, either.”
Lexi laughed softly; she couldn’t help it. “Okay, you got me. I’m not sorry it happened, but Mitchell, it can’t happen again. It was unprofessional, and—”
“How was it unprofessional? You dumped me as a client, remember? You’re not my lawyer anymore. Are you?”
How could she say no? Where would he find another lawyer that believed in him like she did? If she walked away from him now, she might as well sentence him herself.
“Do you still want me to be your lawyer, after what happened?” she asked.
“Yes,” Mitchell said without hesitation. Lexi pushed the carton of food away from herself, stuffed full. She picked her glass of wine up and sipped it.
“Okay. Then let’s just pretend you’ve just got here tonight and have a whole redo.”
“That works for me,” Mitchell said, wiggling his eyebrows and grinning at her.
“Stop it,” she laughed. “That’s not what I meant. Seriously, Mitchell, if you want me to be your lawyer, then we have to keep this professional, okay?”
Mitchell nodded, but she saw in his eyes he didn’t mean it. She wasn’t sure she meant it herself, but she knew she had to try. She couldn’t let her emotions cloud her judgement on the case.
“I’m going to ask you one more time. And I swear, if you lie to me again, then we’re done in all capacities. Where were you at the time of the murder?”
“I don’t want to lie to you, Lexi. Believe me, that’s the last thing I want. But I just can’t tell you. What I can tell you is that I wasn’t doing anything I am ashamed of. And I can also tell you that even if I told you my alibi, you couldn’t use it in court. They would never believe it. In fact, I’m not sure even you would believe it.” Lexi sighed. She wanted to get this alibi so bad, yet she knew it was useless. Mitchell wasn’t going to tell her. “I promise you, Lexi, I will tell you one day when this is all over. But not tonight,” he added.
That gave Lexi a spark of hope. Not for the case. He wasn’t going to tell her in time for her to use the alibi in court, that much was clear to her. But he was going to tell her when it was over. That meant he still wanted her in his life, even when she wasn’t his lawyer anymore.
“I wish you would just trust me enough to tell me,” she said.
“And I will. In time. Lexi, you believe me, don’t you? That I didn’t kill Lisa.”
“Yes, but it doesn’t matter what I think, Mitchell. It’s not me you have to convince of your innocence. It’s a jury.”
“You believed me by looking at the facts of the case. You know this is a setup. Make them believe it the same way. Find something that proves I’m being set up,” he said.
Lexi nodded slowly. He was right. If she could just prove that he was being set up somehow, then she wouldn’t need his alibi. It wouldn’t matter where he was.
“So, who might have enough of a grudge against you to do this? To kill an innocent woman just to frame you?”
“I honestly don’t know. You would think if someone hated you that much, you would know who it was and what you had done to them to make them feel that way. But I really can’t think of anyone. I have some people looking into it, though.”
Lexi raised an eyebrow. That didn’t sound good at all.
“Like private investigators?” she asked.
“Something like that.” Mitchell smiled. “Friends who know where to look for information.”
“That sounds awfully illegal,” Lexi said.
“It’s not. They’re just asking questions.” Mitchell shrugged.
“Right. Don’t tell me anything about these guys, in case they find something. I don’t want to know if they’re doing something illegal, because if I don’t know, I can’t be expected to report it. Now, you should go.”
Mitchell looked at her in surprise. “I can call them off if you want me to.”
“No,” Lexi said. “They might get to the bottom of this a whole lot quicker than I can, and I’m still on Hughes’ clock, don’t forget. That’s not why I need you to go. I need to concentrate and try to find something I can use. And I don’t think I can do that with you sitting here with me.”
Mitchell grinned at her. “Why, Ms. Lord, if I didn’t know better, I would say you were having dirty thoughts about me.”
Lexi felt herself blushing. Every time she looked at him, she could almost feel his lips on hers, and all thoughts of the case melted away, leaving her wanting him again.
Mitchell laughed, stood up, and held his hands up.
“Okay, I’m going.” He backed towards the door and then stopped, serious again. “When can I see you again? Not as my lawyer.”
“You can’t,” Lexi answered. She knew she should leave it at that, but the thought of never being with Mitchell again made her feel like she had lost too much. “At least not until the case is over.”
“Then you had better find something quickly, because I’m really not sure how long I can wait to taste you again,” Mitchell said. He ducked out of her office before she could even think of a reply, leaving her sitting open mouthed, shocked, but happy. Whatever this thing was, the pull she felt towards Mitchell, he obviously felt it, too.
Lexi was smiling to herself when she opened the file, but after a few minutes, the smile faded. This all felt so hopeless. She had been through the file so many times and hadn’t spotted anything to suggest where to even start looking for evidence of a setup. She sighed and shook her head, telling herself to start at the beginning and read every word like it was her first time with the file. The answers had to be there somewhere.
She hadn’t been reading the file for long when her eyes started to become scratchy, and within minutes, they were wet, and her eyelids felt heavy. She stifled a yawn and forced herself to keep reading. The words started to blur, and she knew the long day and the wine were taking their toll.
I’ll just close my eyes for five minutes, she thought, and then I’ll be able to concentrate better. Lexi laid her arms on the desk and rested her head on them, closing her eyes. Within moments, she was asleep.
Lexi could feel the man’s grip on her wrist. She tried to pull her hand away, but the grip was too strong for her, and the more she struggled, the tighter the hold got. She could feel the small bones in her wrist almost succumbing to the pressure. If she kept fighting, they would break. She relaxed her arm, and the pressure eased up a little.
She was afraid, but it was like an abstract sort of
fear, the sort of fear a person feels when they’re watching a scary movie and they know the thing on the screen can’t actually hurt them.
She looked around, but she didn’t recognize any of the buildings. She blinked, and she was out in the countryside, surrounded by green fields. She could still feel the pressure on her wrist. The man was still dragging her along. They walked for what felt like a long time, and Lexi’s legs were starting to ache when abruptly, the man stopped walking. She looked up and saw the entrance to a cave before her.
Fear began to eat at her, gnawing around the edges of her mind, sending panic through her body. Something told her that if she got into that cave, she wasn’t getting out alive. Her fear was no longer abstract, it was very real, and when the man turned around, Lexi’s knees almost buckled.
His skin was blue, and across his face were crusty red slash marks. His eyes burned into hers, a fierce looking purple color that could have been beautiful if it wasn’t filled with such evil. He grinned at her, a predatory grin that made her shiver. His teeth were pure white except for one, a gold tooth that shone in the light.
Although Lexi had no idea what sort of a creature the man was, she knew one thing: it wasn’t human. It opened its mouth to speak, but before it could form any words, there was a noise from the sky.
Lexi and the fearsome creature both looked up at the exact same moment. Lexi’s mouth dropped open as a huge black dragon with red wings and blood red eyes swooped down towards them. The creature dropped Lexi’s wrist, but she found she couldn’t run. She was frozen to the spot, her eyes fixed firmly on the dragon. She should fear it, yet when she looked at it, she felt a warmth inside of herself, and a feeling of peace fell over her. Somehow, she knew the dragon was a friend come to rescue her from the terrible blue creature.
Lexi watched the dragon land. It eyed the blue creature who turned to face it. The creature’s eyes grew wider, the purple filling the whites, but the dragon didn’t seem to notice. It threw its head back and roared, and a plume of orange and red flames burst from its nostrils.
Lexi knew what she had to do. She had to make her legs work and edge away from the creature so the dragon could turn the flames on it without incinerating her in the process. She began to edge slowly to the side. She never took her eyes off the dragon and the creature, and although it seemed like the dragon was entirely focused on the blue creature, as soon as she was out of range of the flames, it roared again, bathing the blue creature in flames.
The blue creature screamed, a sound that made Lexi want to cover her ears with her hands. She could smell burning flesh, and she gagged. Her knees did give way then, and she tumbled to the floor.
The dragon rose once more into the sky and swooped down towards Lexi. Still, she felt no fear of it. It had saved her. Even when it hovered above her and extended its claws, she didn’t shrink away. The dragon scooped her up in its claws gently and took back to the skies, taking Lexi with it.
Lexi jumped awake and rubbed her hand over her face, groaning. She looked at her watch. It was just after midnight, and she was still at the office, asleep at her desk. She shook her head, stood up, and headed for the kitchen. She desperately needed coffee.
She was halfway to the kitchen when the dream came back to her in all of its terrifying glory. She felt shaky all of a sudden, and she reached out a hand to steady herself against the wall.
Lexi hadn’t had a prophetic dream since she was fifteen. But that couldn’t have been real. Dragons weren’t real. The blue creature certainly couldn’t be real. And yet… she still felt it inside of herself. It was real. A premonition? Maybe not. Maybe it was a message. Could it be possible? Was her dream telling her that Mitchell was a dragon?
Lexi stumbled back to her office, her need for coffee forgotten. She was wide awake now as her thoughts tumbled through her mind. The idea of Mitchell being a dragon was crazy, but at the same time, it all fit. It explained why she hadn’t feared the dragon in her dream. Why it had saved her from danger. And it could explain why Mitchell was so convinced that no one would believe his alibi. What if he had been in dragon form at the time of the murder?
She knew it sounded unlikely at best, crazy at worst, but was it really any crazier than having a twin sister who had become a bear shifter? If bear shifters were real, then couldn’t dragons be real, too?
Her eyes opened wide as something else hit her. The blue creature in her dream. It had to have been a demon. She knew they were real, too. One had abducted her sister before she had become a bear shifter.
It all made a strange sort of sense now, and Lexi’s mind flashed back to the moment Mitchell’s cock had entered her pussy. She could have sworn for a second that his eyes had flashed red before he’d closed them. She hadn’t given it a second thought at the time, assuming the light had caught his eyes funny, but now she had to question that. They had been the same color as the eyes of the dragon in her dream. She knew it one hundred percent then. Mitchell was a dragon.
She had to be more than one hundred percent sure, though. She could just be clutching at straws, making something of nothing. Because the dream could just as easily be her mind’s twisted version of the case. The blue creature, the demon, it could be a representation of it, dragging her along, pulling her with it, and locking her in a cave could be the visualization of her career being over. And the dragon? Well, that could be what she already thought; that she needed a Hail Mary pass to win this one—a mythical creature sure fit the bill for that.
She could think of only one thing to do, and despite the late hour, she reached for her cell phone and called her sister.
“Lexi? Is everything all right?”
Lexi felt herself relax when she heard Chessa’s voice. It was so familiar, like coming home. And even her panicked sentence made Lexi feel better.
“I’m sorry to call so late, and Chess, this is going to sound crazy, but I need you to hear me out, okay?”
“Okay,” Chessa said, a note of caution in her voice.
“I’m not drunk or anything,” Lexi said, knowing what her sister was thinking. “I have this client, right? He’s been accused of murder, but I know with every instinct I have that he’s innocent. He won’t tell me his alibi. He keeps saying no one would believe it, even if he could tell me. Are you with me so far?”
“Yeah, but I’m not sure how I can help with this. Or why this call couldn’t wait until the morning,” Chessa replied.
“Hang on. I’m getting to that. I fell asleep reading over the file, and I had a dream. It felt like one of my old dreams. You know the ones?”
“Yeah.” Once Chessa had become a bear shifter, she told Lexi the dreams had stopped, but Lexi knew she remembered them, how she knew just as Lexi did which dreams were normal dreams and which dreams were more than that.
“In my dream, I was taken by something that I think was a demon. And I was saved by a dragon. Chess, do you think it’s possible that my client is a dragon shifter? Is there even such a thing?”
“There is such a thing,” Chessa said. Lexi felt her heart speed up. “And if you’re sure this was one of your prophetic dreams, then I’d say there’s a good chance that your client is a dragon shifter. Which makes him dangerous, Lexi.”
“You’re the one who always told me that most shifters aren’t dangerous,” Lexi reminded her. “You told me stories about your friend who travels the world saving humans. Why does this make him dangerous?”
“Okay, you’re right. It doesn’t make him dangerous as such, but you said in your dream, a demon took you. That’s pretty dangerous. Knowing about this stuff is dangerous, Lexi.”
“Well, it’s a bit late for me to start worrying about that now, isn’t it?”
“Just be careful, Lex. We could still be wrong about this.”
Lexi thought for a moment, and she decided to tell Chessa the rest. She couldn’t exactly hope to get her advice if she only told her half of the story.
“I slept with him, Chess. And it was magical. It
was like I’ve been waiting for him my whole life, but I didn’t know it until I found him. Does that make sense?”
“Yes,” Chessa said cautiously.
“His eyes… I swear they flickered red for a moment while we were… you know. But it wasn’t until after the dream that I let myself believe it was anything other than a trick of the light.”
“He’s a dragon,” Chessa said simply.
“You’re that sure?” Lexi pressed her.
“I’m that sure,” Chessa answered. “And unless you’re willing to become one, too, you need to stop sleeping with him. Like I said, it’s dangerous. Look what happened to me because I loved Noah.”
“Well, if my dream is anything to go by, he saves me, doesn’t he?”
“So you’re seriously thinking of turning?” Chessa asked.
Lexi shrugged, aware that Chessa couldn’t see her. “I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about it. I mean, it’s not something I ever thought I’d need to think about. But I have the Sanmere protein, right?”
“I don’t know for sure, but I’d guess you have. With us being identical twins, we share much of the same DNA.”
“Then I guess I have a big decision to make,” Lexi said.
“Just don’t rush into making the decision,” Chessa warned her. “I wouldn’t change my decision for the world, but this life isn’t for everyone. I’ve seen girls turn who regretted it afterwards.”
“I have time to think. I’ve told him we can’t sleep together again, anyway, because I’m his lawyer and it shouldn’t have happened even once, but I don’t know. It was like I was drawn to him, like I couldn’t have stopped myself from doing it, even if I’d wanted to.” Lexi heard Chessa sigh down the phone. “What?” she said.