Dragon Her Back (Entangled Covet) (3 page)

Chapter Four

The next morning, Mei walked through an early morning drizzle to work. Overnight, an unusual rainstorm had blown in from the desert, calling her dragon from the apartment to fly with the clouds and soar on the wet currents.

After hunting, she’d returned to the top of their apartment building with barely enough time to shower and change for work. She was centered and calm in a way she’d not been able to manage before. She was ready for whatever the day, and Bo Quan et al., had to throw at her.

The Crown Jewel lobby looked especially gilded when she stepped inside. The chandeliers and sconces shone golden light around the lobby, casting an angelic glow over the early morning crowd. Walking into her office, she hung up her raincoat and purse and saw another white gift lying on her desk.

She heaved a heavy sigh, froze, and smelled the air again.

What was that smell?

Something dead. It smelled awful, pungent and rotting.

Using her dragon senses, she located the offending odor at her waste bin. She hurried to it and hefted the can, nearly gagging on the gasp through her mouth.

Fish—very dead fish. In Darius’s present from yesterday.

She didn’t know whether to be touched or insulted. What kind of idiot sent someone fish with no warning that the gift was perishable? She yanked the trashcan liner out, tied the plastic bag tight, and put it outside her office door.

“Have housekeeping take that away, please,” she said to her assistant.

“Yes, Ms. Chen,” the woman said. “Scott said to let you know he had something for you when you came in. He wanted to give it to you in person.”

“Thank you.” The words were automatic and smooth, but underneath, fear displaced her tranquil peace.

Everything came into sharp focus at once. The slight flicker of the lights behind her, the shuffle of human feet trudging over the lobby floor, the ring of the phone at the front desk, all sounded deafening to her suddenly sensitive ears.

She withdrew to her office and shut the door, suddenly loath to know what Scott had found and would only give to her in person. If Bo Quan were a protocol-ignorant bumpkin, Scott would have left the report on her desk. Probably with “no problem” scrawled on the corner in the red ink he favored.

The fact that he hadn’t, and he wanted to talk to her in person, meant Bo Quan was a threat.
Fuck.
Her heart pounded in her chest, and her vision swam.

Suddenly, she couldn’t get enough air. Sinking into her chair, she bent over her knees until her vision narrowed, and all she could see was a single dust bunny housekeeping had missed under her desk.

The room felt hot and clammy, and perspiration broke out on her forehead. Her heavy black hair pulled hard on its constraining bun, and her palms left wet handprints on the leather of her chair. Her mind raced with options, all of which came down to: run, or run!

If it were really the dragons of the Crescent Islands who were descending on Las Vegas, Darius would be exposed as her lover. His dragon mark on her hand would tell the truth of their bond. They would demand, and deserve, his death. Her stomach turned over, and the fish smell intensified, so she gagged and choked.

She stayed down until her breathing settled and her vision expanded. The white of Darius’s newest gift box on the corner of her desk came into focus. She sat back and picked it up. Her insides felt raw as if she’d been kicked from behind in the kidneys, a feeling she’d not had since escaping the Islands.

Her head ached like she’d been too long away from water. She imagined the ocean lapping gently at the surface, restorative and renewing. Her dragon, cowering for cover somewhere between her rib cage and heart, unfurled with a gentle, brave nudge.

Peace,
she spoke to her inner beast.
We
’
re safe
.

She didn’t add “for now”.

She turned the box in her hands. It was light, and the slight clatter of metal inside reassured her it hadn’t once been alive. Still in a daze, she removed the blue ribbon and tucked the cherry blossom sprig between her stapler and tape dispenser. It looked out of place, drooping over the office accoutrements. The pink and white petals of the flower reflected in the surface of her pristine black desk, hazy and blurred.

Was she the flower, or the murky copy? The self-sufficient woman she’d become, or the past shadow she couldn’t avoid?

Li had never given her flowers. She seldom let herself think about the past, but now the walls she’d mortar-bricked around her memories came tumbling down.

They’d not had cherry blossoms on the Islands. Nothing grew on the rocky archipelago in the South China Sea. The inhospitableness of the place deterred would-be human inhabitants and made it a perfect hideout for dragons long thought to be dead.

She’d believed she and Li were destined mates. How could she have known any differently, she or any of the other women? They were isolated from the rest of the world, “for their safety.” They never questioned why so few children were born. It would have been like asking why the ocean was gray at the surface, but shone with a thousand blue lights beneath.

It just was.

They’d been betrothed from the cradle. Li was handsome and charismatic, loved by all in the Crescent Houses scattered throughout the barren island crevices. While she’d believed herself to be the luckiest of women to be paired with him, it was no secret that he was pitied.

Her lack of beauty was easy to quantify. She was small enough, but her skin was not the porcelain white favored by the elite Crescent Houses. It had a darker cast of yellow. “Peasant skin,” they’d whispered disapprovingly and forbade her to go outside and expose her skin to the sun.

Her eyes were also a disappointment with their eyelid fold, which did not open enough to be considered beautiful. The array of derogative adjectives they had for her seemed like comments on her character as well as her appearance: Unworthy, ugly, low born.

Run!
The inner command surfaced with the long buried hurt. She could just fly away again, like she’d done before, with no destination or knowledge of what she would find on the other side of the ocean. The morning storm would carry her west, away from Vegas, toward the Pacific. It wasn’t too late to hide from them again.

She shook her head, knowing she couldn’t leave Darius with the fallout.

She had to tell him. Today.

Dialing Scott’s number on her cell, she headed upstairs. “Hey, it’s Mei,” she said when he answered.

“I can’t find your guy,” Scott said without preamble.

She’d figured, but hearing it made her heart gallop in her chest again. Every dragon on the planet was registered with the king, even those hostile to the throne. “Dissenters”, they were called. They didn’t attend mixer-type galas where they might meet their potential mates. They didn’t fall under the protection of the Kingdom—but they were registered.

“Could it be an alias?”

“I’m thinking it must be.” Scott sounded stymied. “Either way, the king needs to know so he can deal with it.”

“Wait.” The word was a gasp through the phone back to her ear. She thought fast. “Is Darius there?”

“No, he said he would be in late this morning,” Scott said.

“I’ll be right up.”

“I thought you said he wasn’t here,” Mei whispered, even though she knew it was too late. Darius was just as aware of her presence inside the surveillance center as she was of him at his desk in his office on the catwalk overlooking the analyst hub.

“He walked in right after I hung up with you.” Scott handed her a stack of papers.

She rifled through the research results on Quan, seeing traditional credit checks, NSA files, and printouts from records of the ancient dragon clans, with the family trees diagrammed backward in time. “So, basically you couldn’t find him anywhere?”

“Oh, there are a ton of Bo Quans out there,” Scott said. “Just not this one.”

“What do you mean?”

“I reverse checked the fax you got. It was computer generated, not a real fax. It just looks like one.” Scott’s face eased with a pleased-with-himself smile. “It came from a server that pinged around the world and stopped in Vietnam.”

“Why?” Hope filled her chest. If it was the Vietnamese, maybe it wasn’t Li at all.

Scott shrugged. “The Vietnamese ambassador disavows knowledge of any clandestine activity in his territory. It’s someone completely off the grid. Our on-the-ground intel checked it out overnight.

“You told Darius?”

“Of course.”

Dread filled her. The stairwell to Darius’s office seemed to lengthen, making the steps she knew she would have to traverse seemed too steep to climb. “Thanks,” she managed as her feet trudged upward.

What would she say to him?

What
should
she say to him? She peered through the wall of glass surrounding his office, aware that although he ignored her, he could sense that she stood just a few feet from him.

Darius’s private domain boasted a minimalist black decor and five computer screens. He sat in a large, executive-style chair, writing on a yellow note pad. The hum of his jewels, hidden in a wall safe, vibrated like champagne bubbles on her nose.

What kind of jewels would Darius treasure? As a Russian ice dragon, maybe diamonds. Her own secret stash was freshwater pearls in grays and blacks and pinks. Soft and lovely, smooth and warm to the touch.

She lifted a knuckle and tapped on the glass until he glanced up. He motioned her inside, and she stepped into his inner sanctum.

“Did you open your gifts?” He leaned back in his chair and smiled as if he deserved a medal.

She blinked several times. Gifts? In the turmoil over the fax she’d completely forgotten the dead fish.

His pleased expression shifted, and he thumped his feet down hard on the floor. “You didn’t open them, did you?”

“No.”

“Why not?” His furrowed brow was intense, like he was trying to discern the last word in a crossword puzzle.

“I’ve been a little preoccupied.”

He stared hard, communicating his displeasure with a lift of his dark brows. “What can I do for you?” His question was gruff, and she sensed his dragon, barely leashed under his human skin.

Mei sat across from him in a black chair without invitation. A gray tie coiled in a perfect circle on his desk, the edges perfectly aligned. She stared at the weave and symmetry of the fabric rather than the overwhelming feeling of being ensconced with him.

“I’ve never been in here.”

He frowned and open-palmed his hands toward the ceiling. “You want a tour?” His voice was sarcastic, and he dropped his palms to his flat stomach, drawing her eyes. She knew what he looked like under the business suit. The images of him naked, strong, in their bed in Paris cascaded in rapid succesion, making it hard to breathe. The scent of him, the heat of him surrounded her and she looked at the tie as if it was a lifeline to sanity.

Silence stretched, becoming loud and distorted with numbing white noise, making him too close and too far at the same time. She raised her eyes to his, seeing him staring, waiting for her to speak.

The fax. She had to get answers on Bo Quan. “You’re angry with me.”

“I’m frustrated with you. There’s a difference. It’ll be six years in—”

“I know.” Immediately, the images she’d pushed aside crowded back in her mind and a tight ball of longing, edged out her current fear. He was supposed to have been a fling for her, an escape anthem, a declaration of independence. Then she’d woken to find his binding dragon mark on her hand and all her hopes for a new life had disappeared.

“I understand that things between us took you by surprise,” Darius said, drawing her attention to the present. “They took me by surprise, too. But like it or not, we’re mates, and I want you back in my bed.”

With their very lives at risk, his preoccupation with the carnal side of their relationship rubbed her the wrong way. “That’s all you care about? Sex?”

“Is there more?” His tone issued a challenge for her to wade right on into that quagmire.

What more indeed? Li hadn’t cared about anything but her ability to continue his line, and when she’d been unable to, he’d made no attempt to hide his interest in other women. “Mates are supposed to love each other, or at the very least like each other. We can’t stand each other.”

“I like you very much.”

“No, you don’t.” Mei laughed. “You want to strangle me most of the time.”

“That’s not true,” he said. “I’d never harm you.”

She held his gaze, caught by his certainty. He took note of her interest with an assessing side tilt of his head, and she dropped her gaze to the stack of papers in her hands. “Scott said you sent ground intel to investigate the fax I got?”

“Yes,” Darius answered, but she could tell his mind was still on their more personal conversation. “They found nothing. Very odd.”

She lifted her face, and for once did not try to mask her fear.

“What is it?” Darius leaned farther over the desk. “You’re upset.”

Upset was such a benign word for the raucous nightmare ruling her life that she laughed, brittle and tight. “Yes, I am
upset
.” She gathered the facts to filter them down to the essentials. “This group may present a threat.”

His eyes narrowed on her face, so she knew he looked beneath her façade. Studying every clue she gave away in her expression, in her body posture, in the tight clasp of her hands on the pages of research. He was trained to detect body language tells, and keeping the secrets from him no longer seemed possible. The words balled up on her tongue and fought with each other.

“I’m afraid,” she finally said.

He came around the desk near her, then backed off and sat on the edge, as if understanding not to push too hard when she’d only cracked open the door. “Of what?”

“There are things you don’t know,” she said. “Things about my past. Things I never wanted you to know. I wanted to protect you.”

He frowned as if she spoke gibberish. “I don’t need protection.”

“Yes,” she whispered. “You do.”