Dragon Her Back (Entangled Covet) (9 page)

“First, a dance lesson.” Darius motioned at the floor. “Nothing sinister, I promise. And if you don’t want to try that, we can do whatever you like.”

Chapter Thirteen

“A pole dance lesson?” Mei’s head filled with sexy images of Darius working out at the gym the day before.

“Just a plain old box-step waltz.” Darius pushed his chair back from the table. “I have it on good authority that a couple should dance together.”

“Really?” Mei welcomed the distraction from her worries over what would happen that night at the gala. Why not enjoy the few hours they might have left before her enemies caught up to her?

She took a sip of her water. “I’d love a dance lesson.”

“Good.” Darius nodded his chin at her half-eaten plate. “Finish up, you’ll need your energy.” He waggled his eyebrows at her.

“Tell me about pole dancing.” She lifted the cucumber roll and munched on one end.

“There’s actually a whole sport developing around it.” He sounded pleased. “Pole sport, they call it.”

“And you’re a pole sport athlete?” She remembered him in the gym, holding the iron cross.

“No, I just do it to exercise. It is tough.”

She finished her dinner and pushed her plate forward. “Is the sport of it catching dollars in your pants?” she teased.

Darius laughed, leaned back, and laced his fingers behind his head. “The sport requires strength and athleticism, and a cohesive dancing routine.”

“Did you do this with the circus, too?”

“It was a part of the conditioning. There was nothing seedy or sexual about it.”

“Too bad.” She gave him a genuine smile, and then tilted it deliberately toward lasciviousness.

The quiet pauses between them were comfortable now, charged with awareness. It was as if they were on the same-metered count.

“Can I ask you a question?” he asked.

Mei sat straight, bracing herself, knowing it was going to be a question about the rest of the water dragons.

“It’s just a question, Mei. You don’t have to answer.”

“All right.” She sucked in a breath. She felt as if she was preparing for a blow to the abdomen.

Darius looked disappointed by her change in demeanor. “How about I’ll trade you a dance lesson for ten minutes of truths?”

“What does that mean?” Mei stood, nerves suddenly crawling up her back.

“Fine. The truths are optional.” Darius stepped to the middle of the floor and extended his hand. “Come on.”

Her heart pinched in regret that she couldn’t be as open as him, that she still had secrets that would drive him away from her. “I’m not a very good dancer.”

She walked to him with a determined step. They had this moment, and no promise of another. She didn’t want to wish she’d taken his hand tomorrow, only to find it too late. “I’ve never had lessons.”

There was no music on the islands. The first time she’d heard music had been in Paris, the night she met Darius. It had rocked her to her core, and she’d swayed and moved for hours alone in the crowded nightclub, her mind and body completely absorbed by the rolling melody.

“All the more reason to try.”

Mei stepped flush to him, feeling the heat between them, the pull of attraction in her lower body. She placed her hands in his, feeling them shake slightly.

“Are you scared?” He leaned his face closer to hers so she could see the concern in his pale eyes.

“I’m nervous.” The admission was real, and she let it slip out uncensored.

Darius pulled his hands from hers, making it clear it was her choice. She put her hands in his again, and he gathered her to him, close, but not nearly close enough.

“The proper distance is about a foot apart. You put your hand on my shoulder, and I get the pleasure of putting my hand…” His palm wandered down her backside and tiny tingles of pleasure followed. He cupped her butt, and her anxiety dissipated with her laughter.

He brought his hand up to her lower back and finished his sentence. “Here.”

Mei was surprised how well they fit together. Without her usual heels on, her head didn’t top his broad shoulders, but she didn’t feel overpowered by him.

“Backward-side-together,” he called the foot moves in her ear. Mei followed his lead until they were dancing short turns around the office. “Forward-side-together,” he said.

Mei leaned back in his arms and laughed. She could have been flying, but without the sluggishness that always accompanied her dragon in the air. She opened her eyes to see Darius grinning at her, and her heart constricted a little.

“I like to see you laugh,
Mushka
,” he said.

“What other smooth moves have you got?”

“The Viennese Waltz.” Darius slowed their pace so they were moving more sedately.

Mei stepped closer to him and twined her hands around his neck as Darius explained the basics of the dance. The jut of his arousal brushed her belly, and she rubbed closer, loving his quick inhale of breath.

He moved her away from his chest, giving her distance to take in the slight nuances of his expression. She read enjoyment in the slight upturn of the corners of his mouth.

She deliberately misstepped so that he bumped into her. He righted her with a hand at her hip. “You have to follow,” he whispered in her ear.

“Is this why you like dancing so much?” She stepped wrongly again so that he quickstepped to avoid her feet. “The whole leading thing?”

“You can lead if you want.” He whipped them around so he moved backward, pulling her with him across the floor.

“You’re still leading,” she said.

“Perception is a tricky thing.” He kissed the side of her neck, and shivers followed.

“I know one way to lead.” She dropped her hand from his shoulder to the band of his shorts, and slipped her hand in his waistband. He sucked in a breath, and her hand snaked downward. She stroked the length of him, feeling him grow hard and rigid.

“Mei.” He pulled her closer so they were no longer the proper distance apart.

Her need pulsed, reminding her of the electric connection and utter bliss she’d found in his arms. Escape, if only for a while with him. She wanted that now. She continued stroking him, and he leaned his forehead to her, a small groan escaping even as he shuffled them in tight circles around the floor.

“We’re supposed to be just dancing here,” he said.

She misstepped entirely, and he lifted her off her feet. “This is not dancing at all,” she said. “You’re just carrying me around the floor.”

His hold placed her mouth level with his neck, and she leaned forward, kissing him, tasting saltiness and heat. He shuddered as she moved her mouth upward to his ear.

He stopped abruptly, releasing her to the ground. The absence of his arms and the circular motion of the dance made her feel as dizzy as if she were the ocean tide called back to his shore.

Darius walked stiffly to the audio equipment and turned off the music so that the sound of his jagged breathing came to her ears. She felt faintly guilty for tormenting him. The euphoria of the dance slipped away with the last strains of the music.

“I want you to talk to me.” Darius sat hard on a stool near the sound system, a good twenty feet away from her. She knew from the pulsing excitement of her own razor sharp desire that she’d pushed him to the edge.

“I am talking to you,” she insisted.

“No, you aren’t.”

The distance between them seemed to expand, the space growing vast with all she had not yet told him of her past. “There are things,” she conceded. “Things I can’t talk about.”

“I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what we’re up against.”

“
We
are not up against anything. It’s my problem, not yours.”

“If Alec won’t accept you into the kingdom, I’ll leave with you,” he said, a fierce frown on his face. “But you have to tell me everything. No surprises.”

She must have heard wrong. “What?”

“I’ll go with you.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying.” Mei walked to their dinner table and scraped their finished meal scraps onto one plate. She stacked the plates neatly together.

“Got it the way you want it now?” Darius’s question brought her eyes back to him, still sitting on the stool.

“What do you mean?”

“The table,” he said. “You just cleared it like a pro. You’ve worked as a waitress somewhere?”

Mei looked away from him to the closed door. She hadn’t worked as a waitress; she had been a handmaiden to the Triton House. Taking care of the men in the dragon fold was ingrained, expected. Her whole life consigned to service.

Her whole life a lie.

The bread plate in her hands slipped from her grasp and shattered on the floor at her feet. “Why can’t you just leave it alone?” she whispered.

Darius walked to her, picked up her hand, and brought it to his lips. The warm brush of his breath said he was not going to leave anything alone. She shook her head, considering the ramifications.

Mei felt the insurmountable distance between them with a tight ache of longing. Sadness for all that would not be—could not be—between them overwhelmed her.

Then his cell phone broke the heavy silence with peals of
“Urgent, urgent, urgent—Emergency… Urgent, urgent, urgent—Emergency…”

…

“What the hell?” Darius walked to his phone, still plugged into the speaker feed. “I had that thing turned off.”

Mei followed him to his desk. “Is it Scott?” Her voice was anxious and tight, the ease of their dance session long gone.

“We aren’t done talking yet.” Annoyance filled Darius at the interruption.

“Urgent, urgent, urgent—Emergency… Urgent, urgent, urgent—Emergency…”

Mei kept her eyes on his phone, tension in every line of her body.

“Hello,” he said with a brisk, this-better-be-good tone.

“Boss,” Scott said, “I’ve been trying to reach you.”

“Obviously.”

“Your query is still running—”

“How’d you hack my phone?” He had his own security system protecting all his computers, including his phone.

“I have my tricks, too.” Scott sounded pleased.

Darius listened to his manager’s smug satisfaction. There was no real harm done. “Nice touch with the song.”

“Get it?” He could hear Scott smiling over the line. “Foreigner, like you.”

“Yeah, I get it.”

“Gotta have a little style to your hacking,
someone
once told me.”

That someone had been him. The elite levels of the interweb they traipsed through contained coders as interested in the art of the hack as the information. “All right, you got me. What’s so urgent?”

“Your query’s still going,” he repeated. “But I found your guy, Bo Quan.”

Mei was picking up the broken plate a few feet away. She seemed to not be paying any attention to the conversation, but he knew better.

“And…?” He walked out of his office and onto the dark stage for privacy from Mei’s ears.

“He boarded a plane in Hanoi, through Heathrow, arriving in Vegas in three hours. Quan is definitely an alias.”

Which made the probability of them being mother-fucking-water dragons high. “Has the security been increased around the sanctuary and the king as I ordered?”

“Yes,” Scott said. “And the king has plans to safeguard Lucy during the gala.”

“Good.”

“Get me everything, and I mean everything you can, on Quan. Put it all in my office.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Also, increase the dragon perimeter flights around the casino and send back out the forward scouts.”

“All of them?”

“Yes.”

“They’ll need a reason…”

Annoyance lanced Darius, but he knew Scott was right. Dragons were easy to send into a tizzy. Calm had to be maintained even when there was every reason for alarm. “Just tell them we’re testing ahead of the gala tonight. I’ll be in shortly.”

Darius disconnected and looked into the black darkness of the Sterling Club.

“What did he say?” Mei stood in the doorway to the theater. The bright light from the hallway surrounded her and obscured her face to him.

Their reprieve was over. “The group is arriving in Vegas in three hours.”

Mei reached him in a quick stride. The neon lights from the stage made her look a sickly green color. “Let’s just go, leave here now.”

She tugged at his arm, and her eyes darted left then right. He could almost hear the wheels of her brain squealing, with no traction to be found.

His mind touched hers, and she shrunk back in alarm.

“Stop that.”

“What aren’t you telling me?”

“We don’t have time for this,” she said, pulling harder.

Darius leaned back on the stage edge, making it clear he wasn’t going anywhere until they had it out. “You’ve known it might be water dragons. Why run now? Why not stay and argue your case to the king?”

“He’ll never listen.”

“There will be no future for us or our children if you aren’t recognized by the throne.”

The thought of his child being shunned from the kingdom filled him with renewed purpose. He hadn’t considered children from their union in anything but future abstract terms, but the advent of another bonding ceremony could bless them with a child. If the water dragons were like the other types, he and Mei could have either a pure ice dragon or a water dragon like Mei.

“Children!” Mei threw her hands up. “We’ll be lucky if we escape with our lives.”

He came to his feet in a sudden move that made her step back into the shadows. He couldn’t believe that she actually thought she needed to protect him. “Mei, I know I’m a big softy with you, but I’m a pretty bad-ass dude. There isn’t a dragon in the kingdom I fear.”

“You don’t understand.”

He crossed his arms over his chest, determined to get to the bottom of her panic. “The fact that they want to come to the casino to meet the king could be the beginning of a new relationship for your kind. Why would you want to circumvent that?”

“Don’t you get it?” She shook her hands at him. “They sent the request to
me
. They were letting
me
know that they were coming for
me
.”

“Coming for you?” Unease ran up his back at this new information. “What do you mean?”

“I ran away.” She said the words with a chilly blast that cooled his super-heated skin. “They’ll take me back.”