Gambling on Her Dragon (Charmed in Vegas Book 2) (3 page)

She’d watched him from the moment he walked into the casino, because how could she
not
 watch a man like that? A man who prowled more than he walked, like a lion on the savannah or a boxer stepping into a ring. A man whose aura reached out in front of him like a couple of bodyguards yelling,
Clear the way! Clear the way!

Not that he needed bodyguards, not with a build like that. People had unconsciously ducked away from those broad shoulders and powerful legs as if clearing space for a herd of bulls.

A man with patience, brains, and a touch of endearing innocence. He’d circled the poker tables a couple of times — watching, waiting, quietly observing. When he finally decided on one, he slid into an empty chair like a bull rider climbing into the starting pen: wary. Confident. Ready for the ride of his life. Impossibly blue — peacock blue — eyes had studied the deck as if he had X-ray vision and could guess what was coming next. Not that he’d been counting cards or pulling any tricks, because he simply glanced once at his cards, made up his mind, and seemed to sit back and wait.

Gimme what you got, fate.
That’s what his body language said.

Not,
Watch out, sucker, I’ve got an ace up my sleeve.

Just about the only trick he’d pulled was when he glanced up and met her gaze.
Captured
 her gaze was more like it, even from twenty feet away, because she couldn’t drag it away after that. And hell, he couldn’t seem to, either. His bottom lip had swung open as if he’d never seen anything like her before.

And she hadn’t even been in her dragon form.

She’d been just Kaya. Kaya, the veterinarian’s assistant from Wyoming, with straight hair and small boobs and a tendency to frown when she was thinking.

She rode an updraft on wide, steady wings, trying to rein in her racing pulse.

So, big deal. She’d seen a good-looking man. A good-looking man with just enough of a lucky streak to become her target that night.

But it wasn’t that simple, because she hadn’t been the only one watching Trey in the casino that night. The two bounty hunters had zeroed right in on him, too. She’d been warned about their type and had even seen them in action as she frequented the casino over the past couple of days. The big one had brushed right past her, reeking of bear. Not the pure, woodsy scent she’d caught coming off the handsome wolf shifter, but the pungent smell of a dank and dirty winter cave.

She’d seen the two thugs shift their focus from a scrawnier guy to him. Dollar signs practically lit up in their eyes like spinning symbols in slot machines. They recruited for the fighting pits, and a wolf like Trey was the perfect candidate. He’d fight long and hard. He might even survive in the fight pits a couple of weeks, bringing thousands to the bookies the thugs had partnered with.

The fighting pits were Vegas’ best-kept secret. Or one of Vegas’ many secrets, anyway. An arena in which bets weren’t won and lost with cards but with lives. Animal lives, shifter lives. The colosseums of ancient Rome had nothing on the fight pits, judging by what she’d caught from whispers and hushed tones.

The big bounty hunter had muscled past her and taken up position on the right side of the table, watching Trey take his cards. The man sniffed, then nodded at someone across the room. Kaya followed the bounty hunter’s gaze to the opposite end of the table. Who was he signaling to?

Probably not the anorexic doe shifter with big hair and fake boobs — she was too busy hanging over her sugar daddy, a balding human. Not the down-and-out werebear, lumbering toward the slot machines, nor the unicorn shifter who pranced by in a tuxedo that was a little too tight in the ass.

No, the thug had nodded to a second bear shifter. A skinnier one in the brown suit that all the employees wore. He nodded back, disappeared, and came back two minutes later with a tray full of drinks. She’d bet money that one of them was spiked.

“Whiskey, sir?”

Hot Stuff nodded absently as he turned two cards in for two new ones and didn’t notice a thing. Within a couple of rounds, he’d drained the glass.

Jesus. Hadn’t anyone warned this cowboy about Vegas? Whatever poker he’d learned must have been in a bunkhouse out on some ranch and not in a two-faced place like a casino that played by its own rules.

The drug would take a while to work on his shifter metabolism, but it would kick in eventually. The thugs would wait until he could no longer see straight, then make their move, and he’d wake up in a dungeon five stories underground, ready to be cast into the pits.

How could he be so naive?

But she’d been no better, drowning in the universe of blue in his eyes. Like she’d been drugged, too. Drugged on his eyes, his scent, his soft touch. Oh, Lord, what had she done?

She huffed her frustration into the night, and —
whoa!

A thin trickle of fire exploded from her mouth.

Holy shit.

She lost her rhythm momentarily and had to shake out her wings before she got them to flap in sync again. The fire had gone out of dragons generations ago. Nowadays, only the mightiest could summon up a good, old-fashioned, barn-burning inferno. The best Kaya had ever managed was little coughing flames that snuffed out almost before they started. Baby flames that tasted like ash and smelled of rotten egg — and that, only when she was really worked up.

Her grandfather had been full of stories of old dragon ways.
 Fire isn’t kindled by greed or desire,
 she remembered him explaining as they flew side by side, years ago.
 Fire is kindled by love, and if you truly believe…

She snorted. Sure. Love. She barely knew the man she’d slept with last night.

The ridiculously attractive man with a voice that tickled something deep in her soul.

She flew on toward the purplish-brown mountains in the distance, wondering why the hell she was so worked up.

It was her sister. That’s what it was — anxiety for her sister, because it sure as hell couldn’t be the man. Definitely, definitely not the man.

She banked around a bend in the first valley and dropped into a canyon. With one strong flap of her wings, she rose and wheeled hard to land on a ledge on the south side. The ledge where she’d set up a lair for the duration of her stay in Vegas, while she figured out what to do about her sister.

Having the bag clutched between her claws meant she had to land one-footed, and she shifted so fast that when she came to rest, it was on human feet. She rolled her shoulders as her wings retreated beneath her skin. Then she cracked her neck a little, left then right. Flexing her fingers a couple of times, she closed her eyes, getting used to the sensation of breathing down a shorter windpipe again.

Dawn was just breaking over the desert, and it was beautiful. Faint yellow and pink light filtered over the hills, working its way deeper into the valleys, inch by scrubby inch. An owl hooted somewhere over to the left, saying goodbye to the night.

A beautiful day. So why was her stomach tied into knots?

She sat on a rock, dumped out the contents of the bag, and started counting and recounting the bills.

“Eighty-seven thousand… eighty-eight thousand…” She counted out loud, telling herself it was real. She had enough. More than enough, as it turned out. Ninety thousand, altogether.

She gave a little fist pump and slid a hand into her back pocket, but it just bumped off her bare flesh.

Her breath caught, and the little high of triumph still coursing through her veins suddenly turned to ice.

Jesus, her clothes. Her jeans. Her phone…

She’d left them all behind in the hotel room.

Her blood slowed in her veins. She hadn’t been that careless, had she?

Oh, God. Yes, she had. She’d only brought the money bag out to the balcony for a quick count while Trey was asleep. She’d planned — Truly! Honestly! — to take only what she needed and leave him the rest. There was no way she could have guessed that the thugs would show up just then and rouse Trey out of bed.

Trey, in all his naked glory. Trey, blinking the sleep out of his eyes.

Trey’s eyes going wide as he saw her getting ready to jump.

Her heart thumped, replaying it all.

He’d leaped her way, stretching like an Olympic athlete, reaching with all his might. Yelling in fear, like she’d never heard a man yell before. Not for himself, but for her.

And what had she done?

Kaya let her eyes slide shut in shame. She’d grabbed the money and flown the coop. Literally.

For all that she tried gulping away the lump in her throat, it stayed stubbornly stuck.

She shook her head and gave herself a stern lecture. The only thing that mattered was the money for her sister. Trey would have given her the money if she’d had a chance to explain why she needed it so badly, right? Especially if she explained what danger her sister was in.

When she cleared her throat, the ashy taste of fire was still there. Damn it, Trey had won those thousands easily. He could win another couple of thousand just as easily, right?

She had to get Hot Stuff out of her mind. She had to forget and move on, because the last thing she needed was a card-playing wolf in her life. What she needed was to concentrate and get on with her plan.

A plan which called for her phone, an unlisted number, and a wad of cash.

And crap, she was one for three, because the phone and the number were back in the hotel room, along with her clothes.

She sat down on the rock so hard, it hurt. But hell, she deserved it for being that dumb.

Tears welled up but she blinked them away because that wouldn’t help. What she needed was a plan. A new plan.

She groaned and hung her head in her hands.

A plan that meant she wasn’t through with Hot Stuff, after all.

T
rey looked left and right then hustled out the back door and into an alley where the temperature soared to a skin-scorching hundred degrees, even in the morning shade. He shouldered his backpack and checked the watch he’d just had time to grab after bouncing the two thugs off the wall in the hotel room and racing out the door.

Seven a.m.

Jesus, it was going to be a hell of a day. Following a hell of a night. How did an innocent detour to Vegas turn into…into…into whatever hornet’s nest it was he’d gotten himself tangled up in?

He put his hat on — his lucky hat, a going-away present from his cousin Lana — and took off down the alley. Once he rounded the corner to Fremont Street, he jumped in the first cab to pass.

“Where to, buddy?” The driver glanced at him in the rearview mirror. Once, not twice, which was good. No need for anyone to remember seeing him, just in case.

His mind spun. Where to? What he really needed to do was get the hell out of town. Pronto.

But before he could stop it, his wolf made him say something totally different. “A good breakfast place on the far side of town.”

The driver flashed a crooked smile. “Lemme guess. Fun night with a pretty girl turns into a quick exit?”

Trey sighed and flopped back against the seat. If only the guy knew how quick an exit it had been. The last hit of adrenaline was still washing through his veins, rapidly turning to a weary throb. He could still feel the brush of her fingers against his, the backwash of her wings…

Jesus fucking Christ. Her
wings
.

It wasn’t that he didn’t know dragons existed. But he’d never, ever seen one, much less slept with one, or woken up to a fistfight over one. His knuckles throbbed from the punch he’d thrown at one thug’s temple, and his shoulder still felt the lead weight of the second guy as he’d body checked him into the wall. The headache was back, too, along with the questions.

Who was dragon lady? Where did she go? Would he ever see her again?

He cleared his throat, because that last part sounded a little too close to a whimper, even in his mind.

“Welcome to Las Vegas, man,” the cab driver chuckled. “I know just the place for a morning-after breakfast. Best coffee in town.”

The coffee was mud, as it turned out, and he wasn’t sure who that said more about — the cab driver’s judgment or the quality of Vegas’ coffee. But the omelet was good, and he’d succeeded in leaving a cold trail the werebears couldn’t follow. He had a separate stash of money to pay for the cab and breakfast, but it sure wasn’t what he’d had in the canvas bag Kaya had flown off with.

He scraped the last bit of sticky yolk off his plate with his toast and considered his next move. Nearly choked on the next slurp of coffee when his wolf chimed in with his two cents.

Find girl. Fuck her. Make her our mate.

He slammed the coffee cup down so hard, three heads turned his way. What had gotten into his beast?

Destiny,
 the wolf purred, driving an image of the woman into his mind. A very dangerous image of open lips, hungry eyes, and flaring nostrils. Like she couldn’t get enough of his scent. Like the same magnetic force that had moved him had acted on her, too.

Mate
, the wolf concluded.
Mine.

He shook his head the way he always had at that destined mate nonsense. Just because the occasional shifter fell head over heels in love with another didn’t mean it was destiny at work.