Thea Harrison - Dragon Bound

“Sure.” She hooted. “Whatever you say.”

He wasn’t by any stretch of imagination an expert on emotions, let alone female emotions. Scowling, he tapped her lips.

“I’ll just, I don’t know, be happy until you decide to start rending.” She hiccupped. “How will that do, Your Majesty?”

“I was being sarcastic,” he said.

“Which is very reassuring, coming from a pissed-off dragon,” she told him. “Kinda like the whole ‘tell me what I want to know and I’ll let you go’ joke. Definitely has its own charm. I bet all your other prisoners love it.”

Her slender body continued to shake. She was out of control. He would get no sense out of her as long as she was this overwrought. Dragos cupped her chin. He stared into her eyes, intending to beguile her into a sense of calm. Instead he came up against a mental barrier. Intrigued, he inspected it, feeling along the borders.

The barrier seemed to be both natural and intentional. There was the echo of another feminine Power interwoven in it, a subtle presence very like her own and yet separate. It was an altogether beautiful construction, an elegant citadel that protected the female’s core.

This was why she was able to break the beguilement in the dream. He could batter that wall down if he wanted to, but that would be like taking a sledgehammer to an opal. There would be nothing coherent left to salvage of her afterward.

“Stop it,” she whispered. Her body had stiffened, straining away from his touch. “Get out of my head.”

He held fast and used his voice instead of his mind. “Quiet, female,” he murmured. “Be quiet now.”

His deep voice murmured. Tendrils of the sound curled into the air and wrapped around her. It soothed and reassured. Her breath shuddered and she grew still.

She stared in Dragos’s gold eyes. Impossible depths existed in those brilliant pools. She could fall into his gaze and never come out. “Valium’s got nothing on you,” she murmured. “Bottle that, and you could make another fortune.”

“You are calmer now,” he said. His severe dark face was inscrutable.

“Yes.” She wrenched her gaze away and stared into her coffee mug. She forced herself to say, “Thank you.”

He let go of her chin and hands and stepped back. “Drink.”

She looked up as he disappeared into the hall. Then she raised the mug to her lips and drank it all down. Scotch napalmed her veins, hitting her all the harder since she hadn’t eaten well the last week.

She put the mug on the counter and inspected her hands, felt along her jaw. She had taken a battering when he slammed her into the ground, but his handling of her since then had been quite careful. How remarkable. What did it mean?

He strode back into the kitchen, the light blue hoodie she had bought earlier bunched in one hand. He nodded at the empty mug and dropped the hoodie in her lap. She shrugged it on as he crossed his arms. Perched on the bar stool as she was, he towered over her even more than he would if she were standing upright. She had thought the house was quite spacious until he had walked into it.

“We will begin again,” he said.

She kept her gaze focused on his crossed forearms that looked very dark against the white silk shirt. The distance across his pectorals was extraordinary. On another man it would be too much. On him, those heavy muscles armored a body long enough to carry them with power and grace.

“Keith blackmailed me into stealing something from you,” she said. “It didn’t matter what it was. He owed some people a lot of money.”

“Gambling debts,” he said.

She lifted her head. He had settled into a hunter’s patience. “You got that far already?”

“We found his bookie. Also dead.”

Icy fingers slid down her spine. She pulled the hoodie closer around her torso. “I dated Keith for a few months. For a little while I thought—it doesn’t matter what I thought.”

He tilted his head. “You thought what?”

“You’re not interested in all that.” Color tinged her cheeks.

“Don’t make assumptions about what I am interested in or what I will think or what I will do. You have no idea what interests me,” he told her. He settled back against the edge of the dining room table and crossed one ankle over the other. “We clear?”

She nodded, her color deepening. She went on, “We’ve already established I was an idiot. Keith came along when I was feeling low, and I fell for his charm. I was . . . indiscreet. I should have known better, and I screwed up.” Her throat closed.

“You said you had broken things off,” he prompted when she fell silent.

She nodded. “I had, a while ago. Then last week he showed up. He was full of this scheme that was going to pay off all his debts and make him rich. Of course by then my rose-colored glasses were gone. I didn’t want to have anything to do with it, or him. Then he . . . made me.”

“Blackmail, you said. Over your indiscretions.”

He spoke in a neutral tone. He had throttled the aggression down. She was very aware that he was “managing” her, but he still sounded pitiless. She covered her throat with one hand as he dissected her expression.

“Can we please not talk about that?” She tried to steady her voice. “Please?”

His lids dropped down, hooding his gaze. “Go on with your story.”

“There’s what I know.” She stressed the last word. “There’s what I think, and then there’s what I’ve guessed. Keith was all about his ‘associates.’ People he met through his bookie that he was going to do business with. He was somehow a bigger man in all his stories than he was in real life, know what I mean?”

He nodded, keeping silent.

“Well, I think he was half desperate, half boasting and all-the-way manipulated. He started promising those contacts of his anything he could. His loans had come due. He said he told them he could get them anything they wanted.” She swallowed hard. “And they said, how about something from Cuelebre, then. They gave him a charm that would locate your lair, and Keith came to me.”

“Did they, now.” He hadn’t moved, but he had tensed all over. What radiated off him had her heart pounding.

She licked lips that had gone dry and whispered, “I think Keith told them something about me but not much. He would have wanted to keep me a secret because he wanted to be the big player, and he thought he could control me. He was hoping to set up a repeat business. But I think someone very nasty and Powerful was manipulating him, and now, thanks to me, they’ve got something of yours.”

“They do indeed.” He bared his teeth in that machete smile. “I’ll have to thank you later for that one.”

She whispered, “That charm scared the shit out of me. If I didn’t do what he wanted, I knew Keith would sing like a canary. Would he give me up? In a heartbeat, if it would save his own ass. Then they would come after me. So I was in that damned if you do, damned if you don’t place.”

“Where’s the charm now?” His eyes had gone pure gold, all dragon.

“It disintegrated when I used it.”

His eyes narrowed. “I would have felt my spells fail if it had nullified them, but they were all still in place when I went to investigate.”

She cupped her ear with one hand and rubbed her neck, a stressed, defensive gesture as she remembered the pain from using the charm. He moved closer as that pitiless dragon gaze dissected her face. She whispered, “The charm didn’t nullify anything. Between it and your spells, I felt like I was being ripped apart.”

“Yet you still got through them.”

She didn’t bother to reply. Instead she searched his face. His expression was savage, catapulting her thoughts forward to consequences that were more far-reaching than just her own future. Her lips felt numb. “A charm that Powerful could find anything hidden, couldn’t it?”