Tropical Dragon's Destiny Read online

  Had he frightened it? It extended its legs, four limbs in each direction, and writhed in place as it made more of its trilling noises. Its belly was soft-looking and fluffy. Clearly this was an invitation for affection.

  “It’s a trap,” Scarlet said from behind him.

  Mal, alarmed that he hadn’t heard her approach, let his hand fall carelessly to the young cat’s belly.

  The cat instantly curled into itself and reached up with all four paws, wrapping itself around Mal’s forearm with suddenly extended claws. Sharp teeth gnawed at his wrist, hard enough that he felt the prick through his shirt sleeve, but not quite hard enough to draw blood.

  Mal bit back a yelp of surprise and forced himself not to fling the little monster; it was clearly young and just as clearly playing; once he’d gotten past the shock of the attack he recognized that it hadn’t caused any real pain, even when it kicked out with its rear feet.

  Ah, his dragon said. Our mate is raising it as a guardian.

  Mal was pretty sure she didn’t need one.

  “Hsst, Tyrant,” Scarlet said, sounding amused. “She’s only playing,” she explained to Mal.

  Tyrant—fittingly named—gave Mal one final gnaw and then let go. Ears back against her head, she leapt for the floor, raced under the desk, and streaked out into the courtyard, nearly crashing into the door frame as her paws scrabbled on the hard tile.

  “She’s a feisty thing,” Mal observed.

  “You were going to explain why my resort is in terrible peril,” Scarlet reminded him. “And I was going to decide if I should believe you.”

  Mal came around the desk so that he was standing close to her, breathing in the green scent of her, enraptured by the marble perfection of her pale skin and the fiery strands of her gleaming hair. Her eyelashes were coal black over her endless eyes.

  “Scarlet Stanson,” he said after a moment. “Aaric Lyons’ secretary.”

  “That was a long time ago,” Scarlet said coldly.

  “Do you know, there was a while I suspected you were an impersonator. I thought you’d hacked the Lyons’ account, found the lease contract, and decided it would be convenient to pretend to be the only person with the power to re-open the resort. For a short time, I even thought you might be working with Alistair Beehag, to supply him with rare shifters for his zoo.”

  Her cool mask cracked to hot fury. “I would never—”

  “I know,” Mal said swiftly. “That theory didn’t last much longer than the others that I had. But it was a surprise to find out you weren’t a shifter,” he said softly. “It raised so many questions.”

  “Alice might have been lying,” Scarlet suggested, confirming that she knew about Alice’s deal with Mal. “Or maybe she just got the wrong information. Perhaps even on purpose...”

  Mal laughed. Her misdirection was convincing, but: “I know you’re not a shifter.”

  “How can you be so sure?” Scarlet asked.

  “If you were a shifter, you would have recognized me as your mate when we met.”

  Her entire face changed, melting into astonishment and wonder as her lips parted in shock. “Your... mate?” Her voice was full of longing, and she seemed to hear herself and drew back a step. “I don’t know what kind of joke this is...”

  “That’s not something I would joke about,” he told her. He closed the distance between them with a decisive step. “Scarlet...”

  She tipped her face up to gaze at him in confusion and desire and didn’t pull back as he cupped her jaw and bent to kiss her.

  For a moment, she was stone against his lips, then he tasted a wistful sigh and she was opening her mouth to kiss him back.

  Her arms slipped up around him and he pulled her close against him, twining fingers into her upswept hair. He didn’t feel any pins, but he must have dislodged them, because her hair was suddenly alive around them.

  She was all the wildness and strength she promised, all the untamed passion he’d known lurked behind her icy control. She was desperate and hungry and she was his.

  She was his.

  Mal had never felt such joy and satisfaction and aching need. She would come safely away from the island with him and he would worship her for the rest of their long lives.

  He would never be alone again...

  He lifted her to the top of her desk, hands at her waist, and a pile of papers tilted and slipped off the back of the desk.

  Scarlet didn’t seem to care.

  She was pushing his shirt off his shoulders, hands caressing down his arms as she bared them. The cuffs were buttoned too tight to slip from his wrists so she was thwarted above his elbows, but she was busy using her fingers to explore, wandering across his chest as they kissed again, desperately and deeply.

  He had one hand up under her skirt exploring the plane of her thigh, one at her neck, and her skin was every bit as silky as he’d imagined it must be. He needed her, like he’d never needed anything, and triumph rose in his chest because finally, finally... The months they’d sparred, the phone calls, the letters... it was like the longest foreplay in the world.

  And now they would have forever.

  Forever, he thought, then he realized in shock that his hand had reached her hip and not found the line of underwear he was expecting. He laughed into her kiss, delighted and amused as his fingers walked over her perfect thigh to verify the shocking truth: she wasn’t wearing undergarments.

  Conservatively dressed, fiercely independent, perfectly put together Scarlet Stanson was completely naked under her modest skirt. And when he touched her clit, carefully and gently, she gave a whimper of desire and spread her legs for him, tearing at his shirt, desperately seeking his skin.

  Yes, his dragon purred. Ours...

  Mal had only a split second to recognize Scarlet’s hand, flat on his chest, before he was smashing into the opposite wall, hard enough to rattle every book on the shelves.

  He was confused, blinking at Scarlet, and his dragon mantled his wings in surprise. Hadn’t he managed to get a few of her buttons undone? But she was fully dressed again, bearing down on him from across the room, and even her hair was neatly back in its bun. She was somehow larger and the air in the room felt hard to breathe.

  “How dare you!” she snarled. “Was this your plan all along? Did you think you could bind my people? Did you think you could seduce me into complacency and steal them from under my nose? Is this why you wanted the resort so badly?”

  Mal stared, still not making sense of how everything had changed so completely in so little time. This felt like much more than just moving too fast... then he realized that Scarlet had gotten one of his sleeves off—who knows where the buttons had gone—and the runic tattoos that swirled down his left forearm were clearly visible.

  Her sole experience with warlock tattoos would have been Corbin, who stole shifters and bound them to drain their magical energy.

  “Scarlet—”

  “You won’t get a single one of them without going through me,” she hissed. “And good luck with that!”

  The vines that were draped around the room had come to life and were snaking down from every direction to twist around his wrists and ankles and neck. He tore free from one to find another, and another, swiftly unfurling new growth at him.

  “I’m not here for them,” he protested.

  “Me, then?” Scarlet was standing at arm's length, and Mal didn’t think he imagined the fact that she was taller now, looking him straight in the eyes with blazing anger. “Did you think you could bind me?”

  “Scarlet, wait—” Mal was trying to unbutton his remaining sleeve, but the vines and the pressure of magic in the room were making it a struggle. He muttered a quick incantation and the buttons burst from the sleeve so that he could slip it off. “I don’t need to bind anyone,” he insisted, holding up his right forearm. “I’m a dragon shifter, my own power is more than sufficient.”

  Scarlet paused as the runes on both of his arms, now exposed, flared with b
rief light, and the air seemed a little less thick.

  Mal used her moment of hesitation to rip free of the vines and close the distance between them.

  “Corbin and his cronies used a terrible perversion of ancient dragon magic. If the Phoenix had not taken care of them, I would have done so personally. Your guests—your people—have nothing to fear from me.”

  “So it’s only me that you’ve got some sort of vendetta against,” Scarlet hissed.

  Mal drew a deep breath for patience and it seemed less dense. The vines still whispered threateningly behind and above him, but didn’t move to try to restrain him again. “I don’t have a vendetta,” he said firmly. “But I can explain, if you’d just listen.”

  “I’m not leaving the island,” Scarlet insisted. “You can’t frighten me, and you can’t fool me.”

  “Dammit, Scarlet,” Mal said, letting all of his frustration show. “Stop being so stubborn. Listen and judge for yourself. Sit down with me and let me tell you what I know. Please.”

  The anger seemed to have leaked out of her, leaving only wariness. “Fine,” she said, after a moment of silence. “Outside.”

  A door from her office led to a tidy, sparsely decorated bedroom with sliding glass doors that opened onto a small, private lawn with a round table and two chairs. Mal took one sideways look at the bed as they passed through, wishing things had gone a different way.

  Soon, his dragon growled. She cannot resist us long, and we will take her safely from this place.

  Chapter 12

  The sun was still high in the sky, a blazing coin above them in a bright blue sky. It was baking hot on Scarlet’s lawn, though the worst of the afternoon heat was past.

  She should have made him put his shirt back on, missing buttons or not, Scarlet thought as she settled into one of the chairs. His chest was terribly distracting and she scowled to think how easily he had weaseled his way through her defenses.

  He wasn’t her mate. That could only be another half-truth to wear her down. He hadn’t actually said he was her mate, had he? Only that if she were a shifter she’d have known he was her mate... there was surely some sort of lawyer loophole there. She’d been a fool to let him kiss her, too surprised, too full of longing and desire to be sensible.

  He clearly knew her greatest weakness. She needed to keep more distance, be more careful, and shut down her instincts more thoroughly.

  And his bare chest was suggesting that the table between them was not nearly wide enough for the distance she needed. She couldn’t stop replaying his kiss, his words, the feeling of his hands over her skin...

  “What do you have to tell me?” she demanded, furious with herself for continuing to let him bait her with his sexual appeal.

  “I’m a dragon shifter,” Mal said, and he raised his arms to her in demonstration. “A warlock dragon from a long proud line going back for thousands of years. Our magic has quietly been keeping order between shifters and humans... and other things... for centuries.”

  “Other things...” Scarlet said suspiciously.

  “There are old things in the world. Older than people. Older than dragons. And one of those things sleeps beneath this island.”

  Did he think she would be surprised by this revelation? “I know of this creature,” she said cautiously. “It has never bothered me or mine.” She could not help adding, “Which is more than I can say about you.”

  “I have never tried to destroy the world,” Mal retorted. “And if—when—it wakes, it will attempt to take a vengeance that will drown not just this island, but all islands, and all continents, and it will not rest until the world has been destroyed.”

  Scarlet scowled at him skeptically, but she was listening carefully. “What is it?”

  “It is a great wyrm with two heads, covered in deadly sharp feathers. It can appear as a human, but don’t be deceived. It is not a shifter, it is a powerful, old creature of air and water and it is wrathful. It is instinct and anger, not reason. It is wild, and vicious... and it’s going to be really pissed off when it wakes up.”

  “You’re saying this thing is just... napping beneath my island?”

  “Not just sleeping, but imprisoned as well; my family is thorough. Eleven hundred years ago, my great-grandfather battled him into submission and built a cage around him deep beneath the island.”

  “Why not just kill him?” Scarlet asked. “Wouldn’t that have been simpler?”

  “It is immortal. There is no way to kill it because it’s not really alive. Imprisonment was the only choice. Every three hundred years, the spells are renewed, the cage is rebuilt, and the wyrm is cast down again. My grandfather did so the second time, and then my father, almost two hundred years ago.”

  “And now it’s your turn?” Scarlet wrenched her eyes up from his damned chest and scowled, trying to make herself focus. “That math doesn’t add up.”

  Mal’s eyes were no less distracting than his muscle-knotted shoulders. “We should have decades more, but we don’t. I don’t understand what has happened, but the cage is crumbling, and its slumber has been disturbed.”

  “Corbin?” Scarlet proposed. “Gizelle said he was... noisy.”

  “He might have precipitated the creature waking, but I don’t understand the damage to the cage that I’ve seen. It’s less recent, more insidious. It’s as if it has slowly rusted... the magic feels old and weak, and it’s leaked into all of the rock around it.” If Mal full of confidence was devastating to Scarlet’s peace of mind, Mal admitting that he didn’t know something was even more unsettling. He raked a hand through his hair and gave a confused shrug. “I checked the wyrm’s prison myself when Rupert Beehag began construction and it was as strong and impenetrable as ever at that time. There’s been some change, something new since then. I thought it might be Gizelle’s broken magic... but it could just as easily be you.”

  Scarlet drew in her breath with a hiss. “You think I did this?”

  Mal met her gaze without flinching. “I don’t know what you are,” he reminded her. “I don’t know how you work. But since you came here, a spell that previously withstood hundreds of years containing the power of creature older than the continents has crumbled to almost nothing in the span of a few decades.”

  Scarlet stared back at him, more dismayed than she wanted him to know.

  “I don’t think you necessarily did anything on purpose,” Mal added swiftly. “I know you well enough to know that you aren’t trying to release an old thing to destroy or rule the world. Maybe this has happened because of some aspect of what you are. Or some side effect of something you’re doing here. If I knew more about your nature...”

  This could be her fault? Scarlet almost drowned in the guilt that rose in her throat.

  Mal leaned forward onto his elbows, which made all the planes of his shoulders change in a terribly distracting way.

  “You were never my enemy, Scarlet,” he said.

  “You certainly never treated me like an ally,” Scarlet retorted sharply. “If you needed me to leave so badly, why didn’t you come tell me all this in the first place?”

  “Would you have gone? Would you have believed me?” Mal countered. “Until I saw the radar maps of the storms this week, I thought I had plenty of time to solve this puzzle—years if not decades. I had no idea that Corbin would do anything so stupid as start to wake the creature up, and I didn’t realize that the cage was failing until I got here. I thought I could play the long game, and I could apply just enough pressure that you would do what was best... best for you... without having to step in and force your hand.”

  “Is that what this is to you?” Scarlet asked scathingly. “A game? Where you are the superior chessmaster sitting back in his throne dictating the lives of those less worthy?”

  “No,” Mal said at once. Then, hesitantly, “Maybe.” He raked his hand through his hair again and Scarlet had to glare at her hands to stop herself from staring at his chest. She really should have made him put that shirt
back on.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, so unexpectedly that Scarlet had to look at him again. She nearly drowned in his intense golden-brown eyes. “I played this whole situation poorly and if I had it to do over, I would have done things very differently. I made assumptions I never should have made. I expected you to...”

  “...Roll over and take gobs of money to move somewhere else like a good little game piece.” Scarlet laughed humorlessly. “And I was having none of that.”

  She tried to focus on the larger problem. “Can you make the cage again, from scratch? Can you set the spell again, but early? Do you have that power?”

  “Of course,” Mal said with maddening confidence. “I have trained all of my life for it, and have all the power and knowledge necessary. But doing so will wake the wyrm. I will have to fight him into submission to build the cage around him and that will raze the island. There was not a tree left standing here after the last battle.”

  Scarlet could not quite keep the noise of dismay from escaping her pursed lips.

  “That, that, is why I have been trying to get you to release the resort. I thought I had plenty of time until I got here, but the end result was always going to be the same. The island will certainly be destroyed and everyone still on it will die.”

  The look of sympathy in his eyes was both unwelcome and unnerving. “I understand that you built this place with Aaric Lyons and that you have some debt to him that you feel compels you to continue his dream. I know that this resort is your calling and that your hard work and perseverance has seen it to fruition. And I admire that, Scarlet. I admire you. This place you’ve built is impressive, and you’ve done it against incredible odds... myself included. You don’t want my charity, that’s fine, I more than respect that. So take the three-hundred-fifty million you raised by yourself. Go buy a beautiful new island and build a better resort. I’ll fight my fight, reset the spells, and the last of Beehag’s terrible zoo will crumble to dust and slide into the sea. Everyone will live happily ever after. You have to see why this is the only path ahead.”