Chapter Three
This was a bad idea. The worst. Blake knew it before the woman named Heather, who had answered his request for a date, even sat down. She was pretty, yes, but it was clear that she was guarded. To make matters worse, the coffee was causing him heartburn, and his unease in that world was apparent. He didn’t really know how money worked, they did not have it in his world, and the woman had a shielded look on her face that didn’t go away while he was trying to pay for her drink, with what was apparently the wrong amount of human cash.
He was frustrated and exhausted, and he was also worried that he was going to have to go back to his own world before he got what he needed.
What he needed was a child.
His line, a noble line, was in danger of going extinct. His father had committed a crime that broke dragon law. That his father had had to break that law was not in doubt. Many of the elders that had known his father felt badly about the consequences of his action, especially since it had been so necessary. Necessary, and an action none of the other dragons would undertake because they could not face those consequences. It had to be his father, and it had been.
As a result, he, Blake, was not allowed to mate with the female dragons in his world. That meant he could not have children. No children meant his line was about to end. That was something that he could not allow. That rankled all the way to the core. He wanted a child, wanted to see his line continue, naturally. It was not so much to ask, really.
To complicate it all so much further, his gaze kept going to the gorgeous woman with the dark hair and stunning figure set off by a pair of some kind of pants that clung to her long legs and a blouse in an emerald hue that showed off every one of the enviable curves of her waist and breasts. She kept looking at them, him and his date, and he wondered if it was a bad thing, in the human world, to leave one date and sit down with a different woman.
Probably.
Heather, the woman, said something but he didn’t really hear her. His heartburn was rumbling again, and he had to hold it back. He’d belched a moment before, and he’d had to tamp down the real and deadly fire that had wanted to come up in his chest as he had. Setting a woman on fire was not the way to win her heart, of that he was sure.
He sighed inwardly. There were human women on his world, the descendants of the ones who had been caught up in the same curse that had seen his father and other knights being turned into dragons and sent to the world that they now inhabited, but since they were part of his world, they too were off limits.
He knew some female dragons lived in their human guise in this world and he had been hoping to find one of them with that stupid dating app, but all he had gotten were human women answering. This was his fourth date in six hours, and none of them had worked out.
One woman had talked incessantly. He’d wanted to flee when she had begun chattering about something called a celebrity and then went from there to the subjects of her shoes and her hair. He had made an excuse and bolted out of there. The second date was a woman who had shown up with a bad attitude and practically accused him of being a gigolo. He had no idea what that meant and since he was not sure if she had somehow known that he was a dragon, or if she thought him something even worse, he’d left that date too, and swiftly.
He’d barely sat down at the third when the woman burst into tears and then spent an hour telling him about her ex, and how much he looked like him. He should have skipped this date. His luck was all bad, and he had to get back to his world before his absence was truly noted.
He finally just blurted out, “I need a child. I’m willing to pay…” and Heather, his date, immediately headed for the door, but not before cursing him out.
Shit. She was the last chance he had, so he followed her. To his surprise, the woman that had caught his eye and interest was with her, and they were both running as fast as they could.
He overtook them easily and said, “Wait! Listen…” And the woman who’d been sitting at the other table promptly turned around and sprayed something in his face! It was delicious, all peppery and spicy. He licked it off his lips, realized it was in his eyes, and knuckled them to get the stuff out of there. “I just need a child…”
Bad thing to say, apparently, because both of them started screaming. Blake sighed inwardly and tried to give them his most charming smile. “I have money, lots of it…”
The sound of wings beating against the sky broke off his words. He looked upward, and his mood went flatter than ever. Max, in dragon form, arrowed down from the sky. Blake knew things were about to get much worse.
Both women were screaming now. Heather grabbed a board and started swinging. He ducked easily, but that board whacked across Max’s forearm. Max, glaring and clearly pissed off, said, “Goddammit, Blake! Get her under control!”
Good idea. Blake knew he had to do a spell, fast. These two women could not be allowed to remember that they had seen a dragon, or to keep screaming like they were. They were definitely going to draw unwanted attention, and that was something he and Max both couldn’t afford.
Heather was trying to kill him with that old board and Blake, determined to get a good grip on her in order to cast that forgetful spell over her, clutched her to him, hoping to get her under control. Max, no longer willing to deal with any of it, grabbed him. Blake knew Max was about to yank him through the portal. He was loosening his grip on Heather when the other woman darted in and grabbed Heather by the arm, doing her best to yank her away from Blake.
It happened so fast he didn’t have time to think. Max, who was strong enough to do it, suddenly launched his body upward toward the portal. They were too far off the ground to let either of the women go. They’d die if he did.
He knew Max knew that too. Blake looked down to see the humans stepping into the alley. The women had stopped screaming right about the time Max had lifted off, probably out of shock, and Max was moving too fast for their eyes to spot them, but now there was only one option: to take the women into their world, give them a forgetting spell and send them back through the portal.
It was official. Trying to find a human woman willing to have his child was the worst idea he had ever had.
They landed right below Ragalan, the castle where he and the rest of the dragons lived. The two women stared at him, both of them clearly confused and angry. He didn’t blame them.
Their world was crowded with people and those automobiles and other vehicles. It was smoggy and thick with sound and pollution. But in this new world, there were no roads in sight, and no towns or people or stores, none of the things that they were used to. There was a village, the last bastion of human habitation, but it was on the other side of that mountain that they stood upon and while there were humans there, they were so different from those two women he doubted that they would find much comfort in them.
Heather tottered toward him and shouted, “Take us back right now!”
“I can’t.” He chewed at his bottom lip. He would have liked to do just that, but the portal, that rift in the sky that allowed him to go into their world and back from it, was rapidly closing. He could see the eye of it diminishing, and he knew there was no way to take them back just then.
They stared at him. Remorse came soaring in. He had always acted without thinking and usually he was the only one who got hurt by that, but now he was facing down two women who had gotten caught up in his actions and the consequences of them, something he really disliked given his own circumstances.
Before he could apologize, the Orcs showed up.
