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“Right, yes, absolutely,” she says, as if she’s remembering their standoff. “Especially after he flagged that I’m not wearing a genuine wedding ring.”

The ring. I can fix that. I will. But I’m too busy wondering whether she had such a good time this afternoon that Carl faded from the front of her mind to somewhere much less important. Too busy asking myself the question I increasingly wish I knew the answer to: what the hell happened in Vegas?

“Carter from my team invited him,” Sienna says.

“Sorry, what?”

“Carl,” she says. “Carter invited him in place of where I would have come to the event in years gone by. I want to think it wasn’t his way of intentionally trying to get at me but I think he’s hating on me.”

“Carter? Because he thinks he should have stepped up in Mitch’s absence?”

“I think so. He also takes issue with you and I being together.” She glances up to me and I briefly meet her eyes but glance back to the road, feeling a strange sort of unease that I don’t usually get, like sitting in the locker room before a big game, before I start telling myself that I’ve got this.

Got what? Got who? What game am I playing here?

“I mean, for all intents and purposes,” she corrects.

I push aside whatever has my insides feeling like a laundry machine and turn into the underground parking lot of our condo. We stop, waiting for the gate to roll up.

“Have you held a formal team meeting?” I ask.

“Not really.” We’re looking at each other in the shadow of the building and damn she’s pretty. “I haven’t wanted to be my usual bullish work-self. I mean, the team know their roles, I’m just slotting into Mitch’s for a while. I don’t want to overstep. I didn’t want to seem overbearing on day one and I’ve met most of the team before in any event. People don’t often respond well to overbearing me.” She raises a brow as if to say, you’re case in point, Jax.

“You’re not overstepping or overbearing, Sienna, you’re running the show. You should hold a meeting and make clear who’s in charge.”

I gently nudge the accelerator. “It’s no more than a pretraining huddle, right? People need to know who’s boss in a team and that’s you. Coach starts and ends every training session this way and I know you think we’re young kids fresh out of diapers but it calms everyone. Puts a sense of order and hierarchy in place. Yes, we’re a team and all have the same end goal but there’s one man in charge, one fall guy, and as much as Coach is often laying down the law, he’s also saying ‘I’m your protector’, and we respect that.”

She nods thoughtfully and I can tell she’s slipped back into work mode. “Maybe you’re right. Thanks.”

I roll us into the garage and park up. “Can we please go and devour that takeout now?”

Her lips quirk up and I’ve got my irritating as hell friend back. Friends, plural, because she’s still clutching the dragon to her.

In a highly unlikely twist, Dragon Twelve has got the girl and I have become a sounding board for a businesswoman.

What the fuck happened in Vegas?

23

OCTOBER

Jax

Time to Put a Ring on It

“I’ll take a matcha latte please,” I tell the barista in the matcha bar near where Sienna is having her reformer Pilates class this evening.

She’s been trying to convince me that switching energy drinks and caffeine in the evenings for something slow release like matcha – whatever that is – will stop me from sitting up gaming late into the evening, which also means screen time, and that combined change will result in better sleep.

I’m the king of sleeping. I nap like a trooper. But she’s read the sleep stats on my phone and apparently, I don’t get much deep sleep. I don’t know why she’s taking it upon herself to fix this; whether it’s because Sienna is Miss Fix-It, or because my gaming late into the evenings is driving her mad.

Whatever her motive, I find myself ordering my first ever matcha latte.

I’ve never been to this place and the way the barista bats her eyes at me, it’s possible she knows I’m a Dragon, though I’d like to give her the benefit of the doubt in assuming she doesn’t know I’m married. Because she’s definitely trying to flirt with me.

“Here you go, Jax,” she says, not depositing my latte on the collection counter but holding it up for me to take directly from her. Before I even twist the cup in my paw, I suspect she’s dropped her number on the label and sure enough, as I take my first sip of the drink, I see black scrawl telling me that her name is Jenny.

Regardless of how pretty Jenny is, the drink she handed me tastes like soil and grass in a nasty collision with milk.