She bit her lips and scanned the room. He was healed somehow, and there was no longer a pool of green blood on his bed, and she couldn’t see where she’d thrown the stinger or the bar tongs, despite the fact that there was no one else in the room to move them.
“Satisfied?” he asked her.
“Not even vaguely,” she said. She watched her phrase spark a challenge in his eyes, one he just as quickly quenched—his face losing all the softness it’d held when he’d been asleep or injured—returning to its cold and slightly disapproving baseline.
“Go find Austin. He’ll pay you and take you home. Forget all the rest,” he said. She didn’t move a muscle, and he sighed. “Please, for the first time in your life—I’m sure—just do as you’re told.”
Her resolve to get to the bottom of things wavered. She’d already known this place was impossibly strange, but somehow, he was the strangest thing of all. Even without the insta-lust and green blood. There was just something…improbable…about him.
“Fine,” she said with a sigh. She’d spent enough nights trying to convince doctors that things were going bad before lab values proved her right to know that no one wanted to listen to the unbelievable until they had to.
“Thank you,” he said with a slight nod of his head. He turned and started walking toward what was presumably a bathroom. “Grab clothes from my closet and leave the fur behind. It has sentimental value.”
Before she could respond, the door closed behind him.
Chapter 6
When Damian closed the bathroom door, Grimalkin was waiting for him, sitting primly on the marble counter, tail lashing up and down.
“I put the stinger in your office for you and cleaned up all the blood.”
“And not a moment too soon,” Damian said, leaning back against the closed door. He wondered how long it’d take Andi to vacate the premises. She was right behind the door now, probably not even dressed, putting his clothing over her taut, tight body—that he’d gotten to briefly touch.
Why did you stop her? his dragon asked. Part of being a shifter was experiencing one another’s feelings when paying attention, and when Andi had started kissing him, his dragon had been fully present.
Because it wasn’t real. We stank of succubus.
His dragon pondered this. It felt real to me.
It had, hadn’t it? It’d seemed like the most real of dreams. Waking up to a beautiful girl taking an interest in him, wanting him to take interest back. Everything in him had longed to answer her, and he would have done so, eagerly—thoroughly—if he hadn’t remembered the succubus’s scent.
You should have let her continue, his dragon said.
And not for the first time, Damian realized his dragon wasn’t big on consent. It wasn’t worth getting into with the beast. Especially because his dragon was inside him; it knew how hard he’d been tempted. He thumped his head against the door’s solid wood. And if he kept thinking about it, he’d be as hard as the door behind him. Fucking pheromones.
“…and you told me that you would heal,” Grimalkin said, pointing his tail at Damian for emphasis, and Damian realized he’d lost some of his cat’s words while thinking about Andi. He pushed away from the door and into the here and now.
“I would have. Except for the succubus stinger in the way.”
“That you didn’t know that you were hit with.”
“I’ll admit I didn’t check that closely.”
Grimalkin wove his head back and forth in grand disappointment. “This is why you need a mate. It is easier to clean all the places that need cleaning if you have someone else’s tongue helping you.”
It wasn’t the first time his protector had urged him to find someone—and, unfortunately, Damian knew it would not be the last. “I’m alive, Grim. I mean, come on, a stinger might’ve made me pass out with poison for a little while, but it’s not like it would kill me.”
Grimalkin jumped down to the bathroom floor and reached up with both front paws, planting one on each of Damian’s thighs, gently pricking through his slacks with his claws. “If something happens to you,” he began, and Damian leaned down to pay attention as his cat’s eyes went so wide, they were almost all pupil. “Who is going to buy me cheese?”
Damian laughed and gently kneed the cat down. “It is tomorrow, now, isn’t it?” he said, reaching for his belt buckle.
“Very much so. But you can shower first,” Grimalkin allowed him, with a wrinkle of his nose.
The second Damian was gone, Andi tried a door that was not the bathroom, found his closet, and resisted the urge to just hide inside.
What on earth had just happened to her? She’d told Damian she wouldn’t ask questions—of him!—but that didn’t mean that she wouldn’t spend the next three months asking them of herself. What the hell? Green blood? And the entirely inappropriate way that she’d pounced on him? That wasn’t like her at all.
There are dragons in this world, my dear. Real dragons. Beware.
Auntie Kim’s warnings echoed in her mind, and after the night she’d just had, dragons seemed downright sensible, so, sure, why not?
She tamped down her upcoming freak-out and found jeans that were far too long for her, cuffing them up and belting them tight, before rifling through his closet for a shirt. They were all dress shirts, so she picked the nearest one and tied it at her waist—if she’d tucked it in, it’d have gone down to her knees.
Last but not least, she put on the shoes he’d evidently kicked off on his way in—which were far, far too big on her, like clown shoes almost—and tried to remind herself that it didn’t matter that she wasn’t getting her own shoes back, because with what she was getting paid she could definitely buy new ones.
She caught a blurry glance of herself in one of the many bedroom mirrors on her way out. She looked like she was very ineptly playing dress up. Whatever! She just needed to take a shower at her own place—and crawl into her own bed and forget this unbelievably strange night—and forget him. She glanced back at the closed bathroom door and heard the water turn on. Whatever was going on here, he was at the center of it. He was trouble, for sure.
Incredibly hot trouble.
Andi growled at herself, then picked up her bag of wet clothes left by the bathroom door and stepped out of the room.
“HEY!” she yelled, her voice echoing through the apparently empty corridors. “Is anyone here?”
To her surprise, Austin was waiting for her by the time she got to the lower level, and he seemed surprised to see her. “Damian didn’t take you home?”
“Nope,” she said, as his eyes took her outfit in.
“Damian…took you to bed?” Austin guessed.
Andi rolled her eyes. Not for lack of trying on her part for a bit there. “Also, no, although not that it’d be any of your business if he had.” She wondered what it meant that that’d been Austin’s first guess—did Damian have a revolving door? He was rich and impossibly handsome; of course, he got laid—all the time, probably.
And none of those women had realized he wasn’t human like she had.