Gambling on Her Dragon (Charmed in Vegas Book 2) (2 page)

What the hell was the beast thinking, nipping at her neck?

Mark her. Take her. Make her our mate.
 His wolf rattled the bars of its cage, looking for a weak spot.

No biting,
 he snarled back.
No claiming.

She wants us!
 The wolf fought back.
Look at her!

“Trey…” she moaned, pulling her legs higher around his waist, making his eyes roll back in his head.

Mate. Mate. My mate!
 His body took up the chant in time to the wild beat of his heart.

He shook his head. He might be dumb enough to get drunk in Vegas. Might be bold enough to take a girl he didn’t know to a hotel room. Might be crazy enough to think they were good together. But he wasn’t completely nuts. He didn’t need a mate. Didn’t want one. Hell, he didn’t even believe in destined mates.

Not even when she’s wrapped around you, screaming your name?

He shut out the wolf and concentrated on the pinch in his balls, the unbearable tightness in his dick. The last, hard thrust had him exploding deep inside her then free-falling over a glorious mountain cliff.

He panted into her skin. Hid his face in the sheets. Wondered when the lightning bolt would strike him down. He counted the beats of her heart, slowing down in time with his, and stroked her silky hair, breathing her in.

Slowly, she went from throes-of-passion tension to loose snuggle and brushed the length of his right eyebrow with her finger in wordless wonder.

When she slid her eyes shut, it scared the hell out of him. What if that was regret? Rejection? A precursor to good-bye?

He held her a little tighter, just in case.

She twisted gently in his arms, not quite making an escape, not quite letting down her guard. Just settling into a spooned position, exactly how that crazy night started out.

Except it hadn’t started there. Trey racked his brain, trying to remember something. Anything.

But he couldn’t quite focus on anything because the feel of her in his arms affected him like a drug, and he drifted off again in spite of the thousand questions rocking his hazy mind.

T
rey dreamed of roulette wheels and spitting slot machines. Flying aces and bleeding hearts and the king of spades…

He woke with a jolt, reaching for Kaya in the dark.

He reached a little farther. Not there.

The sheets were still warm, though, so she couldn’t be far. But where did she go?

The curtains flapped in a weak desert breeze, and he rolled toward the balcony. He sighed deeply at the sight of Kaya leaning against the rail, looking up at the stars. At least, whatever stars were visible in the lights of a city that didn’t recognize the boundary between day and night.

She was an ivory statue against the night sky, chiseled by a master artist who liked his models sinewy and tall and strong. Feminine at the same time, though, thanks to her light curves and the way she tilted her hips.

Hips he’d recently had squeezed against his in the horizontal samba of the very best kind.

Torn between admiring the goddess and calling the mystery woman back to his side, he just watched her. Who was she? What was she doing in Vegas? Where was she going next?

His mind spun off on a thousand fantasies. Maybe she was road-tripping, too. Heading west, like him, on her very first trip to the Pacific coast. Maybe they could travel together. Maybe he could learn more about her than the sleek lines of her body and the sharp shudder of her breath when he moved inside her. More than the way she caught her lower lip in her teeth or the way her eyes made his insides sing. Maybe—

Something scratched at the door, and he sat up with a jolt, straining his ears.

“Shh. Pick the lock,” someone whispered outside.

“Step back,” a deep voice replied. The kind of deep voice that belonged to a big, bad bouncer-type. A human might have slept right through that, but his wolf ears caught every word.

“Two minutes from now, all that cash is ours.”

Cash? What cash?

“Yeah,” the second voice replied. “And the bounty, too.”

Trey turned and glanced at the woman, who was standing tense now, coiled like a spring.

A memory came hurtling out of nowhere and smacked him on the back of his head. Cards. Poker. Chips. Lots and lots of chips, standing in uneven piles. Two hands reaching out and scooping the piles toward his chest.
His
 hands, because there was the little scar on the knuckles on the right.

Apparently, he’d gotten lucky in more than one way last night. With cards
and
 with a girl.

His gut lurched as he blinked back to reality and studied her. What if the money was the only thing that had drawn her to him?

Don’t be ridiculous
, his wolf huffed.
She’s not the type.

He wanted to scoff. Like the beast could judge her character on the basis of a couple of hot, hard fucks.

Heavenly fucks
, the wolf corrected him.
And believe me, our mate isn’t the type.

Right. She’d jumped in the sack with a stranger. What type did that make her?

A sudden itch formed on the back of his neck. What type did that make
him
?

They stood staring at each other in the darkness. Her eyes were so shiny, they might even have been wet.

The doorknob rattled again, and the man outside swore.

Kaya whirled, and Trey jerked his head toward her again. What had she been looking for, leaning over the balcony rail like that?

Some way to escape, dumbass,
 a distant part of his mind registered.

He sprang out of bed and stretched to his full height. His considerable height, thank goodness, because what was about to come through the door was plenty big, too.

His nostrils flared, catching a musky, cave scent. Crap — bears. The two thugs outside were bear shifters.

Something scraped on the balcony, and he glanced back. It was like a goddamn tennis match, with the door on his right and the balcony on his left. The balcony where Kaya grabbed a canvas bag that looked awfully familiar as she pulled a chair up to the railing.

The railing she climbed up on.

Every nerve in his body screamed.
Holy shit!

He leaped to his feet and rushed toward the balcony.

“Don’t jump!”

He had no clue what floor they were on, but even a beat-up, outdated hotel like this had to be high enough to kill.

Kaya, though, just leaned farther over the edge.

“Stop!” he yelled, fighting past the curtains, tripping over the track of the sliding door.

She teetered on the rail, eyeing the fall.

“Don’t!” He scrambled to his feet, reaching out.

She might have said something, but he couldn’t hear anything but the pounding of his heart.

Everything slurred into slow motion. Her toes curled over the rail, right at his eye level. Her arms swept wide, and the bag dangled under one of them. The long locks of her hair played in the wind as if she were at a lakeside and not several stories up. Six stories, minimum, he decided, eyeing the space beyond the rails. No pool waiting to catch his lover, either, just a dirty back lot.

His hamstrings screamed as he hurtled upward. His bare feet were cold on the tile floor. He stretched desperately, reaching past her fingers to grab at her wrist.

The scent of open desert reached his nostrils, mocking his effort to cheat death.

Her knees bent, straightened, and her feet left the rail. Airborne.

Her fingers slipped past his. For one glorious, hope-filled instant, his hand was warm. The next, it was empty, and his heart slammed against his ribs.

He crashed into the cold metal of the wrought iron railing and heaved halfway out, still reaching.

“No!” he screamed from the bottom of his soul, like she wasn’t a perfect stranger but his closest, oldest friend.

His own cry echoed in his ears as he watched her hurtle to certain death.

She didn’t fall the way people in movies fell, though. Not stone-stiff, like she was already dead. Not clawing at the air, searching for some ephemeral grip. Not screeching or flailing one bit.

Nope. She dove. The most graceful swan dive he’d ever seen. Arms wide, legs straight, body curved. She did it so casually, he nearly double-checked to see if there was a pool down there, after all.

Then her arms spread wider, and he blinked a little, because it looked a lot more like a skydiver’s controlled free fall than a deathly drop. More like a glide, actually, with shoulders so broad they might have been extending to wings. Feet so tight, they might have been a tail.

He gripped the railing tighter and stared. Shadows dappled over her body until he thought he was seeing things. Her arms looked unnaturally wide. Her fingers so long, he could make out each one of them.

Kaya?

He blinked as his death-bound lover swooped upward in a long, graceful arc. Watched as her skin gave way to glittering scales and her arms stretched into leathery wings. Her legs blurred into her body as a tail extended from her back with a long, graceful flick.

Her tail snapped like a whip, her wings beat, and she shot up like an arrow.

He gaped as the truth slowly registered. His mystery lover was a dragon shifter. A beautiful, petite dragon with scales tinted reddish-black.

He brought his hand to his nose and sniffed, testing her scent. The shifter part was faint and heavily layered with the fragrance of sex and desire. Whatever weird drug he’d been under the influence of seemed to have intoxicated his nose enough that he hadn’t picked up the shifter part until now.

And now was too late.

She swung her neck north and the long body followed with an effortless beat of the wings. Her tail arced, her body rippled, and she flew out of sight behind a towering high-rise. She shot out the other side then rose against the orb of the nearly full moon with that bag clutched in her claw.

Trey clung to the railing hard — so hard, he might as well have been swinging on the wrong side. He strained his eyes, but the night sky had already secreted her away. A second later, he slumped to his ass on the balcony.

Lover…dragon…

Dragon with a bag…

Wait a minute. His bag? The bag he’d put his money in?

He groaned and held his head in his hands — for all of two seconds until the door to the room crashed open and two figures burst inside. Human except for their fangs.

The one on the left crouched into a wary attack pose. The one on the right grinned and strode forward with a cocky step.

“Wolf,” the thug growled, slamming a fist into his own hand in a warm-up blow, “you’re going to regret ever coming to our town.”

K
aya pulled an extra tight loop, trying to clear her head. She dipped a wing, fell into a barrel roll, and then climbed straight toward the moon. No matter what she tried, though, she was still tingling all over — and not from shifting.

Damn it! She was still tingling from
him
. Which was really, really not what she’d had planned for the night.

But crap, nothing had gone as planned. All she’d been after was a quick eighty thousand dollars. Sex had never been part of the plan. It was supposed to be a quick in-and-out job—

She stopped the thought right there with a grimace. Bad word choice, because somehow she’d let the night turn into an entirely different kind of in-and-out. Not her going in and eventually coming out of the casino, thousands richer than she’d started. No — it had been Trey, sliding in and out of her body. Gripping her hands like he never wanted to let go. Not just exploring her body, but worshiping it. Looking into her eyes as if he was just as transfixed as she was by whatever magic it was that had sprung up between the two of them that night.

She dove into another roll and used the chance to fan her face with her left wing, because just thinking about Cowboy Scrumptious had her overheating again.

Not just a man. A wolf,
 the little voice at the back of her mind reminded her.

A werewolf who looked just like the mystery man who starred in her lustiest fantasies. She’d always thought that face was a figment of her imagination, but now, she wasn’t so sure.