Chapter Eight

Dakota woke in an unfamiliar place with her head pounding. She rolled onto her side slowly. The room was huge, the walls curving around her. At the other end of the room was a hearth blazing with flames. Worn rugs covered the stone floor, displaying all kinds of mismatched colors and designs if only to keep the cold of the stone at bay. Someone had thrown a soft blanket over her form after laying her atop the bed.

She pushed it aside and felt her hips protest. She was still wearing the red dress that Clary had stuffed her into, but the night was a blur. No matter how much she tried, she couldn’t remember what happened after she’d left the man at the bar.

Her heart thumped and panic rose inside of her. Had her drink been spiked? It would explain the fuzzy memories, but she didn’t know why her hips hurt the way they did. The panic created a lump in her throat. Tears burned her eyes. She wrapped her arms around herself.

Someone had put a drug into her drink and kidnapped her. She prayed that nothing else had happened while she’d been out, but she had no way of knowing. That terrified her.

The sound of footsteps approaching made fear rush through her. The door ahead of her cracked open and she instinctually scrambled to the head of the mattress. The man from the bar appeared in the doorway, his hair mussed with a mug in one hand and a white bottle in the other. She stared at the bottle, fearing that he was going to try to drug her again. Fear wasn’t going to get her out of here alive, she told herself.

“You’re awake,” he said with clear surprise. “You must feel like absolute shit.”

“Where am I?” Her voice trembled despite her attempt to control her fear.

“You’re at my home,” he said, softly. “Would you like a cup of coffee? I also brought some pain killers. Nothing strong, just the stuff you can get at any drug store.”

She shook her head. She pulled the blanket over herself as though it was some kind of shield. He ran a hand through his mussed hair. She realized at this point that he wasn’t wearing a shirt.

“Oh, right. You have to be really confused right now.” The man sat down on the floor across from her. “My name is Wesley, if that helps you at all. Wesley Taniff. We met last night.”

“I remember that,” Dakota snapped.

He nodded, surprisingly patient with her. “After you accused me of lying you went to your friend’s table and took her drink from her. I think one of the men she was flirting with had spiked her drink. Instead of giving up, one of the men took advantage of the situation and carried you out of the bar. I found him…” She watched his jaw clench as he looked past her. He was angry, she thought. “I found him… trying to hurt you. I put an end to it, but I didn’t know where to take you that you would be safe other than here.”

“And where is here?” Dakota asked nervously. She glanced around again, taking in the cozy setting that the room really was. It would have been a lovely place had she come in on her own terms. Now, she marked where the door was, where the windows were and readied her body to run. Still, a little voice in the back of her mind told her that there was no threat. It whispered to her that she was as safe as she would ever be.

“This is my home,” he said before standing. His jaw was still clenched tight and he fisted a hand in his hair. She noticed that he fought to look anywhere but at her.

“What is wrong with you?” Dakota asked, inching forward, off the bed.

He closed his eyes before turning to her. When they opened again, they were no longer the soft blue that had entranced her the night before. Instead, she looked into golden eyes, the pupils narrowed into slits. He dragged in a breath through his nose.

Dakota’s blood ran cold. She couldn’t be here. This was absolutely the last thing that she needed. Her future was ruined. Once she set foot out of here, the school would have her on a plane back home and her grant to study abroad would be lost.

Her life was over.

His eyes changed again. The gold swirled away and the blue flooded back in. The tension that had been gripping his jaw dissipated and a look of concern flashed over his face. He stepped forward before stopping himself.

“I didn’t mean to frighten you,” he said, his voice unusually small.

“You don’t understand,” Dakota snapped. “Do you have any regard for the lives of others? What you’ve done has ruined my life.”

“I saved you from being hurt, from being used and left in an alley,” he roared.

Dakota didn’t flinch. She didn’t back down. She stared the man that was really a dragon in the eye. Anger burned inside of her. It consumed her, a better feeling than the lost desperation that had flooded her a second ago. She wanted to be angry at this beautiful man, Wesley, as he called himself.

Instead of arguing, he took the wind out of her sails by spinning around. He left, slamming the door behind him. She was suddenly alone in the room. She let herself fall down onto the mattress. She hadn’t believed that dragons liked to kidnap women. She thought of the dragon that she’d run across the day before; how playful it had seemed. She hadn’t been afraid of that dragon, hadn’t thought that it would run off with her. It had made her stupid. That dragon had come back for her.

Her eyes fell on her small purse, leaning carefully against the side of the bed. She reached down and found that her cell phone was still inside of it. If she really had been kidnapped, wouldn’t he have taken her cell phone? It seemed logical. Why would he have left it with her?

There were several messages and missed calls waiting for her when she punched the home button. Nearly all of them were from her new roommate, Clary. They told a story of how Clary realized the man she intended to bring back from the dorm had been a sleaze ball. The man had tried to push her into a cab with him and she very luckily managed to score a well-placed kick before running to safety. Her roommate asked where she was, expressing concern because she realized that her drink had been drugged.

She opened a message to reply to her roommate. Once her fingers hovered over the screen, she realized that she may have over reacted. Wesley hadn’t lied to her about how he’d found her, how he’d rescued her. The night may have been a blur to her, but now she knew there was a reason why. She remembered grabbing Clary’s nearly full drink and throwing it back.

Instead of asking for help, she told her roommate that she was safe and okay. She moved on to the messages from her mother. What would Bea think if she knew where her daughter currently was? Her mother would lose her mind. She sent her mother a vague update, leaving out many of the large events of the day before.

After the messages were sent, she sat on the edge of the mattress and stared at the screen. If she called for help now, the school would know where she’d been. They would know who she had been with. Dakota found that not only did she not want to lose her chance to study abroad, but she didn’t want Wesley to get into trouble.

So, she tucked the phone back into her purse and stood up.