Chapter One
Three months earlier…
Jacques Moldvan slipped his arm around his cousin Emily. She leaned back against the rail allowing the breeze to lift her hair. Basking in the rays of sunshine sparkling off the water, she leaned back against the railing. A breeze lifted strands of her hair while Jacques tilted down his sunglasses and peered out over them to the other passengers aboard the ferry.
“You’re absolutely glowing,” he glanced back at her, smiled to keep up their rouse of a happily married couple.
“Think so?” Emily ran her hand down her fake pregnant belly, concealed beneath her Caspian lace party dress.
His gaze swept down the exposed length of her legs. “If you grow anymore tonight you’ll be up to your crotch.”
“Let us hope that Aunt Margaret’s information is correct, or we’ll both need to cover our asses.” Emily clutched her fake belly as the ferry lurched forward in the water.
Jacques caught a glimpse of golden hair, sparkling in the afternoon’s sun glow. His inner dragon stirred, and his pulse increased. He craned his head to find the owner, but Emily leaned and blocked his vision.
He pushed up his sunglasses. It was a small boat and they were all headed to the same island.
“I can guarantee the lord of the manor will be more interested in yours than mine.” Jacques lifted the corner of her skirt and she slapped his hand away. He loved toying with her.
“He’s probably as old as the manor itself.” Emily turned bracing both hands on the rail. Around them, other guests of tonight’s dinner party and art exhibit at Giresun Manor filled the ferry. Several ladies stood, holding their three-inch spiked heels in their hands and clutching the arm of their escort.
So far, he hadn’t seen a glimpse of the blonde again.
Jacques turned along with Emily, his hand rested on the small of her back. His hair tussled in the wind and he reached up to right it. Emily gave him a shoulder bump when she caught him scanning the passengers.
“Remember you’re with me tonight.”
“Don’t I always?” As far as relationships went, Emily was his rider. Status dragons honored to humans who flew with them. He’d given that right to Emily when they were young and racing around the bayberry bushes back in Harghita.
“I mean it Jac. We’ve only got one chance at this. Only Margaret is here, and she insisted we didn’t need Drake and Alin here to back us up.”
Jacques swallowed back his reservations. It had taken Margaret, his foster mother, years to get an invitation to the exclusive island and its lord’s manor. If only Emily knew what his mother’s true intentions for tonight’s heist included, she would have never boarded the ferry.
“Have I ever let you down before?”
Emily glanced over her shoulder at him. “The heiress in Argentina.”
“I told you I was tied up.” Jacques laughed.
Emily swatted him with her sparkling clutch. “Make sure you stay close tonight, no wandering.”
He couldn’t guarantee her that. Not when his pulse had ceased its increased tempo. He chalked it up to his attraction to blonds and the mission he and Emily faced once at the manor on the island.
“You have the layout? You know where it is?” He pulled her in his embrace, speaking into her ear enough that she could hear above the parting of the water as the ferry sliced through it.
“Aunt M has narrowed it down to his chambers or the den. He’s not bold like the others to display it out in the open.”
“That or he’s not a fool. He knows what it is. Why else would the guy live out on an island and restrict us from having modern technology? Got a lot of nerve making us hand over our phones.”
He watched the waters ripple in their wake. Emily reached up and stroked the delicate chain of the pendent resting close to her heart. His cousin had no idea how much it pained him to have to deliver it to her hands years ago. Nor had she any idea the symbolism of it around her neck.
His gut ached from the memory of Margaret’s fury when she discovered he gave the Dragon Keeper’s pendent to Emily.
“I don’t know what Aunt M was thinking. It is as if he knows her. Why else would he choose to feature her art tonight as part of the revolving gallery?”
He would hate himself later. “Which is even more the reason I don’t trust this. My dragon is on edge. The dude by the gate is without a doubt storing up some serious fire inside him.”
Emily’s turned her head slightly to check out the dude. “Did you smell him?”
Jacques wrinkled his nose. “He’s a green scale, common enough.”
“So, there is another shifter amongst us. Not as if you haven’t ever encountered one of your kind before.”
“For all we know, so could the lord of the manor.”
A breeze swept across the ferry as it lurched in the choppy waters. His dragon’s vision narrowed, and his heart skipped a beat when a long strand of blond teased him from the far railing. He could see her side profile and his dragon rumbled from inside him.
“Hold it in there, fury. We don’t want to go dragon just yet.” Emily turned, embraced, and pressed her fake belly against him.
Jacques felt his chest tighten. All he needed was his lust crazed dragon side coming out on the ferry and their mission would be the last of their worries.
“You can shift as soon as I get what we came for.”
Jacques couldn’t take his eyes off the blond on the other side of the ferry.
Emily took his chin, focused his gaze on her. “You with me?”
“You’ll sing for me at the dock if we get separated.”
“Always do.”
Singing for a dragon was an age-old tradition, one that dated back to the time before dragons had gone into hiding. When a dragon and human sang together, it was a song of trust and acceptance. Dragon riders of old sang to a dragon before mounting them and taking off into the skies.
As the ferry pulled up to the dock, Jacques spotted the blond clinging to the rail. He left Emily and offered his hand to help balance her.
“Here allow me.”
Eyes the color of the of a raging sea storm blinked at him. Her pouted pink lips parted, then formed a smile. She held out the crystal jeweled heels.
Ignoring Emily’s throaty annoyance behind him, he bent and slide the white heel on her foot on. His fingers brushed over her ankles and his chest hummed with pleasure. Satisfied she stood on both heels, he rose about to offer her his arm, and Emily jabbed him in the shoulder.
“Come on Casanova, there is no way I’m making it up this hilly path without you.”
His blond beauty pressed together a bright smile for him and lifted a shawl covered shoulder. He didn’t even get her name before Emily tugged him away.
Jacques glanced back, saw a portly man offer his arm to the blond.
“Eyes on the prize.” Emily clung to him as he led her toward the manor.
“More than you’ll ever know.”