All night, Flick’s dreams swam through her mind in a long series of erotic delights. The dark-haired Dragon shifter was at the centre of her universe for the duration of her sleep. That face of his. Impossibly light eyes framed by raven-black hair. Exquisite, skilled lips that felt so real that she never wanted to wake up.

She saw him so clearly, but she could feel him, too. Dex’s sweet, sensual mouth on her nipples, her hand cradling his head, fingers twining through his hair as he tended to her body’s every craving. She felt his tongue lashing at her sex, drawing orgasm after orgasm from her as she moaned his name in her sleep. His cock, driving deep inside her, gentle and violent at once as he took ownership of her body and she gave herself to him, her channel pulsing with pleasure. When he shot his seed inside her, her head swam with ecstasy.

At one point they’d stopped making love and were fully clothed, lying together on a couch inside a strange, faraway house by the sea. The scent of salt drifted on the air. Sultry summer breezes warmed her skin. The sound of children laughing rang, shimmering, somewhere in the distance.

She could hear—no, feel—the Dragon shifter’s voice inside her. Feel him talking to her, telling him how much he desired her. How he loved her. How he would look after her forever. How their family was the most important thing in the world.

Their family.

* * *

When she shot awake in the morning, the sounds and aromas of the real world were already assaulting her. Horns honking outside, a half-empty bed drawing her back to reality. Life had returned, if only to remind her that her bliss had only been a dream. A sweet one, but a dream nonetheless.

It was Friday morning. She had to go to work, just as she did every other weekday. Somehow she was supposed to return to her mundane daily routine, even after what she’d seen and felt the previous night.

An obedient slave to her paycheque, she dragged herself out of bed, showered and dashed off to work, trying to get herself excited at the prospect of what the day might bring. Well, if she wasn’t to see her Dragon shifter again, then at least she could entertain herself with thoughts of him.

Her small desk at the London Herald was, as always, covered in memos, papers and unfinished projects. Stories that she was supposed to write about banal topics like flower shops and the latest trends of argyle socks and garters made of some new sort of elastic. Nothing quite so interesting as what she’d encountered the previous night.

She sat down at her swivelling chair and leaned back, smiling to herself, wondering if this was how Lois Lane had felt when she’d discovered Superman’s identity. Of course, Lois couldn’t possibly have felt this good; Dex was far better than any superhero. He had fangs, flame and scales as exquisite as the surface of the sea. He could shoot himself into the air with wings both powerful and delicate. No need for red capes for a man like Dex.

His superpower was being a sexy man with biteable lips.

“Working hard, I see,” a familiar, nasal voice shot out from somewhere behind Flick as she daydreamed.

Bollocks.

Mr. Dixon, the boss from the bowels of hell, was hovering over her work station. She drew herself up, fingers hitting her typewriter’s keyboard hard as he perched on the edge of her desk.

“Was just thinking about a story,” she said, staring straight ahead at the blank page that poked out from the machine in front of her.

“Oh? Well, I hope it’s about the latest in wellies, because as you may recall, that’s your assignment.”

Flick looked up at him for a moment to protest, only to see the man’s face glaring down at hers. He was rancid, this one. His employees liked to joke that he put the dick in Dixon, and speculated that he spent his evenings alone, writing lists of all the homeless people he’d murdered in back alleys before having them stuffed for display in his cavernous lair.

Smelly, greasy, repulsive man. He reminded Flick all of a sudden of the rodent shifter in the bar. A fantasy flew across her mind of holding a knife to his throat and threatening him until he begged for mercy or pissed off.

Right, then. Perhaps it was time to consider a new line of work. She was beginning to wonder if there was any sort of employment that involved a certain Dragon shifter and sexual intercourse.

“Yes, I’m thinking about wellies. Of course I am,” she replied, returning her eyes to her typewriter as she told herself to stop thinking about ways to torment her employer.

Mr. Dixon leaned in. “Good. See that the story is on my desk by noon.” he said, puffing out the words so that somehow he managed to blow out a series of repugnant breaths into her ear before heading back to his office.

Flick shuddered. How was it possible that she lived in a world that contained both a man as sexy as Dex and one as horrid as this clod? It seemed so wrong, somehow.

For the rest of the morning she did her best to focus her mind on work, getting the sodding wellington boot story written up well before noon. It wasn’t hard to go off on a long diatribe about the many wonderful assets of the rubber footwear. “These miracles are waterproof!” she raved, “Perfect for London’s rainy season, i.e. every season! Great for treading through puddles and kicking one’s idiot boss in the jaw.”

She left the last bit out.

Before long, she’d managed to write an entire manifesto about why every man, woman and child on her side of the Atlantic would soon be sporting the hideous, blister-creating monstrosities. “Why couldn’t I have gotten a job as a political writer?” she moaned as she proofed the article, nibbling on some morsels she’d brought for lunch.

Finally at 11:50, she carried the brief article over to her editor, Grace. A surly, middle-aged woman who never smiled.

“Thank you, Miss Jones” said Grace, taking the paper from Flick without making eye contact. “I’ll get it to Mr. Dixon this afternoon.”

“Great. Thanks. I’ll be off then.”

“Suit yourself.”

The lightness returned to Flick’s stride as she set out for the elevator. Her afternoon was to be spent doing “research,” which meant that she had the privilege of wandering along various streets in the Marylebone district, studying displays in shop windows. Much as she despised certain aspects of her job, getting out for frequent walks was a much more pleasant endeavour than the sitting at a desk nonsense that other reporters had to endure.

By 12:30 p.m. she was parading along Oxford Street, bag slung over her shoulder, notebook in hand. She was to begin her journey with a few of the newer stores that had begun to crop up at the west end of the road, no doubt in an attempt to distract London’s inhabitants from the fact that their city had recently been decimated by German bombs.

The shops catered to people who obviously possessed more money than they could spend. A plain white shirt went for two pounds, a pair of dull trousers for nearly four. The prices were outrageous, but clearly someone was willing—and able—to pay them.

As she wandered, Flick watched London’s hurried inhabitants jostling between one another’s bodies as though they were running an obstacle course, sour looks painted on their features. Every one of them looked so frantic to get from point A to point B that it seemed as if they’d forgotten to breathe.

Flick smiled to think how oblivious Londoners were to the shifters who wandered in their midst. Creatures with altogether different priorities. To a man like Dex, the most important thing in the world was ensuring the survival of his kind. But to humans, it was making sure they had a coffee in hand before returning to the office, only to run about like hamsters on a wheel day in and day out. Humans didn’t think to question their existence, even after the horrors of war. It was as though they’d simply reverted to whatever they were before the bombs fell. Machines who produced for the sake of others.

Now, that would have made for a good news story—why was it that humans had evolved into a species of mindless servants?

Flick turned her back on the pedestrians, staring instead at a series of mannequins who adorned the Selfridge’s window display. Small children in overpriced, ridiculous clothing, a mother dressed to the nines, all faceless, all dull, all perfectly posed, perfectly thin, perfectly plastic.

She’d just begun to jot some notes down when a deep voice interrupted her train of thought.

“Considering purchasing yourself a very tiny pink shirt, are you?”