Carla
She walked into the bar with a smile on her face and money in her pocket. Her unit, the Steel Scythes, called it home, but today she was the only one in there at this early hour. That was a result of being turned loose early by her squad leader. On their most recent exercise, it had been her quick thinking that had saved the day, and this was her dividend payout: Four extra hours of downtime before everyone else was given their passes.
Liberty. Forty-eight hours of sweet, sweet liberty. Corporal Carla Giannone was absolutely not allowing herself to consider what awaited her on the other end of the liberty. General inspections were a nightmare for normal troops. The unit commander, and often the base commander, would come through the barracks and rip everything apart, looking for the smallest discrepancy. Heaven forbid the soldier who had a loose thread or speck of dust, because they would find it.
Things were ten times worse for her unit, however. The advanced battlesuit division assigned to Fort Banner as the front line of defense against a possible Outsider incursion was still in the early stages. If she’d thought getting her bunk and gear cleaned for an inspection was hard before, doing it to a two-thousand-pound suit of the strongest metal alloys man could develop was, frankly, impossible.
Which is why she was going to get good and drunk today. Recover tomorrow, and spend all of Sunday preparing for Monday. It was the perfect plan.
She pushed open the door, her pupils widening to take in the dimmed room. It was mostly empty at this time of day, though as usual, there were always a few odd sorts having a cold one.
“Hey! Over here!”
The blustery but jovial call of a drunk male caught her attention. Usually she ignored them, because being catcalled was just not a pleasant experience. It rarely made her feel attractive, and often made her feel like she was just a piece of meat the men wanted to service them.
Sometimes, if they were polite and handsome, she was perfectly okay with some no-strings-attached fun. The military life didn’t exactly allow for the formation of stable relationships after all, and after thirteen years of service time, she’d learned to adapt. Today however, the call was more like someone who’d seen an old friend, not a seedy attempt to waggle their eyebrows at her.
She turned and regarded the man sitting at the table by himself. A giant, he dwarfed the chair upon which he sat, making the table seem more like a footstool. It took Carla several moments to realize the container in his oversized paw of a hand was a pitcher of beer and not a pint glass. Her eyebrows rose even more as she took in his facial features and realized she recognized him.
There were several large men on the base, though something about this one made him seem bigger. He seemed to take up the room, commanding attention in a way the others didn’t always do despite their size. Which was perfectly okay, considering he was easy enough on the eyes that any extra attention she gave him wouldn’t hurt her one bit. The question was, what did he want with her?
Carla had heard rumors, but it wasn’t until recently that she’d discovered the truth about this mystery man. As part of an advanced combat unit, she was privy to information many of the regular grunts were not. Such as the fact that the wavy-haired man with the low fade and diamond-shaped face currently waving at her was a dragon shifter.
The thought still boggled her mind now, weeks after she’d seen the first footage of the red dragons fighting the Outsiders. If he so chose, the man in front of her could supposedly turn into a massive dragon bigger than a city bus. Oh, and breathe fire. Talk about hot.
As she approached he smiled, the movement accentuating the definition of his cheeks and powerfully chiseled jaw. Carla had thought him easy on the eyes before, but now she had to ratchet that up a few notches. A pair of topaz eyes reflected some of the dim light as they shined happily, and she felt oddly jealous of his long lashes. He was a specimen, and right now he seemed to have an interest in her.
And in his beer.
The empty pitcher hit the table as he finished drinking.
“Can I help you?” she asked politely, not wanting to come off as crass, but not entirely sure what he wanted with her either.
“You have the look of someone who needs to get drunk,” he pronounced with the happy burr of a man already somewhat imbibed.
“I do?” Carla wanted to get drunk, but in her mind that was a little different than feeling she needed to.
“Yep. Your stance, the set of your shoulders—very broad and muscular by the way, good job—combined with the little lines in your forehead tell me one thing.”
Carla was so busy looking at her shoulders that she almost missed his last few words. Were they really that manly looking? She worked out, obviously, and had the body size necessary to wear the battlesuit, but she’d never thought her shoulders to be manly before. Just…strong.
The bartender plunked a fresh pitcher down in front of the dragon shifter. She couldn’t recall his name at the moment, and he eyed her questioningly. “Whatever he’s having. On his bill.”
The middle-aged man with the eyes of someone who had seen far too much nodded and shuffled off to bring her a pint.
“Sit, sit!” said her new drinking…friend? Companion?
He didn’t seem interested in trying to seduce her, and drinking alone wasn’t overly entertaining, even if that had been her initial plan, so Carla gave up protesting and sat. Moments later the bartender came by, and dropped off her drink.
“Uhhh.”
“Is there a problem?’ the jovial man asked, pushing his fingers through his hair, the bronzed blond locks falling back into place naturally once he was done.
“This is a pitcher. Not a pint.”
“I know. But I asked if there was a problem.”
I guess I’m getting good and drunk today then.
“No, no problem at all,” she said, picking it up in both hands and taking a long quaff. “Just unexpected.”
“Ahh, you have the spirit of a dragon!” he cried boisterously, slamming his pitcher against hers in celebration. “Let us drink to that!”
Carla watched him tilt the pitcher back and drain a quarter of it in one go. She hesitated, but not for long. “Fuck it!” she cried, and lifted her own, taking long gulps of the amber liquid.
She was drinking with a dragon shifter. This was not how her day had been planned out at all, but she was having a hard time arguing about it. He didn’t seem interested in trying to take her home like most other men, and he was in a good mood as well. Her day had just gotten better. Maybe she could ask him to do something dragon-y as well, so she’d have a good story to tell her squad.
“I fucking hate this place,” he declared. “Not the bar!” he added after a hurt look from the bartender. “The base. Fuck it.”
“What’s wrong with the base?” she asked, setting her pitcher down, noting that she’d barely made a dent, while he looked almost ready for another one.
“Oh, nothing really,” he said with a wild wave of his hand to dismiss it. “It’s not so much the base, really. It’s the people on it.”
Carla gave him a long, measured look over the pitchers, not looking away until he got it.
“Not you!” he said with another wave. “No. It’s more like one person.”
“Who?” Now she was curious. Who could the dragon shifter have an issue with on the base? Couldn’t he just beat whoever it was up?”
“Colonel Mara,” he said grumpily.
Carla rocked back in her chair. “Damn, you know how to pick ‘em!” she exclaimed. “Colonel Mara is one badass chick. Did you hear about how she stared down the Outsider when it first attacked her base, and then when her gun didn’t do anything she threw the gun at it? Man, that’s badass. If I have to go, I sure hope I can be like that.”
“Yes, I had heard about that,” he said dryly. “Saw the footage too. And then heard about it some more. You’d think she was a demigod from the amount of worship she gets.”
Carla slammed a closed fist on the table as she leaned forward, suddenly irritated with the way he was talking. “You listen to me, Scaley, and you listen fucking good. Colonel Elin Mara is a goddamned hero, you understand? She went up against something that should have killed her, and she stood her ground until one of your kind could get its ass together enough to stop the Outsider. We should all hope to be so brave when the time comes. Got it?”
The giant of a man reared back in his chair, and Carla felt an icicle of fear stab her in the gut. Had she gone too far? He was huge, and reputably had the strength of a dozen or so men. It would be very easy for him to strike her down, or worse.
As he sat straight up, towering over her despite the fact that they were both sitting, she was forced to calm her nerves. They weren’t killers, not of humans at least. She’d heard of how protective they were. She’d even see the giant who often visited with Colonel Mara. He practically hovered over her in an intimidatingly adorable manner. Carla could only hope to be so lucky one day.
“You are correct. Please accept my apologies,” he said, leaning back in his chair and finishing his drink at the same time a fresh one arrived.
Carla had barely finished a quarter of hers. Tomorrow morning was going to be rough if she kept this pace up.
“Buy my next drink when I get there, and we’ll call it even.”
“I’ll buy them all,” he said, slumping over the table once more, the wood groaning under his weight.
“Why do you hate Colonel Mara so much?” she asked, trying not to act as interested as she was.
“You’re going to need to have some more of that,” he said, indicating her drink.
Carla took up the pitcher and drained some more of it, smacking her lips as she swallowed.
“You are aware of what I am?” he asked when she’d settled back to look at him, licking the last of the beer from her upper lip.
“I’ve been told you’re a dragon shifter. Though I’m not sure I believe it.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Watch.” He abruptly thrust his right arm forward, the weathered skin exposed from mid-bicep down. As she looked on, the skin darkened, and then suddenly scales of a dark carbon black rippled down his arm and to his hand, which morphed into a four-clawed paw as she watched.
“Holy shit,” she whispered as the scales and claws faded away as abruptly as they’d come. “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit.”
“Do you believe now?”
“I…hell, I don’t know. I could be tipsy. Who knows what’s in that beer. But that was an effective demonstration, I have to admit.”
“Well, now that you have proof of what I am, you should know that much of my kind has not walked the earth in hundreds of years.”
“You haven’t?”
He shook his mighty head, the lengths of yellowish olive-brown hair as long as her hand bouncing slightly with the effort. “No. I don’t know for certain, but it seems like the last of us slipped into the long sleep nearly two hundred years ago.”
Carla frowned in thought, her bottom lip rolling up over her teeth as she did, a habit she’d formed some time ago. “If that’s so, then how are you here now?”
“Ah, well that, my good,” he glanced at her shoulder, “whatever rank you are, is the crux of the problem.”
“Corporal,” she supplied absentmindedly, still in awe of the story.
They both paused to take a drink.
“Well Corporal, one of my kind didn’t go to sleep after all. And he’s been working with your military for some time now, and has provided the location of many of us.”
“So they just went and woke you up?”
“Not quite.” He took a sip that ended up being half the pitcher.
Carla was amazed he wasn’t on the floor passed out by now. His metabolism must be insane to keep him mostly sober to this point.
“When a dragon enters the long sleep, it’s something that we don’t often expect to awake from. Our bodies, over time, turn to stone. At that point we never wake up. Ever. But Kyen, the dragon who stayed awake, and a scientist named Lianna found a way to reverse those effects and wake us up.” He sighed, looked at his pitcher, and tossed it back in one go like it was a shot glass. “And here I am.”
“I follow, though the unbelievability level is getting higher. But what does that have to do with Colonel Mara?”
“Two more of these please, and a bottle of your hardest liquor too please,” the titan rumbled, holding up a hand to keep her at bay while he ordered. “And whatever the lovely corporal would like as well.”
“More of this in pint glasses is fine!” she called, speaking up to prevent another pitcher from coming her way. It was just too awkward to hold. “So, you were going to talk about Colonel Mara?”
Carla had no idea why she was so interested in hearing about the story, but something told her it was a good one, and she quite literally had nothing better to do. Why not enjoy a cold one, staring at the gorgeous dragon-man and listen to his stories? When else was she going to get that sort of chance?
“Right. Well, as it turns out, I wasn’t awoken just out of the goodness of her or anyone’s heart.”
She understood suddenly. “They want you to fight.”
The giant nodded. “Exactly. They want us to fight. Or else we get put back to sleep.”
Carla was of two minds about that. On one hand, she had seen the footage of the Outsiders, of how easily they killed and how strong they were. If there was any truth to it, she felt that it was everyone’s responsibility to do what they could to stop them.
But on the other hand, she could understand being angry about being woken up involuntarily, and then told to either fight or go back under. That would irk her as well.
“You don’t want to fight?” She had to ask.
“I…do not know,” he admitted, his voice pained. Another pitcher disappeared before he spoke again, and now she could see that it was starting to have a mild effect on him. A swig from the bottle of liquor went next.
Carla shivered when she realized he was drinking tequila. The headache from his hangover, if he got one, was going to be monumental even for someone of his impressive size.
She surreptitiously eyed the iron-like cords of muscle disappearing under the sleeves of his shirt and the way they stretched and bunched as he lifted the bottle to his mouth to drink. His physique was otherworldly, and in any other situation, she wouldn’t object to being the center of his attention.
“I thought you dragons were supposed to be badasses and able to kill the Outsiders?” she asked. “Didn’t one of the other dragons kill one recently?”
He nodded. “Yes, a red dragon by the name of Vanek killed one, using the power of his mate to finally overwhelm it.”
“His…mate? I don’t understand.” Carla tossed back the last of her pitcher and pushed it to the side, leaning over the fresh pint-sized glass, eager for more information. This was fascinating!
“Each dragon has a mate. One mate. The woman they will spend forever with. When they find this person, a bond forms between them, though it must be accepted by both parties to truly ‘exist,’ I suppose you would say. It’s complicated to explain. Anyway, the bond is about love and life. Living, and the power of it. Because these beings are all about death, and the lack of life, it would seem that the bond actually acts as some sort of shield against their abilities, giving us strength to overcome them.”
He shrugged, drank some more. “So I was told.”
“So you need to find your mate too?”
“I need to find my mate too,” he said with more than a touch of sarcasm. “If I do that, then I can avoid being put back to sleep. Which I really do not want to do.”
“So just find someone, have them pretend to be your mate, and then there you go, freedom.”
He laughed, raised the bottle of tequila, and together they tossed back copious amounts of alcohol. She shared some stories of fights she’d been in during her time in the military, and he recanted tales of glorious raids from days past, in a time she could only imagine to have lived in. He made it seem glamorous, though she knew it wouldn’t have been to his victims. He seemed to avoid killing most of them, simply raiding for the fun.
“Well, Corporal,” he said abruptly, the two of them both good and drunk. “Now is the time to ask a question I do believe.”
“What do you mean?” she said, a giggle slipping out as she stared in a daze at his chest, her baser instincts having long ago taken over.
“You told me to find someone and have them pretend to be my mate. So I ask you, will you pretend?”
Carla leaned back. “Me?”
“Of course! We are comrades in…in…drinks! Let us be comrades in our joke. Perhaps Colonel Mara will even buy into it.”
She blinked rapidly, trying to focus. “What happens if she does? I don’t want to get in trouble!”
“Not much I would assume. Just I have the freedom to take longer to decide if I wish to fight or not, and you…”
“What do I get out of it?”
“Treasure!” he roared. “I shall pay you in treasure. Gold, gems, the like. It will be great fun. What do you say?”
“I say,” she said, picking up her drink. “I’M IN!”
They clanked their classes together uproariously, and drank some more.
Behind her the door opened.
“Colonel Mara!” the dragon boomed. “What fortuitous timing! I come bearing good news!”
Carla giggled into her drink, turning to see who had truly entered the bar. Her jaw dropped when she realized it was Colonel Mara.
“Why is that, Thorne?”
Thorne! That was his name. After drink number three…or was it four? She’d stopped trying to remember, but now she had it.
“I, in an unexpected coincidence, have found my mate!”
The colonel stared at her, and Carla abruptly found herself sobering up. “Is this true?”
A foot nudged her under the table, and Carla suddenly remembered that they were playing a joke. “Yes!” she said, putting on what she hoped was a beatific smile that reflected the happiness she would normally feel if she’d just found the person she was going to marry.
“I see.” The stern-faced colonel looked back and forth between them. “Some were worried over your level of imbibing, but it would seem that there was reason for it after all, wasn’t there?”
Suddenly worried that she would be in trouble if she were drinking for no reason, Carla doubled down on her commitment to the joke, thinking it the best course of action. “Just celebrating, ma’am.”
“I’m happy for you two,” the colonel said, straitlaced. “I can tell the MPs to back off.”
She swallowed nervously. The military police had been ready to come and get them? Had they been that boisterous and inappropriate? She didn’t think so, but if the colonel had been about to send them in, they must have been…
“Of course. Just two happy lovebirds,” Thorne said from behind her.
“That’s good. Your mate seems a little put off, Thorne. Don’t you think you should kiss her better?”
Carla’s stomach flipped upside down. Kiss her? In front of the colonel? That seemed like a badddd idea.
If you don’t, she’s going to know that you were lying to her this entire time, and she’ll send the MPs in after you and write you up for lying to a superior officer. Being drunk won’t be an excuse.
She was trapped. The only way out was to let herself be kissed by the dragon shifter. The jaw-dropping make-you-melt Thorne. Just think, if he’s as good a kisser as he is good-looking, this will be awesome.
Swallowing nervously, she turned to face Thorne, committing to the course of action that she hoped would keep her out of the base jail.
Without hesitating, he leaned over the table, long dexterous fingers cupping her jaw as he pulled her in close. The touch of his lips seared her skin, and she tried to gasp in surprise. Thorne took this as invitation to kiss her more thoroughly, and his tongue quickly explored her mouth.
Carla felt herself pulled into the moment, her body responding to his touch. Abruptly she pulled back, slamming her ass down into the chair, trying to catch her breath. Kissing him in public was one thing! But making out with him in front of the colonel was something else entirely! She needed to maintain a sense of decorum.
“Very well. Congratulations, you two. Pack your things, you’re going to Barton City for your honeymoon. Colonel’s orders.”
Carla’s jaw dropped as Colonel Mara walked away, leaving her there red-faced and stunned. Leave? For Barton City? But what about her unit? What about the general inspection?
She looked at Thorne, but he too was staring past her at the departing officer, left equally dumbfounded.
What the hell had Carla just gotten herself into?