Chapter Five
Something swatted her in the face.
“Wake up, you lazy bitch!”
Wyatt was looming over her with another shirt to swat her with. “Wake up! We have places to case. And your lazy ass is not going to hold us back.”
Betsy looked at the clock, which declared that it was nine in the morning. She looked back at Wyatt, sighing. “Can I shower?”
“Damn well better. You have leaves in your hair.” He threw the shirt at her and walked out of the bedroom.
Betsy sat up slowly. She was achy, and there were actual leaves in her hair. She stretched and everything was sore. The good kind of sore, the kind that made her smirk—
—then freeze.
Her hand flew to her mouth with a gasp. She ran to the bathroom and whipped her shirt over her head, and lifted her breast to see it more easily in the mirror. She stared. Sure enough, there was a bite mark around her nipple. Distinct, clear marks where each of the teeth hit and bruised the skin... and the two marks that broke skin. Like small fangs.
“Oh my god.” Betsy’s words hissed out on a disbelieving breath. “Oh, shit.” She plunked onto the toilet behind her. I really fucked a strange man on the side of the lake after he morphed from a dragon. She paused. Without a condom. Do mythical creatures even have STDs?
Staring at the floor, she put her hand to her breast to see if she could soothe one of the aches that had blossomed there. She wasn’t sure which one—the pain of the bite or the longing for him to do it again.
Correction: do mythical creatures who crawl out of the water and turn into men to fuck random women on the water’s edge have STDs?
For just a moment, she entertained the idea that it had not happened—but from the way everything on her was sore, and the damn hickey on her tit that stood out like a flag in front of a bull, she was sure she hadn’t imagined it.
Panicked, she ran back out of the bedroom and grabbed her phone. She swiped through until she found the ovulation tracker app and brought it up. She and Wyatt always, exclusively, perpetually used protection—and she was pretty religious about tracking her cycle. The app told her it was about five days before her most fertile window.
Which meant, *probably* no baby.
Oh, God, if I’m pregnant with a man-dragon’s baby, it’s all over.
She stared at the phone.
Next time, condom.
Betsy startled herself. Next time. So she was planning on going back to the water’s edge again. She cradled the aching breast and walked back to the bathroom.
Yes. She was going back.
* * *
After successfully scamming Drake’s diner out of an early lunch, Betsy and Wyatt walked down the main street, creatively named Main Street, toward the little strip mall they had seen on the drive through a week ago.
Wyatt held her hand as they scanned the street, taking in the buzz of a busy Halloween day. The stores were open only until one or two so that the owners could go home and have fun with their kids. Meanwhile, they all ran up and down the street, trick or treating at the stores.
Wyatt made an indistinct noise. “Kids. Blech.”
“No, huh?” Betsy scanned a cute little clothing store that has some pretty expensive looking jewelry in the window.
“No interest. Little snot bags take up a lot of my capital.”
Betsy nodded non-committally.
Wyatt gave her the side eye. “Why? You want kids?”
“Someday.”
“No.”
She stopped dead. “No? That’s it?”
“Oh, don’t start.”
“Don’t start what, Wyatt. I haven’t started anything. This is the very first time in our five years together I’ve brought up kids and you cut it off like that.”
“I don’t want kids. So don’t try to convince me.” He grabbed her hand and headed down the street again. “They aren’t good for anything. They suck you dry of life and money. They shit, they piss, they puke. How is this enjoyable? No kids.” He paused, then pinned her to the tree, his arm across her throat, cutting off her air. “Why do you think every time I fuck you I put on a rubber? Because I like the way they feel? Fuck no. Because I’m not knocking you up. And women don’t remember birth control. I ain’t getting caught with no fucking kid.”
He pressed hard and then walked away, leaving Betsy leaning against the tree, coughing and sputtering and trying to catch her breath. She put a hand to her throat and cringed. That was probably going to hurt for a long time. Wyatt strode away with a cocky, confident swagger that made her want to choke him out.
Why were things changing so much, so quickly in this stupid little town? Was there something in the air? Or something in the water?
She blinked. Definitely something in the water.
After a minute to catch her breath, she ran to join him on the walk. “Look, I never said I wanted kids. And I sure as hell don’t want them right now. But you don’t choke me out about it, okay?” She punched his arm, hard. Wyatt swung to look at her, giving her a death glare, and clearly considering punching her. Instead, he continued his walk. “So if you hate kids so much, why are we out here? Shouldn’t we be playing recluse in the apartment?”
“Casing.” He casually glanced across the street at the bar arcade there as they turned the corner to head to the strip mall. “We’ll be in by the time this gets into full swing. Hello.”
Wyatt stopped dead and stared.
Betsy followed his gaze and pulled him along, so that he wasn’t so obvious. “You’re the slick rick of this operation and you’re the one stopping and staring. Smooth move.”
“Well, it’s been so long since I’ve seen a place with such potential.” Wyatt was practically drooling.
Shaking her head, Betsy sighed. “You know that if you’re going to pull a heist on a jeweler, we need to be out of town about ten seconds later. So there’s no way this is happening.”
“We have three months on the lease.”
“That’s ever stopped you from doing something stupid?”
He yanked her arm and spun her around to face him. “Don’t you talk to me that way.”
“Fuck off, Wyatt.” Betsy yanked her arm out of his grip, knowing he’d just given her a serious bruise. “Seriously. I don’t want to do anything stupid because you got impatient. That’s what happened in North Carolina and you know it.” She gestured to the stores. “There’s a lot of potential here, Wy. Be patient. We can case the place and not get itchy trigger fingers.” She looked at the store front and smirked. “Hell, if you’re really smart, you could get them to order a nice fat loose diamond, like you were going to propose.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Now that’s a brilliant idea.”
“See. I’m useful.”
“And an amazing lay.”
She smirked, but a shot of guilt ran through her. Not because she had sex with some water guy, but because she realized—Wyatt wasn’t really as good of a lay as she thought he was just the day before.
Holy crap. I cheated on Wyatt.
But it didn’t bother her nearly as much as she thought it should. She...almost didn’t care. It wasn’t like she ever verbalized the idea of Wyatt as her boyfriend—she acknowledged it, but…
Who was she kidding? She cheated. No matter what they were.
She walked with him hand in hand through the little plaza of strip malls and some cheesy imitation big box store. It was actually a very cute, quaint place that spoke of a certain level of pride in their town. There was the pizza place, stupidly named Pizza Pi, a Chinese place, probably the only two take-out places in the whole town. There was an investment place, a pool and landscaping office, with a sign that declared they also did snow plowing and don’t neglect your hot tub. There was an eye doctor’s office who also did glasses and a hardware store. There was a Hallmark, and then... the big win.
Tavoularis Jems.
A fifteen-foot-wide storefront with roll up doors on the inside recessed in the ceiling. Cases of gold, silver, emerald, sapphire, and ruby stood from the wall. Simple, clean, a comforting aesthetic when dealing with jewelry.
But at the very back wall was the crème de la crème, the case that was their ticket to Vegas. The diamonds.
Any woman could have spotted that case a mile away. A guy would know it by the comfortable chairs so they could relax while they had thousands of dollars pulled from their wallets.
There was a young girl sitting behind one of the cases, reading a magazine. Betsy smiled and peered in. She moved closer, having to press on the glass to steady herself.
A shot of desire and familiarity blew threw her as her hand pressed the glass. She almost staggered back away from the glass, but managed to stay herself through an act of sheer will.
Oh my God, we can’t rob this place.
This was her dragon man’s business. This was his livelihood. She couldn’t...
“Enough gawking.” Wyatt’s voice cut through her shock, knocking her back to reality. He grabbed her hand and started to walk her down the sidewalk again. “Got the layout?”
After sputtering and choking for a moment, Betsy nodded. “That place is armed to the brim. We’re going to need three months just to figure out what systems are in there. Whoever owns that doesn’t trust anyone.”
Wyatt winked. “I have confidence you’ll get this one.”
But she didn’t want to.