Chapter Ten
The water caressed his flanks, feeling cool and delightful against his always warm to too hot body. There was no disparity between ‘Niko’ and ‘dragon’ anymore. They were two halves of one beast—Niko on the land and dragon in the water.
Twirling and spinning in the liquid, he felt more free than he ever had before. Nothing held him back, and nothing was in his way to stop him.
And still, the water thrummed with her.
A soft, low thrum that ran through his scales and spine, calmed him. Collected his different parts and made him whole.
Betsy was the key.
She was the one who gave him the link to control his dragon—himself. She twirled in the water with him, no distress on her face from the lack of air, and in fact she had dove deeper than him this time. To his delight, she was also completely naked, no worry about the temperature of the icy water on her face.
She’s beautiful, son.
Turning his massive head to the shore, he could see his father sitting there. With a few power strokes of his tail he was to the edge and eye to eye with his father, he a dragon, his father a man.
She’s beautiful. Stephanos smile at him, the big stupid grin he used to give him when he was so proud of Niko his face couldn’t contain the joy. Both of them looked down into the water, and the graceful form turned somersaults and twisted in the deep dark water below. She owned her body, and she owned the water.
And very quickly, she was starting to own his heart.
She’s a thief, Dad.
Yes, I know. She knows it too.
What the hell does that mean?
It means she knows what she’s doing is wrong. The time will come for her to make up for all of her wrongs.
Niko shook his head. If she’s going to pay, how can I keep her?
Stephanos sighed. Oh, son. I wish I had lived. There was so much I had to teach you.
Dad, I’m mostly in love with her.
And there’s nothing wrong with that. She’s yours to keep.
I can’t keep her if she has to pay for her crimes.
Stephanos shook his head. Son, you’re immortal. Do you really think that human justice is going to take up that much of your time? He chuckled. I forget how truly young you are.
She isn’t immortal, though, Dad. She’ll waste time—
There is no wasting time, son. None. Your grandfather should have explained all of this to you. Your uncle. Someone should have. Your true mate will live as long as you, after you bond. It’s that simple. You don’t have to worry about time, Nikomedes.
He missed the sound of his full name from his father. He missed his father. He missed his mother.
How do I convince her home is here?
Stephanos smiled. That is up to you, Niko. I think you can figure that out.
Niko glanced down at where Betsy was still swimming through the depths. She saw him at the surface and flipped around backward, tempting him with her breast and then her pussy. He turned back to his father, to find him gone.
Letting himself slide back into the water, Niko dove down to meet her. She tossed a leg over his back and grabbed one of his ridge spines. She was warm and small against him as he swam through the water. He could feel laugh, her joy as she held on.
Twirling through the water, he spiraled them up and up and burst through the surface of the water into the night sky, spread his wings—
—and flew.
The water shrank beneath them, farther away with each beat of his wings, and the moon grew and grew as they cut through the icy night air. But he didn’t feel the cold. Neither did Betsy. Her laugh rang through the chill air, reaching deep inside him and stoking the blazes within. Both fire and lust.
Find us a place to land, Niko. Her voice was in his head. I want you inside me, now.
Niko the dragon was pleased. He wanted to bury himself inside her and make her scream his name. He started looking for a large enough clearing for him to land—
The claw dug into his back, and they began falling, uncontrolled toward the earth.
Niko sat straight up in bed, clawing at his back, trying to keep the dream-Betsy on his back safe from the fall.
There was no danger. Not in his bedroom.
Not without Betsy there.
He flopped back on the pillow, shaking his head. He was so screwed.
* * *
The phone rang.
As much as she tried to ignore it and let it go to voicemail, it would start ringing again a moment later. Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore and knocked it off the cradle and put it to her ear. “What?”
“Damn, baby, I thought you’d never answer.”
“Fucking hell, Wyatt. I was in the middle of an amazing dream…”
“I am too, baby. You’re not going to believe what Wayne has planned for us.”
“For us?” Betsy didn’t like the sound of that at all.
Wyatt ‘hmmed’ through the phone. “I’m going to San Diego with him. He’s got info on a massive shipment of Mercedes and Bugatis that have no preset destination. We’re going to snatch some up and resell on the market.”
Betsy cringed. “Wyatt. This isn’t Gone in Sixty Seconds. The last time you tried to do something big with Wayne you were stuck in a jail cell for a week.”
The disgusted huff of breath filtered through the phone. “My brother is the most brilliant auto thief out there. What happened last time was not his fault, or mine. It just went bad. Do you want to go to Vegas or not? This will really set us up. We can get a gorgeous little place—”
“Wyatt. Stop. Your brother is dangerous. He’s reckless. He’s not a brilliant thief, he’s lucky. Go to Vegas, Wyatt. I’ll meet you there instead.”
“No, Betsy. I’m going to help Wayne with these cars and we’ll be set. We’ll get those diamonds and that’ll be the end of it. We can go to the high desert.”
Betsy took a deep breath. “Those diamonds are going to be a problem.”
“I have confidence you can get in there.”
“It’s not getting them, damn it. It’s fencing them. Every single one that this guy sells are GIA registered. They’ll be traced. If we fence them as we go, we’ll leave a trail.”
“Damn it,” Wyatt growled. “Any hope at all we can get rid of the numbers?”
She rolled her eyes. “They are laser etched in the diamond, small enough that you can’t see them with a high-powered loupe. There’s no way to fence something that’s both GIA and ethically sourced. They’re hot commodities and if we’re followed with those, we’re fucked.”
The silence on the other end meant that Wyatt was trying to think of another way to get the diamonds. He cleared his throat. “Well, go back there and see how the other gems are tracked. If the emeralds and ruby and sapphires aren’t tracked by numbers, let’s work on those.”
Betsy nearly vomited at even the idea of going back there to do anything but to talk to him and learned who her dragon was. “Can’t we skip this, Wyatt?”
“No. Are you getting soft on me, bitch?”
“Call me a bitch again, and you’ll never find me again.”
“I didn’t mean it.”
“You did. I’m going back to bed. Don’t call in the middle of the night again.” She hit the end button hard enough she thought it was going to break the handset. Staring at it for just a moment in the dark, she sat up and hurled it at the wall and heard it smash.
Betsy spent the rest of the night crying.