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“Um, yeah, good idea,” Min said airily.
Inhaling deeply, she followed the uniformed lizard down the path. As she closed the gate, she looked back and waved to Bonnie. There was no sign of Gingerbread, of course. What else would you expect from a cat?
As Min stepped into the limo, she wondered yet again if she could really pull this off. Being away from her home, her shop, which she’d barely left in the whole of her twenty-five years.
You have to, Min. There’s no other option.
Glancing around the cabin she was bedazzled by jewels. Jeweled ceiling, jeweled walls, jewels around the windows. The seats were leather, but the armrests had jewels set into them. As the doors of the capsule zapped shut she felt a little claustrophobic.
“All buckled up in there, ma’am?” Vincent asked.
“Please, just call me Min.”
As they zoomed sharply upward, Min looked down at the bookshop, set in its little garden, like a doll’s house in the middle of the low-lying plain. As the Westerly turned into a little dot, she pulled back her shoulders and lifted her chin.
It was high time she stepped out of her comfort zone.
Except… she’d never imagined it would be quite like this.
Ethan flipped a look at his watch. Gladys, his goblin stylist, was carefully clipping the scales around his scalp. She was doing a great job, but she was really taking her time. “Could you hurry this up, Gladys? I really have to get somewhere.”
“That sounds like a man on a mission.”
He didn’t even know why he said it, but out came the words, “I’ve got a date.”
“Woohoo, Ethan Blade, you wicked boy.” Gladys tapped his shoulder lightly with the clippers, and Ethan grinned sheepishly at her in the mirror. He’d been going to Gladys at Monstrously Beautiful for years now, she really knew how to treat his scales. “This sounds like something out of the usual run of things,” Gladys said.
His spinal scales tingled. Probably just nerves, he kept telling himself, even though thoughts of Min’s big brown eyes blinking owlishly at him from behind those glasses and her soft lips had been pulling his attention away from work for days now.
“Do you want a quick head massage?”
It was tempting. Gladys did a great job—there was something about the way her fingertips tweaked the end of his scales—but as he glanced at his watch, he knew he had to decline. “Sadly no time,” he said. If he didn’t get home before Min arrived, she’d be meeting his mom or his brother first, which would not be a good start.
The last thing he needed was for her to lose her nerve and bail on him.
Once he’d paid Gladys, adding a hefty tip, he went out onto the street and called up his limo.
“We’re stuck up here in a queue,” Igor, his bald-headed eagle pilot, informed him.
“How come?”
“There’s a concert happening, quite a few flights backed up,” Igor said. “Just waiting on clearance.”
Fuck. Knowing he couldn’t override his own traffic safety policy, Ethan paced up and down, flexing his claws anxiously. He could fly using his own wings, of course, but there was an agreement that free-winging should be limited to the gargoyles from Tower Security. If you saw winged monsters in the sky, it meant security. Free-winging as a dragon was only allowed in the outer suburbs. He’d been part of the planning committee that voted in favor of these guidelines, so he couldn’t over-ride them.
Not that fucking Beau paid the slightest attention to the rules.
So why should you?
Heck, he had a reputation to uphold. That’s why.
He was going to be late, and he was too chicken to check if Vincent had picked up Min. Every time he thought about it his heart nearly jumped into his freakin’ throat and strangled him.
Why was he so nervous? Everything had been properly prepared. The room next to his had been all made up, new bed covers and feminine touches, special lotions in the bathroom he’d had put there by his valet Snibs, who he could trust not to gossip to other staff or tell his mom, who would wonder why they weren’t sharing a room.
But the truth was, the idea of that rather delectable human sharing his wing of the house for a month was more than a little exciting. Sleeping, showering… gods save him. He closed his eyes, imagining her in the shower, imagining her naked, her fingers moving over her soft curves, flicking those long, burnished waves down her back.
His cocks stirred.
