Page 3 of Red Dragon’s Heart

Zakerek snapped, Cazbek is the porn collector, not me. But he didn’t want to think about his brother dragon right now, and the human girl who’d turned out to be his true mate. Zak was not like Caz, and hooking up with a human who expected him to fuss over her and try to make her happy for eternity would just be hell for both of them.

Zakerek was the first to admit, he was grumpy and sarcastic and very, very bad at relationships. Even his clan only put up with him because he’d once helped save the king’s sister from being kidnapped.

Also, so he’d let them come play pinball in his man cave, and watch the big-screen TV.

The beast stirred again. They both watched the tech girl.

The monster definitely wanted her. That had to be the first thing that it, Zakerek and his dragon had ever agreed on. They just wanted to do different things with her.

Zak dragged his eyes back to his computer screen. He had to stay focused. He just wished she wasn’t so soft and biteable, her eyes looking all deep and mysterious, like she was full of delicious secrets to be uncovered, one by one.

And there was a… vibe. One that spoke of someone who was solitary and alone, like him, because the world had treated them badly and they couldn’t trust anyone or anything.

But it hadn’t beaten her down. She was still strong, still a fighter.

He found his gaze straying to her again, and he pulled his eyes away. He couldn’t afford to get distracted. He had to kidnap a murderer.

Chapter 2

Maddie went to pour a replacement coffee for Zak, even though she wasn’t technically a server. He made the actual server so nervous she spilled things every time she went near him. And Maddie could use the distraction—she was so edgy and twitchy she felt like she was sitting on an anthill.

If everything went the way it was supposed to, tonight was the night she would get her life back.

But first she had to get through the next eight hours—and she was doing it by messing with the hot, mysterious guy in the corner.

He’d been here in Café Cyborg three days in a row, opening to closing, working away on his computer and ignoring everyone as much as he possibly could. There was a fierce intensity about him that had instantly intrigued her, even though he was not the type of guy she was usually attracted to—or more to the point, not at all the kind who was usually attracted to her.

First off, he was four-alarm-fire hawt. Tall—at least six-four—and movie-star ripped. Even though it was cold and rainy out, he only had on jeans and a black t-shirt that clung to every single muscle. Even his forearms rippled as he typed on his laptop keyboard. He also wore jewelry—a small gold pendant on a thick chain—and his long hair swept back from his face, dark blond with a bleached strip that ran all the way from the top of his head down almost to his shoulder blades, like he’d once had a mohawk but it had grown out.

Now and then when he ran his fingers through his hair, she could catch glimpses of scalp tattoos where the sides had once been shaved.

He looked wild. Untamed. Unconventional. Dangerous. Definitely not her type. But he also looked… lonely.

Lonely was something she could relate to.

Of course, he was possibly alone because he was even more dangerous than he looked. But maybe he was just socially challenged, like her. Either she didn’t know what to say to people, or she said too much of the wrong thing. She’d been practicing, though, in the four months since she’d gotten this job. It helped that she was already pretending to be someone other than who she was—so she could act however she wanted.

Chrystal Sherman was a fiction—made possible by the fact that her boss, Ella May, had agreed to pay her cash under the table, no social security number required. She thought Maddie was hiding out from an abusive husband, and Maddie hadn’t told her different.

What she was hiding out from was way worse than that, but just as potentially deadly. So she’d made Maddie Fox invisible behind Chrystal, with her dark hair and goth makeup and piercings, contact lenses, thirty extra pounds and a friendly attitude.

But if everything went right tonight—and it absolutely had to—she would have the proof she needed to clear her name, and bring down Eric Chisholm.

Then the whole world would know that he was the monster and the murderer, not her.

She could abandon Chrystal and be Maddie again. She could go home. She could see her little brother, Troy, hug him and make sure he was being taken care of. And then she could use the information she’d stolen from Chisholm’s company to help Troy, to help so many people.

She rolled her head back and forth, trying to get rid of the tension in her neck. Tonight would be dangerous—crazy dangerous. It was a huge gamble, but it was the only way.

Stop thinking about it, she told herself. You’ll freak yourself out and you’ll be too scared to go through with it.

She took Zak’s coffee over and put it on the table. He grunted something unintelligible.

“You’re welcome,” she said. “How’s the novel coming?”

He stopped typing but didn’t lift his eyes from the screen. Instead he just waited, like he was deciding whether to answer, or just snarl at her. Oops. Maybe he really was tired of her.

She had to get better at reading people’s ‘I’m done with you’ signals.