Lord's Fall (Elder Races #5)(8)

“So?” He didn’t care if Pia wasn’t qualified. In this instance, he was fully prepared to act in unabashed nepotism. She would learn the job in time if she wanted it, and in the meantime she wouldn’t screw up too badly.

Pia sprawled across his body, her head on his chest. She liked to draw light circles around his ni**les with her soft, gentle fingers while they talked. It drove him absolutely crazy. Plus they had just finished making love. At that point he was inclined to give her anything she wanted. He was most amused to note she didn’t seem to be aware of that fact.

“For another thing, you’ve got people on staff who actually are qualified and deserve the promotion, like Talia,” she told him.

He kissed her forehead, almost closing his eyes as he inhaled her beautiful scent. When they were intimate, he always insisted she take off the cloaking spell that hid her full nature from anyone else. Her pearly luminescence filtered through his dark lashes and lit all the dark corners inside of him.

He said, “I’m still at the ‘so?’ part of this conversation.”

She yawned and told him, “Third, I believe it’s a big mistake to take any position that would make me your employee. You’ll just think it gives you that much more right to run roughshod over me.”

He whispered huskily, “Is that what I do when I’m over you?”

Her throaty chuckle was barely audible. It brought to the forefront of his mind fevered images of what they had just done together. What he had done to her. What he would do to her, with her, again soon. “Seriously,” she said. “I may be your lover and your mate . . .”

“That’s not all you are.” He gathered up her left hand and kissed her fingers where the diamond in the ring he had given her gathered all the light in the room and threw it out in a spray of rainbow sparkles. “You’re going to be my wife too, as soon as we have time to do it right.”

She paused, then said, “Okay, I’m a little intimidated by what you mean when you say ‘do it right,’ and I’ll be your wife at some point, but the real point I’m trying to make is that I have no idea how to be your partner. I think that job is the wrong way for us to go.”

“Fair enough,” he said. And that had been that.

Now he strode through the crowded space of the arena, and Talia registered his presence with a quick, smiling glance, but she never stopped speaking to the reporters in front of her, and he maintained his distance. The selkie was all right, he supposed, as he maneuvered through the crowd to the elevators. There was just one big problem with her: she was scared to death of him.

While that might be a reasonable reaction to him, her fear saturated her scent whenever they were within proximity of each other. He didn’t know a single Wyr who would believe anything she had to say when she was in that state, so at the moment they were limited to televised appearances together—and Dragos almost never did televised appearances.

Plus there was another unfortunate consequence. Her fear drove him crazy. Not a tolerant male at the best of times, he felt the urge to smack her upside the head whenever they got in the same room. It made for a poor working dynamic.

When he reached the Cuelebre Enterprises Executive Suite, he surveyed it with satisfaction. It had been customized perfectly to his specific requirements.

The interior would have surprised anybody outside his inner circle. Most suites at the arena were designed for high-end entertaining, either personally or for business clients. Cuelebre Enterprises had taken over the arena’s new “supersuite” that had the capability of entertaining up to three hundred people, with comfortable lounge-style furniture, stylish decor, kitchens, full bars and fireplaces.

For the duration of Dragos’s use, however, the supersuite was currently furnished as a mobile working office, with secure laptop systems that had been personally couriered over by his assistants, office desks and chairs and a lounge area by the windows. It was fully plugged in, with high-speed internet, phones, and fax, print and scan capability. After several months of hard work and negotiations, they were finally at the end stages of some critical business deals. The office would allow Dragos to maintain a presence at the Games without losing a full week of work he could ill afford to lose.

One of his assistants, Kristoff, was already present and hard at work, talking on his phone while he typed on his keyboard. No matter how well dressed Kristoff was, he always appeared to be slightly shaggy and shambling. Kristoff was an ursine Wyr whose untidy, self-effacing demeanor disguised a sharp, quick wit and the kind of sturdy disposition needed to work around Dragos on a daily basis. Not only that, Kris was a Harvard-educated MBA who thrived on aggressive corporate maneuvering. Dragos paid him well for those traits.

Nodding to Kris as he strode in, he went immediately to the window look out over the arena. The sand on the combat floor was pristine, all footsteps raked smooth.

The door slammed open. Dragos looked over his shoulder, one eyebrow raised. One of his sentinels exploded into the suite. The harpy Aryal’s furious gray gaze fixed on him and she stormed toward him. In her human form, she was a six-foot-tall, powerfully built woman with dark hair that was tangled more often than not, and she had a strange, gaunt beauty that had nothing to do with dieting. In the harpy’s Wyr form, both strangeness and beauty were accentuated.

Naturally it would be Aryal who dared to storm and seethe around him that day. Chick was crazy, but no doubt that was axiomatic. All harpies were.