CAI Wyvern trotted down the hallway of the Dragon’s Den Casino, squinting at his cell phone and swiping his thumbs across the screen to answer the texts that were coming through one after another. Texts and direct messages from four different social media platforms pinged his phone, jumping over each other as he answered them, dozens of them, within minutes.
Just a typical Tuesday afternoon.
Texts from celebrity talent who wanted to perform at one of Dragons Den, Inc.’s many venues, their lawyers and agents who wanted their cut or were trying to convince Cai to book them in different theaters, and venue managers who were complaining that all of the above were calling them, trying to get them to influence Cai’s decisions about who would perform what, where.
White walls rushed by him as he walked, stretching his long legs and trying to get there faster.
Everything needed to be faster. Cai was booked in meetings straight through until ten o’clock that night with no breaks for meals or even to take a piss. Maybe he could bribe an admin to slip him some protein bars to munch during the meeting with Rhee-Rhee at three.
Cai had a meeting scheduled in five minutes with one of the biggest rock bands in the world, Shifter Valentine, trying to convince them to play the DDC arena during the gala-opening week. They didn’t want to play the gala-opening week. They said they weren’t a Las Vegas band, they were an arena-touring band, but Cai needed to convince them to play the damn DDC arena for the gala opening because the casino needed to open big-big-huge, and the meeting with them was eight floors up and started in four minutes, now. Dammit.
The lead singer was a phoenix shifter, so maybe Cai could call on some mythical-shifter loyalty to convince him.
He held his arm straight out and barreled through the door to the Human Resources Division as he scrolled down on his phone, looking back through his messages. “Smedley! The new sea serpent wrangler is supposed to be here. Arawn told me that if those sea monsters don’t get fed every morning, they start picking pedestrians off the street. Are they here yet?”
The HR manager, Smedley O’Tentacle, a rare and unusual squid shifter, raised his lugubrious gaze to Cai. “I am currently in the hiring process, Mr. Wyvern. Again, I must protest these irregular hiring practices. We are a publicly traded company. We have equal opportunity guidelines and outreach programs for under-represented minorities. We should not just hire any witch off the street at the recommendation of previous employees who are no longer employed by Dragons Den, Inc. I must protest.”
“Yeah, yeah. Your request is noted. When are they getting here?”
Smedley sighed and turned back to his computer screen. “She’s right here. I’m typing her information into our system.”
“Oh, thank the Dragon Lords.” Cai began to turn while he texted Marti D back that she was going to perform in the much larger arena that seated thirty thousand during opening-week-plus-two, not the small and intimate Dragon’s Lair Bar, because they didn’t want a stampede and riot in the casino. Riots were bad for business. He was not going to allow goddamn riots on his watch.
Without looking up from his screen, he said, “There’s been a delivery of three hundred pounds of halibut on ice. When do you think you could—”
Cai glanced up from his phone.
A woman sat in the chair, holding her phone out to the side while she looked up at him from under her eyelashes. Her dark hair curled in luxurious, sumptuous spirals around her pointed face, and her eyes were deep pools of darkness that Cai fell into and kept falling.
The blue tube lights above the woman’s head showered her with glowing light, and the room was so bright that he blinked tears from his eyes.
Cai Wyvern landed on his knees.
His phone tumbled to the floor from his numb hand.
He was nearly eye-level with her bare thighs where her skirt had drifted up as she sat.
She smiled at him.
He reached out one shaking hand. “Hi.”
“Hello,” she said, her voice like a symphony in his heart.
She shook his hand.
A shiver of magic surged through Cai, a pulse of pure sex and instinctive covetousness that made him want to carry this woman off and dump her in his hoard. “—I’m Cai Wyvern,” he gasped.
She tilted her head. “You okay?”
“Never better.” He looked at his legs and realized he was standing on his knees and was still on the floor. “Uh, trick knee. I blew it out playing soccer for my college team.”
Cai had not played soccer in college.
He staggered to his feet. “And you are?”
“Ember Niamh,” she said, her voice swelling to a crescendo as she named herself. She pronounced her last name as Neeve, but as Cai’s family was originally from Wales, he could spell that Irish name easily.
“Hello, Ember Niamh. Let’s get out of here.”
Her nose wrinkled delicately between her eyebrows. “I beg your pardon?”
“Lunch!” Cai shouted and then realized that he needed to tone it down a lot. “Let’s eat lunch. The union mandates that you get a lunch break.”
Behind him, Smedley O’Tentacle sputtered, “Mr. Wyvern! This is highly irregular!”
Cai spun, his fist clenched and ready to deck the guy. “This is none of your business.”
O’Tentacle’s wide-set eyes bulged from his face, his pupils elongating and becoming bars. “Your eyes! By all the Mighty Many-Armed Ones, your eyes!” He was so disturbed that ink droplets sprayed over the papers on his desk. “Mr. Wyvern! I will not be responsible for this! This is highly inappropriate! Your eyes!”
Cai snatched his phone from the floor and hustled Ember Niamh out of the Human Resources office, telling her, “It’s customary when a new employee comes on board to take them on a tour of the casino and then to lunch.”
Ember turned to him, her eyes sparkling as she laughed and swung a huge purse from her shoulder. “Goddesses, I thought I would never get out of that HR office. All that paperwork was driving me nuts. Thanks!”
“A tour of the casino,” Cai said, plastering a wide grin on his face. “Let’s start downstairs in the ballrooms and casino and work our way up. The revolving restaurant on the roof isn’t open to the public for lunch yet, so we can have some privacy to talk over the, uh,” Cai’s brain was not braining, and he had the dumb, “job. Your job. Job.”
“Don’t you have somewhere to be?” she asked him.
Cai sighed, “I don’t remember.”
Ember Niamh smiled at him, and she had a lovely smile that reached her dark eyes and seemed to bloom in her kind and beautiful heart. “I’d like some lunch.”
“Yeah,” Cai said, his whole world falling apart and reforming around this vision who went by the name of Ember Niamh. “Lunch sounds great.”