Light His Fire: Paranormal BBW Dragon Shifter Mail-Order Bride Romance (4 page)

She shrugged noncommittally, a strand of hair falling on her forehead. Every little detail about her drove him to the edge of sanity, and he liked that feeling. Teetering on the very precipice of madness had always been to his liking.

“I’ll take that as a yes. Be seeing you soon, princess. Don’t miss me too much.”

He winked at her and twirled around, heading out of the store with long, purposeful strides. On the door, he yelled back over his shoulder, “Be seeing you around, loverbear!” and the grumbly harumpf he got in return made him snicker to himself.

Ah, young love.

But he had more important things to deal with – like figuring out how to get Pearl naked and screaming under him in as little time as possible, or he would really be playing with fire soon.

Luckily, he knew just the bear to see about that.

CHAPTER FOUR

Pearl

“What in the name of all that is… ARES!”

Pearl could feel the blood rushing to her cheeks so fast that it was making her dizzy. She ran across the road, almost getting hit by one of the big lumbering trucks that was preparing to park in front of her store.

Her store.
Her
store! Mae’s General Goods. But it certainly didn’t look like the store she had left just last night.

Countless people were bustling around, loading and unloading boxes from several trucks she hadn’t been expecting for another hour or so. She barely recognized most of the people there, and when she saw a familiar face, she clung to him. Pearl grabbed onto Dalton, who was walking into the store with a big box of whole chicken in his arms, and stopped him mid-step.

“What the hell is going on here!?”

Dalton frowned, looking to the box in his arms and then back to Pearl like she’d lost her damn mind. Did she not see he was carrying things? The anger that had seemed to be such a distant emotion to Pearl just some days ago was becoming more of a staple all of a sudden and she was sure that there was no one other than Ares to blame for it. It had to be him. How could it not?

“I don’t know, Miss Mae. This dragon guy called us last night and told me I had to be at work early, that the trucks were coming sooner and we had some furniture to put together. When I got here, he already had half of Tyler and Trey’s crew working on building new shelves and putting up the storage rooms, and an electrician was fixing the big walk-in freezer in the back. Uncle Deacon said that I shouldn’t trust him, but I dunno… He paid me up front for the day, double, so I’m cool with him. Can I go now?”

There was nothing left to do but nod weakly and let go of the surly polar bear teen. She stared at the hoard of people working on her store, moving ten times as fast as she could have on her own with the one pair of helping hands she could afford. Like a plague of locusts they had descended upon her store, but instead of screwing everything up, they were… making everything better.

“ARES!?” she yelled again, getting over her momentary bout of awe and confusion.

“Princess! How nice of you to join us! I’ve been waiting for you!” a familiar, cocky voice called, making Pearl spin around and look for its source.

When she laid her eyes on him, she felt the oh-so-tempting jolt of desire rush through her and her throat threaten to dry up again. He was shirtless (of course he was shirtless, how else could he be…) wearing a pair of working gloves and sporting that grin she wanted to smack off his face every time she saw him.

Ares was carrying three boxes of cheese and she knew each of them weighed at least forty pounds. He made it look like it was nothing.

“What the hell are you doing!? Who are all these people? What are you…”

She stood right in his path, the crew bustling around them. Pearl had run out of words. There just weren’t any left. Her brain froze over and all she could do was helplessly wait for him to tell her exactly what in tarnation he was doing.

“Why, I’m fixing up your store, of course. Gotta be ready by the grand opening, you know. I hear it’s any day now. Most of these guys are Trey and Tyler’s crew from that big guesthouse mansion they’re building down the road. They’re having some issues with shipments and were more than glad to lend out the crew to me for the day. Such sweethearts. Must be all this mountain air making everyone so pleasant.”

Ares grinned and easily veered past her as if she were some sort of immobile stump in his way. Pearl’s mouth fell open. Phrases like “I never,” and “the nerve of him,” and everything else that could only be said by ladies at least forty years her senior kept coming to her in bouts. After a moment, she finally regained her senses and stomped right after him.

Distantly, Dalton’s words came back to her.

A dragon? Is he a freaking dragon!?

She’d never discussed what kind of shifter he was, and for all the things he so gladly shared, Ares had been surprisingly tight-lipped about his last name and the type of shifter he was. But Ares and dragon made her brain jump to one very obvious conclusion, and it made her stomach sink.

He was Ares Goldplains, of the Gold Dragons, one of the biggest rock bands in the country. Like just about everyone in the world, she’d heard of the Goldplains brothers. Only Ares’s two older brothers were still at the helm of the band, but over the years the younger Goldplains brood had also gone through the band at various times. She wasn’t just dealing with a guy far too self-assured for his own good, she was dealing with a dragon – a
billionaire
dragon.

Which of course didn’t really mean anything to her. He was still a bastard who was screwing with her plans and she wasn’t about to take that lying down, no matter how much she wanted to.

Embarrassingly, the memories of the previous night came back to her at the most inopportune time. She’d spent a good long while imagining all the deliciously devious things Ares would do to her body if she only let him, but instead of getting to enjoy him, she’d had to settle for her vibrator and good, old-fashioned imagination. It was a good thing she was red with anger because otherwise she would have been red with a sudden bout of desire.

And that wouldn’t do at all.

“You can’t do this. This is
my
store,” Pearl said, stomping after the dragon who was now stocking the shelves with cheese.

It had to have been the most ridiculous thing she’d ever seen – a billionaire dragon stocking cheese. The absurdity of it all made her want to laugh out loud.

“Ah, but that is where you are wrong,” Ares said casually, giving her a toothy grin.

Pearl’s eyes went wide.

Oh no.

“What have you done? Ares, you better fucking tell me or I will take one of those cheese wheels and bash that damn grin of yours so far into your face that you can taste your last night’s dinner!”

That got her a few raised eyebrows but Pearl didn’t care. She was mad as hell and it didn’t matter who knew. Ares, of course, just chuckled like she’d made a mildly funny joke.

“Well, I met this delightful werebear by the name of Rhett Dean.”

Color drained from her face.

“Did you know our fathers used to be in the Gilded Beast club together? I didn’t. Apparently Rhett used to drink with my brother Alexander when they were both just getting started on their individual paths to greatness. You meet the weirdest shifters around here.”

All the while, he was hauling one cheese roll after another onto the shelves, his muscles glistening with a thin sheen of sweat that made Pearl’s knees threaten to buckle. When she’d started flirting with him over SassyDate – and lord did she regret it now – she’d never imagined she’d actually have to come face to face with him like this.

Sure, she’d told him all about the fact that she’d one day like to have a family and she’d joked about moving to an old gold rush town and ordering a mail-order mate for herself, but she’d never expected things to play out quite so… literally.

But, there he was, Ares Goldplains in all his gold-tinted glory, making her life hell and her body scream for his touch. It was unfair and her body was totally betraying her, right alongside her heart. What she wouldn’t have given to lick that sweat right off his rock-hard abs…

Freaking hell, Pearl. Snap out of it.

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Oh, it hardly does. But I did end up buying the building from Rhett… and his stake in the store. So, I guess you can call us partners now. He was glad to hear we knew each other from way back. Nice guy. We’re going out for beers tomorrow.”

Pearl’s world came crashing down around her. Now she really was tongue-tied.

All her carefully laid-out plans had been stomped on in a matter of less than a day by a dragon who just wouldn’t take no for an answer. In all honesty, he might have taken no for an answer, but she hadn’t really found the heart to say no to him. It kept being ‘maybe’ and ‘perhaps’ and ‘could be’ until she’d maybed her way right into a mess so big she couldn’t tell which end to start unraveling it from.

Feeling dizzy, she sat down on an overturned wooden box. Ares put away another humongous block of cheese and paused. He scraped off the gloves and kneeled in front of her, catching her gaze with his dazzling, mischievous eyes.

He really did have nice eyes. She had never been able to tell what color they really were from the muddled pictures he kept on his profile or the very short meeting they’d had at The Top Hat Bulldog, but they were sort of mesmerizing in their gold and blue shimmer.

Ares took her hands in his and she had to stifle a gasp as a feeling of impossible heat passed through her, starting from where he touched her and gathering at the pit of her stomach.

“Hey, relax. I’m going to be a silent partner. Quiet as a mouse, as long as you give me some cheese. Rhett told me about your deal and I promised to honor it. I’m a man of my word. When you’re ready, you can buy me out. And I figured if I can get this place in tip-top shape, then you won’t have any reason to say no to going out with me. By the way we’re going, I think we’ll be done with everything by noon and you’ll have plenty of time to tidy up whatever you’re not happy with before your big launch. Okay? Breathe, Pearl.”

Through a haze, she nodded. The only thing real was the way they were looking at each other and how he touched her; everything else seemed to fade away into the background. There was worry in his eyes, and she could feel the way his thumbs rubbed over her skin, making small circles. It ignited a fire in her and it wasn’t a bad kind of burning. It was the kind of fire that made her feel warm and safe, momentarily eclipsing the anger that had been gnawing at her from the inside.

This was one of the good moments. When he dropped the pretense, the attitude, the bad boy veneer and was real for a moment. She’d seen it a few times in their conversations, but it damn near blew her away in person. Of course she couldn’t agree with his methods, but she had to hand it to the man, he certainly was determined. And when he wasn’t being a complete pain, well… he was sort of irresistible.

“Are you feeling better?” Ares asked, and it snapped her out of her reverie.

Like a movie panning back into the scene, the bustle that was going on around them came back to her fast and hard. People were running back and forth, and she could hear the sounds of drills buzzing and saws roaring and people joking amongst one another as they set up her store.

“Lookin’ good, Mae,” a wolf shifter she’d seen around town a few times said, patting her on the shoulder as he passed by with an armful of bags.

Ares huffed lightly.

“I still prefer Pearl. Mae makes you sound like you’re an old lady.”

“Mae is approachable,” Pearl objected, though she’d been getting the same vibe herself.

Perhaps not one of her most enlightened decisions ever.

“Pearl is sexy.”

“Pearl’s an old lady name too,” she said, a giggle bubbling up inside of her.

“Not to a dragon it isn’t,” Ares said with a sly smirk that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up.

“So it’s true, you’re a dragon?”

“Ah, nosy!”

Ares stood up, pulling her to her feet as well. She almost toppled over but he caught her in his arms and, for a second, she could feel what it meant to be so close to a dragon that she could hear his heart pounding inside his chest.