“Are you serious, bro? She’s taken.”
“No tan line on that ring finger,” Tawk observed, looking at her left hand. His fiery eyes lifted to hers. “Are you taken?”
“Nope. Completely single. Long-divorced, not dating, no interest in anyone. I have two cats. I’m a cat lady. I don’t wantanything more than that. I want peace. Men do not bring me peace. Just my cats.” Oh God, she was rambling.
Tawk nodded, his eyes thoughtful. “I like cats. I came up here for my drink.”
“Shoot, I’m sorry,” she muttered, rushing to pull a beer from the fridge. “I totally forgot.”
“Don’t stress. I was going to put a food order in anyways.” He sat at the bar, just one seat empty between him and her ex-husband.
Well, this was her nightmare.
Tammy fumbled popping the cap off the beer, and when she looked up, Tawk was watching her with an unreadable expression.
“Um, what would you like to eat?” she asked. “If you rush, I can get your order in before happy hour is over.” Her stupid voice was trembling.
He frowned and looked from her to Aaron, and back. “Is he bothering you?”
She sighed and hooked her hands on her hips. God, this couldn’t get any worse. “Tawk, this is Aaron. My ex.”
A smile took Tawk’s lips, and he hung his head, huffed a humorless sound. He nodded, and looked over at Aaron, and chuckled low again.
“What’s so funny?” Aaron asked.
“You’re the reason for the bangs? You?”
Tammy pursed her lips and dropped her gaze, half-mortified, half-amused by the dry humor in Tawk’s tone.
“Who do you think you are?”
Tawk’s smile faded a little but didn’t disappear completely. “Security,” he answered simply, then swung his attention to Tammy. “Do you want him to stay or to go?”
“It’s a free country,” Aaron said. “I can be in here if I want to be. Get me my favorite drink, honey,” he gritted out. “You knowwhich one. The kind we used to drink together before I took you home and did that thing you like? We’re just talking, you and me. We’re catching up. Just taking a little trip down memory lane for old time’s sake.”
Motion caught her eye over Aaron’s right shoulder, and she watched Jess stand up at the end of the table, and then lift her hand into the air, palm up.
And then something terrifying happened.
A prehistoric rumble shook the room, and in a wave, an enormous translucent bronze dragon appeared. To fit into the cavernous room, he had to be curled up. His tail appeared first, curled around the jukebox. The back of the dragon appeared next on the dance floor, and then the legs with the foot long, razor sharp claws. She tracked the progress of the dragon with a terrified gasp in her throat. The shoulders appeared and the long neck curved toward the bar, right over where Tawk sat was the head. It was long, and there were spikes behind the ears. The eyes were glowing red, with elongated slits for pupils. The lips were curled back to expose hauntingly sharp teeth, and his nostrils flared just inches from Aaron’s face. She could see right through the dragon, and Tawk just sat there in the middle of that monstrous head, watching Aaron.
“What the fuck?” Aaron yelled out, falling out of his chair. He hit the ground hard and scrambled backward, but the illusion of the dragon was already gone. There sat Tawk, arm resting on the bar, watching Aaron crab-crawl away with the same red hue to his eyes as the terrifying dragon.
Jess sat back down and started her conversation with Harley again, but Tammy couldn’t move. She stood there frozen in terror.
“That’s…that’s what you look like?” she whispered shakily.
Tawk tracked Aaron’s progress toward the exit, and then Brian and Jeff’s. When they were gone and ripping out of theparking lot in Aaron’s truck, only then did Tawk give her his attention again. He took a sip of his cold beer and said, “Burger basket, hold the veggies, triple meat.”
“F-f-f French fries or tater tots?” she stammered.
Never in her life had she seen a shifter Changed. That was the closest she’d come, and the sheer size of him, and the power that emanated off that illusion still made it hard to drag air into her lungs.
“Both.”
“Say please!” Cash called across the bar, where it seemed none of the human inhabitants had seen the terrifying dragon for that split second.
Tawk gave a slow smile, and his teeth were too sharp. “Please.” There was a growl to his voice, and he smelled like bonfire smoke.
