Rosamund shook her head. “No thanks. I’m going to be handling all the dicks today.”
A crowd was gathering now, and several passersby snickered. Oops. That hadn’t come out exactly how she’d meant it to.
Still, she forged ahead. She stepped a little closer and batted her eyes. “You know what’s the one thing I’ve found is common to all species of humanoid males?”
His lips stretched in a loathsome smirk. “No, tell me. Or better yet, show me.”
She smiled back. “It will be my absolute pleasure.”
She kneed him in the crotch, hard, and he doubled over.
“This.This always works,” she snapped, and walked past him as he cupped his injured testicles and shouted curses.
The crowd cheered and clapped. Nobody had ever cheered and clapped for Rosamund before.
Wow, that felt great! She was invincible!
She strode forward with a new sense of confidence.
“Alert, alert,” Dot-R said. “There is your object.”
Rosamund glanced across the street. Kodran was turned away, talking to one of his retinue, but there was no mistaking him. That glossy blue-black hair and the powerful breadth of his shoulders. He gave a low laugh that thrummed through her body, making her toes curl. Her heart staggered in her chest, punch drunk.
God, why did the man have such a powerful effect on her? Her eyes wandered down his silk-clad spine and lingered on the fabric skimming over the taut globes of his ass, and she caught herself wondering what it would be like to sink her teeth into that firm flesh. She shook her head to dislodge the thought and tried to pull herself together.
“Maybe it’s not him,” she muttered. “Maybe it’s someone who looks exactly like him.” Right. Like maybe Kodran had a seven-foot-tall identical twin who dressed in the same garb and was followed by a dozen Draell clan-mates.
Dot-R snorted and patted her new metal hairdo. “Maybe you are a feathered female earth bird that lays eggs humans find to be delicious.”
Rosamund shot her a dirty look. “That was a rather long way of saying I’m chicken.”
Dot-R replied with a smirk. “It worked, didn’t it?”
Rosamund threw her hands up in the air in annoyance. “Fine,” she snapped. “I’ll go tell him the bad news.” But her feet suddenly seemed to have grown a thousand pounds heavier and she found herself not moving.
It didn’t help that since she was a little girl, she’d been entranced by dragons. She and her younger sister Alison had grown up in foster homes, but the one possession she’d clung to had been a book of fairy tales featuring dragons and princesses. The giant beasts fascinated her. Their raw strength, their power…in fact, she was wearing little dangling jade dragon earrings at the moment.
Her attention was yanked back to the present as Kodran stalked over to a lion shifter who was selling barbecued meat on a stick from a stall. It was the same shifter Kodran had told off before.
Behind the lion shifter, a glum-looking woman and several cubs cowered.
Kodran shouted at the lion, smacked him so hard he staggered, then picked him up by the collar and threw him a good ten feet into a trash bin. The lion shifter gave Kodran a terrified glance, then turned and limped off as fast as he could go. The woman and cubs ran in the opposite direction.
That was it. Rosamund didn’t like bullies.
She stomped over, with Dot-R following her, and grabbed him by the arm. Her floater followed right along next to her, with her piles of shopping bags teetering perilously.
“How dare you?” she yelled at him.
His biceps was firm and muscular under her fingers as he looked down at her with an expression of surprise. She could feel the heat radiating off his skin through the fine silk, and she was suddenly aware that he wasn’t just a big, physically powerful man – he was a Draell, an alien creature of freefall and dragonfire. She snatched her hand away, shaking away the tingling in her fingertips as if she were still touching him. Her heart thumped, and she was sure her face must be scarlet.
The look in his eyes melted into one of amused challenge, and his lips quirked into a smile. He said something like “Veerga leee marzvan.”
Damn it. Of all times for her universal translator to die on her.
“Dot-R, my translator isn’t working,” she said.
Dot-R glanced at it. “It appears that you have one of the lower budget models. I doubt it will translate Draell.”