Releasing the Dragon Read online

  “Well, never mind, dear.” Mrs. Hofstadter patted her hand. “You’ll find the right one some day. Too bad you didn’t happen to meet that huge Kindred fellow that was over by the elevator. He was certainly handsome—in a scary kind of way.”

  Annie had to agree with her on that. But she didn’t want to talk about Drugair the Drake Kindred any more than she wanted to talk about her last disastrous Love Match.

  “Actually I’m not dressed up for a date tonight,” she told her neighbor. “I’m about to go to my fifteenth high school reunion.”

  “Really? On Halloween?” Mrs. Hofstadter’s faded blue eyes gleamed. “Well, how exciting. My oh my…” She sighed and shook her head. “My graduating class would have had their fiftieth reunion last year if they’d had one. But there weren’t enough of us left, I guess. I went to the thirtieth one though—it’s where I met my second husband.”

  “You did?” Annie’s ears suddenly perked up. “Was he someone you knew back in high school?”

  “Oh my, yes. He was in my Algebra class my senior year.” Mrs. Hofstadter sighed happily, her eyes misty with recollection. “I had such a crush on him, only I was too shy to show it. And come to find out, he’d always had a crush on me too!”

  “Really?” Annie felt her heart swell. It sounded just like her and Christian. Or enough like them to make her hopeful, anyway. “So what happened?” she asked, urging her elderly neighbor to finish the story.

  “Oh, well both of us had just lost our spouses in the last year or so and so he asked me out on a date. I said yes and before you knew it, I was saying ‘I do.’” She smiled. “My children were kind of scandalized by it—me getting married again, you know at that age. But they were all grown and married themselves so what could they say? We had a real happy marriage too, until my poor sweet Lenny died of lung cancer about five years ago.” She shook her head and dabbed at her eyes with a crumpled Kleenex she’d pulled from the sleeve of her sweater. “Don’t you mind what anyone says, Annie, honey—just go have a ball and if you meet a nice boy you used to know, have yourself some fun with him. You hear?”

  “That’s kind of exactly what I’m planning,” Annie confessed recklessly, though she knew she would have to give Mrs. Hofstadter the details later. If things didn’t work out with Christian, that was going to be painful. But she couldn’t keep her secret hope to herself any longer.

  “Oh, really now?” Mrs. Hofstadter looked at her with interest. “So you’re going after an old beau, are you?”

  “I did an Internet search and it turns out he’s single,” Annie confessed. “And so am I so I thought…” She shrugged, feeling her cheeks get warm.

  “I think that’s wonderful!” Mrs. Hofstadter beamed at her. “You just go and have some fun, sweetie. You know, in lots of ways my second marriage was better than my first. I didn’t have any children to raise, you see and neither did Lenny. We only had ourselves to please so we got to travel all over—had a wonderful time. I bet you’d like to do some traveling too, wouldn’t you?”

  “I really would—I’ve never been to Europe,” Annie confessed. Though if she’d had any idea how very much further away than the UK she would be soon be traveling, she might have kept her mouth shut.

  “Oh, yes—Paris is lovely.” Mrs. Hofstadter sighed. “You ought to go there first. And then be sure to see the Tower of London too—so much history there!”

  Annie laughed. “I think I’m getting a little ahead of myself. I have to go to the reunion and catch his eye first.”

  “Dressed like that, you’d catch any man’s eye. You look as pretty as a peach,” Mrs. Hofstadter declared, boosting Annie’s spirits immeasurably. “And what’s your young man’s name—the one you’re looking to get back together with?”

  “Christian—Christian Wentworth,” Annie told her. “But we were never really together—I just helped him with his English lit papers.”

  More like wrote all of them completely from start to finish, whispered a little voice in her head but she pushed it away. Who cared about details at a time like this?

  “Well, you just go get that Christian of yours,” Mrs. Hofstadter told her. “And have a wonderful time, honey. You deserve it.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Hofstadter.” Annie dropped a kiss on the old lady’s wrinkled cheek and smiled as she turned to leave her neighbor’s cluttered apartment. “Oh, and would you keep an eye on my door once in a while. Just to make sure nobody tries anything?”

  “I’ll peek at it several times before I go to bed,” Mrs. Hofstadter promised her. “And I’ve still got your spare key safe in case you lose yours again.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Hofstadter.” Annie smiled gratefully. That was actually how she’d gotten friendly with her neighbor in the first place. After losing her purse with her phone, her wallet, and the key to her apartment, she’d needed to call a locksmith. Mrs. Hofstadter had let Annie use her ancient landline and had asked her to wait in her apartment and served her cookies and tea while they waited for the locksmith together. They’d been friends ever since and Annie had trusted her neighbor with the spare key to her apartment in case of any further emergencies.

  “You have fun now,” Mrs. Hofstadter said again, smiling at Annie and waving as she shut the door. “Tell me all about it later.”

  Annie only hoped she would have something good to tell. Glancing at the time on her phone, she saw that she still had time to get to the reunion if she hurried. And since the giant Kindred hadn’t come back and she still had her pepper spray with her, she decided it should be safe to go. She would keep a sharp eye on her surroundings but with any luck, Drugair the Drake Kindred had already gone back to the Mother Ship where he belonged.

  What even was a Drake Kindred anyway? She’d only heard about Beast and Blood and Twin Kindred. Was he some rare kind of warrior that hadn’t been on the Mother Ship previously?

  Impatiently, Annie pushed the thought away. She ought to be concentrating on seeing Christian right now—not worrying about what kind of Kindred the big, rude warrior had been.

  Still, she couldn’t help seeing the burning expression in those black eyes when he looked at her. Why had he come down at all if he didn’t want to claim her, as she’d heard that other Kindred warriors claimed Earth brides? It was really insulting in a way—the fact that he would come all the way down just to see her while telling her that he essentially wanted nothing to do with her. Jerk!

  Well, I don’t want anything to do with him either, Annie told herself firmly. I just want to get to the reunion and see Christian. Maybe we’ll have a happy ending like Mrs. Hofstadter and her Lenny. That would be nice.

  More than nice, actually—she hadn’t had sex in ages. Well, other than with her vibrator when she woke up from one of those deeply disturbing dreams of Drugair.

  There you go again—thinking about that jerk of a Kindred instead of the reunion.

  Angry with herself, Annie shoved the image of the big Kindred aside and concentrated instead on the picture of Christian from her old yearbook. The melted honey hair…the sky-blue eyes… She would be seeing him soon if she hurried!

  Keeping a firm grip on her pepper spray, she walked briskly down the hallway, determined to carry out her plans no matter what.

  Four

  Annie needn’t have worried that Dru would ambush her—he was too stunned for that. His meeting with the little Earth female hadn’t gone how he had expected at all.

  When he’d pictured seeing her face to face, Dru had envisioned the same kind of scene he’d watched when other Kindred warriors claimed their mates on the Mother Ship or down in the HKR building on Earth. Sometimes the brides-to-be blushed when they saw the male they’d been dreaming of in the flesh. Sometimes they grew pale and weak and had to be supported by their friends and family—sometimes they even fainted. Once or twice Dru had seen a prospective bride get almost hysterical with excitement and rush into her chosen warrior’s arms.

  As he was imagining his first meeting with