Page 12 of Dragon in Denial
Chapter 4
Antoinette didn’t have a plan when she left the Ormarrs’ house. But she was so keyed up, she needed some kind of release, and fighting bad guys seemed like the perfect solution. It would burn off some of this adrenaline and, with any luck, make a small dent in the dragon’s blood empire. Every little bit counted. She had to keep telling herself that so she wouldn’t become depressed over how trulylittlethose dents were.
Well, he knows about Henri now.
She didn’t know why she’d been hesitant to tell Ketu about her son. Okay, yes, she did. She’d worried that he would look down on her, see her as following in her own mother’s footsteps, even though her mother had been a teen when she had her first kid and Antoinette had been twenty-four.
Hell, that made it worse, didn’t it? At least her mother could claim to be a dumb kid; Antoinette had been old enough to know better.
Although he’d been gone for ten years, Ketu’s opinion still mattered. For most of her life, he had been the big brother she never had. Well, she did have one, a biological one, but he’d had as much time for her as her father had, so she’d learned at a young age to never expect much out of him.
Ketu, on the other hand, had always been there for her, even when she didn’t want him to be. Like when she met a boy she was interested in and he decided he didn’t approve of the “little creep” as he used to call her crushes. Or when her grades started slipping in middle school. He told her she was too smart to fail, and he’d quizzed her endlessly on those vocabulary words until she was spelling them in her sleep.
And then he’d disappeared, at the moment when she needed him most.
He was right, people did change, and she’d changed most of all. “If Ketu had still been around, I wonder if he would have scared off Micca before I screwed up and got pregnant.”
“Probably.”
She gave a littleeepand tripped over a protruding root as she twisted around and pressed her back to the tree she’d been using to shield herself from view. Ketu moved into her line of vision, stepping around another fat, old oak tree.
“How did you find me?” she asked, working to regain control of her heart rate.
“I followed you.”
She sputtered, “F-followed me?”
Instead of explaining further, he glanced around at the dense copse of trees and then from the ten-foot fence with rolls of barbed wire lining the top to the vast, empty parking lot that butted up to a handful of old warehouses, all with lights blazing from inside.
“What is this place?” he asked.
“What do you care?”
“Well, besides the obvious, I’m concerned for your safety. You shouldn’t be out here at night by yourself.”
She snorted. “I can take care of myself. Why don’t you go on back to Detroit and get the hell out of my hair?”
“Speaking of hair, I like it.” He waved at her windswept curls.
“Stop trying to be nice.”
“Fine. Tell me about Henri. I take it his father’s name is Micca? Is he in the picture? Are you mated?”
Antoinette sighed. “Yes, his father is named Micca. No, he’s not in the picture, and no, I’m not mated. Now, why don’t you go away?”
“What’s with you? Ten years ago I used to tease you because your stories were so long. Now you barely give me enough information to make sense of anything.”
“Probably because I don’t really want to talk about it.”
“Why not?”
She flung her hands into the air. “I screwed up, okay? I met Micca at a bar. We hit it off. I went back to his hotel with him and we spent the night together. The condom broke. I ended up pregnant. And when I contacted him to let him know, he informed me that he was mated and didn’t want his mate to know he’d messed around on her. So he sent me a big, fat check and told me to have a nice life.”
“Whoa. Seriously?”
He didn’t sound condescending. Or critical. Or disapproving. Or anything that Antoinette might have expected from him.
She sighed again. “Yep. Pretty much. Stupid, huh?”
