Triplets For The Dragon Page 2

  “It was,” Macy agreed.

  “So, you understand it’s like I said: it wasn't just a toss-off.”

  “No. No, it wasn’t.”

  Aaron sensed something very odd in her tone when she said that; something odd and unsettling. “Then can you please not be upset with me, and just come to me?”

  “Not yet,” said Macy. “Not ‘til after we talk.”

  For the first time, a look of worry came over Aaron’s face, and a sound of concern crept into his voice. He was beginning to sense that he was now in a place he had not been with anyone else.

  “Macy,” he said in a tone as if to cool her off in anticipation of a blow-up, “I wish you wouldn’t look at me the way you’re looking and sound the way you’re sounding, because it kind of seems like…”

  “Like what? Like I’m expecting something more than just a good time with you?”

  “Frankly,” said Aaron, “yes, that’s how you seem.”

  She took a step towards him, fixing him with a look that made him more than a little nervous. Aaron had ways of defending himself with women who became demanding and aggressive. All men like him had such ways. He just never thought he’d have to call upon them with this particular woman. And besides, at this moment, he really was not dressed for it.

  “Well,” said Macy, her eyes drilling into him, “I am expecting something more than just a good time. I’m definitely expecting something more.”

  “What?” Aaron asked, ready to back off a step for the one she took, and not at all liking the defensive feeling in which she was putting him.

  Macy pursed her lips a moment, pondering exactly what to say and realizing that in a way she had actually already told him. “You know those meetings you’re supposed to be going to this morning?” she asked.

  “Yes…”

  “You might want to cancel them, or delegate them, or do whatever else you have to do to clear out your schedule. You’re going to want a clear schedule for this.”

  Aaron was liking the sound of this less and less by the moment. “For what?” he now demanded, his voice raising slightly.

  Macy almost felt sorry for him. Clearly, he was not accustomed to being in the kind of position in which she was now putting him. Granted, he was accustomed to being in certain other kinds of positions. He had been in them enough with her. But nothing in his considerable experience had prepared him for this. No man was ever prepared for what Aaron was now about to hear.

  “For this,” Macy replied.

  And then, she told him.

  Macy knew that Aaron often had occasion to change the color of his skin—the color and the texture. It came naturally to him; it went with what else he was besides the billionaire CEO of a conglomerate that dealt in exercise, fitness, and fitness-related media. But usually when he changed his skin, Aaron took on hues of green, blue, and tan, in scales laid over his muscles. Aaron did not usually turn as pale and porcelain and as clammy as raw poultry, the way he did now. This was a very different sort of change for him.

  He actually seemed to stagger ever so slightly upon hearing the news. Then, he cleared his mind just enough to realize that he really did need to clear his schedule. He made a dash for his desk to notify Debra that he would not be going to the meeting to which he had just sent his executives, and to instruct her to pass on his apologies and tell her whom he wanted to conduct this morning’s business in his place. Then, he sat quietly with both hands on his desk to steady himself and looked over at Macy with an air of shock and confusion.

  Aaron cocked his head in the direction of one of the comfortable leather chairs on the opposite side of his desk. “Come here and sit down,” he told her numbly.

  Macy walked over to one of the chairs, remembering times just a couple of weeks ago when he had told her to do other things, and she had done as he said. And she remembered all the things that Aaron did next.

  Which was what brought them to this moment.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Just a couple of weeks ago, Macy had stepped off an elevator not into a floor of corporate offices but into a Park Avenue penthouse.

  A tall, smiling, handsome man in a suit met her at the door. He was square-jawed and very solidly built, suggesting muscles on muscles beneath his attire. The man, his voice deep and strong, took her invitation card and read her name. “Macy Jacobs. Good evening; welcome to Mr. Bedford’s home. My name is Rudd Ainsleigh; I’m Mr. Bedford’s personal assistant. I’m running the party for him, so he can just enjoy his guests. Let me take your coat.”

  “Thank you,” Macy said, turned around, and shrugged out of her coat, which Rudd put over one arm.

  “Please go right in,” Rudd said. And with a nod, Macy did.

  The first thing that she noticed inside the penthouse, other than the place being Architectural Digest beautiful and filled with smartly dressed celebrities, politicians, and models (male and female), was the music: not the obvious flavor of the month from the popular charts, but jazz. Tasteful, polished jazz. Coils of saxophone and piano music from speakers somewhere in the place wrapped themselves around everyone and everything. It reminded her of old clips she had seen of a TV show that Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner used to do, in which they would stage a swanky party with all the most glittering company in a posh penthouse and make viewers feel as if they’d been invited to some very elite, very exclusive gathering of all the most interesting and desirable people. Macy remembered that Hefner himself had seemed very posed and unnatural, even rather stiff, in those old clips, a bit like a talking mannequin. She had found his on-camera manner rather stiff.

  Well, she thought, set up an unnatural situation and get an unnatural performance. Wondering what kinds of poses she would see people putting on this evening, she smiled and joined the party.

  She decided the first place she would seek out would be the bar. At a party like this, she expected, there would pretty much be free-flowing everything. There were cater-waiters making the rounds with trays of champagne, but there was also a bartender on duty, and she’d rather have something made for her than something right out of the bottle. So, into the midst of the glitterati she stepped in her black cocktail dress and shoes with heels of just the right height, putting on her best party manners.

  Macy was a much more anonymous person than many of the people she saw sitting and flitting about her. Though she was a producer, no one ever saw her face or her name on screen, and her work was not entertainment. As the owner of a commercial video company, she was “in” the entertainment industry in a very peripheral sort of way, but she was not “of” it. She was a part of the engine that made mass-media entertainment possible. She was what paid for all the shows that people spent their hours watching, outside of the more rarified world of public television. As such, she was in the rather unique position of watching the entertainment world as just barely an outsider. Taking a seat at the bar and ordering a Mimosa—the first drink that came to her mind, basically—she looked out across the spacious and sumptuous living room of her host and picked out all the people that she recognized, and recalled snippets of the things she knew or had heard or read about them. Macy was the sort who read or listened to celebrity gossip for about five minutes, then forgot about it and moved on to things she found more interesting or important. She knew bits and pieces of things about many of the people here, or at least she knew things that had been said or written or reported about them, and recognized them as the soup of fact and fancy and shallow rumor that they were. Odds were that a few more myths would be spun out of this occasion to which they had all been invited by their very wealthy and exceptionally well-connected host. Speaking of whom, where was he…?

  Over her shoulder came a distinctly male voice: “Macy Jacobs, right?”

  She swiveled around in her bar seat and was directly face-to-face with the handsomest face she had ever seen in her life. For an instant, she did not know whether she was breathing or whether her heart was still beating. Then, he held out his hand.


  “Aaron Bedford,” he introduced himself, very obviously.

  She shook his hand, which felt as hard and smooth and strong as the muscles that she guessed were under what he was wearing: a casual grey mock turtleneck with a black jacket, slacks, and shoes, all of which were surely from the most expensive men’s fashion labels. The man knew how to make semi-casual look formal, she granted him that. “Good evening, Mr. Bedford,” Macy said.

  “Aaron,” he corrected her, letting her hand linger in his. “Please, you’re my guest; it’s a party. No business tonight.”

  “Of course…Aaron.” Macy smiled, reluctant to let her hand slip from his when it finally did. “And it looks like a wonderful party.”

  “And well it should be,” said Aaron. “I wouldn’t have anything less for my birthday.”

  “And happy birthday,” Macy acknowledged.

  “Thank you,” Aaron accepted. “And I’m very pleased you accepted the invitation.”

  “Frankly,” said Macy, “I appreciated the invitation, but I wasn’t sure why I even got it. That is, I don’t remember the two of us ever meeting before.” She had searched her memory for any occasion when she had previously seen or met Aaron Bedford and had come up with nothing. She certainly would not forget ever being in the presence of a man like this. He was incredible.

  “Well, I said it’s not business,” Aaron explained, “but I still invite all my business associates to my birthday party. It’s the one time a year that I really entertain, and I like to include everyone.”

  Slightly puzzled, Macy replied, “I’m sorry… We’re ‘business associates?’ Are we?”

  “Indirectly,” Aaron said. “You’ve produced a lot of the spots that appear on my channel. A lot of our outside advertising is from Macy J. Video—your company.”

  Macy’s eyes were lit with understanding. She nodded. “Oh, right. Yes, of course you’d know that.”

  “I know everything,” said Aaron. “That is, everything that goes on in my companies. We have had a business relationship, even if you’ve only dealt with my people, not personally, directly with me. Since we’ve had so much business, I thought it was past time we met—especially after that article I saw.”

  Macy rolled her eyes, thinking. “That article…” Then, she remembered. “Oh…that article. You saw that, really? That wasn’t even really about me—not specifically, anyway.”

  “But you were a part of it. Manhattan Magazine, ‘The Twelve Business People to Watch in the City.’ I take notice of things like that. And the most interesting people in things like that.”

  “You thought I was interesting?” Macy asked, now as intrigued with his business acumen as she was with the way he filled his designer wardrobe.

  “Very,” he said. “I was interested in how fast you’ve built your business, the way you’ve gotten around town. That and the quality of your work, which I’d naturally already seen when I screened the spots you produced that ran on my channel. You’ve joined the movers and shakers pretty quickly.”

  Macy chuckled softly, discreetly. “Any ‘moving and shaking’ I’ve done is thanks to my father. He’s retired now and doesn’t live in the city anymore.”

  “But you worked in his advertising agency and got all your first contacts from clients of his, and from there, you were on your way,” Aaron continued.

  “That was in the article,” Macy said. “You remember that…”

  “I remember that,” he said. “And I wanted to meet the woman who’s come so far, so fast, who’s had so much of her work on my channel. And my birthday party was the perfect time to make an acquaintance.”

  “That explains the invitation, then,” said Macy. “I was surprised to get it. And I’m glad you gave it.”

  “And I’m glad you accepted,” he replied, flashing a smile.

  “Well,” said Macy, warmed by his graciousness as much as by the looks of him, “most people haven’t come as far or as fast as you have. I did a little bit of homework of my own. You’re thirty-six today.”

  “I am,” Aaron replied. He politely did not bring up her age, but Macy suspected he knew she was thirty-three the same as he knew everything else. Clearly, this man took it upon himself to know things—and people.

  “And your family is originally from Kinross Green, Scotland.”

  Aaron nodded and chuckled softly. “Yes, we are from Kinross Green.”

  The meaning of that went unspoken. It needed not be said. Macy glanced out at Aaron’s other guests, those who were in the living room. “Are there any others here tonight?”

  “A few,” he said. “Kinross Green is a small place, you must know, and not everyone from there is like my family. And a lot of us who are like me left and started families and businesses elsewhere. Outside of Scotland, we’re pretty spread out.”

  “But still very well known,” Macy observed. “And it’s natural you would be. People naturally take notice of… That is, when you’re actually open about the fact that you’re…”

  He touched her bare shoulder, which set off sparks in her. Macy was not prepared for that, and she covered her reaction by suppressing the leap that she felt inside. “You don’t need to be delicate about it,” Aaron said. “It’s common knowledge. I am Nathairfear.”

  At this point, Macy looked slightly off, wondering if Aaron knew what she was doing. It was something that she had done more than once since she first started doing business with his company and looked him up online. She had “done her homework” about him well enough and knew his background. Aaron Bedford, before becoming a mogul, had been one of the most successful fitness models in the world, and he had gotten that way by virtue of who and what he was and where he had come from. He was the former Mr. United Kingdom of international bodybuilding competitions, who had parlayed his title into a career in modeling and product endorsements on both sides of the Atlantic. When one thought of nutritional supplements, exercise clothing and gear, bodybuilding equipment, and fitness machines, one thought of Aaron Bedford—both of his faces and both of his bodies. He was the Nathairfear—the dragon man—who had made himself synonymous with male physical perfection. His pictures and videos, for years, were everywhere, showing him posing in both his human form and his semi-dragon humanoid body, spreading his wings and flexing his tail as well as his muscles. He was a star of the fitness world, and he had worked it to his conspicuous advantage.

  Macy called up in her mind the pictures she had seen of him in his posing and modeling days. Aaron was not the kind of bodybuilder who pumped himself up to such an extreme that he looked gross with his clothes off and ridiculous with his clothes on. He was the kind who trained for lean and sleek, but perfectly sculpted and ripped, perfection. He was built like a Thor or a Superman of the movies, not a would-be Hulk. His tall frame was wrapped in breathtakingly wrought, lean muscle like the skyscraper that was now his corporate headquarters. He was a tower of artistically honed manhood. And when he morphed to a dragon and became a creature of serpentine head and neck with horns and spines, wings and talons and tail, every inch of those superb muscles was covered with shimmering scales of green and blue-green and topaz, making him seem like a jeweled reptilian statue. Through his efforts at perfecting his body, Aaron had made himself one of the most famous of a famous breed, the Nathairfear who had captured the attention of the world. It seemed inevitable that he would become who he now was.

  Macy looked back at him, retrieving herself from her memories. She could imagine that many people, upon meeting him, would mentally undress and transform him. She could guess that he knew she was doing it even now. He was probably accustomed to it, had probably learned to expect it from the humans that he met. Still, she felt a little rude and hoped she was not being too obvious and blatant about it.

  “Would you like to see the rest of the place?” Aaron offered, smoothly changing the subject. “You just got here, and you’ve never seen it before. I’d be happy to give you the official Aaron Bedford home tour.”

>   Macy daintily finished her drink and set the glass on the bar. “I’d love to,” she said.

  He gallantly took her by the hand as she stepped down from the stool and led her out across the living room. On the far side of the room, past the grand piano where a panoramic window at the top of a short flight of stairs showed the vista of Central Park and the towers of Manhattan sparkling in the night outside, there was a longer staircase leading to an upper level. Well, of course he’d have a two-story penthouse. What self-respecting billionaire on Park Avenue wouldn’t?

  “Down here,” said Aaron, “there’s my living room, my game room, my kitchen, my dining room, and my pantry and wine room. Upstairs, I have my den and office, my personal gym, library and art gallery, my home theatre—and the bedrooms.”