Chapter Eleven

Drake

She was everything we'd dreamed of and more. My serpent coiled within me, watching, knowing, insisting we mate her immediately, but we still had a lot to learn about her, and she about us. From the moment she came into our arms, it became difficult, nearly impossible to think logically, but we hadn't survived in war zones by being scatterbrained. Naga and I could handle any situation that arose. After greeting her, we'd picked up her stowed bag and escorted her right to the car.

"Here's the house." Naga pulled into the driveway and activated the garage door. We did not park outside, for security reasons. Most of what we did was for security reasons, except for Jasmine. I still had some concerns about her, but we'd taken precautions to make sure our work was secured, and I really didn't think she was a spy or any kind of operative. I just wanted to know what her deal actually was. "Don't get out until I deactivate the alarm." Once we were inside the house, it would be rearmed. The house itself didn't hold anything super secret. It was all downstairs, but our home was one more layer of protection for our business, so it had a lot of its own electronics going on.

At the beep, I opened the back passenger side door and exited, opening Jasmine's door. "It's fine, now. Come on in and we'll get you situated." I ushered her into the house via the kitchen. "If you want or need to go outside, you'll have to enter a code."

"Is there a lot of crime around here or something?" She looked alarmed, not what we wanted to have happen.

"No, but we picked up our habits of being extra careful in the military," Naga said in a casual tone. "Ready for the tour, or would you rather rest after your long trip?"

"The tour," she said decisively. "Train travel is pretty relaxing, as it goes." She flushed, warm pink rising in her cheeks. "I napped for a lot of the trip."

"That's good." Naga rolled her bag to the foot of the stairs. "Want to leave your backpack here with the suitcase and we'll start downstairs?"

We showed her around the living room and pointed out the powder room under the stairs then the back patio where we demonstrated the code for disarming the French doors. "It's not meant to keep you in, so go out anytime, but when you come in, please rearm it, okay? It puts our minds at ease."

"You sure there aren't a lot of criminals around?"

"Truly, no," I reassured her. "So the kitchen is this way." We were proud of that room with all its shiny stainless steel appliances, even if we didn't cook as much as we should. Especially in the last few years, there were so many delivery services available even here, a bit out of town. Not as many as in the city of course, but enough. And convenience foods. But we did enjoy cooking, and the delivery that came last night was all about preparing fresh and healthy meals for our guest, our possible mate.

"Help yourself to anything you like. We want you to feel at home," Naga said. "Let's go into the family room area here. We mostly use it for media stuff, watching movies or listening to music. Relaxing."

"It's actually where we are nearly all the time when we aren't working," I put in. Big comfortable leather sofas and the biggest TV we could find made it a great place to screen the latest releases one of our clients hooked us up with. It wasn't illegal since they were charged with handing out copies to selective people, and our job was making sure those movies didn't go where they weren't supposed to.

Much more cutthroat than we'd ever dreamed when we took on that contract.

"Upstairs next," Naga suggested, and we left the kitchen, family room area, passing the basement door. It was the third time we'd passed it, but the first time, Jasmine came to a halt.

"What's behind there? Is that a keypad?"

"Our office in the basement," I told her. "Nothing interesting down there, but in our line of work, we are responsible to keep data private, so yes, it's locked."

"Uh, okay."

"Upstairs!" I ushered her away from the door. "I hope you'll like the room we have for you."

She allowed us to take her up, along with her luggage, and show her around the room. We did not take her into the other bedrooms, nor had we shown her our bedrooms downstairs, something she noticed. After admiring the attached bath, she asked, "So the other bedrooms are yours?"

"We sleep downstairs," Naga said. "But we're not far away if you need us."

We left her to take a shower and change after her travel, heading downstairs to prepare dinner. I got salad ingredients out while Naga heated the spaghetti sauce he made the day before. While chopping lettuce, I commented, "I think that went okay. My serpent is very excited."

"Mine, too, but there's something there."

I piled the lettuce in the bowl and turned my attention to a tomato. "She's hiding something, and we can't let our guard down until we know what it is."

We talked while we got everything ready and agreed that while we were both very attracted to her, and something about her presence calmed our serpents, we had to keep our heads about us and not reveal too much too soon.

Patience was a skill we had. We needed to use it.