Bride Of The Dragon by Georgette St. Clair

then…then you must have been having sex with him!” Pandora said furiously to Kelly.
    People around them were snickering behind their hands, and Pandora’s father looked as if he were about to explode.
    “Are you serious?” Kelly scoffed. “I flew in from Seattle on the morning of the fair, checked into my hotel, and went straight to the fairgrounds. And I’ve never even been in the Tri-Valley area before. All of that’s easy to prove. So what’s more likely – that you were banging a local guy, or that I was?”
    “She still broke into the trailer,” Pandora’s father said desperately to Principe Teague. “Breaking and entering is illegal. Arrest her.”
    “All I did was bring her and her boyfriend more beer,” Kelly said. “They let me in.” Also true. Mostly. They had let her in.
    “I need to talk to the people who own the trailer. That’s the fair committee,” Teague said unhappily, shaking his head. “I have to find out if they want to press charges. And do you want any more publicity about this than you’ve already gotten?” He glanced around at the crowd.
    “Fine, take her side,” Pandora’s father muttered angrily.
    Tears of rage and humiliation glistened in Pandora’s eyes. “I will get you for this,” she swore. “I will destroy you both.” And she and her family stormed off.
    Principe Teague looked at Gabriel. “I suppose you think you’ve gotten away with something,” he said angrily. “Your luck won’t hold forever.”
    And he walked away.

Chapter Ten
     
    La Dolce Vita was a popular Italian restaurant in South Lyndvale. Gabriel and Kelly sat at a table at the back, but the eatery was packed, and a steady stream of people stopped by their table, offering their congratulations and asking when the wedding would be held. Apparently Gabriel and his family were well liked in the valley, even though they were criminals. Kelly wasn’t really surprised; they were the most charming bunch of thieves she’d ever met.
    “Did you deliver all your drugs?” Kelly asked Gabriel, digging into her fettucine Alfredo.
    “Yes, thanks, heroin sales are up but crack seems to be on the decline.” Gabriel ate an entire steak in half a dozen bites. Dragons were known for their huge appetites; they needed a lot of fuel for their flames.
    “Are you going to tell me what was really in the bag?”
    He ignored her and kept eating.
    “So,” he said when he finally slowed down, “What did you mean about Marvin?”
    “Well. He was in my class at the Gemological Institute for Empaths.”
    “And?”
    Kelly hesitated. She didn’t like bad-mouthing people, but the problem was, an incompetent gem empath could cause a lot of harm.
    “It’s just…his powers are very, very weak. Barely enough to register. He was okay with the really powerful gems, but he couldn’t even detect the less powerful gems. And some of those gems could do a lot of harm in the wrong hands. He shouldn’t have gotten his certificate as a gem empath, but he was having an affair with one of his male, married professors, and that was the professor who tested our abilities.”
    “So how did your abilities rank?”
    Off the charts. Too high to measure. “Pretty good,” she said modestly.
    “You’re a lousy liar.”
    She smiled sweetly. “Actually, I’m a pretty good liar. That’s why I manage to finagle my way into so many places that I shouldn’t be, and close so many cases.”
    He smiled at her. “Then maybe it’s our deep psychic connection that allows me to tell when you’re trying to pull the wool over my eyes.”
    She made a scoffing noise. “Or the voices in your head.”
    “Anyway, back to Marvin,” Gabriel said. “He came with a glowing recommendation from his professor…I imagine that would be the guy he had the affair with.” He frowned. “So you’re saying that his skills are weak.”
    “Yes. I wanted to see if he’d missed anything, so I looked closely at some of your pieces, and I already found a