Page 31 of Dragon’s Ending

Of course he would have. I already knew he noticed everything, whether he admitted to it or not. But even while part of me was willing my dick back down, another traitorous part of me didn’t entirely care. It was as if I’d thrown caution to the winds up there with Dominic, and somehow forgotten to pick it up again. For that instant, I felt wild—as if I could do anything, be anything.

As I pulled my trousers on, I couldn’t resist any longer, and I glanced back at him. His eyes flicked downward briefly to my not-so-small problem, but then came back to my face, without a hint of the smirk I was expecting. His gaze was heated on mine, and that was absolutely not helping.

Then he turned away and started dressing, which I was not going to watch. Something about the way he moved… He was magnetic. I’d seen it in the house, the way everyone always knew where he was in a room. It wasn’t like they were with Rhodri, scanning for threats. This was as if they couldn’t look away from him. And I was beginning to understand their problem a little too well.

“Come on,” he said. “Before we both freeze to death up here.”

He was obviously going to ignore what had just happened, to my deep relief.

As we picked our way down the damp hillside, I could see him changing with each step. The closer we got to the house, the more he tightened up, the less I was able to read his face. And I knew how he felt, I thought, as the house came into sight. It was like a predator of some kind—no, more a parasite, sucking the life and lightness out of anyone who ventured in.

And maybe we’d been flying longer than I’d realised and I was getting loopy on lack of sleep, because that was just ridiculous. Though as Dominic peeled away from me at the door without another word, I thought perhaps he might not think so.

Chapter Fourteen

DOMINIC

I left it until late morning to go to the records room. Flying with Ben had knocked something off-centre, and I hadn’t yet worked out whether I liked it.

I also knew damn well that if I walked into that records room too soon after last night, it’d look suspiciously like I actually wanted to be there. Which I absolutely did not. It was just something to do.

Ben looked up at my entrance, and his eyes flared briefly before his expression settled back into its usual composure.

Oh, that was interesting. And totally in line with last night and the way he’d tried—and failed—to hide the fact that simply looking at me naked had got him hard. And maybe I was just a bit smug about that.

Ben cleared his throat and looked back down at the papers spread across the table with an intensity suggesting they’d personally offended him.

The room looked different today. He’d cleared whole sections of shelving and stuck strips of masking tape along the edges, neat labels written in precise black letters—legal, estate, genealogical, correspondence.

I stared at them, wondering how even his handwriting was confident and calm. “You’ve got categories now.”

“At last,” he said, the triumph in his voice suggesting he’d restored civilisation after a particularly brutal apocalypse.

Dust coated the front of his dark blue jumper, and there was a faint smudge of ink on the side of his hand where he’d evidently been writing for hours already. His hair was uncombed. Or perhaps he’d been raking his hands through it in history-fuelled excitement. That shouldn’t have made much difference to how he looked, and yet somehow it did. I liked him ruffled.

I wandered further into the room, trailing my finger along the newly cleared and dusted shelves. “What happened to your strategy of diving blindly into piles and hoping history happened at you?”

“That was not my strategy,” he protested, an edge of outrage in his voice. Seemed I’d impugned his professional pride.

“Oh, it most definitely was,” I informed him.

“I was conducting an exploratory assessment.”

I snorted, and Ben glanced at me again. His gaze caught briefly on my mouth before flicking away so quickly he probably thought I wouldn’t notice. He really had no idea how obvious he was becoming.

With anyone else, I’d have made a move last night. But as it was, something in me kept stalling. Maybe because I liked this version of things too much already. The records room, the castle, flying together through cloud and darkness while he laughed into my mind like he’d forgotten how to be careful for a while. If I moved this into sex, it would change. And Ben didn’t feel like someone to fuck and forget about afterwards. Even thinking it sat strangely under my skin.

So I ignored the flare of heat in his eyes and wandered over to the nearest unsorted pile of papers like I hadn’t noticed anything at all.

His categories were absurdly precise. Apparently there were distinctions between estate legal disputes, family legal disputes, and inter-family legal disputes, just like there were between estate financial records and household financial records.

It sounded entirely made up to me, but each time I put something in the wrong pile, Ben would make a small noise under his breath and end up moving it with offended precision. It was strangely entertaining.

Some time later, I gave up on the piles and crouched to investigate the bottom shelf beside the window, where a pile of volumes with cracked leather spines had been shoved beneath a stack of loose papers.

“Well,” I said, after opening the first one. “Either our landlocked family’s history turns unexpectedly piratical, or someone’s made a mistake.”

Ben looked up immediately, alarm flashing across his face so quickly it was almost comical.