Page 33 of Dragon’s Ending

“Oh my God, you do mean that.”

And at the despair in his eyes as he took in the sheer number of novels piled on the shelf, the tightness in my chest loosened into helpless laughter.

BEN

After lunch, Glenys confirmed with reassuring certainty that the novels had already been in the room before the papers were moved. As had the porcelain figurines.

“It was a junk room, really,” she said, while aggressively buttering bread, and I wondered what it must be like to have a house so large that a room could just be left with no function.

“Dominic said his mother was the only person who ever really looked at the records,” I said, only realising once the words were out that perhaps that hadn’t been intended for public consumption.

Glenys’s knife stilled in the butter, and when she looked at me, her eyes were wide with surprise.

“He’s right,” she said slowly at last. “She used to sit up there reading for hours, when she wasn’t playing with Dominic.”

Strangely, that hurt to hear. I decided to be much more careful in this house about what I said to whom.

“Were records the only things kept in the original room?” I asked.

Glenys shrugged. “No idea, love. I never went poking through it myself, not till the leak got bad, when it was all hands on deck to clear it. Ceiling started dripping through onto the landing outside. There were buckets everywhere for weeks.” She sighed. “And then we got mice. Again.”

“Were any of the records damaged by the leak?” I hadn’t seen anything with water damage, but perhaps some had been affected and had been thrown out. Oh God, no. The thought left me cold inside, my lungs constricting as I waited for her answer.

“No, nothing like that. The water came down the wall, and the old papers were in bookcases in the middle of the floor.”

God, they’d been lucky. I really did have to talk to Rhodri about proper storage and pest control for the fragile old records before I left.

By the time I escaped back upstairs, the house had gone quiet with the strange stillness that characterised this place. So many people lived here so very quietly.

The records room door stuck briefly before giving way beneath my shoulder. And then I stopped dead in the doorway.

The room was warm. A small electric fire sat beside the table, its one bar glowing orange and its cable disappearing towards the socket near the shelves.

For a second, I simply stared at it. Then, very slowly, I looked around the room as if Dominic might somehow still be there despite the silence. He wasn’t. Of course he wasn’t.

I crouched beside the heater, holding one hand near the faint current of warmth. Not hot enough to damage anything, I thought. It had been kept away from the shelves and their elderly papers. Meaning someone had thought about that.

I hadn’t said anything this morning about being cold. I hadn’t been quite cold enough to go looking for an extra jumper to wear. But it’d been chilly enough, just sitting, that my shoulders had ended up hunched and my handwriting had grown clumsy.

And Dominic had marked it. He’d done something about it quietly enough that I probably wasn’t supposed to notice.

I sat down slowly at the table, looking around at the newly organised shelves. Dominic’s presence lingered everywhere despite his absence. Careless-looking stacks were sorted into categories in a way that suggested he’d actually listened to my explanations.

This was becoming a problem. Last night, I’d thought it was just attraction. Lust, or merely the unavoidable result of spending time with Dominic, who was simultaneously the most frustrating and most attractive man I’d ever encountered. Maybe it was a result of the exhilaration of flying with him, which had been better than anything I’d felt in years.

But now I knew. The real problem was that I’d started wanting things I absolutely should not want. Like Dominic’s presence. All the time, even when he was being frustrating. Maybe especially then, because laughter was beginning to dawn in his eyes as he baited me.

I’d been both dreading and looking forward to seeing him this morning, embarrassed about what had happened last night but also unable to stop wanting to see him. To be in his presence. And then he’d lounged into the room, in that annoyingly easy way of his, and my heart had jumped. Not just my heart, either. I really did need to do something about the fact there seemed to be a direct line from Dominic to my dick.

Physical attraction alone was easy to ignore, relatively speaking. But Dominic, it seemed, had somehow lodged himself beneath my skin in the space of less than a week. I was already building my days around when he’d appear in the records room and drape himself irritatingly across furniture while pretending not to help me.

And somewhere along the line, that had become important to me in a way that felt distinctly unsafe. Because Dominic Bedwyr, restless, reckless, and beautiful, would be catastrophic for someone like me. My life was stable and sensible, and good and happy, and not exciting. It wasn’t as exhilarating as flying with Dominic had been, but it didn’t risk anything either. If I gave my heart to Dominic the way I was beginning to want to, I knew he’d have no use for it. And I’d be left, never happy with my life again but unable to have what I wanted. Because I wanted Dominic.

I looked down at the pile of correspondence in front of me, but all I could think of was moonlight on silver-grey wings and laughter breaking warm and wild into my mind.

God. I was in trouble.

Chapter Fifteen