Page 40 of Dragon’s Ending

“It’s a theory at least,” I said. “And I think it’s plausible. I might run it past Evelyn later.”

He said nothing about bringing Rhodri in on our conversation, and I was glad. I knew at some point I’d receive a summons from Rhodri, and a demand to share with him what I’d found, but I didn’t want that to happen any sooner than it had to.

Dominic pushed himself off the table, which brought him even closer to me. There was a suspended moment, where he was very still and intimately close.

I stared at the paper in front of me without seeing a word, and he finally moved past me and threw himself back into his chair. There, he held his letters carelessly in one hand, a smile curling his lips as he read. And I tried to remember how to breathe.

DOMINIC

The only sounds in the room were the hum of the heater, the rustle of paper, and the occasional click when Ben put his pen down. I couldn’t work out why he made some notes on his laptop and others on paper, but I knew he’d have his reasons. The way he did for everything.

I was supposed to be sorting correspondence. Instead, I was watching him. Not intentionally, but every few moments, my attention drifted back to him.

He’d pushed his sleeves up at some point, exposing strong forearms dusted with dark gold hair. His mouth shifted slightly now and then as he made notes, as if he were silently translating parts of the Latin under his breath.

God, he was weird. And somehow, increasingly, so was I. Because a week ago, if someone had told me I’d voluntarily spend hours sitting in silence with a historian while reading about family trees and inheritance disputes, I’d have assumed I was being punished for something dire in a previous life.

Yet here I was, and it felt comfortable. The room smelled of dust and old paper, and the heater took the chill out of the air. Ben had taken his jumper off earlier and draped it over the back of his chair, leaving him in a blue shirt that fitted him altogether too well. Which was incredibly distracting.

Not just because he was attractive—though he was, in a restrained sort of way that kept catching me off guard—but because I was beginning to know him now. The expressions he made when concentrating. The little crease that sometimes appeared between his brows. The way he forgot the rest of the world existed once he disappeared into a document.

Watching him like this set loose a kind of longing inside me, though I didn’t know for what.

And then there was the way I wanted to have him under me, to taste every bit of him before I slowly took him apart. I wanted to fuck him until he couldn’t remember family trees or legal disputes or even his own name. To be the reason he stopped thinking.

I was still watching him when my phone buzzed.

Study. Now.

Foreboding spiked in my gut, heavy and familiar as I shoved the phone back in my pocket and set the letters to one side. I didn’t seriously think about ignoring the summons, but for an instant, I was tempted. Ben was looking at me, hazel eyes questioning, and something about his calm, a solidity that went beyond his physical body, made me want to stay here, with him. It wasn’t fucking fair that Rhodri could reach in and, with two words, disrupt that.

I didn’t tell Ben where I was going. I didn’t say anything as I left. And I wasn’t even sure why, just that I didn’t owe him an explanation. I didn’t owe anyone anything.

Rhodri was behind his desk when I entered the study, which felt like a statement. I took the chair he indicated, in front of the desk, and waited to find out what this was about. He’d probably been thinking about my answers to Mortimer last night and had found new ways in which I’d failed the family.

“Robin told me that they’re establishing a more open relationship with the Burrell family, following the success of their Moot-mandated visit.” His words were clipped with anger. I hadn’t been forgiven for the way I’d fucked that up for our family with the Carlews. But at least he didn’t linger on it this time. “If that pattern’s being repeated across the board, then I don’t want to be isolated. I’m considering opening lines of communication with families we don’t normally deal with. I want to know any gossip you’ve picked up over the years about the other families. Start with the Welsh ones.”

I didn’t know how he could leave me both excited at the prospect of working with him—he’d asked me for something, and he’d actually told me why—and seriously pissed off that all I was good for was idle gossip.

He wasn’t wrong, though, that I knew things he didn’t. Like the fact Heath’s youngest brother was head over heels in love with one of the Morgan family, but Robin had made it clear he disapproved. I couldn’t immediately see how that could be useful politically, but maybe… Maybe if Robin and David fell out over it, that might become a pressure point for Rhodri to use, if ever he needed to.

I rooted around in my hoard of facts and laid them in front of him. He listened to me intently, eyes gripping mine as if he could measure my truthfulness that way.

When I finally shrugged and said, “That’s it, really. Can’t think of anything else,” he sat back, and his eyes were almost warm. Maybe because I’d weighed everything I knew for usefulness before deciding whether to mention it—I didn’t think the fact Heath’s little sister was terrified of birds would exactly help anyone, unless we were going to send in squadrons of attack seagulls to declare war.

“Thank you,” he said, and I almost fell off my chair. It felt good to be part of something, to be playing the role that had been set out for me since I’d been born but which I’d always been forbidden. And I hated that it felt so good. I hated that I felt grateful.

In the following silence, he reached out to alter the angle of a silver-framed photo on his desk that, until now, I’d only seen the back of. And my breath froze in my lungs. I could see just enough to know that was my mother’s face smiling out at him, beautiful, and forever young.

His eyes were back on me, and thankfully he didn’t seem to notice I was having issues breathing. “Lunch?”

I nodded, because I didn’t know what my voice would do if I tried to say anything.

By the time we walked into the dining room, I’d got my balance back. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that he missed her, or thought of her. I just… Well, I guessed I hadn’t thought about it at all. I had a handful of memories of my mother, but only one of my father from that before-time. He’d swooped down and lifted me onto his shoulders, and run around the house as I wound my hands in his hair and shrieked with laughter.

My throat was so full it wasn’t easy to choke down the lunch that Glenys had made. Rhodri said nothing more to me, but it didn’t feel the same as usual. He wasn’t ignoring me. He just had nothing to say to me.

I flicked a glance around the table and noticed Ben was missing. He’d probably lost track of time, deep in clothing receipts from the eighth century or something equally fascinating. Unless one of those full bookshelves had toppled over and trapped him underneath, a kind of archive avalanche. No, much more likely he’d found two different spellings of Thomas in the same record and was still trying to understand why.