Page 48 of Dragon’s Ending

“My whole family treasures history,” I told him. “But it’s not—it’s not like we have to own the documents ourselves, though God help anyone who tried to raid our family’s archives. It’s…” I shrugged slightly again, because I knew it was weird, compared to all the other dragons out there. “It’s just the way it is.”

“God,” he said, and he sounded stunned. His hand was still for an instant, and when he moved again, it wasn’t my skin he was stroking but the ring on his right hand. Made of emeralds and gold, and I guessed one of those was his treasure. It seemed he was absent-mindedly reassuring himself as he tried to imagine life without treasure. Evidently, he failed. “That should be illegal,” he declared at last.

Fair enough. I had the opposite problem—I couldn’t imagine being so tightly tied to a hoard of metal or jewels that I’d always worry it might be stolen from me.

He started kissing along my shoulder, and I wriggled. His mouth on my skin felt so good, warm and certain, but it tickled. “Stop moving,” he murmured. “I haven’t got them all yet.”

“What the—?” My last word got swallowed in what sounded embarrassingly like a giggle. God damn it, I’d never known I was ticklish.

“Dominic,” I said firmly, when he finally raised his head and looked at me, eyes glinting. “What exactly are you doing?”

“Freckles. You’ve got them on your shoulders. Which is weird, because they’re not—” He was peering closely at me, like I was an eighteenth-century fake of an older document. “Nope, they’re really not there on your face. How does that work?”

“Let’s just put it down to me being a white dragon,” I told him.

“Oh,” he said, and his eyes lit up. “If a white dragon and a red one had a dragonet, would it be pink?”

“No, Dominic. It would not be pink,” I told him.

“How d’you know? Have you tried? Pink dragons would be awesome.”

“Because if colours worked like that, then the first gold dragon to have offspring with a red one would’ve had rose-gold dragonets. And they don’t exist.”

He looked so disappointed that I had to kiss him. He gave a pleased-sounding little hum, and kissed me back, his hand sliding down my spine in a way that made me shiver.

Then he pulled away. “No. You’ve got to stop doing that.”

“Doing what?” I asked, because okay, maybe my hands were doing their own bit of wandering, with one currently cupping his arse and the other pressed against his chest, but he hadn’t seemed to mind that before.

“Distracting me. I was asking you something.”

“You were campaigning for pink dragons,” I informed him.

“I mean, yeah, and I think I’m going to petition…” he frowned. “Someone. But your family—why did they hide all those years? And why come out now?”

I loved that he felt comfortable enough with me to ask direct questions. And what he was asking was no great secret. Well, Rhodri probably wouldn’t want me telling him, but I wasn’t going to think of Rhodri right now. Not when Dominic’s legs were tangled with mine and he was pressed against me. Still naked.

“We hid away from all other dragons when we lost our throne, and it seems as if the rest of you forgot about us,” I told him.

“Your throne?” he asked, quirking an eyebrow. “Am I supposed to curtsey?”

“I mean, don’t let me stop you, but no, we’re going back centuries, and it was a little principality in south—oh, God.” It hit me for the first time and I stared at him. “Wales. No wonder I love it here.”

“There’re no other reasons?” he said, and trailed his hand suggestively along my thigh.

I shook my head. He was impossible. “As I was saying,” I said firmly, “we fled and hid, otherwise we’d have been wiped out by the usurpers.”

Well, that was interesting. I’d never consciously thought of the Mortimers as usurpers, but that was the word that had come out, and my dragon’s disapproving rumble had vibrated in my voice.

“We survived mainly because our family had enough distant branches to maintain separate lines over the years,” I continued. “Not so much a family tree as several family shrubs growing next to one another.”

Dominic snorted a laugh.

“But everyone memorised the relationship charts as dragonets. Who was closely related to whom, and which branches were acceptable options for romantic relationships.”

“That sounds restrictive as hell.”

“It was,” I admitted. “Though relationships with humans were tolerated, which helped.”