Page 55 of Dragon’s Ending

I watched him spread it across the toast with the same concentration he brought to fourteenth-century land disputes, his brow faintly furrowed as though breakfast required serious scholarly consideration.

And suddenly, with horrifying clarity, I understood Rhi completely. God help the poor girl.

To distract myself, I leaned in and stole half his toast from his plate.

Ben looked up in outrage. “Dominic.”

“You weren’t going to share with me?” I asked, wounded by his lack of care.

“There’s bread right there for you to make your own,” he said, but his attempt at a reproving tone was fatally undermined by the grin tugging at his lips.

Glenys snorted loudly enough to suggest she’d entirely given up pretending not to listen, and I stole the rest of Ben’s coffee.

BEN

Despite Dominic’s continued existence proving distracting, I made genuine progress that morning. The discrepancy between the Bedwyr family records and the court documents widened the deeper I dug, and by midday I’d surrounded myself once more with folders, notebooks and increasingly frantic cross-references.

I’d also somehow acquired a dragon. Dominic had abandoned any pretence of behaving normally sometime around eleven. He leaned against the back of my chair whenever he passed, brushed fingers over the back of my neck while reaching for records, and once stopped in the middle of reading something simply to tuck my hair behind my ear before carrying on as though that was a perfectly ordinary thing to do.

It was impossible to ignore him, even if I’d wanted to. Each time I looked up, he was there, sprawled in his chair with a folder on his chest, or perched on the edge of the table, swinging one foot absently as he watched me with the warm, intent look that sent heat straight through me.

At one point I became aware that I’d been staring at his mouth instead of the genealogy in front of me for a solid minute.

“I can hear your concentration failing from here,” Dominic said without looking up from his records, sounding deeply smug.

“I hate you.”

“You very clearly don’t.”

Which, infuriatingly, was true.

I was relieved when Dominic finally stretched and announced he was starving, because I’d just tried to catalogue the same dragon three separate times. It wasn’t my fault that Dominic’s thighs were looking particularly spectacular.

The dining room was fairly empty when we got there, with no sign of Rhodri. Conversations drifted lazily around the long table as people passed dishes back and forth, the atmosphere noticeably more relaxed in the absence of the head of family.

I’d barely sat down when Dominic spoke from his usual place near the head of the table. “Ben.”

I looked up to find him watching me. He was sprawling again, that way he had of taking up space as if it were his absolute right, with one arm slung over the back of his chair. “Why are you so far away?”

“You’re perfectly capable of surviving at a distance for one meal,” I informed him.

His mouth twitched. Then, without the slightest warning, he stood up. For a second, I thought he was leaving the room. Instead, he grabbed the back of his chair.

Conversation faltered around the table as Dominic dragged the chair noisily down the length of the room, snagged an unused place setting from further up, and deposited both beside me.

“Budge up, historian.”

Heat rushed into my face as I shifted sideways to make room for him, Phoebe on his other side moving further down the table.

“Dominic,” I muttered under my breath as he dropped into the chair with complete satisfaction.

“What?” he asked innocently, already reaching across me for the bread basket.

I opened my mouth, then shut it again. Because the thing was, I didn’t actually mind. Quite the opposite. I liked him beside me far more than I probably should have. It was simply that Dragon’s Ending ran on such rigid, unspoken structure, and Dominic had just dragged his chair halfway across the dining room as though centuries of tradition were little more than a mild inconvenience.

Around us, conversation slowly resumed, though the number of sideways glances we received suggested we were still the centre of attention.

Dominic, meanwhile, appeared blissfully unconcerned by the social disruption he’d just caused. He stole half my cheese, drank my water after finishing his own, and spent most of lunch lounging sideways in his chair with one knee pressed against mine beneath the table as though physical contact had become a necessity.