Page 31

Mine's doing the same thing. That's how I know.

Her scent is everywhere. It's in the blankets. It's in the chair she curled up in. It's soaked into the very air of this cabin, sweet and warm and maddening, like honey and woodsmoke and something underneath that I don't have a name for. Something that's just her. Every time I breathe in, my dragon lifts its head and growls.

She's in heat. Her first heat. And she has absolutely no idea what that does to us.

She laughs, and my skin goes hot. She stretches, arms over her head, and the borrowed shirt pulls tight across her breasts, and I have to look at the ceiling and count beams. She tucks her hair behind her ear, and I swear my gums ache, like my dragon's trying to push its teeth through.

I've charmed a lot of women in my life. More than I'd admit to her. I've flirted with duchesses and danced with princesses and woken up in beds I couldn't find again with a map.

Not one of them ever made me feel like this.

I want to pull her into my lap. I want to kiss her until she forgets her own name and then teach it back to her. I want to tell her she's ours, that she was ours the moment we caught her scent, and that we'll spend every day for the rest of our lives proving we deserve her.

Instead, I bring her stew.

It's the third bowl today, and she eats it like she hasn't seen food in a month. Then she sets the bowl down on her knees and starts nibbling on her lower lip.

I notice. Of course I notice. I'd notice if she so much as twitched her little finger.

"What's on your mind?" I ask.

She looks up, startled. "How did you know something was on my mind?"

"You're chewing your lip. And your eyes went somewhere else." I give her my best grin. "I've always been good at reading beautiful women."

She raises one eyebrow.

That's it. Just the eyebrow. It says, very clearly, Is that so? and also, You're going to have to do better than that, and possibly, I've met a hundred of you.

I'm in love. That's it. I'm done.

"How long do you think we'll be stuck here?" she asks.

I glance at Zarek. Then at Kaelen, who's just come back in from the cold and is brushing snow off his shoulders by the door.

We're all thinking the same thing. As long as it takes. Long enough for you to fall hopelessly, desperately in love with all three of us. Forever, ideally.

Can't exactly say that.

"Hard to know," I tell her. "Mountain storms can last weeks up here. And even after the snow stops, it'll be a while before the trails are safe. Avalanches, drifts. The pass can stay closed for a long time after a storm like this."

All true. Every word.

What I don't say is that the three of us could simply strap her to one of our backs and fly her to her friend's door in an afternoon. I'm hoping very much that she doesn't ask how we normally leave the cabin in winter. I don't have a lie ready for that, and Zarek would kill me if I made one up on the spot.

She doesn't ask. She just looks disappointed. Not surprised, though. Like she'd already guessed the answer and was hoping to be wrong.

Quiet falls over her. Her eyes drift over to the attic ladder and stay there.

"Can I ask you something?" she says. "All of you?"

"Anything," I say, and I mean it far more than she knows.

"The decorations up there." She hesitates. "I was wondering if... maybe we could put them up? For the solstice?"

I stare at her.

Whatever I thought she was going to ask, it wasn't that.