Chapter Six
DOMINIC
The records room. What the hell could Berstow be doing in there? The options were limited, of course, but what was he looking for exactly?
The question nagged at me as I headed through the gardens, the wet grass soaking the hems of my jeans. But something else was bothering me just as much. Berstow himself.
He was an infuriating puzzle of a dragon.
Like a locked room with no key. He’d given me nothing earlier.
Not that I’d been particularly interested in getting him into my bed, but I’d expected something, even if it was embarrassment or shock.
Instead, he’d merely held to his purpose, treating me as if I were nothing more than a GPS giving him directions.
My stride lengthened. I didn’t have a destination. I rarely did. Not that it mattered—movement was enough. And with each step, the house behind me shrank, and the sky seemed to open up above me, letting me breathe. Beckoning me into freedom. No, I told my dragon. Not in daylight. Tonight.
My dragon settled again, watchful as always, but willing to wait just a little longer.
I’d left the maintained grounds behind and was halfway up the hillside when I saw it.
A dry stone wall had a large portion missing.
Well, not missing, precisely. The stones were still there.
They just happened to be scattered over a large area of field rather than stacked closely together in the shape of a wall.
I remembered the satisfaction of stones giving way to the might of my dragon. I hadn’t meant to do it. But I hadn’t not meant to do it. It’d been a last act of rebellion after a flight, when I’d landed and remembered all over again that I had to go back there. To the house. To my father.
For a moment, I stood, hands in my pockets, looking at the mess I’d made. I could leave it. It wasn’t my job to patch up walls, and John would notice it soon enough and put it right. It wasn’t as if we had any livestock to worry about—dragons and prey animals weren’t a good mix.
I kicked a small stone, hard, and watched it tumble down the slope. I didn’t exactly have anything else to do. Might as well do it properly.
I turned and headed back to the house. To the old stables, to be precise, where the tools were stored.
I wondered how dragons in centuries past had managed with horses as their only available transport.
The grooms would have had to be human, surely, but how would horses cope with having dragons in the carriages they pulled?
I selected the tools I needed and headed back to the wall, managing to keep my brain busy by figuring out non-harmful ways to dampen horses’ senses.
Blinkers, and a nosebag with scent in, and bells on the bridle, perhaps?
But what about that instinctive, crawling feeling that every creature got in the presence of a predator? Reminded suddenly of my father, I lengthened my stride to reach the collapsed part of the wall. Yeah, I’d really done a number on it.
Once I’d cleared away the last of the dislodged stone, I was glad to see the foundation stones were still exactly as they should be. It was a testament to the skill of the original builder that even tonnes of dragon picking a fight with the wall hadn’t destroyed it completely.
Maybe it had been Laurie’s work, who’d been groundskeeper before John. He’d been the one to show me the skill involved in repairing these walls and was probably the only person who’d not been worried about upsetting me.
“Make yourself useful,” he’d said when I’d wandered past him during my first week back in this wretched household, watching his strong hands placing oddly shaped stones with an ease and accuracy I could only hope to imitate.
I’d thought he mustn’t know who I was, and that was like freedom.
And then later, when it became clear he knew exactly who I was, he didn’t change.
He gave directions that he clearly expected me to obey, but which always had a gentle edge to them.
Orders that made eighteen-year-old me wish viciously that he was my head of family. My father.
He was the only one who’d ever mentioned my mother to me. He’d fixed those blue eyes on mine and simply said, “You must miss her.”
Anyone else, I’d have flamed on the spot for such a stupid statement.
But the expression in his eyes… He knew what loss was.
For a second, I hadn’t been able to breathe.
Then I’d bent to the stones, already moving before I’d decided to.
I broke one clean in half that should have needed two strikes with the hammer, the impact jarring up my arm as gold had filled my vision.
He hadn’t said anything like that again. He hadn’t needed to.
But then Rhodri had heard I was hanging around the stable buildings, painting and mending things, and all hell broke loose. It wasn’t appropriate, he’d said. As if everyone would forget who—what—I was because I got my hands dirty.
After that, I’d gone back to drifting aimlessly around the estate and village instead. Looking for increasingly meaningless ways to fill the hours.
I’d got the first few courses seated properly when I heard someone approaching. John, of course.
“Laurie would have told you to start from the corner,” he said, surveying my progress.
I huffed out a breath and straightened. “Laurie would have told me a lot of things.” And he’d have been right about most of them.
John nodded. After marrying Rae, he’d taken over when Laurie had retired a few years ago. Like Laurie, he didn’t waste words, so as the silence continued, I turned my attention back to the wall. Sliding a larger, flat stone into place, I tested it and was pleased when it was solid.
“You’ll have me out of a job at this rate,” he said.
“You wish,” I said. Though when I thought about it, John wasn’t someone who’d cope well with enforced idleness.
He gave a small nod in recognition before changing the subject. “Teddy’s started a collection. Apparently you gave him some very important guidance.”
I stood up again and brushed my hands off on my jeans. “Everyone needs a hobby.”
John grinned. He didn’t smile often, but when he did, there was something that reminded me of Laurie. I was glad Teddy had him as his dad. “So I’m discovering. We’re going to be knee-deep in pine cones this time next week.”
“Could be worse,” I pointed out.
“Could be worms,” he comforted himself. “He went through a phase.”
I turned back to my wall as he walked off, and for a while, everything felt lighter.
The satisfaction of lining up stones so the final one slid in just right, the cool, rough stone in my hands somehow grounding, then filling the gaps with small stones, solidifying it.
Until the next time a dragon barged into it, anyway.
I stood up straight, hands to my back, stretching out the kinks from all that bending, and eyed the wall. It wasn’t quite as smooth as if Laurie had done it, but it was good enough. Not that anyone other than John would notice or care.
I breathed in the scent of coming rain, the hillside falling away from me into the valley below. Quiet, unchanging, and empty. The way it always was.
I glanced back towards the house, gloomy in the encroaching rain, and wondered if Rhodri had left for his meeting yet.
The one with Abimelech Mortimer and some of the other Welsh dragon heads of family.
I had no idea what it was about. I only knew it was even happening because I walked in on Rhodri telling Dylan about it.
Yet again choosing his cousin over his son and heir.
Something was obviously stirring out there in the world, but because Rhodri only ever talked to his small circle of confidantes, I had no idea what.
Like our visitor. A dragon from a family no one had ever heard of, coming and staying with us?
And then being given the key to the records room, which no one cared about. Not since…
He was out of place, and his confident calm was like a piece of grit that had worked its way under one of my scales.
Dusting my hands off on my jeans, I headed to the house.
BEN
It had taken me a while, but the table was now clearer, with papers arranged into neater stacks. I had no idea what was in each stack, but they looked less disordered and gave me space to spread out as I worked.
The room had that musty smell of badly maintained old documents and dust, and I longed to fling open the window to air everything out.
But one glance at the leaden sky changed my mind.
I couldn’t risk the papers getting damp.
In fact, I’d be much happier for this room to have a level of climate control if some of these papers were as old as they appeared.
But my priority was to gather the information they contained. I’d only talk to Rhodri Bedwyr about proper storage once I’d gleaned every last bit of information, because I had a feeling he’d interpret the suggestion as criticism. And I didn’t think he’d take that well.
My family would be happy to offer him part of our dedicated, purpose-built space for archive storage, but he’d never let these records out of his house.
Not because he had any interest in them—the amount of dust made it very clear no one had been in here for a long time—but because they were his.
It was dragon nature to hoard, and I shouldn’t judge him for it.
I did, though, because hoarding was one thing, and letting priceless dragon history moulder into oblivion was something else entirely.
I’d already examined the scroll that had been balancing on top of the vase.
Disappointingly, it looked like a Victorian creation designed to look older, presumably to lend weight to the family tree it contained.
It was quite nicely done, with various coloured drawings of mythological creatures twining around some of the letters.
The dragons were, of course, anatomically accurate.
It was evidently an attempt to emulate an illustrated medieval book like the Rosea, on display at Oxford University.
I cleared one of the bookcases of all its papers, plus another vase and some porcelain figures. I’d start work on the papers that looked oldest and then I could begin to create some kind of order as I filed them on the empty shelves.
Sneezing yet again from the dust I’d swept off those shelves, I looked around at the quiet room, just waiting to give up its secrets, and I almost vibrated with joy.
If Lucy or Rob had come with me, we’d have got this done so much more quickly, and it would be nice to share discoveries we made.
Or to have someone to exchange horrified eye rolls with over the state of this place.
But this way, it was all mine. My discoveries to make, my treasure to explore.
* * *
The door opened behind me. I registered it distantly though I kept reading.
The Welsh course I’d taken during my first history degree was proving to be further in the past than I’d thought.
I was concentrating hard, unwilling to lose the thread due to an interruption. Not unless it made itself unavoidable.
Silence settled again, but it wasn’t quite the same silence as before. I could feel someone’s presence. And then I heard footsteps, the scrape of something being picked up and the small thud of it being put down again.
I continued reading. Another sound came, closer this time. And, worryingly, it sounded like someone ruffling papers.
I looked up. Dominic Bedwyr was standing at the end of the table. As I watched, he picked up a piece of paper from the closest stack and looked at it with mild interest.
Then he glanced up, met my gaze, and held it. Up close, the effect was distracting. There was no other word for it. Not just because he was attractive, although he undeniably was, but because he carried himself as though the world existed largely for his amusement.
His presence was unhelpful. I turned my attention back to the page I was working through, but couldn’t shake my peripheral awareness of him. Especially when he put the piece of paper back down—on completely the wrong stack.
“Would you not do that?” I said.
He froze for the merest instant, and I flicked my gaze back up to him. There was a hint of amusement in the way he raised his eyebrow, then he carefully picked up the same sheet of paper and set it back down on the correct stack.
“Thank you,” I said, and returned to my journal.
I found it was becoming increasingly difficult to hold in my head the distinction between two Bedwyr lines that kept using the same damn names for everyone in the family.
They’d kept repeating names for their children in case one or more died.
That was always annoying, though not usually too difficult to keep a handle on which one was which.
But Dominic Bedwyr’s presence somehow filled the room.
And worse—he seemed to be concentrating on me.
I wasn’t going to break. Instead, I pulled my laptop over and started making notes. He wandered round the room and picked up one of the porcelain figurines I’d moved, examining it as if he couldn’t decide whether to drop it or put it back safely.
And the thing was, with each slow circuit of the room, he drifted a little closer to me.
I tried very hard not to feel like treasure with a dragon closing in on me.
Not least because I had the distinct impression he was doing it deliberately.
The closer he came, the harder I concentrated on my laptop.
“So you’re here to… read,” he said, finally breaking his silence.
“In part,” I told him shortly, opening up my genealogy software. I’d scarcely scratched the surface yet, but already I’d been reminded how freely the different dragon families used to mix and intermarry. Before everything fell apart. Before we went to war with one another.
That eyebrow raised again, but this time it looked a little less amused. “And the other part?”
Okay, this needed my full attention. I took my hands off the keyboard and sat back. He wandered over to the window and fiddled with the handle as he looked out over the valley below, seemingly uninterested in my answer.
“Your head of family invited me here to read through your records and make a summary report to him.”
It was an answer without being an answer, and when Dominic turned to look at me, it was evident he knew it. His casual stance was belied by the gold of dragon in his eyes, the hint of fire and challenge.
“I’m not at liberty to say more,” I pointed out, and to all intents and purposes turned my attention back to my laptop. I kept a cautious watch from the corner of my eye, though—there was something almost predatory about him right now.
I saw the moment his mouth twisted, and he pushed off the wall and headed for the door, footsteps loud in the otherwise silent room.
And then he was gone. I looked back at my screen, and it took me a moment to remember why I’d opened the genealogy software in the first place.