Chapter Ten
DOMINIC
By the time I reached the records room after breakfast, I’d already told myself twice not to go in.
I’d be wasting my time. It’d been clear yesterday that Berstow was as careful with the information he chose to share as my father.
Though, in Berstow’s case, I didn’t completely blame him.
If Rhodri thought he was passing on things that Rhodri had kept secret—and to me, of all dragons—there’d be hell to pay.
Something was going on in the world of dragons.
Abimelech Mortimer’s involvement told me as much, as did the amount of time Rhodri was spending with other heads of dragon families.
Then there was Ben Berstow. Dragons introduced themselves by family name, not whatever was in their passport, and I knew damn well that I’d never heard of a Berstow family before.
With only sixty families in the country, all young dragons memorised their names and territories along with their times tables.
No Berstow among them. Dafydd had asked on our way up to the castle the other night and received only puzzled grunts in response.
But even knowing Berstow wouldn’t tell me anything useful, something had driven me back to the records room. Boredom, probably. At least he was something new to poke at.
Nothing with him had gone the way I’d expected. Not until last night at supper, when I’d caught him watching me. Maybe he wasn’t as immune as he wanted me to think.
He was sitting with his back to the door, curled up in his chair in a way that looked bloody uncomfortable, tapping his pen on the table and murmuring something to himself. He stilled as I closed the door behind me, but he didn’t look round.
I moved across to the bookshelves beside the window, and could just catch his reflection on this wet, dark day. He was looking at the paper in front of him, still and tense, so aware of my presence.
I turned around, leaned my arse back onto the windowsill and looked at him properly.
And he couldn’t help it—his eyes flicked up to my face briefly.
He made a wordless little noise that might have been a greeting, or a protest. Hell, he might have been overcome by being in my presence, though somehow I doubted it.
And then he returned his gaze very obviously to the paper in front of him.
I watched him a while longer, but he was absorbed in what he was reading—or he wanted me to think he was. So I reached out and grabbed a leather-bound book at random from the shelf next to me.
Well, damn. Some of my ancestors must have been almost as bored as I was living here, because it was a record of the harvests over about fifty years.
How much had been sold, for how much money, and rents from…
was that tenant farmers? God, whoever had written this had handwriting almost as bad as mine.
I leafed through it, checking there wasn’t anything more exciting in its pages, then put it back and took another one.
This was a little more interesting—an account of a court case between the Bedwyrs and the Gruffydds.
Evidently, our proximity to one another had been a problem for longer than I’d been around.
The writing was ridiculously small and cramped, and I could only read about half of it, but the bits I did pick up suggested the Bedwyrs had been accused of damaging the Gruffs’ crops.
When I finally managed to decipher the rest of it, I snorted.
Fire, apparently. Which meant someone had had the time of their life flaming the neighbours. God, I envied that dragon.
Putting the book back, I wandered around the room, looking at the piles of leather-bound ledgers and paperwork shoved into cardboard folders. My mother would have hated seeing the state it was in.
I swept some dust off one of the shelves and glanced back at the window.
If it weren’t pouring out there, I’d have opened the window and got rid of some of this dust and musty smell.
But probably letting this old paperwork get rained on wouldn’t be a good idea.
I ran my gaze over the shelves, wondering just how long it would take Berstow to organise these.
And if he’d bother, once he’d found what he was here for.
Watching him again, I saw he was deep in contemplation of the paper in front of him, a slight frown between his brows as he read. “Oh,” he said, and a smile tugged at his lips.
Like yesterday at the castle, he suddenly looked like he was alive, and nothing like the buttoned-down dragon he was normally. He was attractive in a quiet way, I realised, as he pulled his laptop towards himself. His typing had a speed and excitement that, again, I wouldn’t have expected.
And then he sat back in his chair, done, and smiled at the screen. Yeah, he wasn’t hot in an obvious way, but there was something about him that crept up on a person. Plus, the breadth of those shoulders was kind of enticing.
“Are you planning on standing there watching me all morning, or is there a purpose to this visit?” he asked without looking up.
I shrugged, and picked up the porcelain figurine that was on the shelf next to me. It was a woman in a ballgown, holding a fan, and dusty as hell. Decorative and entirely useless. I had no idea what it was doing here. I had no idea what I was doing here.
“Well, if you want to make yourself useful, you could start putting those in chronological order.” He waved in the direction of a stack of leather-bound books. “I’ll need to go through them all, and it’ll save time if they’re organised.”
God only knew why, but I found myself biting back a grin as I moved over to the pile in question.
Maybe it was the imperious way he’d said it, as if he didn’t give a toss about my status.
Or maybe it was the fact he was instantly engrossed again in what was in front of him, like my response didn’t matter to him.
I dumped the pile on the other end of the table, sending up more clouds of dust. Berstow barely concealed his wince, but by the time I’d hitched my hip on the table and started to go through the books, he was lost once more in his work.
His pen had somehow found its way into his mouth as he read, and every now and then he’d drag it out to mutter something and scribble furiously on the notepad by his side. It was distracting.
Especially when combined with the way he’d thrust his other hand through his hair until it stood up in uneven tufts that looked far too debauched for someone usually so composed.
Eventually, I realised I probably should stop studying him and look at the books beside me instead.
They turned out to be a mixture of marriage settlements and records of estate income and expenditure.
Then I found something that was actually interesting—a book containing the list of dragons’ treasures, carefully accounted for after their deaths.
According to age-old custom, one tenth of their treasure was always buried with them.
Almost automatically, I stroked the ring on my right hand as I read.
It’d been designed as a wedding ring, with a band of emeralds enclosed in gold, but I didn’t care about its purpose.
The purity of the emeralds chosen for this ring had meant I’d had no choice once I saw it.
I’d had to own it. I wore it always, a reminder of the rest of my treasure, so carefully hidden in my room.
I trusted that my father wouldn’t take it—some things were simply unthinkable to dragons—but it still didn’t feel safe, not when his shadow stretched across every part of this house.
The entries very swiftly resolved into a clear pattern. Our family had a predisposition for gold, it appeared, but there were a few outliers who’d treasured precious stones and other metals. No emeralds, though, and I wondered if that had come from my mother’s side of the family.
I glanced up at one point, aware of a shift in the room, and found Berstow watching me. What might have been the beginning of a smile was tugging at the corners of his lips.
“Found something interesting?” he asked.
I shrugged. My go-to of a dismissive answer wouldn’t work because he’d obviously caught me deep in some dusty old record and loving it. “How d’you want these ordering when some span centuries and others only cover a few years?”
He sucked on that pen again as he thought. “Separate the estate records from personal ones first, then keep anything legal or genealogical apart from the financial material. We’ll sort chronologically within those categories later.”
Deciding to ignore that ‘we’ because I was only amusing myself here for a while—couldn’t imagine anything more tedious than spending days combing through old family trees—I began to work my way through the pile of papers.
It soon became clear the record of treasures was by far the most interesting, and I wanted to ask why he was doing this.
What could he possibly find in these that made him look so animated as he read through page after page of cramped, monotonous handwriting?
But he was evidently lost in a different century, so I kept my opinions to myself and sorted the papers into stacks.
Probably not neat enough for Berstow’s standards, but if he wanted military precision, he could do it himself.
BEN
I’d known it was Dominic entering the room, even though I had my back to him.
There was something unique about the way my dragon reacted to him.
Not as if he were a threat exactly, but a very definite awareness of his presence.
Plus, there was a part of me that had been almost expecting him again after yesterday, when he’d seemed unable to leave me alone.
He was like a very big, very annoying bluebottle fly, who had an entire house to choose from but decided to gravitate to me.
And each time I thought he’d finally settled and I could relax, he’d be moving again, restless and aggravating.