Chapter Twelve #2
Then he laughed softly under his breath, though there was still something careful in it. “You really are enjoying this, aren’t you?”
“Aren’t you?”
“I’ve no idea what’s going on, honestly.”
That made me laugh, and to my surprise, he smiled back almost immediately, easy and unguarded enough that something warm shifted low in my stomach.
Right. Definitely a problem.
I looked back down at my notebook before my face could give anything away.
“So,” I said, trying for a more measured tone, “what actually happened in the story?”
After he'd given me every detail he could remember, we worked for most of the morning in easy silence. It was companionable, having someone there. This was still my project, and I wasn’t giving that up for anything, but I was enjoying the company.
I’d been living on my own for the past year or so, ever since Will and I’d split up.
My parents had pressed me to go back home, but I’d grown used to being independent of them.
I still visited often, because dragons really did need to be around other dragons, but weekly Sunday lunch with Mum and Dad and my sister was usually enough for me.
I hadn’t realised until now that maybe I’d been lonely.
When I reached the end of my document, I looked up to find Dominic had gone.
I was surprised I hadn’t heard him, but then, I had been trying to figure out if the Richard Bedwyr who was named in a court case was the father or the son of that particular generation.
If it were the son, that meant he’d joined the Sawyer family when he’d married, but I hadn’t yet found a record of his marriage.
It had to be him. It made no sense to be the older one.
But I couldn’t draw conclusions based on what I thought was most likely—at least, not unless eventually it came down to a balance of probabilities.
And then, of course, I’d need to footnote everything, giving the evidence underlying my reasoning.
That wouldn’t be for some considerable time yet, I thought, looking around the room.
For the first time, I felt slightly overwhelmed.
I’d need to read every piece of paper in this room, and then probably go back through many of the documents rechecking my findings in light of whatever information I’d uncovered since first reading them.
Normally, I loved this—it was life’s blood to me. My dragon was never so happy as when I was researching, unless it was when we flew. But it’d been nice, that walk up to the castle with Dominic yesterday. Nice to be with someone, even if he wasn’t always the easiest person to be around.
I stretched in my chair, and glancing at my phone found it was almost two o’clock. Shit, I didn’t know when the lunch buffet was cleared away, and now I’d stopped work, I realised I was ravenous.
Lunch had been cleared, I found when I went into the dining room, so I took myself off to the kitchen, hoping I could throw myself on Glenys’s mercy.
It turned out that as long as she could tell me about the problems her daughter was having over flowers for the wedding, she was more than happy to provide me with a roast beef sandwich and a bowl of soup.
I ate at the kitchen table as she poured cake mixture into tins, the scent of chocolate filling the gloomy room.
“They keep you busy,” I said. “How many of the family actually live in the house?”
“Nineteen at the moment,” she said, closing the oven door with a rather mournful-sounding clang. “Though I don’t think John and Rae will be here much longer. They’ll be needing more room, what with wanting another little one. About time, if you ask me, and so I told Rae.”
I was far more interested in the Bedwyr family’s ancestors than the modern-day crop, but a part of me was still nosy, wondering how this family worked.
Evelyn had made it clear they had money, and I guessed there weren’t that many jobs going in an area this rural, especially when dragons couldn’t mix with farm animals.
Presumably, the family members who could find paid work had jobs, and the others were supported by family funds, much like the way Evelyn underwrote those of us who were full-time researchers in dragon history.
Come to think of it, Dominic didn’t appear to do anything with his days—anything other than bother me, that was—and yet the way he dressed said he wasn’t exactly hurting for money.
And damn it, I’d done so well not thinking of Dominic for the past few hours.
My dragon stirred, and I realised that his restlessness was bleeding through to me, sending my thoughts in unhelpful directions.
It had been almost a week since I’d last flown, and as I thought it, I realised how badly I needed it.
Being in the sky quietened my mind in a way nothing else did.
Every wind current, every scent and sound occupied my attention, leaving little room for the thoughts and concerns that crowded my head in human form.
“Where’s safe to fly around here?” I asked Glenys. I knew the RAF did low-level training flights somewhere in Wales, but I had no idea where, and the last thing I wanted was to come face to face with a disconcerted night-flying pilot.
She stilled where she was washing up the mixer bowl. “You’d do better to check with Mr Bedwyr first,” she said. “Have you finished? I’ll put that in the dishwasher.”
I let her take my plate instead of offering to do it myself, because I was fairly certain that if I were to open my mouth, she’d hear exactly what I thought about what she’d just said.
Flying was essential to a dragon. Surely she couldn’t mean that Rhodri controlled that as well, along with everything else.
Without intent, I flicked my tongue over suddenly dry lips. If he didn’t let me fly, if he thought a strange dragon shouldn’t be flying over his territory, then I couldn’t stay here. I couldn’t not fly. No dragon could.
“I’ll take you.”
I hadn’t heard him, but Dominic was leaning against the doorframe, looking like a freaking model or something as he watched me, a very slight tug at the corners of his mouth. I could only hope he hadn’t picked up on my immediate and entirely unwelcome thought of God, I hope so.
I cleared my throat. “Thanks. And thanks for lunch, Glenys. I’ll get out of your hair now.”
By the time I turned back from talking to Glenys, Dominic was gone.