Chapter Fourteen
DOMINIC
I left it until late morning to go to the records room. Flying with Ben had knocked something off-centre, and I hadn’t yet worked out whether I liked it.
I also knew damn well that if I walked into that records room too soon after last night, it’d look suspiciously like I actually wanted to be there. Which I absolutely did not. It was just something to do.
Ben looked up at my entrance, and his eyes flared briefly before his expression settled back into its usual composure.
Oh, that was interesting. And totally in line with last night and the way he’d tried—and failed—to hide the fact that simply looking at me naked had got him hard. And maybe I was just a bit smug about that.
Ben cleared his throat and looked back down at the papers spread across the table with an intensity suggesting they’d personally offended him.
The room looked different today. He’d cleared whole sections of shelving and stuck strips of masking tape along the edges, neat labels written in precise black letters—legal, estate, genealogical, correspondence.
I stared at them, wondering how even his handwriting was confident and calm. “You’ve got categories now.”
“At last,” he said, the triumph in his voice suggesting he’d restored civilisation after a particularly brutal apocalypse.
Dust coated the front of his dark blue jumper, and there was a faint smudge of ink on the side of his hand where he’d evidently been writing for hours already.
His hair was uncombed. Or perhaps he’d been raking his hands through it in history-fuelled excitement.
That shouldn’t have made much difference to how he looked, and yet somehow it did. I liked him ruffled.
I wandered further into the room, trailing my finger along the newly cleared and dusted shelves. “What happened to your strategy of diving blindly into piles and hoping history happened at you?”
“That was not my strategy,” he protested, an edge of outrage in his voice. Seemed I’d impugned his professional pride.
“Oh, it most definitely was,” I informed him.
“I was conducting an exploratory assessment.”
I snorted, and Ben glanced at me again. His gaze caught briefly on my mouth before flicking away so quickly he probably thought I wouldn’t notice. He really had no idea how obvious he was becoming.
With anyone else, I’d have made a move last night.
But as it was, something in me kept stalling.
Maybe because I liked this version of things too much already.
The records room, the castle, flying together through cloud and darkness while he laughed into my mind like he’d forgotten how to be careful for a while.
If I moved this into sex, it would change.
And Ben didn’t feel like someone to fuck and forget about afterwards.
Even thinking it sat strangely under my skin.
So I ignored the flare of heat in his eyes and wandered over to the nearest unsorted pile of papers like I hadn’t noticed anything at all.
His categories were absurdly precise. Apparently there were distinctions between estate legal disputes, family legal disputes, and inter-family legal disputes, just like there were between estate financial records and household financial records.
It sounded entirely made up to me, but each time I put something in the wrong pile, Ben would make a small noise under his breath and end up moving it with offended precision. It was strangely entertaining.
Some time later, I gave up on the piles and crouched to investigate the bottom shelf beside the window, where a pile of volumes with cracked leather spines had been shoved beneath a stack of loose papers.
“Well,” I said, after opening the first one. “Either our landlocked family’s history turns unexpectedly piratical, or someone’s made a mistake.”
Ben looked up immediately, alarm flashing across his face so quickly it was almost comical.
“What?”
I held up the book. “The Corsair.”
He stared at it in genuine horror. “Oh no.”
That probably shouldn’t have been as funny as it was.
“There’s more,” I informed him gravely, pulling another book free. “The Mysteries of Udolpho. Sounds murderous.”
“That’s a novel.”
“I gathered.”
His expression was deeply pained as he crossed the room and took the book from me carefully, like it might contaminate the rest of the archive through proximity alone.
“The problem,” he said, already sounding tired, “is that I don’t know whether these were accidentally shelved here or intentionally stored alongside the records.”
“Why would anyone intentionally store novels in a records room?” I asked.
“Hiding things in plain sight. Proximity can be significant.”
“Ah,” I said. “You’re having historian feelings.”
He looked at me over the top of the book with profound offence.
Before he could launch into whatever lecture was bursting to get out, I added, “The records used to be kept in the old turret room upstairs, if that helps. This lot got moved down here a few years ago after there was a leak.”
That caught his attention instantly. “Leak?”
I shrugged. “Through the roof, I think. It was only noticed once it spread to the landing outside. My mother would have been furious it wasn’t picked up sooner.”
The words slipped out without intent, a simple statement of fact that normally I would have thought but never said. And for a moment, the room was filled with silence.
Ben’s expression changed slightly. Not pity, thank God, just the careful kind of attention he seemed to pay to everything.
“She worked on these records?” he asked after a second.
I shoved another book back onto the shelf harder than necessary. “She loved them. Used to disappear up there for hours. Said everyone else left the records alone, so it was the quietest room in the house.”
Unexpectedly, my throat ached as I remembered her saying that, drawing me into her confidence about her favourite hiding place. Making me feel special for knowing what no one else did.
I was somehow fiddling with a book, and I couldn’t remember if I’d been putting it on the shelf or taking it off.
“When they moved everything downstairs, people mostly just shoved armfuls of stuff into bookcases and hoped for the best,” I added. “I doubt anyone noticed if the shelves in here were cleared first.”
Ben looked down at the novel in his hands like this was personally distressing.
“So these may have been part of the original records,” he said. “If hidden writing was used to conceal dragon history from humans, where better to hide it than the margins and end papers of perfectly innocent books? No one would think to look there.”
“And how exactly are you planning on checking?” I asked. “Got a tame red dragon you can whistle up?”
“Ultraviolet lamp,” he said absently, leafing through the book he was holding as if he could find any hidden writing simply by staring at it hard enough. “Red dragons’ eyes pick up wavelengths no one else can see, and one of them figured out it was UV vision.”
He closed the book with the suspicion of a snap. “I’m going to have to examine every page of every book in this room now.”
I stared at him. “You can’t possibly mean that.”
He simply looked at me.
“Oh my God, you do mean that.”
And at the despair in his eyes as he took in the sheer number of novels piled on the shelf, the tightness in my chest loosened into helpless laughter.
BEN
After lunch, Glenys confirmed with reassuring certainty that the novels had already been in the room before the papers were moved. As had the porcelain figurines.
“It was a junk room, really,” she said, while aggressively buttering bread, and I wondered what it must be like to have a house so large that a room could just be left with no function.
“Dominic said his mother was the only person who ever really looked at the records,” I said, only realising once the words were out that perhaps that hadn’t been intended for public consumption.
Glenys’s knife stilled in the butter, and when she looked at me, her eyes were wide with surprise.
“He’s right,” she said slowly at last. “She used to sit up there reading for hours, when she wasn’t playing with Dominic.”
Strangely, that hurt to hear. I decided to be much more careful in this house about what I said to whom.
“Were records the only things kept in the original room?” I asked.
Glenys shrugged. “No idea, love. I never went poking through it myself, not till the leak got bad, when it was all hands on deck to clear it. Ceiling started dripping through onto the landing outside. There were buckets everywhere for weeks.” She sighed. “And then we got mice. Again.”
“Were any of the records damaged by the leak?” I hadn’t seen anything with water damage, but perhaps some had been affected and had been thrown out. Oh God, no. The thought left me cold inside, my lungs constricting as I waited for her answer.
“No, nothing like that. The water came down the wall, and the old papers were in bookcases in the middle of the floor.”
God, they’d been lucky. I really did have to talk to Rhodri about proper storage and pest control for the fragile old records before I left.
By the time I escaped back upstairs, the house had gone quiet with the strange stillness that characterised this place. So many people lived here so very quietly.
The records room door stuck briefly before giving way beneath my shoulder. And then I stopped dead in the doorway.
The room was warm. A small electric fire sat beside the table, its one bar glowing orange and its cable disappearing towards the socket near the shelves.
For a second, I simply stared at it. Then, very slowly, I looked around the room as if Dominic might somehow still be there despite the silence. He wasn’t. Of course he wasn’t.
I crouched beside the heater, holding one hand near the faint current of warmth. Not hot enough to damage anything, I thought. It had been kept away from the shelves and their elderly papers. Meaning someone had thought about that.
I hadn’t said anything this morning about being cold. I hadn’t been quite cold enough to go looking for an extra jumper to wear. But it’d been chilly enough, just sitting, that my shoulders had ended up hunched and my handwriting had grown clumsy.
And Dominic had marked it. He’d done something about it quietly enough that I probably wasn’t supposed to notice.
I sat down slowly at the table, looking around at the newly organised shelves. Dominic’s presence lingered everywhere despite his absence. Careless-looking stacks were sorted into categories in a way that suggested he’d actually listened to my explanations.
This was becoming a problem. Last night, I’d thought it was just attraction.
Lust, or merely the unavoidable result of spending time with Dominic, who was simultaneously the most frustrating and most attractive man I’d ever encountered.
Maybe it was a result of the exhilaration of flying with him, which had been better than anything I’d felt in years.
But now I knew. The real problem was that I’d started wanting things I absolutely should not want. Like Dominic’s presence. All the time, even when he was being frustrating. Maybe especially then, because laughter was beginning to dawn in his eyes as he baited me.
I’d been both dreading and looking forward to seeing him this morning, embarrassed about what had happened last night but also unable to stop wanting to see him.
To be in his presence. And then he’d lounged into the room, in that annoyingly easy way of his, and my heart had jumped.
Not just my heart, either. I really did need to do something about the fact there seemed to be a direct line from Dominic to my dick.
Physical attraction alone was easy to ignore, relatively speaking.
But Dominic, it seemed, had somehow lodged himself beneath my skin in the space of less than a week.
I was already building my days around when he’d appear in the records room and drape himself irritatingly across furniture while pretending not to help me.
And somewhere along the line, that had become important to me in a way that felt distinctly unsafe.
Because Dominic Bedwyr, restless, reckless, and beautiful, would be catastrophic for someone like me.
My life was stable and sensible, and good and happy, and not exciting.
It wasn’t as exhilarating as flying with Dominic had been, but it didn’t risk anything either.
If I gave my heart to Dominic the way I was beginning to want to, I knew he’d have no use for it.
And I’d be left, never happy with my life again but unable to have what I wanted. Because I wanted Dominic.
I looked down at the pile of correspondence in front of me, but all I could think of was moonlight on silver-grey wings and laughter breaking warm and wild into my mind.
God. I was in trouble.