Chapter Seventeen
BEN
I was vaguely aware of the afternoon passing. The records kept swallowing me whole for stretches of time before abruptly releasing me back into the present. Each time that happened, I’d glance automatically towards the door. And each time, Dominic still wasn’t there.
It was ridiculous of me to think he would be. He had his own life, his own responsibilities here. Yet somehow my brain already expected him to appear periodically beside my chair with some outrageous comment designed to derail my concentration completely.
I was halfway through trying to untangle a truly appalling series of fourteenth-century inheritance disputes when the door finally opened. I looked up far too fast to be casual.
Dominic leaned against the doorframe, damp hair curling slightly at his temples. He looked relaxed again, more like himself than he had when he’d left earlier, though there was still something a little unreadable beneath it.
“You still alive?” he asked.
“Debatable,” I admitted. “I may actually have expired somewhere around 1382.”
His mouth twitched. “Tragic way to go.”
“I don’t know. There are worse deaths than being crushed beneath badly catalogued legal records.”
“God, you really are a historian.”
I smiled despite myself, and there was a brief pause that didn’t feel awkward exactly. Just… aware.
Then he said, almost casually, “Want to go flying tonight?”
Happiness rushed through me, immediate and ridiculous.
“Yes,” I said, trying very hard not to sound too eager. “Could we stop at the castle first? I’d like to look at those markings in dragon form.”
“Of course you’d want to do that,” he said, and if I weren’t losing my mind, he sounded fond.
The thought warmed me embarrassingly all over again.
* * *
The castle felt different at night. Wilder somehow, with a presence suggesting it was more than a simple ruin that had been abandoned to weather and time. Moonlight and shadow shifted constantly across the broken walls, giving the impression of movement. As if something were there.
I wasn’t fanciful at the best of times, and I definitely wasn’t going to let Dominic suspect how creepy I found this place in the dark.
So I stripped as fast as I could, shifting while Dominic was still unfastening his jeans.
And no, I was not going to hang around to watch that.
Instead I paced over to the marks on the wall, my large body feeling almost clumsy on the ground compared to its streamlined self in the air.
Evelyn had been right to make sure, but the moonlight revealed nothing new. In fact, the marks themselves were pretty hard to discern. I tilted my head, closed one eye then the other, stepped back, looked at them from above and below and each side, and saw absolutely nothing.
That some kind of mating dance you’re doing with the wall? Dominic’s voice was amused.
Dragons didn’t blush, but it felt as if I did. Just checking, I told him, then sighed. I’d hoped that my dragon would have recognised them or sensed what I couldn’t. But instead, I was standing staring at an old stone wall and getting absolutely nowhere.
Seen enough? Dominic asked.
Perhaps I was hopelessly gone for him, but I thought it meant something that he’d asked rather than taken himself off flying on his own.
I took the hint and launched myself skyward.
He followed hard on my heels. And God, it’d only been two days, but I’d already missed flying with him.
Banking together through cloud and darkness, so close I could hear the beat of his wings beneath the wind.
I seemed to know where Dominic was without needing to look, adjusting instinctively to his movements through the night sky.
By the time we landed again at the castle, my entire body felt loose with exhilaration.
I shifted first this time, still half-laughing under my breath as cold night air hit my skin.
And then I realised Dominic had shifted and was watching me. His gaze roamed over my body slowly enough that heat flared inside me. Oh, God. I couldn’t— I mustn’t…
“I’d better let Evelyn know that was a bust.” My voice was high and thin as I yanked my clothes on. My fingers wouldn’t work properly, damn it. “It’s interesting that she and I both felt we recognised those marks the first time we saw them. Did the same thing happen to you?”
He was lazily pulling his jeans up his strong legs, which I was not looking at. “Can’t remember,” he said. “It was a while ago now, maybe a couple of years.”
“Have you shown them to anyone else?” I asked. I’d asked whether Rhodri knew, but it had never occurred to me someone else in the family might.
“They’re not really the kind of thing anyone round here’s interested in,” he said.
“So you haven’t?” I checked. I’d learned that Dominic rarely answered or asked a question directly, but I wanted precision on this, to be absolutely sure of his meaning.
“No, historian, I haven’t.” His voice was low and warm, as if he were somehow amused by my insistence.
“Just checking,” I said, glancing over my shoulder to see if he was ready to return to the house. Thank God he was dressed, though his eyes were still lingering on me. On my body. Which was thankfully fully clothed again.
As we walked back to the house, I asked him if he had any idea when those marks had first been visible.
“Do you remember seeing them as a child?”
He was silent for a moment before answering. “The first time I remember seeing them was a couple of years ago.”
“So it’s possible that the outer wall has collapsed recently, which means it may be easy to bring more of it down with a little encouragement,” I said. Sue me, I may have been just a little excited.
“Are all historians secretly vandals at heart, or is it just you?” he asked, and God, something inside me melted at what sounded like fondness. A teasing that was just for me.
But this wasn’t anything, no matter how much I wanted to believe it was. He was Dominic Bedwyr, a dazzling comet in a dark sky, while I was a normal person.
The house was silent when we let ourselves in through the back door, and the clock on the wall showed almost two am. We’d been flying far longer than I’d thought.
“I, um, I’m going to get a glass of water to take up to bed with me,” I said, and winced at the fact I sounded just like my dad.
In the overhead light, I could see laughter in his eyes, but it was mixed with the kind of warmth I thought I’d heard in his voice. As though he was laughing at a shared joke, not at me.
“Night, Ben,” he said.
And then I was alone in the huge kitchen, wondering where on earth Glenys kept the glasses.
I’d panicked, really, and I didn’t even know why.
Just that walking up the stairs with him, so close our shoulders would have brushed, had felt like too much.
Worse, if I’d let him take the lead, I’d have been staring at his arse the whole way.
It was too dangerous. So I’d decided to act like a middle-aged dragon who couldn’t sleep unless they had a drink of water by their bed.
I eventually found a glass in entirely the wrong cupboard and stood at the sink drinking half the water immediately. Apparently, flying for hours made one dehydrated. Or emotionally unstable. Possibly both.
Upstairs, floorboards creaked somewhere, and absurdly, my whole body froze at the sound before common sense reasserted itself. Dominic wasn’t coming back downstairs looking for me. Why would he?
Still, as I climbed the stairs a few minutes later, I found myself listening for the sound of another door opening in the darkness.
I heard nothing. Which was definitely for the best.