Chapter Twenty-one
DOMINIC
I woke slowly, warm in a way that had nothing to do with dragon heat.
Ben was sprawled half on top of me, one leg tangled with mine beneath the duvet, face buried against my shoulder like he’d simply collapsed there sometime during the night and never bothered moving again.
Grey morning light leaked weakly through the curtains, turning everything soft around the edges.
For a while, I just lay there, watching him.
Ben asleep was unfair, honestly. Awake, he was composed and thoughtful and faintly stern in a way I found deeply entertaining.
Asleep, all that careful self-control disappeared.
His mouth was slightly open against my skin, his hair hopelessly wild from sleep, and there was something so trusting about the weight of him sprawled there.
God, this felt almost dangerously right. Ben in my bed, in my arms, sleep-warm and solid against me like he belonged there. My historian.
He snorted suddenly, and woke up, eyes blinking confusedly at me for a moment. Then I must have come into focus, because he muttered something. Could have been Morning. Could have been Ugh, why are we awake so early?
“I’m sorry, what was that? Didn’t quite catch it through your sleepy grumbles.”
“Sod off,” he said, and kissed my shoulder before putting his head back down and closing his eyes once more. “I don’t do mornings.”
“Hmmn.” I moved just enough so my morning wood poked into his thigh. “So what do you do?”
This time, when he raised his head, his eyes were much more alert. “You don’t play fair,” he said, but he didn’t sound like that was a complaint exactly.
And by the time I’d put him on his back and reacquainted myself with every part of him—because I didn’t think I’d ever stop wanting to hear the noises I wrenched out of him simply with my hands and my mouth—he was more than ready for my mouth on his cock.
After he’d recovered from coming and then brought me off in turn, paying such careful attention to my reactions that something deep inside me simply gave up and melted, I realised the downside to my plan.
Using sex to wake him up wasn’t going to work if he rolled over the way he just had, sleepy, sated and happy, and closed his eyes again.
I poked him. With my finger this time. I’d come so hard it’d be a while before anything else was up for poking. “Don’t you want to solve that discrepancy between the family records and the court case?”
He rolled over, and glared at me. “You do not play fair,” he grumbled again, but I could see his brain was coming online, determination firming his jaw even as his eyes grew more alert. “Damn it, how’m I supposed to sleep now?”
“You’re not,” I pointed out. “There’s this thing called daytime.”
I rolled out of bed, and he followed, yawning all the way.
I chucked my towelling robe at him, and pulled on some boxers.
Highly unlikely anyone would be in this part of the house—the only other rooms on this landing were a bathroom, the records room, and a door to the back stairs—but I didn’t want to give Glenys an eyeful if she decided today was upper-landing dusting day.
He hesitated when I opened the door. “I should go down to my room and get some clean clothes,” he said, sounding reluctant.
“Shower with me, then get them,” I said. And because, no matter what Rhodri thought, I was capable of learning from experience, I added, “I mean, maybe not try that showering together together thing again, but we can take turns.”
He grinned, and happily followed me to the bathroom. It was ridiculous how little I wanted to be away from him, even if there would only be a floor of the house between us.
He showered first while I shaved, then when he was done, I kissed him before he went on his way in search of clean clothes. He was still wearing my robe, and I liked that fact.
We’d missed breakfast by some margin, so once dressed, I wandered down to the kitchen. Ben was already there, listening to the latest instalment in Glenys’s wedding drama as he watched the toaster, sipping coffee.
Glenys looked up as I came in, her posture straightening slightly in the way it always did around Rhodri and, by extension, me.
“Morning, sir,” she said.
“Morning, Glenys.” I crossed straight to the coffee machine, needing my caffeine fix. “How many disasters are we up to with this wedding now?”
“Oh, don’t start,” she said darkly, though she was visibly delighted by the question. “Now the florist says the roses might be a problem, and Cheryl’s future mother-in-law says carnations are tacky, which I think is rich coming from a dragon who once insulted someone else’s treasure.”
Ben made a strangled sound into his coffee cup that might have been an attempt not to laugh.
I leaned against the counter beside him, and gave him a shoulder bump that somehow turned into me pressing into him.
Glenys’s eyes rested on us for a moment. She probably thought I’d simply enticed the attractive historian upstairs for a bit of entertainment. Which, in fairness, wasn’t an unreasonable assumption given my previous life choices.
Rhi walked out of the pantry and into the brief silence, carrying a tray of eggs. Then she noticed the way I—well, for some reason, I still seemed to be pressed against Ben’s side. And he wasn’t moving away. Instead, he was leaning into me.
Her entire face went scarlet. “Oh my God,” she whispered.
Before either of us could say anything, she dumped the eggs on the table and fled out of the back door.
Ben straightened and stared after her in worry. “Is she okay?”
Glenys calmly rescued the abandoned tray of eggs from where they were threatening to fall off the table. “Well,” she said, “that’s one teenage fantasy dead and buried.”
The toaster popped violently beside us, making Ben jump slightly. He muttered something under his breath and reached for the butter.
I watched him spread it across the toast with the same concentration he brought to fourteenth-century land disputes, his brow faintly furrowed as though breakfast required serious scholarly consideration.
And suddenly, with horrifying clarity, I understood Rhi completely. God help the poor girl.
To distract myself, I leaned in and stole half his toast from his plate.
Ben looked up in outrage. “Dominic.”
“You weren’t going to share with me?” I asked, wounded by his lack of care.
“There’s bread right there for you to make your own,” he said, but his attempt at a reproving tone was fatally undermined by the grin tugging at his lips.
Glenys snorted loudly enough to suggest she’d entirely given up pretending not to listen, and I stole the rest of Ben’s coffee.
BEN
Despite Dominic’s continued existence proving distracting, I made genuine progress that morning.
The discrepancy between the Bedwyr family records and the court documents widened the deeper I dug, and by midday I’d surrounded myself once more with folders, notebooks and increasingly frantic cross-references.
I’d also somehow acquired a dragon. Dominic had abandoned any pretence of behaving normally sometime around eleven.
He leaned against the back of my chair whenever he passed, brushed fingers over the back of my neck while reaching for records, and once stopped in the middle of reading something simply to tuck my hair behind my ear before carrying on as though that was a perfectly ordinary thing to do.
It was impossible to ignore him, even if I’d wanted to. Each time I looked up, he was there, sprawled in his chair with a folder on his chest, or perched on the edge of the table, swinging one foot absently as he watched me with the warm, intent look that sent heat straight through me.
At one point I became aware that I’d been staring at his mouth instead of the genealogy in front of me for a solid minute.
“I can hear your concentration failing from here,” Dominic said without looking up from his records, sounding deeply smug.
“I hate you.”
“You very clearly don’t.”
Which, infuriatingly, was true.
I was relieved when Dominic finally stretched and announced he was starving, because I’d just tried to catalogue the same dragon three separate times. It wasn’t my fault that Dominic’s thighs were looking particularly spectacular.
The dining room was fairly empty when we got there, with no sign of Rhodri. Conversations drifted lazily around the long table as people passed dishes back and forth, the atmosphere noticeably more relaxed in the absence of the head of family.
I’d barely sat down when Dominic spoke from his usual place near the head of the table. “Ben.”
I looked up to find him watching me. He was sprawling again, that way he had of taking up space as if it were his absolute right, with one arm slung over the back of his chair. “Why are you so far away?”
“You’re perfectly capable of surviving at a distance for one meal,” I informed him.
His mouth twitched. Then, without the slightest warning, he stood up. For a second, I thought he was leaving the room. Instead, he grabbed the back of his chair.
Conversation faltered around the table as Dominic dragged the chair noisily down the length of the room, snagged an unused place setting from further up, and deposited both beside me.
“Budge up, historian.”
Heat rushed into my face as I shifted sideways to make room for him, Phoebe on his other side moving further down the table.
“Dominic,” I muttered under my breath as he dropped into the chair with complete satisfaction.
“What?” he asked innocently, already reaching across me for the bread basket.
I opened my mouth, then shut it again. Because the thing was, I didn’t actually mind.
Quite the opposite. I liked him beside me far more than I probably should have.
It was simply that Dragon’s Ending ran on such rigid, unspoken structure, and Dominic had just dragged his chair halfway across the dining room as though centuries of tradition were little more than a mild inconvenience.
Around us, conversation slowly resumed, though the number of sideways glances we received suggested we were still the centre of attention.
Dominic, meanwhile, appeared blissfully unconcerned by the social disruption he’d just caused.
He stole half my cheese, drank my water after finishing his own, and spent most of lunch lounging sideways in his chair with one knee pressed against mine beneath the table as though physical contact had become a necessity.
Afterwards, we drifted back upstairs to the records room. The rain had finally stopped, pale autumn sunlight spilling weakly through the narrow windows and turning the dust hanging in the air to gold.
We did genuinely attempt to work. For nearly twenty minutes. Then Dominic got bored and wandered over to where I sat cross-referencing parish records with dragon genealogies. He rested his chin on the top of my head to read what I was working on.
“You smell nice,” he informed me.
“That’s an incredibly disturbing thing to say to someone reading about burials.”
“Still true.”
I tried very hard to remain focused on the records in front of me. Unfortunately, this became significantly more difficult when he slid one hand slowly down over my chest, and started opening the buttons of my shirt.
“Dominic.”
“What?”
“You are actively preventing research.”
I twisted slightly in my chair to glare up at him properly. Which turned out to be a tactical error, because one look at Dominic made recklessness seem like an excellent idea. His expression shifted too, amusement turning into hunger.
For one dangerous moment, the records room seemed to narrow around me. Then Dominic blinked, breathed out sharply, and stepped back before we did something profoundly irresponsible on top of irreplaceable family archives.
“Ben,” he announced, with mock severity. “You really do have to stop seducing me onto medieval tax records.”
“I’m fairly certain you’ve got that the wrong way round.”
“Historian,” he said gravely, “I am trying to preserve your professional reputation.”
I laughed despite myself as he flopped dramatically back into his chair. Everything I already felt for him was abruptly turned up to eleven—he knew I wanted to work almost as much as I wanted him, and he was denying his own impulses to let me.
We managed nearly another two hours of work after that. Then, without warning, Dominic looked up from his papers and said, “Let’s fly tonight.”
Anticipation fizzed instantly in my stomach, and judging by the slow smile spreading across Dominic’s face, he knew exactly what that suggestion had done to me.