Flashing her a sheepish grin, he said, “Dinner’s ready.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
This was dangerous. Nick washed down bits of blackened chicken and couldn’t stop himself from replaying the best sexual experience of his life in his head. Only moments ago, he’d had Rowan under him. It was all he could do not to throw down his fork and carry her back into his bedroom for round two. She might be willing. God knew the chicken wasn’t keeping her at the table. Only, a familiar fear had crept into Nick’s thinking, and it curled prickly and cold over his heart.
It would be easy to love Rowan. Too easy. If he were being honest with himself, he might already be halfway along that journey. And he wasn’t worth loving. A person whose own mother left him was not a person capable of being loved long term. Committing to someone like Rowan—especially Rowan, who would live forever—was signing up to be left, to experience abandonment all over again. That particular terror ran deep. No, he needed to keep this relationship in the casual zone and not allow his brain to tempt him with this thing inside that wanted a ring on her finger.
“You don’t have to eat that,” he said to her. “It looks like I pulled it out of a volcanic pit in the earth. We should call it Mount Vesuvius chicken.”
“It’s not that bad,” Rowan said lightly. “Once you scrape the black part off, it’s delicious.”
He ran a hand over his face. “Okay, so cooking isn’t exactly in my wheelhouse, although usually I do better than this. At least you had the cold potatoes and broccoli to keep your charred meat company.” He rolled his eyes at himself.
“We were distracted,” she said softly. “I think it was totally worth it.”
“Definitely.” He smiled and looked away, the panicky feeling coming back with a vengeance.
“We have a dish like this in Paragon,” she said. “Only we don’t use chicken. They don’t exist there.”
“What do you make it with?”
“It’s called krilpon. It’s like your pig but with gills and webbed feet. It’s traditionally thrown into a fire and eaten after it is completely charred like this. The meat is different though, more like the dark meat.”
For a moment Nick tried to picture what she was describing but couldn’t wrap his head around it. “Your world is so completely different from this one. It must have been a big adjustment for you to come here.”
“It was.” She stabbed a piece of broccoli with her fork. “In some ways it’s better though. Life for me in Paragon was difficult. I never got along with my parents. If it weren’t for my brother Alexander, I would have probably run away a long time before I was thrown out.”
“Is that why you run Sunrise House? Because you had a rough childhood?”
She sipped her wine. “Not exactly.” She balked, and he got the sense she was hiding something.
“You don’t have to tell me. I know the feelings can be complex.”
“My childhood was different from yours,” she said softly. “I wasn’t physically abused, but my parents had unreasonable expectations for my behavior and decorum, and my constant punishment was solitary confinement. My brothers were my only confidants and friends. I wasn’t allowed girlfriends. I was rarely allowed beyond the palace walls. Alexander, he’s my younger brother, he taught me to paint as an escape from the rigors of palace life. It was my only oasis from a constant desire to slit my own throat.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I wasn’t happy.” She sighed. “Not at all. To me, my future was a tragedy. Art was my escape. And Tobias. He never failed to lend an ear when I needed one. My brother Gabriel was harder to get close to. He and Marius trained constantly. As the oldest, they were true warriors. A two-man army. Nathaniel, Xavier, Sylas, and Colin were kind enough to me but loved to try my parents. Practical jokers, the four of them. Known for causing trouble. I remember Xavier once made me a small cake for our birthday celebration, and when I bit into it, a live parlor mouse jumped out and hit me in the face.”
“Ourbirthday. You and Xavier were born on the same day?”
She shrugged and laughed nervously. “The details of our birth may seem strange to you. All nine of us were born on the same day. Dragons lay eggs. The first male to hatch is considered the eldest and the heir to the throne. That was Marius. After that, succession goes by who hatches next. Gabriel, Tobias, Alexander, Nathaniel, Xavier, Silas and Colin. I, as the only girl, was destined to be queen even though I was born third.”
Nick tensed. “What now? You said Marius was the heir to the throne. Wouldn’t that make you a princess? Why would you be queen?” He bristled at the idea of her being forced to marry her brother.
“Dragon reproduction is often unsuccessful and females are very rare. In order to ensure there is an heir to the throne, the firstborn male and female rule side by side. Each take a consort outside the royal family. That doubles our likelihood of producing heirs. But because I was the blooded female, my young—we call them whelps—would be first heirs to the throne. That’s why it was so important that I be mated. My future pregnancies were the preferred future of the bloodline.”
“You talk about it as if they were breeding you? Did you even have a choice?”
“A choice among the highest bidders. I was only allowed to meet men of my station, the ones from wealthy households. When my uncle murdered Marius, my mother cast us all out of Paragon to protect us. That was around three hundred years ago. I came to this world with nothing but the clothes on my back, and to be honest, it was a relief.”
“Three hundred years ago,” Nick said incredulously.
“Yep—1698. The eight of us arrived in what is now Crete.”
“And somehow you all made your way here, to New York.”
She laughed. “No. Our mother warned us to split up lest our uncle find us and eliminate us like he’d done Marius. We traveled by boat to Italy, then split up at the port of Genoa. As our knowledge of this world grew, we all agreed it wasn’t safe for us to remain in the same country. If we kept moving, we were safe. Even if my uncle found us, by the time he traveled here we would be long gone. But when we settled, we needed to be apart, to dilute our magic enough that he couldn’t trace our whereabouts.
