The fact I’d be swimming withAlex had nothing to do with my decision to try again.
The Severn was fast-flowing and wide, and there was plenty of room for us to dance around each other in the water. Snapping my wings was as effective at creating speed underwater as it was in the sky. It wasn’tquitethe freedom of flight where the entire sky was mine. But the weightlessness, the sheerfunof chasing Alex, only for him to turn on a sixpence and chase me right back until we were rolling and tumbling together in the depths of the river, was just as good as flying.
I was panting slightly as I climbed out of the water and shook myself, following Alex’s example. There’d been no return of thatstrange impulse to venerate him that I’d felt last time we’d been together in dragon form. Now, when I looked at him, I just sawAlex.
Wait. Alex’s voice sounded in my head before I could shift.I want to see you properly.
He shifted and then lifted the camping lantern to see me better. The top of his head reached my shoulder, but compared to my bulk he seemed so small and fragile. Neither were words I’d normally apply to Alex, but dragons arebig.
Acutely self-conscious, I stood there and let him look me over, nose to tail. I wasn’t sure what held his attention. I was just a normal dragon. Wings of semi-translucent membrane were folded against my back, and my scales glinted in the lamplight as I turned my long neck to look away from his continuing observation. My tail curled around me, its arrow tip stroking my chest in an unconscious search for comfort, and my dark-gold talons flexed uneasily into the earth while he looked me over so appraisingly. Smoke trickled from my nostrils as my breathing deepened in discomfort.
“Should have known you’d be gold,” he said, which didn’t make sense as my hair was darker than gold. Unless, perhaps, he meant because of my family and our love for wealth. I hadn’t forgotten his pointed remarks about bankers when we’d first met. But he looked delighted and approving as his gaze moved over me, so I wasn’t sure that was what he meant.
Even with that expression on his face, I hated that he was looking at me for this long. Alex had a way of seeing things clearly. If he kept looking, he might be able to see who I really was. Once he did, he wouldn’t be able to get away quickly enough.
ALEX
When Nate had shifted back and was towelling himself dry, I ran my finger down his spine until he shivered.
We didn’t have time for another round, but I wasn’t ready to go back to the house, where I couldn’t touch him. I wanted to keep this physical closeness with him, and so I trailed my fingertips down his back again, over the knobs of his spine, feeling the tiny twitches my touch caused as it went.
He turned towards me, looking up from under his eyelashes, his face full of invitation. That purr was in his voice. “Is there something I can do for you?”
He hadn’t done that with me for a while, that flip into giving me a come-on. Almost like he was a sexbot or something. My dick was practically standing up and saluting, but another part of me, somewhere deep inside, didn’t like it.
Reluctantly, I shook my head. “We’re pushing it already, time-wise,” I said. “We should get back.”
I watched him covertly as he navigated us back to the main roads, trying to figure out what had just happened and what my subconscious recognised that my conscious mind, ruled by my dick, hadn’t. It slowly dawned on me that the reason I hadn’t liked it, unlike previous times he’d done it, was because I now knew Nate. And when he gave me that blatant, practised come-on, it was as if Nate disappeared.
That made no sense. Except, as I turned it over in my head, perhaps it did. Nate had said he’d done a lot of clubbing after he and Charlie split. Was that a club persona, where the personality, thepersondidn’t matter, and all that mattered was getting laid?
Was that all he saw himself as, a body to fuck? Or did he think that was howIsaw him? I knew he wanted nothing more than friendship with me, but friends didn’t treat one another that way.
It still wasn’t quite making sense. He wasn’t usually like that when we were together, not lately. What had been different tonight? What had happened just before he flipped into it? I’d been looking at him, drinking in his beauty as a dragon. He’d started to look uncomfortable, so I’d stopped looking long before I’d wanted to.
That discomfort he betrayed…perhaps he’d been self-conscious. Perhaps that come-on had been to distract me from studying him. But could Nate really have been self-conscious? He was one of the most confident people I’d ever met. He had the charm and easy conversation of someone who spent their life socialising with influential types. Nate would never be stuck for something to say to a stranger at a cocktail party. Nate was the sort who’d be invited to cocktail parties in the first place.
This was wild speculation and I didn’t know if I was right. What I did know was that Nate was like a three-dimensional puzzle. Just as I thought I had one side sorted out, another dimension formed a pattern that made no sense.
That wasn’t going to stop me trying. Iwantedto know who Nate really was.
“How did you become a banker?” I asked him. “Did you just wake up one day and think that was what you wanted to do with your life?”
His hands tightened briefly on the steering wheel. I only noticed because I was watching him so closely. “It’s what our family does.”
“So you didn’t have a choice?”
He glanced at me with a slight smile. “You say that as if it’s a bad thing. It makes my dragon happy, multiplyingtreasure. We’re doing it for our clients, but at the same time, we’re increasing the bank’s bottom line.”
“What if you’d found you didn’t like it? Could you leave?”
It wasn’t my imagination—his hands definitely tightened. “Leaving the bank would mean leaving the family.”
And no dragon would want to be alone. I thought I’d better change the subject. “Has Fiona cornered you yet?”
He grinned. “She won’t make that mistake again. She now has a near-encyclopaedic knowledge of the development of breeches in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”
Noone got the better of Fiona. No one except Nate Mortimer, apparently. I knew there was a reason I liked him. That I more than liked him. That I was—hell, that I had already fallen for him. Damn it.
