“I treasure you,” he told me, and for the first time, I saw shyness in him. It was the most profound and intimate declaration of feelings a dragon could make, and it set something in me free, something that made me shivery yet joyous inside.
We kissed, and for that moment, nothing else mattered. There was only Ollie and how much I loved him.
Chapter Thirty-four
ARCHER
The next morning, I checked Ollie’s burn and found blisters were already forming. After giving him some more painkillers, I lent him another of my shirts that was big enough on him not to pull the dressing. Not that he was an invalid, precisely, but he was a couple of orders of magnitude less bouncy than usual, which put him on the same sort of bounce rating as a rubber ball. He was evidently feeling his injury more than he wanted to let me see.
Having established him on the sofa in the sitting room, I brought him breakfast on a tray, putting it across his knees.
“I feel like a king,” he said imperiously, before making a quick dive for the egg that had fallen off the egg cup on the tilting tray.
“What are we going to do first?” he asked me after he’d cut his buttered bread into soldiers and was contentedly dipping them, one recruit at a time, into the yolk of his egg.
“I want to find out what Lillian knows about the bible, but I’m going to need you to stay here.”
Ollie’s face fell in disappointment.
“I don’t want Mia coming downstairs to an empty house after last night,” I explained.
“Oh, of course I’ll be here for her,” he said instantly.
I wasn’t sure he’d have been quite so biddable if I’d told him my other reason, which was that I wanted him to rest and heal.
“I won’t be long,” I promised. It was all I could do to leave him and Mia for any time at all, even though I was confident that Chris wouldn’t come back.
“Are you going to expel June, too?” he asked.
“They’re both out. She was his first attempt to get the bible. She came here when she knew she wasn’t allowed.” June had also shamelessly taken advantage of Ollie’s good nature, and my anger over that burned bright.
I could see Ollie’s reluctance for me to impose such a severe punishment, even after what they’d done. He was too kind-hearted. He didn’t understand what it meant to be the head of a family.
Before leaving, I fetched him some more tea and took the tray to the kitchen when he’d finished with it. I finally tore myself away, leaving him furtively scrubbing egg yolk out of the sofa cushions.
OLLIE
Archer was only gone for an hour. Time enough for me to pick up my phone to message Jack about five times and put it down again each time. I wanted to talk to him, though I wasn’t sure what I could say. Even though Archer wouldhatehis family business to be the subject of gossip, I wanted to tell Jack I was sitting here wearing Archer’s clothes. I had to turn up the sleeves, but still. He’d given me his shirt to wear, and along with the terror and strangeness of last night, I wanted to share that with someone.
Before I could give into temptation, Mia came downstairs. She brought her breakfast into the sitting room, and as she ate, she questioned me further about the previous night. It gave me the chance to ask what she was doing back at the Court, when we’d thought she was safely at Lacey’s.
“Lacey had really bad period pain, and she got snappy with it. She does that sometimes, and she knows it, so it made sense for me to leave and come home. Her mum dropped me off, butyou and Archer were out, and I guess I was asleep by the time you came back because I didn’t hear you.”
Just as well, because there’d been some heavy groping and kissing on our way up the stairs, thinking we were alone in the house.
“I don’t understand why Uncle Chris—”
The sitting room door opened, and I’d never been so thankful to be interrupted. I had no idea what had been wrong with Chris that led him to try to kill her brother and still less idea how to answer her questions.
“No luck with Lillian,” Archer reported, dropping into his usual chair. “All she knows about the bible is that it’s German and from the sixteenth century. She spent most of my visit complaining that I hadn’t brought Ollie with me.”
“Where did Chris get the idea he wanted the bible if not from Lillian?” I asked. “And when? You said they’ve not been here for years, yet suddenly they can’t stay away.”
“Short of interrogating Chris and June, I doubt we’ll ever find out,” Archer said. “I thought I’d try talking to Evelyn Berstow. Unlikely she’ll know anything specific about the bible, but shemight.”
He left us to make his call from the dining room. I was disappointed, but I supposed it was hardly etiquette for a discussion between the heads of two families to be listened to by junior members, whose only motive for being part of the conversation was nosiness.
He’d only just left us when Mia’s phone sounded. She looked at me with a mixture of longing and guilt on her face. “Lacey wants me to go over,” she said. “Will you be okay if I leave?”
