Matthieu fell silent, but his mouth, the treacherous thing that it was, dropped open in astonishment. Luckily, both Ian and Geoffrey were too distracted by the irate feathered banshee on the hood of the car to pay much attention. Now that Killian’s attempts at murder via impalement from glass shards had fallen through, he had taken to screaming the same flat note at the top of his lungs and stomping his scaly feet wherever they happened to fall.
Ian’s beautifully painted car was being scratched to pieces, and Ian had begun to notice.
Ian sighed. “What are we supposed to do, Geoff? He’s going to destroy the car and shit all over the bedroom window again. It’ll be exactly like the time we left for Brussels in 2010 for Jan d’Arenberg’s millennial celebration.”
Geoffrey shuddered. A note of disgust shot through the mate bond, and Matthieu found himself shuddering, too.
“Perhaps I may assist,” Matthieu said. “He has no reason to be sour toward me, correct?”
“Killian?” Ian snorted. He looked over his shoulder at Matthieu, and in that moment, Matthieu understood in no uncertain terms how Ian was the sun to Geoffrey’s moon. Late-morning sun shone in his eyes, lighting them up with vibrant fire from the inside like they were exquisitely cut yellow diamonds. Matthieu’s heart skipped a beat, and he sank back into his seat, flustered. “Kitten, Killian is the angriest bird you will ever meet. He may not be angry at you specifically, but he’ll put on a fantastic show trying to convince you otherwise.”
Geoffrey cleared his throat. “Not if I have any say about it.” He undid his seatbelt and set his hand on the door handle. “I’ll go take care of it. Wait here.”
There was a small push through the mate bond. Matthieu, whose heart had been hammering and whose fair cheeks were surely crimson, snapped back into focus and blinked several times in quick succession as he attempted to figure out what Geoffrey was doing.
A push?
Why?
Then the car door closed, and Matthieu thought he understood. With Geoffrey gone, the warmth of Ian’s attention was focused solely on him.
During his years in the Pedigree, Matthieu had been trained to be polite and unflappable. In addition to his extensive education in gemology and metallurgy, he’d been drilled on social graces until he could recite them forward, backward, and while intoxicated—not that he’d ever imbibed enough to feel more than a slight buzz.
Some dragons,Superintendent Durand had once claimed,are exceptionally charming. You’ll need to keep your wits about you at all times so that you remain the perfect, polished, potential mate your dragon has arranged for.
Once, naively, Matthieu had thought that Superintendent Durand was full of shit. Now he knew better. Ian, with his sunny smile and kind disposition, was exactly the kind of dragon who could woo an omega with a simple smile, unaware that he was doing it. And Geoffrey, who had to have read into Matthieu’s emotions through their bond, had sensed him figuring it out.
He’d sacrificed himself to a petulant bird with razor-sharp talons so Matthieu could spend a moment alone with Ian.
“Does he really make bird sweaters?” Matthieu asked uncertainly. He glanced out the windshield at Geoffrey, but as he did, Killian fanned his tail feathers, completely obscuring his view. “It seems so…”
“Uncharacteristic?” Ian hitched a brow playfully. He undid his seatbelt and turned to better face Matthieu. “I know. To answer your question, yes, he does. He crochets a new sweater for each of the boys every year, just like he has for our last two clutches.”
“Clutches?”
“Peafowl clutches,” Ian admitted with a laugh. “When I moved into the consulate after being awarded the position as legal counsel for the Topaz clan, there was already a muster of peacocks on the premises. Wild things—bitey. I tried to befriend them, and give them names, but they were little feathery savages willing to cease thoughts of murder only temporarily if bribed with dried fruit or cheese.”
Matthieu choked back a laugh.
“It seems that the birds went somewhat wild due to improper care. After my first attempts to domesticate them failed, I simply let them do what wild peacocks do, but there came a time after Geoffrey and I were involved that one ended up biting him in quite the intimate place, and—”
“Wait.” Matthieu’s lips trembled as he held back another bout of laughter. “Are you saying that one of those birds bitmonsieur dragon grincheuxon his…”
“Well, to be fair, it was his ass.” Ian rubbed a hand over his mouth, but even without the help of his lips, his eyes smiled at the memory. “His very recently bred, decidedly sore, tight little ass. We’d just finished having sex behind the storage shed. Back in those days, we fucked like rabbits. Of course, Geoffrey was younger then, and his bones didn’t protest as much.”
“Ian.” Geoffrey wrenched open the Hellcat’s back door. Killian had disappeared from the hood of the car—he was tucked under Geoffrey’s arm instead, his beady black eyes set on Matthieu. “I can hear you, you know. For the record,” Geoffrey sat beside Matthieu, hugging Killian to his chest and tucking his tail so it didn’t get caught in the door, “both of us were terrified of being caught, and we very rarely held congress in the consulate.”
Ian rubbed his face. “Held congress. Dear God, Geoff.”
Geoffrey puffed his chest out. “What?”
“Held congress?”
“I believe he means sex,” Matthieu replied, lifting a brow playfully. “Even I could infer that,monsieur dragon.Perhaps you need a translator?”
Geoffrey laughed. The sound made Matthieu’s soul happy—Geoffrey laughed so seldom that it was a privilege to hear it. Matthieu did not mistake how fortunate he was to see the laxer, friendlier side of his oh-so-somber dragon.
“And what I meant was that the term he used is so outdated, it’s cringeworthy.” Ian turned back around, but before he did, he let his gaze linger first on Geoffrey, then allowed it to come to rest on Matthieu. The fire Matthieu had previously seen in his eyes continued to burn there, but with it came a wholesome kind of passion that left Matthieu feeling endlessly adored. Geoffrey’s love for Ian and the happiness he felt in the moment infused their bond with an excited, undying energy that Matthieu found his own heart mimicked.
