There would be time for all sorts of things.
She bit her lip on a groan.
Maybe it was a good thing she hadn’t apologized. He’d agreed to come with her—they were allies in saving his family. Anything more than that would be a betrayal.
A betrayal of him. Of the sacredness of the mate bond. Of any chance they had for the connection between them to be something pure, and beautiful, and not as broken as everything else about her.
Francine closed her eyes and thought back to who she used to be.
Francine Delacourt. Not the heir to the Delacourt pride—that was her brother—but all the freer for it. She could do anything she liked. She sponsored the sorts of charities rich young women were meant to sponsor. She funded the arts. She made appearances, and always appeared beautiful and in charge.
She hadn’t had to work, but she’d chosen to. Building a career on shifter-centric architecture had come as easily as everything else in her life. Humans liked her designs as much as shifters did, even if they didn’t understand why. She had won awards. Sponsored scholarships. Everything she touched turned to Delacourt gold.
Looking back, she still didn’t know whether any of her success was because she was actually good at any of it, or because her name opened doors so quickly it was as though the doors didn’t exist in the first place.
The one time she tried to do something herself, somethinggood, without her sycophantic parade of friends and employees, she’d almost gotten people killed.
Francine stared unseeing at the ceiling.
If Julian knew who she really was, and what she had done, he would never come with her.
Several painful hours later, she realized that instead of using the time before their boat embarked to throw herself into bed with Julian, or vomit out every terrible thing she’d ever done, she could have, for example, talked to him. Gotten to know him a little better. Asked if he was doing well, or needed anything, rather than sending the butler service to his room with breakfast.
At last, it was time to leave.
She showered. Dressed. Pulled on one of the heavy fur-lined coats that had appeared while she stared at the ceiling and dissociated. Honestly. Of all the ways to waste the little time she had.
She went to Julian’s door, steeled herself, and knocked.
When he opened the door, she had to remind herself to breathe.
He’d showered. He must have. There was no other explanation for the flush of warmth over his cheekbones, the shimmering droplets in his hair—and in a line across his collarbone, too, where he’d missed with his towel.
She wanted to lick him dry.
Repressing a shiver, she stared anywhere but at him. “You’re almost ready? Good. It’s time to leave.”
7
Julian
Five years ago, the city of Ushuaia would have left Julian reeling. He knew cities existed, from books and stories, but the imaginings of a juvenile dragon, whose social circle barely extended past his own family, hadn’t been close to the real thing. So many people, so manystrangers,all doing strange things. New ways of moving and speaking and reacting. He’d spent his first months in the outside world jumpy as a penguin near a seal hole, not knowing whether an encounter with a modern human would end in friendship or mortal enmity.
And then he’d met Gerald Harper. And he still hadn’t known.
Now, though, he could read the city with ease. Almost. He understood the storefronts along the main street, and the behavior of the shoppers prevaricating with their body language while the vendors waited or lured them in. He understood the far more enthusiastic behavior of the crowds flocking around food carts. He understood why the workers at the docks moved, it seemed to him, so slowly and carefully—the limitations oftheir human bodies, the danger of injury. He even understood the shrieking excitement of what were clearly tourists, clustering phones-first around whichever examples of local wildlife made the mistake of being out and about this time of day.
They were traveling to Antarctica by ship. He understood that. He could not fly, and the ice they needed to go offered no friendly runway for airplanes, and possibly it was too far for a helicopter to reach.
A ship would get them close enough that he could fly the rest of the way, because hewouldbe healed enough by then. He did not let himself consider the alternative.
And he did not understand Francine Delacourt.
She’d bundled herself as warmly as the humans and moved as though she wasn’t injured—though he was beginning to learn the pinch at the corners of her eyes that meant she was in pain.
And she was making no effort to keep her presence hidden.
He would have been content to stay in the hotel room until it was time to leave. Content, ice above and below—he would have feltsafe. But Francine strolled around the shopping district as though it was her own territory. She made no effort to stay out of the way of tourists videoing themselves, or drones surveying the waterfront.
