Page 65 of The Dragon’s Good Girl

"I would strongly prefer a different phrasing."

Margot presses her lips together, but I can see the smile she's trying not to give me. It disappears when she looks down at the flowers again, and when she speaks, her voice is quieter. "And these?"

"I pressed them when they began to wilt. After you left, I nearly threw them away."

That gets her attention.

I don't particularly want to tell her the rest. Which is precisely why I came here.

"After you left the other day, I went back to my rooms and started undoing everything. I moved the robe, took the flowers down and closed the drawer I'd cleared for you. By the next morning I was prepared to reopen my entire roster and go back to exactly the life I had before you walked into it."

Margot watches me carefully. "Why?"

"Because for a while, it was easier to believe my clan had been right about me than to admit how badly it hurt to lose you. You walked out of my room, and within a day I was ready to prove them right—pack it all away, reopen the roster, go back to the safest version of myself I know."

Margot is quiet for a moment before she reaches across the space between us and takes my hand. Her fingers are cool against mine, and the simple contact pulls more heat into my palm.

"They were wrong about you," she says. "Wanting to care for someone doesn't make you weak."

My fingers close carefully around hers. "No. And wanting someone to care for you doesn't make you weak either."

She goes very still, and for a moment I wonder if I've pushed too far, but she doesn't take her hand away.

"I worked something out too," she says.

I wait.

“I panicked because I believed you,” she says. “If you’d been lying, I could’ve been angry and walked away. But you weren’t. You meant it, and suddenly I had no idea what to do.”

She looks at me. “That scared me more than being wrong.”

There are a dozen things I want to say, most of them involving the many ways she has already become necessary to me, but that would miss the point so spectacularly that even my dragon understands enough to remain quiet.

"You don't have to work out what you want tonight," I tell her. "I didn't come here expecting an answer. I came because you left before I could tell you everything, and once I understood why you'd gone, I couldn't leave you thinking you were just another client when I'd already started changing things because I wanted the chance to put you first."

Margot's eyes search mine. "What does that mean?"

"It means I was winding down my sessions before you ever saw Monica. Not because you asked me to, or because I expected anything from you. I did it because I knew I couldn't keep treating whatever was happening between us like part of my work. And because I should have been honest with you before it ever reached that point."

"Honest about what?" she asks.

There's still one thing I haven't told her, and after everything else, keeping it back feels like cowardice.

"I love you."

Her fingers tighten around mine, but she doesn't pull away.

"I know how quickly that sounds by human standards. We've known each other a month, we've had four sessions, and I'm aware none of that makes this sensible." I take a breath. "But I realized something else when you opened the door tonight. You're my mate."

Margot goes completely still. "Your mate?"

"Yes. And I'm the last one to work it out." Despite everything, a little irritation slips into my voice. "My dragon knew from the moment he saw you. That's why I reacted to you the way I did from the beginning—the need to keep you close when I have never reacted that way to anyone in six hundred years. I kept treating each thing as a separate lapse in control because I was too stupid to recognize what was directly in front of me."

Her eyes have gone bright. "And you trust that feeling?"

"With my life." I turn her hand gently in mine. "But being my mate doesn't obligate you to feel anything for me. My dragon can know what you are to me; he doesn't get to decide what I am to you."

She looks at me for a long moment. "You really love me?"