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Quiet like satisfaction. Like she finally found what she’s been waiting for.

Chapter Four

silas

She is warm in my arms and she smells like honey and she is mine and my dragon is a being without language. He is pure satisfaction. A low, continuous hum of correct, correct, correct that I feel in the base of my skull, in my chest, in every place my body is touching hers.

My knot is still inside her. Her legs are wrapped around me. My face is against her neck and I can feel her breath, slow and even now, and each exhale warms the skin over my pulse. Her heartbeat has settled from the rapid staccato of climax into something deeper and I am still counting it.

This is precisely what I expected.

Not the specific circumstances. I did not expect to sweep trust documents onto the floor and take my mate on a desk crafted in the 1780s that has belonged to my family since 1823. I did not expect her to look at the scales on my arms and say you’re a gold dragon like she was reading data off a spreadsheet. I did not expect the way her body pulled my knot deeper, the way she said my name, the pitch of the sound she made when she came.

But the inevitability. That I expected.

My dragon knew the moment her scent hit us. It was not a question.

Mate. Ours.

Yes.

Good mate. Brave. Warm. Smells correct.

I am aware.

She touched the scales.

She did. She touched the scales on my forearm while I was inside her and she did not flinch. She ran her fingertips over them like she was reading Braille, and my dragon nearly broke through entirely, and I had to lock my jaw and breathe through my nose and think about property tax assessments for three seconds to keep my shift contained.

That has never happened during intimacy. I have never lost control of my shift. I have never lost control of anything.

My mate undid more than a century and a half of discipline in twenty-two hours and twenty-three minutes.

“Silas.”

“Yes.”

“Are you all right?”

I consider the question. I am knotted inside the woman I have been waiting a lifetime for. My dragon is purring. The fire needs another log. Several items on my desk are on the floor. My shirt is open and her fingerprints are warm on my chest.

“I am perfectly all right.”

She lifts her head. Looks at me. Her eyes are dark and warm and searching and her lips are swollen and she is the most beautiful thing in a room that contains a Vermeer.

“You’re very calm about this.”

“I am not calm. I am experiencing an appropriate level of satisfaction at a biological outcome I anticipated from the moment you arrived.”

She watches my face. I can see the accountant working behind her eyes, the same mind that noticed the handwriting across a century of ledgers now running calculations on a different kind of data set.

“So the knot,” she says. “Does it confirm what you already knew? Or does it change things?”

“It deepens the bond. Biologically, hormonally. You will find that my scent becomes more pronounced to you. And yours to me, which is frankly alarming, given that I can already detect you from any room in this lodge.”

“That’s a lot.”

“Yes.”