Page 5

Chapter Two

silas

She smells like honey.

I have cataloged thousands of scents in my lifetime. Tens of thousands. I can identify the origin of a wine by the minerals in the soil where the grapes grew. I can distinguish between cedar harvested from a north-facing slope and cedar from a south-facing slope by the resin alone. I have walked through perfumeries in Grasse and spice markets in Constantinople and incense halls in Kyoto, and I have remembered every single one, because that is what my dragon does. He catalogs. He categorizes. He assigns value and files it away in a system that has not failed me in well over a century.

This woman walked into my home and the entire system collapsed.

Honey. Warm ginger. Something that smells like sunlight on skin, which is absurd because sunlight does not have a scent. Except on her it does. On her, everything has a scent, and every one of them is telling my dragon the same thing.

Mate.

I am standing in my study with the door locked and both hands flat on my desk and I am using every year of discipline I have earned to stay exactly where I am instead of going upstairs and pressing my mouth against her throat and breathing her in until my lungs give out.

This is inconvenient.

I knew the moment she stepped through the door. Before that. I knew when she was still in the car, because her scent came through the walls and hit me in the foyer. Then my dragon, who has been patient and quiet and manageable for more than a century and a half, sat up and said the one word I had stopped expecting to hear.

Mine.

And I thought: Ah.

And then I thought: This is going to be a problem.

Not because I doubt it. I am a gold dragon. I am old enough to remember things that are now taught in universities as history. I know exactly what a true mate scent means. It means my body has identified the one person in this world whose biology aligns with mine so completely that every instinct I possess will reorganize around her existence. It means she is, from this moment forward, the most valuable thing I have ever encountered. And I have encountered the Amber Room.

I do not doubt the bond.

I simply believe I can manage it with appropriate restraint.

She is my employee. I hired her to modernize the estate’s financial systems, which have not been updated since 1987 because the previous system functioned perfectly well and I saw no reason to change it. She is Mara’s closest friend. She is sleeping in my guest room thirty feet from my bedroom and she smells like honey and warm ginger and I am going to handle this like a civilized man.

My dragon finds this position amusing.

Go to mate.

No.

Mate is upstairs. Mate is alone. Mate is in our territory.

She is my employee. There are protocols.

Mate’s pulse was fast. Mate responded to our scent.

I noticed. That is precisely why I left the room.

Why did we leave?

Because I was three seconds from pressing her against the bedroom door and burying my face in her hair and finding out whether the honey is stronger at her throat or behind her ear or at the inside of her wrist. Or between her legs. And she has been in my home for twenty minutes. So I left.

Cage claimed his mate in fourteen seconds.

Cage Brannon is a fire dragon with the social instincts of a chopping block. I am not Cage.

Cage is currently sleeping beside his mate.

I adjust my cuffs. Cross to the window. Look at the rain.