Lucien looks as angry as I feel. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Why not?” she asks, frowning.
“No room,” Gareth barks out.
She gets that look in her eyes that says there’s about to be a fight. “Didn’t I make it clear to all of you that you might be able to boss me around in training, but you won’t do it in my personal life?”
Lucien leans in, flashing his teeth in a way that seems predatory. “Try it and see what we do.”
I see it in her face. That’s exactly what she’s going to do. But she doesn’t know what’s brewing underneath our surfaces. She doesn’t know the violence we so desperately want to unleash on this fucker. If she did, she wouldn’t be challenging us right now.
“Come on, Arthur,” she says, sliding her hands down to take his hand, which actually makes the hairs on my arms stand up.Why does she keep fucking touching him?
A bell chimes, distracting all of us for a minute, and then it hits me what it means. “Breakfast. You hungry, Arthur?”
He looks completely unaware of just how close he is to being torn to shreds. “I could eat.”
To my surprise, Harper smiles. “Let me show you the dining hall. The food is amazing!”
It’s not. I’m kind of surprised she thinks it is.
“That sounds awesome,” Tesson says, but we all ignore Arthur’s random friend.
Harper drags Arthur to the dining hall, grinning ear-to-ear, telling him all about the different foods they serve, and the different herbs they use in their cooking. Arthur openly stares at her, with a smile on his face. There’s an ease between them that I’ve never felt with anyone in my life. Like they trust each other with all their deepest secrets.
I wonder if Harper will ever feel that way about us.
Gareth and Lucien walk at my sides, but they’re not really walking, they’re stalking after the couple, completely enraged. I don’t ever actually think I’ve seen Lucien like this. He’s practically foaming at the mouth. Over a girl. And Gareth? I’veseen him angry. Hell, he’s angry more than he feels anything else. But jealousy? This is a new emotion for him.
They snag a place at a table that doesn’t leave room for us. We shift, sliding into another table that gives us a complete view of Harper and her man. Tesson slides into a random spot between dragon riders, looking nearly as pissed off as we are.
What follows is one of the worst hours of my life. I watch as she touches him, talks to him, laughs with him, and it’s like a knife turning in my gut. Fuck, I think a knife in the gut would be less painful than watching her withhim.
If we’re forced to marry, I have no doubt it’ll break her heart. The way she looks at Arthur… I doubt she could ever look at us that way. Not that I blame her. Arthur is obvious with his adoration of her. His eyes seem constantly glued to her, his smile genuine, and there’s always some part of him touching her. I’m not sure we could ever wear our feelings on our sleeves like that.
No one has ever shown us how to be that way.
This man… he’s not broken the way we are, and it shows. My stomach sinks. Somewhere in the back of my mind I’d thought Harper would be lucky to be with us, that she could have no better husbands than princes, but a title alone isn’t what would make us good partners. In all other ways, we’d come up severely lacking.
“Have you ever seen her so happy?” I ask quietly.
They don’t need to ask me who I’m talking about. For once, we’re not exactly hiding the fact that Harper’s presence is consuming us.
Lucien pushes his food around on his plate, reminding me to eat. “No. Apparently, that peasant makes her smile.”
Gareth seems to choke down a bite of his food. “They have a history together.”
“You think it’s one of those stories where they’ve loved each other since they were children?”
“Yes,” Gareth answers, the word dark and tortured.
“How do we compete with that?”
Lucien finally tears his gaze from her to me. “There is no competition. Our dragons will choose each other, and we’ll end up together. Peasant boy doesn’t have a chance with her.”
It’s the first time Lucien has sounded like he wants Harper to be his. It should shock Gareth and I, but it doesn’t. Somewhere along the line we’ve started seeing Harper as ours. It’s a notion that we pretended to be bothered by in the beginning, but things have started to change with us. And I blame it on our dragons. No one becomes this possessive over a woman without some magical, undeniable force at play.
“Do you think she’ll resent us for ruining her relationship?”
