Bastard. Unfortunately, he was right. It was impossible for that man to look ugly.
She glowered after him as he left. He’d just walked off with her most useful tool – and one that would be incredibly hard to replace.
The truthstone gems only existed in Alforia, a small country in northern Africa. If she couldn’t get that back from him, she would have to go to that tiny mine, trekking through about fifty miles of jungle, pay a fortune for the right to enter the mine and hunt for the vein where the gems were… Damn him.
And truthstones weren’t easy to work with, either. They required special handling to unlock their powers. It wouldn’t be easy to get a new one to work for her. It would take weeks or months to get the gem attuned to her vibrations.
Cursing under her breath, she went to take a shower and change.
* * * * *
As soon as the truthstone was locked away safely, Gabriel headed down the hall towards the elevator that led to the south tower. Once he’d reached the top, he stepped out – and saw his brother walking towards him. Gabriel felt a wave of red-hot anger rush through his veins.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded.
“I came to visit Alexandra. As a member of this family, I have that right.” Calder glanced down the hallway at a large metal door.
“You’re a member in name only.” Gabriel glowered at him. “It’s your fault she’s still here.”
Calder snorted. “Keep telling yourself that. By the way, congratulations on your lovely new bride-to-be. You could have gotten rid of her, of course, but then you’d have been stuck with Pandora. So I assume you picked her because she’s the lesser of two evils?”
Rage roared through Gabriel. He knew Calder was spoiling for a fight, provoking him on purpose… Well, if he wanted a fight, he’d get one.
“How dare you?” he shouted, and he let out a blast of flame that enveloped his brother from head to toe and burned the clothes right off him. Calder responded with an answering blast, and Gabriel felt the air around him go warm and his hair started to singe. A human would have been instantly reduced to a blackened skeleton, but a dragon could withstand another dragon’s fire for a short time.
“Stop that at once! I said stop it!” Their mother’s voice rang through the air, and then Tabitha stepped between them.
The flaming stopped.
Gabriel and Calder stood there, panting with rage and exertion, fists clenched, and their mother stood there, stark naked and furious, between them.
“You two idiots just burned my favorite dress. That was a Dior, I’ll have you know,” Tabitha snapped, but, as was her custom, she only looked at Gabriel.
“What are you doing here?” Gabriel asked her. “Why aren’t you downstairs with the guests?”
Tabitha’s mouth twitched into a sad smile. “I came to deliver your happy news to Alexandra,” she said, glancing at the big door. Then her face fell. “But even here, I get no peace.” She gave a rare glance at Calder, her eyes brimming with tears, lip quivering.
As if she hadn’t suffered enough. Gabriel drew his breath in to blast his brother with a fireball he couldn’t recover from, but Calder merely shot her a look of annoyance. “We all know you were a theatre major in college, mother – or should I say, Tabitha,” he said coldly. “So save it.”
Tabitha’s tears vanished instantly, and she turned and stalked off, holding up her hand and extending her middle finger at her older – by five minutes – son.
“I curse the day you hatched!” she yelled at him, then leaned in to let the retinal scanner scan her eye. The door opened for her, and she paused as if to brace herself, then walked into the room, leaving her two sons alone.
Calder flashed Gabriel an annoyingly superior look, as if to say, “She suckered you, as usual,” then turned and walked away. Gabriel was even angrier because his brother was right.
And unfortunately, family tradition required that Calder remain in the valley until Gabriel was married. It would be a miracle if they could get through the next thirty days without killing each other.
He climbed onto the elevator and took it downstairs, then strode through the great hall that led back to the main area of the castle. He was determined not to let his asshole ex-brother ruin his good mood. The universe was clearly smiling on him today. For the past year, he’d been crushing on Kelly Henderson. More than that – dreaming about the stubborn spitfire brunette. Lusting after her. Struggling to banish her from his thoughts. Enjoying himself far too much every time she showed up and tried to interrogate him.
For the past month, since both his name and Pandora’s had been selected by the fair committee, he’d been plunged in gloom. Not only would he never be with Kelly, he’d be married to a horrible, viper-tongued, social-climbing phony who made his stomach roil.
He and his family’s lawyers had researched every possible angle to get him out of the nightmare that would be his fate, and had found nothing. They were positive she’d cheated and rigged the drawing so she’d be selected – and it didn’t even matter.
If he refused to marry the Fair Maiden, he would be in defiance of the Dragon Codicil, which meant that he and his family would forfeit everything they owned to Pandora’s family and would be banished from associating with their fellow dragons forever.
The Dragon Elders didn’t mess around.
And then the spyware that his family had recently used to infect Kelly’s laptop had paid off…shockingly well. They’d done it because they were still desperately hunting for a power gem with healing powers, and hoped that Kelly might have information about such a gem on her computer, and also because they wanted to keep abreast of Kelly’s investigation into them. But when he’d learned that Kelly planned to come to the Tri-Valley Dragon Festival and substitute herself for the Fair Maiden, it had been like a hurricane had blown away and the sun had beamed down on him from the heavens.
