Page 92 of Retrograde

He was a smart man who was smirking on my couch when I arrived up in my suite a bit later. Yeah, he was a good actor… For a dragon. I made a point to say that all of the tigers and wolves had immediately busted him and luckily they were well trained to handle those kinds of fibs.

“I keep forgetting how they scent it all,” he grumbled, almost pouting. He stood and came over to me. “There are a few roses that I don’t think fit the arrangements. What do you say we use them in a nice relaxing bath?”

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize the roses were fine and it was just an excuse to take a bath with me. I told him that I should kick him out for getting me subpar roses and he burst out laughing and swooped me up in his arms, growling that I was too much sometimes.

The bath was fantastic, and apparently I wasveryinto someone washing me, especially my hair… Except he did it wrong.

“I’m doing something wrong, aren’t I?” he hedged after a few more minutes. He turned me and kissed me when I didn’t say anything. “Sagan, I don’t ever want you to feel like you can’t tellme things, even something like this. I want us to be stronger than that—better foreach otherthan that.”

I melted and kissed him. “I need a trim and to figure out who my stylist will be. How about when I do, they give you a lesson on how to deal with lots of heavy hair?”

“Whatever you want, baby girl,” he chuckled.

“Whatever I want?” I purred, licking my lips. “There’s a lot I currently want.”

“If it involves my tongue in your sweet pussy then we want the same thing.”

Apparently, we did.

Repeatedly.

I touched him too and he really,reallyliked finishing on me, the joke of getting me dirty after a bath awkwardly cute. But then we stared at each other for a long time and there was so much we clearly wanted to say but weren’t ready to.

Or that was what I was feeling?

“I can’t even tell you how much I want you and it feels so right to move forward, but all I keep thinking about is one of those fuckers could figure it out and ruin our first time together and I…” He swallowed loudly. “But then it seems like the wrong reason to wait or let them influence what we have and I sort of spin out from there.”

I sighed. Heavily. “Yeah, I’m feeling the same.” I curled up into him. “I’m sorry I got us busted. Myriam is right and I need to work on that.”

He sighed this time. “I know you should as queen, but watching you blush when you’re—fuck, it’s so sexy. Knowing you blush because you’re into me too and—I don’t want you to change that. I want you to be you. I just want you to be who you are and I hate that you have to curb any of it. I really do.”

I think that was the moment I realized I had feelings for Onyx too. Not just the crush on the nameless professor from myearly college days. Not an attraction to him or thinking he was sexy. Not chemistry and our naked time was amazing.

Him. I had feelings for him—the whole package and who he was.

Okay, fine, I’d probably realized it before, but… That my feelings were strong enough to look past him being Kole’s uncle?

I wasn’t sure, but something changed and it was good.

It was good unless he broke my heart and then it would be much harder to recover from.

23

Darren

I lost my mind when I heard Sagan was attacked while flying. I almost went right after her, but Maple reminded me that the goal could be to get all of us out of the castle so to trust Sagan. Plus, that was probably why Belinda had shot out of there with the ancients a bit ago so to wait.

I’d never hugged anyone harder than when Sagan had come back safe—blood on her but safe.

“I’m fine, I promise,” she whispered, hugging me back.

But she wasn’t. I could hear it in her voice, and she knew this was going to be a mess beyond something she might be able to handle. Killing an elder—no matter what they’d done—would be a shitstorm.

And it was. I hated to leave, but there was something I needed to handle face to face, but while I didn’t think it would go the way I wanted it to… One could always hope.

Father simply raised an eyebrow when I walked into Sunday night family dinner at the main branch compound. “I didn’t know you were finally pretending to be a Gurren instead of the royal family’s lackey.”

People froze, having heard his criticism of my becoming Sagan’s advisor and maybe even forbidding it, but nothing like this.