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“Yes.” He pulls the blouse open. Looks at me. His eyes are solid gold. “I intend to be significantly more inappropriate. Tell me to stop and I will. Otherwise I am going to put my mouth on you and I am going to take my time and I need you to understand that I will not be brief about it.”

I should say stop.

Instead I say: “Please don’t be brief.”

Something hungrier and more satisfied than a smile crosses his face. He lifts me onto his desk and shoves the trust documents aside. They scatter. He doesn’t look at them. A man who keeps records from 1847 just pushed them onto the floor without a glance, and my brain registers that as the most significant data point of the day.

He unclasps my bra with one hand. Looks at my breasts the way I imagine he looks at a painting he’s deciding to acquire. Cataloging. Assessing. Wanting.

“Every single thing about you,” he says, “is unreasonable.”

He says it like a compliment. He lowers his mouth to my breast and his tongue is hot and precise and my hand fists in his hair, messing up the perfect silver-blond arrangement of it, and I feel a vicious satisfaction in that. In ruining something pristine.

His hands slide up my thighs, pushing my skirt. His thumbs trace the inside of my knees, my inner thighs, unhurried, devastating. He drops to his knees in front of the desk and I look down at Silas Lowe kneeling on the floor of his study in a navy suit with his hair wrecked and his gold eyes looking up at me like I am the most valuable thing he has ever appraised, and the last functioning part of my professional brain quietly shuts down.

“May I?” he asks.

He is asking permission. On his knees. With my skirt around my hips and his thumbs hooked in the waistband of my panties. He is asking may I like we are negotiating a contract and he would like favorable terms, please.

“Yes.”

He pulls my underwear down. Puts his mouth on me.

I was wrong about him being precise. He is not precise. He is meticulous. He tastes me like he’s memorizing every detail. His tongue moves in slow, deliberate strokes and when I gasp he adjusts immediately, reading my body like a ledger, finding the column that makes the numbers add up. His hands grip my thighs, spreading me, and his fingers are hot, too hot, and when I look down his forearms are bare because he has pushed his sleeves up and there is something on his skin.

Gold.

Scales. Small, fine, shimmering gold scales spreading across his forearms like gilding on a manuscript. They catch the firelight and gleam.

I stop breathing.

He feels me tense. Lifts his head. His mouth is wet and his eyes are pure molten gold and the scales are creeping along his jaw now, faint, glittering.

“You’re a gold dragon,” I say.

Not a question. Data. My brain processes data even when the rest of me is a wreck. Mara told me. I filed it next to “secluded” and “a little difficult,” under Things Mara Exaggerates. Knowing it and watching it bloom across his skin turn out to be two very different line items. A gold dragon. An ancient gold dragon. My fated mate is an ancient gold dragon billionaire and he is on his knees between my thighs.

“Yes.”

“Mara told me what you were. She didn’t tell me it would look like this.”

His thumb traces a slow circle on the inside of my thigh while he talks, which makes it difficult to evaluate his reasoning. “Mara did not know what you would be to me. I did not know until you arrived.”

I look at him. Gold eyes. Gold scales. On his knees between my thighs on the floor of a study older than my entire family tree. My mate.

“Are you going to stop?” I ask.

“Do you want me to stop?”

I think about it for approximately one quarter of a second.

“I do not.”

The sound he makes is a growl. An actual growl, low and resonant, something I feel in my head and my chest and directly in the place his mouth was two seconds ago. He puts his mouth back on me and whatever restraint he was still holding onto dissolves.

His tongue moves faster. Harder. His fingers slide inside me and curl and I cry out and grip the edge of the desk because the combination of his mouth and his fingers and his heat is too much and not enough and I am going to come apart on an antique mahogany desk in a dragon’s study and I have worked here for less than a day.

“Now,” he says against me. “Come on my tongue like a good little mate.” And it is the single filthiest thing anyone has ever said to me because it is him and he is on his knees and the words sound like a request and a command simultaneously.