Page 7

I noticed her photograph when it arrived with her application. I looked at it six times. I did not understand why. My dragon was attentive. Unusually so. He studied her face the way he studies objects he intends to acquire. But a photograph carries no scent. There was no recognition. No certainty. Only a strange, persistent interest I did not examine.

Then she walked through the door and her scent hit me and more than a century and a half of dragon biology rearranged itself in one second and my dragon said MATE with a force that buckled something behind my sternum, and I stood in my own foyer clenching my fists until the bones ached and thought: oh.

This is nothing I was prepared for.

I finish the whiskey. Set down the glass.

Beside her file on my desk is a pen. When I handed her the estate orientation packet in the hallway, she pulled her own pen from her bag. Clicked it, signed the NDA in quick efficient strokes, and handed the packet back. But she set the pen on the hallway table while she adjusted her laptop bag, and she forgot it there.

I picked it up. I had every intention of returning it.

I am looking at it now. It is sitting on my desk beside a Montblanc Meisterstück and an eighteenth-century mahogany surface and a crystal glass I acquired in Vienna in 1962.

It is a blue Bic pen with a chewed cap.

My dragon has assigned it a value somewhere between the Montblanc and the desk.

I stare at it. Consider returning it.

I open my desk drawer and place it inside, carefully, beside a pocket watch from 1847 and a first-edition Keats.

This is a temporary lapse. A biological impulse I will correct in the morning when my proximity to her scent has normalized and my dragon has stopped whispering mate, mate, mate like a metronome made of instinct and poor judgment.

The sound comes from the kitchen.

A cabinet opening. A spoon against ceramic. The faint, unmistakable scent of ginger honey moving through my house.

It is eleven seventeen.

My mate should be asleep.

Mate is awake.

I am aware.

Mate may need something.

She is twenty-seven years old. I suspect she is capable of preparing a beverage without assistance.

Go.

I remain seated for precisely forty seconds before getting up.

Nina is standing at the kitchen counter in soft gray sleep pants and an oversized T-shirt, stirring something into a mug. Her hair is down. I have not seen it down before.

This is a problem.

“Mr. Lowe.” She jumps slightly. “Sorry. I couldn’t sleep. I hope it’s okay that I’m using the kitchen.”

“Of course.”

Her scent has changed. Softer now. Sleepy. Honey and ginger and something warm beneath it that makes my dragon press against the inside of my skull.

Look at her hair.

I am looking at her hair.

We should touch it.