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Math spread his hands open in front of him helplessly. “That’s all I know.”
“Can we take it slowly? Can we date for a while and see what happens?”
Math raked his hand through his hair. “I don’t think so. The way that King Llewellyn was talking about ‘the mating frenzy,’ it sounded like that was an all-or-nothing situation. It sounded like, when the mating frenzy takes hold of me, either we will mate or we won’t. At the end of it, if we are not mated, then it’s just over. We don’t get a second chance. It’ll never work out between us, so we go our separate ways. Prolonging it makes it worse, I guess.”
She said, “So, it’s magic.”
“And it’s biological, and it’s societal. It physically changes the dragonmate in more ways than just the eye characteristic, too. Dragonmates live as long as dragons do. They’re physically stronger than they were before the mating. They become immune to most diseases. And they have a dragon’s metabolism, even though they can’t shift. It’s like shoveling potato chips into a furnace. My mother used to get so angry at having to eat so much and all the time or else she couldn’t maintain her weight.”
“Hold on a sec.What was that one?”
That line between his eyes was back. “It’s something to do with the magic or the bond.”
Okay, being able to eat anything she wanted to wouldn’t suck. “But the actual mating fever itself,” Bethany said. “It’s just some sort of mating impulse? It doesn’t mean anything?”
“It means everything,” Math said. “It means I’ll love you for the rest of our lives.”
“It doesn’t sound like love. You can’t control it. You wouldn’t be able to choose. It’s just some sort of hormonal or chemical or neurological or physical thing. You don’t loveme.”
“I had a lot of time to think while flying back from New Wales. Dragon Airlines has lousy in-flight entertainment, and three hours is a lot of time to consider your life choices when you’re doing nothing but staring down at mountains and desert while you fly.” Math clutched her hands in his. “I am already mating with you because I am already desperately in love with you. If we become mates, I will love you more than I could love anyone else, ever again. It means magic will bind my love for you and make it eternal. It’s a combination of timing and maturation and magical biology, yes, but a mating fever means that I fell in love with you, that my dragon fell in love with you, the stars aligned, and I am yours forever, if you want me.”
Panic welled up in her stomach. “This is a lot of pressure.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m not the jump-first type. I’m the clean-up-other-people’s-mess type.”
Math smiled at her. “I know.”
“I really like you. It just feels like it’s too soon to even talk about moving in together, let alone a lifelong, magically bound commitment.”
Math smiled at her, though his smile was sad around the edges. “I understand. Hell, I agree with you. I’m sorry this happened.”
Bethany untangled her fingers from his and stood up. “I mean it, Math. I really do like you, a lot. If you can un-mating fever yourself, I’d like to see where this could take us. I think we could have had something amazing. But it’s too fast, you know? It’s too much.”
“I know,” he said, standing beside her. “I understand. I do. And as much as it pains me to say this, I think you need to leave.”
“I—I don’t understand?”
“I don’t know what a mating frenzy is like in dragons. I can’t find any information. I don’t know if it’s going to hit me in an hour or a week, but I’m pretty sure we shouldn’t be around each other. I don’t want you to get hurt. In wolves, from what I read on the internet, anyway, a shifter in a mating frenzy can’t control himself around a woman, especially if she’s his fated mate.”
“Wait,fated mate?What the heck are you talking about?”
“I think it’s fated for me, but not for you. King Llewellyn kept saying that the dragonmate has to decide, that they have toacceptthe mating, or—” He paused, biting his lower lip.
“Or what?” Bethany asked.
“He said that the dragonmate has tosurrenderto the mating.”
Bethany stared at him. “Oh, I don’t like that at all.”
“I don’t like that wording very much, either. Maybe it’s just an artifact of the language, an anachronism.” He was still frowning. “Dragon society is so conservative, so maybe the word didn’t change. Or maybe it means something else.”
“You don’t think it does.”
Frustration filled his voice, and he spoke quickly, “I can’t find any information. This isn’t a damned spreadsheet. There’s no org chart. It’s nothing but chaos and void.”
“Well, yes,” Bethany said. “It’s not tidy. It’s not organized and spotless.”
