Page 43 of Kiss of Smoke

“Or you could blow me.”

He flipped his paper back up.

“Arsehole,” I muttered.

“If you spill whisky on my sofa,” he said airily from behind the paper, “you’ll regret it.”

“I’ll buy you a new one.”

“I like that one.”

I grabbed the glass, sat, and drained it in one gulp. “Better?”

A muffled grunt was all I got.

“You know they put the news on the internet now. You don’t have to murder trees to know what’s going on in the world.”

“Joshua Bennington announced his engagement to Clarissa Wakefield this morning.”

My jaw dropped. “Get the fuck out.”

He lowered the paper. “Says it right here in the Times.” His brows pulled together. “That son of a bitch moves fast.”

No kidding. “Do you think Chloe knows? They publish all that shite online. Or someone could have texted her. She has her phone.” Which Lach and I had debated taking from her. In the end, we decided the risk of her contacting anyone was minimal. What would she tell them? That a couple of dragons were holding her prisoner so she didn’t get kidnapped by a werewolf or fae?

Lachlan folded the paper and tossed it aside. “It’s hard to know when she won’t even speak to us.”

That wasn’t entirely true. When she didn’t emerge for meals, I took to leaving food outside her door as I had when she felt queasy in the long gallery. I’d whipped out every culinary skill in my arsenal, trying to tempt her with herb-roasted lamb, duck breasts in cranberry chutney, and crème brûlée.

Lachlan had shaken his head at the last. “Chocolate, Alec. If you’re going to grovel to a woman, always go with chocolate.”

His advice proved prescient, because when I added a chocolate and caramel tart to her dinner, there was a note scribbled on the napkin when I collected the empty tray later that evening.

Has a dragon pair ever been wrong about thinking someone was their mate?

I’d tucked my reply on a card beside her eggs Benedict the next morning.

Never.

Two meals went by—crab brioche bites and chickpea gnocchi—before I received her second note.

Do dragons ever have daughters?

My heart had soared at the thought of it, then sank when I had to reply with the truth.

Sadly, no. The Curse extends to our offspring, too. We only produce sons.

I decided not to mention I was willing to spend the rest of my life trying to break that streak with her.

Her next question came a day later.

Have other dragons mated with a human?

It took me three hours to get the fondant on her petit fours just right, and I was equally careful with my answer.

It’s rare. But we live a long time, and there aren’t all that many dragons in the world. There would probably be more human mates if we increased our numbers.

Which we were desperate to do. Dragons had never been a prolific species—something true across all the Firstborn Races. Most agreed it was Nature’s way of controlling the magical population. We lived such long lives. The planet couldn’t sustain billions of beings capable of surviving thousands of years.

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