Page 45 of Hoarded By the Dragon

“You leave it on your nightstand.” Now he shifts in unease. “I am not always tired when I come to you at night.”

And he what? Flips through my sketches while we cuddle? My cheeks burn, suddenly self-conscious.

“You should have asked. That’s personal,” I say.

He aches his brow at me. “Like my hoard is?”

I scrunch my nose, unwilling to admit that he has a point. “Then we’re even. I only stole from you once.”

He snorts but doesn’t reject that notion.

“You’re a talented artist,” he says. “I especially like the sketches you did of Maggie.”

A rush of pleasure has me blushing. “Thank you. I’ve been drawing since I was young.”

“I’m sure it helps with your work.”

I try not to wince. “Not exactly. It’s a different skill set for me entirely. It made it easier to learn how to make forgeries, and that has contributed the most to being able to restore.”

“Did you make many forgeries?” he asks.

“Some,” I allow, not really wanting to get into it. The pieces I forged and then switched with the real thing on display are what I can never hope to make right. The original works were sold and changed hands so long ago, and the cut I got from the process was too small to ever hope to buy them back.

As if he senses my discomfort, he changes the subject. “Do you like to draw everything?”

“I love portraits but could do without buildings. Sometimes I’ll sketch things from my dreams. It’s why I started to draw in the first place, to capture the images in my head that didn’t make sense.”

Kalos frowns, so I explain.

“I have two skills that are, for the most part, useless. Getting past wards and sometimes I’ll have dreams that come true. There’s no way to change the outcome, and most of the time they are too confusing to make heads or tails of until they happen.” I shrug.

“Prophetic dreams,” Kalos murmurs. “That’s unusual.”

“I don’t think about it much. It hasn’t happened in a while.”

“Those don’t sound like witch talents. True, there are some witch lines that have dreams, but bypassing wards, no.”

“You don’t think I come from witches?” I and everyone around me just assume I’m a witch because my aura apparently feels enough like one. I figured I didn’t have any craft-oriented abilities because I hadn’t been trained. Witches are usually taught how to practice their craft by family, strengthening their natural abilities and branching it with developed skills.

Kalos shrugs. “There is really no way to know unless we were to track down your biological family. It’s possible that you have some fae mixed with a witch line far back in your family tree.”

I frown. “You looked into my background?”

My upbringing hadn’t come up in the short amount of time we’ve spent together.

“Some,” he admits but lacks any guilt. I suppose if I had a thief living with me, I’d do some digging too.

The dragon waits for me to continue the conversation patiently, and I bite my lip before answering his unspoken question about my biological family.

“I don’t want to find them.”

Kalos raises a brow.

I clear my throat. “The baby will be a dragon, right?”

He pauses before nodding. “Most beings will breed true when breeding with witches, and with how hungry for heat this impossibility is, they are definitely a dragon.”

My cheeks heat at the word “breed” even though it lacks the context of lust. “So it wouldn’t really help to know where I come from, would it?”

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