Page 23 of Dragon His Heels
“Okay,” Ruby said, and then she was gone, leaving the door open, but at least she was no longer standing there staring at them, naked, together, in his bed.
Talia shoved away the quilt and eyed the mess on her stomach.
“Looks like you could use a shower,” Gabe said, waggling his eyebrows.
Climbing to her feet, she said, “Yes. But I’m going to my own room to take it. That may have traumatized me for life.”
“Better not have,” he called after her. “Because we’re doing it again tonight.”
Wait, we are?
***
Gabe strolled into the kitchen twenty minutes later, whistling, his hands shoved into the pockets of his shorts, his outlook on life far brighter than it had been for quite some time. Roughly six years, but who was counting?
Ruby sat at the counter, devouring pancakes as quickly as Noah could slide them onto her plate.
“Hey, save some for me,” Gabe protested.
Ruby patted the seat next to her, and with a mouth full of half-chewed pancake, said, “Sit here.”
“Order up,” he called out, slapping the ceramic tile counter. Ruby giggled. Noah glanced over his shoulder, arched his brow, and then continued doing whatever it was he was doing before Gabe walked in. Noah had always been a dragon with an attitude, but his food was so damn good, it was easy to overlook such a flaw.
“So, you have a kid?” Noah asked with his back to Gabe.
“Yep,” Gabe said. “Any questions?”
“Nope.”
Huh. Maybe introducing his five-year-old offspring to the colony would be easier than he thought.
Snagging a piece of bacon from Ruby’s plate, Gabe said, “You ready to go back to school?”
His daughter chugged half a glass of milk before saying, “Never been to school before.”
He stared at her. Even Noah paused in the act of ignoring them to stare at her. She glanced from one man to the other. “What?” she asked.
Noah returned to cooking, and Gabe rested his elbow on the counter and massaged his temples. “Dragon offspring generally start school when they’re three or four at the latest. Since you won’t go through your first shift until you’re probably thirteen or so, you need to learn about your history, your species, your…”
“Yourself,” Noah added, sliding a plate loaded with a pile of steaming blueberry pancakes in front of Gabe.
“Exactly,” Gabe said. He doused the hotcakes with maple syrup that Noah had probably made himself. Knowing the man was assigned to cook for him on a pretty much daily basis had helped ease the burden of becoming this colony’s reeve. Marginally, anyway.
“Kimberly used to give us lessons,” Ruby said. “Until she started hanging around with the adults.”
Probably until she started using dragon’s blood, like seemingly every adult in that colony did at some point. How the hell they managed to maintain any semblance of control or governance was beyond Gabe.
“Man, I wish I’d known about you sooner.” He didn’t mean to say it out loud, but he wouldn’t take it back. It was the truth. Sure, he probably wouldn’t have been ready to be a dad when she was born, but he still would have stepped up. Hell, was he ready now? And yet, he was reasonably confident he was holding his own. For the moment.
Although if he had taken responsibility for her when she was an infant, the Elders might have forced him to mate with her mother, and Jasmine didn’t sound like the sort of woman Gabe wanted to be saddled with for the rest of his life.
Not like Talia.
He growled. Noah glanced over his shoulder and raised one eyebrow. “Pancakes not up to par?”
“It’s probably his dragon,” Ruby said. “He’s kind of an asshole.”
Noah’s lips quirked.
