Page 37 of The Dragon With A Girl Tattoo
“Are we having fisticuffs?”Christian asked when we stopped next to him.He glanced at the dragons.“You are six.I will ask another guard to join us, so that we might make easy teams.”
“Fisticuffs?”I asked before I realized it.I looked at Yrian.“Why are you guys going to fight?I thought you were all friends?”
“It’s not like that,” Aisling said at the same time May answered, “Dragons get a bit testy when tensions run high, and it helps calm them down if they can have a rumble.”
“Mayling!”Gabriel said, outrage dripping from the word.“Wyverns do not get testy!It is simply that our primal selves occasionally get the better of us, and physical exertion helps alleviate that.”
“Uh-huh,” Aisling said, automatically taking the suit coat that her husband peeled off.“That’s why you guys take advantage of any dragon get-together to beat the stuffing out of each other.Drake, so help me, if you lose another one of your real teeth, I will have many things to say to you.”
Drake looked like he wanted to roll his eyes, but he simply muttered something in Magyar, and proceeded to remove both his tie and cuff links.
“What is this?”Yrian asked his brother.
Baltic, who was also divesting himself of his coat while rolling up his sleeves, said, “We fight.The mates insist on human form only, no weapons, just fists.”He smiled, his gaze on Gabriel.“They are enough.”
“It sounds barbaric,” Allie said as her vampire was stripping down, removing his coat and a fancy vest, his tie, and a couple of rings.“But it’s honestly kind of mmrowr.No one gets seriously hurt, and Gabriel is a healer, so if someone does break something, he can help it heal.Christian was hoping he and the others could get down and dirty, and had a small section of the side garden blocked off from the public just for that purpose.We even got in some of that killer wine the dragons love, since they seem to favor it for recovery time.”
“Recovery—Yrian!”
“What?”he asked as he handed me his phone, then stripped off the jacket and shirt he wore, leaving him clad in nothing but his shoes and a pair of black jeans.I stared at his bare torso, my mind staggering to a halt, while my tongue felt like it cleaved to the roof of my mouth.
Holy shit, the man had the chest of a Greek statue, all pectorals and a ripple of muscles that disappeared into his jeans.He had a six-pack, an actual six-pack.My mind had a hard time getting past the idea of a man who had lived in his own griefscape for sixteen hundred years and still had the ability to maintain a six-pack, biceps that turned my knees to jelly, and shoulders that made me—not at all a petite person—feel delicate by comparison.
And then he turned away in order to toss his shirt and jacket onto a bench.
A glorious, full-color tattoo of a dragon coiled down his spine.
“Oooh, pretty,” Aisling said, catching sight of it.
“Wow.That really is,” Ysolde said, then slid a glance toward her husband.
“No,” he told her.
She smiled, and leaned in to whisper something in his ear.
“Becket?”Yrian asked, clearly waiting for me to explain my protest.
I moved behind him to look again at the tattoo.It was a piece of art, with shadowed shading on the scales that somehow held muted colors.“This is absolutely gorgeous.I’ve never seen such an artistic tat.Where did you have it done?”
“Mongolia,” he answered.“My mate arranged for me to have it.I wished to have the image be of her, but she insisted a dragon was more fitting.”
There was something about the set of his jaw that said the memory wasn’t a happy one.
“The battle arena awaits,” Christian announced, gesturing toward my four guards.The three men had stripped down to just pants, while Annaliese peeled off her shirt to expose a sturdy sports bra.She flexed her fingers a couple of times as she eyed the dragons.
“Did you need something of me?”Yrian asked me as Christian suggested teams of two.
“No, I’m just a bit taken aback that you’re so ready to fight your own family.”
He thought about that for a moment, then gave a one-shoulder shrug.“We are primal beings.I used to practice on a pell when my humors were out of sorts.This sounds like it is similar, with the added bonus of honing battle skills.”
I had a vague memory of a historical romance defining a pell as a sort of target dummy for swordplay, so said nothing else, just held his things while he turned back to the others.
“There’s six of each group,” Ysolde said as she accepted one of the bottles of dragon’s blood.“Why don’t you guys make it a bit more fun and have a vampire and dragon pair up?That way you can’t blame one group for beating up the other.”
I could tell no one really liked that idea, but in the end, it was settled that it would be the fairest way to hold what I was beginning to think of as a massive pissing match.
Yrian eyed the vampires.“I will take you as a partner,” he told Annaliese.
