Page 31 of Dragon Kissed

“I was not aware you possessed disciplinary authority over me.”

“You’re courting me. I assume that grants me some authority over our relationship.”

“It grants you all of it.” The words hung between them, and Nica lowered the toast. He didn’t take it back — of course he didn’t; the man made declarations as though retreat were a language he’d never learned. She reached for her coffee. “What are we doing today?”

“Nothing, if you prefer. You did not sleep.”

“How would you know?”

“The lights remained on.” A pause. “I was outside.”

“Flying?”

He looked at her, and she looked back, and the silence stretched until her heart pounded. He still wouldn’t tell her what she’d seen — the scales, the heat, the healing, the enormous shape in the fog. She should have demanded answers before she ever sat down at his table. She definitely should not be wondering what he wore beneath the sweater.

“I need to return to WMS,” she said.

“No.” The answer came instantly, and her temper sparked.

“That wasn’t a request. The records are there. Crowe’s physical intake files are in Margaret’s office. Some of the provenance notes were never scanned.”

“Margaret can identify them.”

“Margaret is concussed.”

They went back and forth like that until they settled on the number of armed men required to escort her across the city.

“Six,” Demetri said.

“Two.”

“Six.”

“Three.”

“Six.”

“Four, and they stay outside.”

“Six, and two remain at your side.”

“You are impossible.”

“Yes.”

She glared; he waited. The man could probably negotiate a hostage release without shifting in his chair. “Fine,” she said. “But no one touches anything without gloves. And we leave the moment I have the files. And you are not going to loom behind me while I work.”

“I do not loom.”

She looked at him.

Demetri lifted his coffee. “Fine,” he said. It was the first lie he told all morning.

Whitfield,Marsh & Sampson looked wrong without people — the auction floor dark, velvet ropes across the entrances, a notice on the glass blaming an electrical issue, the air holding that flat, held-breath stillness of a public place emptied out of hours. Demetri’s team went in first while Nica waited beside him on the sidewalk. Six men. He hadn’t been bluffing. He’d added a jacket before they left, black and immaculate, and it did nothing to make him less dangerous.

One of the security men emerged and nodded. Demetri placed his hand at the small of her back, and heat spread through her coat, sinking into her spine, and she should have objected. She walked inside.

Margaret waited at the top of the mezzanine stairs with a bruise blooming along her temple and fury in every line of her body. “You should be in bed,” Nica said.