Page 86 of Bought for Blood

The oven is fine. She’s had that oven twenty years.

I’ve been in the study since four with my feet up on his chair. The Montaigne is open on my knee. I can’t read it, but I know whose handwriting is in the columns, and lately that’s been enough to make me hold the book anyway.

Not today.

My wolf won’t lie down. She’s been up since the cars came. Head raised, ears forward, watching the study door. She’s held that watch for two hours.

What is it?

She doesn’t tell me. She keeps watching the door.

He’s been out every night this week. He leaves after dusk, comes back late, and when I ask, he saysbusiness. Tonight he went out the moment the sun was down—I heard the car—and tonight there are extra men on the wall. Something’s going on, and it’s happening soon.

He comes back at half past six. I hear him on the flagstones, and by the time he reaches the doorway I’ve got my face arranged. Then I stop caring about my face, because I’ve caught something.

Cold air. Wet road. And underneath, other people. Wolf…more than one. And under the wolves, something dry and warm and scorched at the edges.

Dragon.

I know that smell. I spent a year with my back against a wall that smelled exactly like that, talking to the woman on the other side of it.

Kalli.

He’s been standing close enough to a dragon to carry the smell home, and he’s never said a word to me about dragons.

My wolf comes straight up the front of my chest and growls so hard it comes out of my throat.

Maximilian has been curled on the windowsill for the last two hours. He comes up onto his feet, hisses—at me, not at the door—then drops down and stalks out of the room. He’s never done that. He sleeps on my lap most evenings.

Who has he been with?

“You’ve been out,” I say.

“I have.”

“With shifters.”

He stops. Then he shuts the door behind him.

“Your nose is working.”

“My nose is working very well. Better than it ever did.” It’s something I’ve wanted to talk to him about, but he’s never around. I put the book down. “And you’re dressed.”

He is. Not the way he dresses in this house. The dark suit, the good one, cut close. The way he looked the first time I ever saw him, walking down a corridor full of women in silk.

“I’m going out again later,” he says.

“How much later?”

“Later.”

He crosses the room, lifts my ankles off the arm of his chair, sits down, and puts my feet back in his lap. Then he stops moving. One hand closes around my ankle and stays there.

I wait.

I know how his evenings go now. He comes in. We talk. Somewhere in the middle of it, his hand ends up in my hair then moves lower, and I’ve stopped pretending I don’t want it.

This isn’t that.