The Billionaire Dragon Shifter Meets His Match: BBW Paranormal Romance (Gray's Hollow Dragon Shifters Book 6) (8 page)

“
Rent
,” he admitted sheepishly. “I’ve seen it live six times.”

Jane got it then, remembering where he’d been headed the night before when all this started. “You travel all over the place, far from your cave, far from your territory, and instead of gathering things you can hoard...”

“I look for things that can’t be hoarded,” Laurence agreed, smiling a little. “Concerts, plays, experiences. I trade gold for... for time, I guess.”

Jane felt a strange twist of slightly horrified fascination, as if he’d just confessed a kink she’d never imagined. A dragon giving up gold for
anything
was strange enough, but deliberately trading it for things he couldn’t keep...

Jane brushed her fingers over his scars again.
That’s you,
she told him.
You choose that. You control that. You can control yourself better than you think, because you do it all the time
.

Laurence shook his head slightly, twisting his wrist and flexing it against the dragonglass.

Aloud he said, “So, stuffed French toast, bacon, freshly-made donuts. Any more requests?”

“Whatever kind of strange and exotic fruit people eat in fancy hotels,” Jane said promptly. She knew full well that her mate wanted to give her whatever she wanted, and she knew she would take nearly as much pleasure in seeing him well fed. “And some kind of pastry or cake with gold leaf decoration. And omelets? What do you like in omelets?”

“Everything,” Laurence said, grinning, and looked around for his phone. He actually had to pick it up with his hand—no gold in the case.

Jane tugged her own over from where she’d dropped her clothes without having to stir. She turned it on to check her messages; for a second she wondered what news she would have from the other Georges who’d been on duty overnight, and then she remembered that she
was
the night’s news. She smiled a little, snuggling closer, and Laurence murmured, “What do
you
like on omelets?”

She didn’t respond. She was staring at her phone, at the last text she’d expected.

Mom

Kolodziej told me what happened. I’m coming up there.

Jane’s mouth fell open as she tried to think of an answer. Instinctively she reached for her father in dragon speech, only to find, as she always did the last few years, that the distance was too far, and she couldn’t sense him at all.

Her mother had never used dragon speech with Jane. Her mother had felt that as the human parent, she had to be entirely human with Jane, to serve as a good influence. And anyway her mother was as far away as her father, and one way or another, Jane was going to have to reply to the text message.

Her thoughts were a flood of possible replies:
What are you going to do? What do you think I should do? Is Dad coming? Please don’t.
Please hurry
.

Jane felt a little fantasy spin out involuntarily, imagining that her mom would show up and hug her and let Jane cry on her shoulder, and promise her that it would all work out somehow. But when she tried to imagine it, it was Aunt Beata—William’s dragon mother—whose arms went around her.

There were arms around her now, though, and a hand guiding her to tuck her face against a strong chest.

Shh, treasure. I’m here. I won’t let anyone hurt you
.

Jane closed her eyes and clung to her mate.
It’s not that. She won’t hurt me. She’s my mom. She’s just... Georgian Corps.

Laurence tightened his grip. “Do we have time for breakfast first?”

Jane snorted a little laugh and tapped out a message on her phone, asking the logical question.
When will you arrive?

Not sure,
her mother promptly replied.
O’Hare, after all. I’ll text you when I land.

“Definitely time for breakfast,” Jane concluded. “If she were on a plane already she’d have told me the flight number.” And if Jane’s father were coming, there would be no need to text once he was close enough to speak to her.

“So, we sample all five kinds of omelet I asked for,” Laurence murmured, dropping kisses on Jane’s forehead and cheeks, “and we hope for delays at O’Hare.”

***

A good thunderstorm could keep O’Hare backed up all day, so of course the weather was clear and looked set to stay that way. Jane couldn’t do anything about her mother’s impending arrival, but she had her mate, a day off from work, and a beautiful day in the city.

Laurence caused new clothes for Jane to arrive while they were taking a very leisurely shower together, so she had something to put on when she got out. Still they didn’t fit
quite
right, and weren’t exactly what she wanted.

“My apologies, it’s off the rack,” Laurence murmured, sounding only moderately apologetic.

“Oh, don’t worry,” Jane kissed him with a smile. “You’re coming home with me so I can change, and then we’re going
shopping
.”

She saw the flicker of flames in Laurence’s eyes. Of course he’d heard the full greedy intention she put into the word.

“Anything you want, treasure,” he agreed softly.

Jane checked her phone to get her bearings, and realized that they actually were in the Gold Coast—the hotel was one of the big towers on Lakeshore. She went to one of the windows, draped in heavy velvet to give the oversized room a pleasantly cave-like darkness. When she drew the curtain back, she was dazzled by the pristine blueness of the sky, stretching out for miles over the glittering blue of Lake Michigan.

Laurence came up behind her while she was drinking in the soaring view, wrapping his arms around her as he snugged up against her back. She could feel the longing in him, wordless and buried as it was.

Me too,
she agreed.
It’s too clear a day to fly, but the first day we’ve got cloud cover, we’ll go.

He held her tighter, pressing his face against her hair, and didn’t say yes or no. Still, she could feel him wanting to fly, and to fly here, with her. That was something to go on.

“Come on,” Jane murmured, tangling her fingers with his where he was holding on to her. “It’s not far to my place.”

Walking hand in hand with Laurence through the familiar neighborhood, Jane wanted to show him off to everyone who passed, wanted to yell at the top of her lungs.
My mate, my mate! I’ve found my mate! Look at him, he’s amazing, and he’s all mine!

“You know I can hear you,” Laurence murmured out loud, and Jane had to stop and kiss him right there on the corner of the block where she’d grown up, knowing full well just how many of the neighbors would see. They could go right ahead and tell her mother. Laurence was her mate, and no one could argue with that.

Jane eventually let go of Laurence enough to keep walking, and led him to a house of reddish-brown stone toward the north end of the row. She hesitated on the front walk, letting him look; she could see him noting the way the houses all adjoined here, so that only the house itself—and the postage stamp of grass or plants by the stoop, if there was one—could be secured as a dragon’s territory.

Still, the houses were sturdy and stately, stretching three and four stories up.

“Welcome to my ancestral home,” Jane said, tugging on his hand. Laurence smiled at her, hearing her certainty that it was nothing compared to
his
ancestral home, even if it was quite something in human terms. “It only goes back a hundred years—the Fire, you know.”

Laurence raised his eyebrows, looking around again. “There were dragons already settled in Chicago then?”

“In the words of the great poet Billy Joel,” Jane said, unlocking the front door with a twitch of her fingers, “No, we didn’t start the fire. Although we had more success protecting our possessions from it than most humans, which put a lot of dragons in the market for fine new homes afterward with the ready means to pay for them, so a lot of us wound up clustered here.”

She watched Laurence anxiously as they stepped into the foyer. Her father had passed possession of the house, and a great part of the ancestral hoard, to her when he and her mother went down to Arizona. Still, they weren’t anywhere near the level of Laurence and his lordly family in their enclave. Barely any gold was on display in the main parts of the house, being saved for the cellar hoard and her bedroom.

Laurence looked around appreciatively though, admiring the antique furniture and the art on display—mostly items from her great-grandfather’s extensive porcelain collection, which were only sparingly decorated with gold leaf.

Laurence raised a hand—not touching, even with a dragon’s ability to manipulate gold, but sensing how much was there to be manipulated.

“Not enough to catch one if it falls,” Jane informed him with a rueful smile. “I broke a three-hundred-year-old vase when I was

just starting to fly—I loved this part of the house for that.”

Jane gestured up, where the stairwells made the center of the house open all the way to the roof, four floors of stairs and railings making irresistible perches for a dragonet.

“My father found me standing over the pieces, with the gold embellishments all still held in the air in perfect shape. He told me his grandfather had liked porcelain for that reason—it was something we couldn’t easily make or mend, and that should make it more precious to us than gold, which comes easily to us.”

“It does need fire,” Laurence said, touching the bowl before him with a single fingertip now. She caught the edge of his thought: if he tried to breathe fire on such a thing to harden the clay, he would incinerate it, and probably the errant human who had sculpted it in the bargain.

“We can try after our first dragonet is born,” Jane informed him, holding firmly to the thought that it would happen, that they could have a dragonet who Laurence would live to see, safety and time to pursue eccentric hobbies. “I’ll be immune to dragon fire then even in human shape, so you needn’t worry about your aim being off.”

Laurence smiled slightly as he shook his head, but didn’t argue. “What did your father do? Melt it back into shape?”

Jane shook her head. “It doesn’t work like that. No, he took me down to the basement and showed me where he kept all the broken pieces that had accumulated over the years, and showed me how to break them more, on purpose, to make tessellae—tiny little tiles to be used in a mosaic.”

She led Laurence further into the house, up to the cozier rooms on the second floor. In the den where she’d watched TV and done homework as a kid, a mosaic hung between the front windows, gleaming and glittering.

“There,” she said, picking out the right tiles without difficulty; she had watched her father put them in place, and helped him guide the gold that flowed between the individual pieces to hold them in place. “That’s the vase I broke, right there.”

It’s beautiful
, Laurence told her silently, and she could hear clearly that he didn’t only mean the artwork hanging on the wall.

***

Jane promised him a full tour after the shopping trip, and made him stay downstairs admiring the porcelains while she changed, so he couldn’t distract her while she was naked and prevent them from going out at all.

He could have distracted her anyway, and he was certainly tempted to, but she wanted him to take her shopping, and his dragon was in full, furious agreement. He couldn’t deny both of them.

He hardly noticed the walk from her house down to Michigan Avenue. While he didn’t share her impulse to shout his happiness to the world, he couldn’t stop watching her, memorizing the exact curve of her smile and the deep pink of her lips, the sweep of her eyelashes and the silky wildness of her curls.

My mate, my mate, I’ve found her
.
Please let me keep her, please, just a little longer.

His dragon wanted more, of course—his dragon wanted to take Jane down to the cellar under her ancestral home, pile gold upon the hoard he could sense there already, and make Jane his forever. He wanted to keep her, hoard her, protect and possess her.

But who would she be then? Jane had left off the black medallion of the Georgian Corps, and the gold chain it was normally suspended on, but he couldn’t forget her lineage, her life’s work.

Even when she had been declaring how glad she was to have a mate, she had quickly turned to speaking of the Georgian Corps, the limits placed on her work because she was unmated. He didn’t doubt that she felt their bond as keenly as he did, but Jane wanted to
do
something with it. She would never be content just to be near him and accomplish nothing more.

And he could not be the kind of mate the Georgian Corps had envisioned for her, even if he didn’t lead her rapidly into treaty-breaking and murder.

He shook those thoughts off, focusing on Jane herself again, walking happily at his side. Instead of the badge of the Georgian Corps, she now wore a cheerful profusion of gold earrings and bangles, all of them simply designed, with the feeling of being often reworked into new shapes. She loved gold as much as any dragon, but didn’t have so much of it that she could own different pieces to suit every mood and occasion.