She opened the fridge door and pulled out a pan that had the something he was craving. It smelled oh so good. His stomach rumbled and he arched toward it, reaching with both front paws.
“Hold on—let me get the plastic wrap off first.”
As she slid to the floor, he struggled to get to the appetizing smell. She snatched off the plastic wrap, set the pan on the kitchen tile, and he fell on the leftover sirloin roast. Eyes closed, his whole body tense, he focused on gorging on the meat.
Running footsteps sounded in the background, but it was only Daddy, so he ignored it. A moment later, Daddy said in a quiet voice, “Well, damn. Look at that. Hello, little man.”
A large, gentle hand came down on Liam’s back, between his wings, and contentment filled him.
“I didn’t know what else to do.” She gestured to the pan. “He acted like he was starving, and he has all those teeth. Then I remembered what you said about how he was going to need a lot of meat.”
“He gave you clues about what he needed, and you followed your instincts,” said Daddy. “You did exactly what you should have done.”
Liam finished off the roast. The hungriness had gone away, and his belly felt comfortably stretched and full. Sleepiness descended. Eyes drooping, he looked over his shoulder. Daddy and Mommy knelt on either side of him, both smiling.
He scooted backward toward Mommy. When she gathered him up, he turned to climb up her body until he lay draped along her shoulders.
“I’m telling you, this is just like my dreams.” Mommy reached up to stroke his leg. He stopped listening to their conversation, tucked his snout in the neckline of her shirt and fell fast asleep.
Relief had turned her leg muscles into noodles, so Pia shifted to sit on the floor, and Dragos joined her. He leaned back against the fridge while she sat forward with her spine straight. She didn’t want to disturb Liam while he was resting on her.
She angled her head and looked at Dragos. “What are we going to do if he doesn’t change back into his human form, and he keeps growing at this rate?”
He stretched his legs out, loosened his tie and scratched his jaw. Even though it was just midday, a new growth of beard shadowed his lean cheeks. He kept his inky-black hair cut uncompromisingly short, and the formality of his dark suit highlighted the richness of his copper skin and intelligent, gold eyes.
In the last year, Pia had gone from living at the edge of Wyr society to being catapulted directly to the top. She had met any number of Powerful creatures in the different Elder Races from all over the world, but none of them, to her mind, had Dragos’s sheer physicality. Standing just under seven feet tall and weighing close to three hundred pounds, he towered over the largest of his sentinels, and his dragon form was the size of a Cessna jet.
His handsomeness had a brutality that never failed to cause her breath to catch at the back of her throat. Not even tiredness could dim the Power and energy that boiled from him. He was as strong as the earth, and whenever she laid eyes on him she felt her soul winging out of her body, arrowing straight toward him.
He sighed. “I should be able to coax him back into his human form, but I don’t think he’ll be able to stay that way. His human form has no capacity to eat meat. If he follows the pattern of other Wyr children with large animal forms, he’ll need to shift back periodically to his dragon form in order to feed.”
“We’re going to need a bigger skyscraper.” She rubbed her eyes with a thumb and forefinger. “Part of me can’t believe I just said that.”
Dragos’s cell phone buzzed. His gold gaze flashed with irritation. Without glancing at the screen, he thumbed the phone on and said into it, “No.” After he hung up, he looked at her, his expression turning rueful. “I think it’s time we talk again about moving up north.”
Resigned, she nodded. Dragos owned a country estate just outside of Carthage, in northern New York. Well technically, since they were married now and nobody had breathed a word to her about a prenup, she supposed she was part owner, too. The mansion had fifty rooms, a separate house for an estate manager, and it was surrounded by two hundred and fifty acres of rolling, forested hills.
They had gone to the estate for their honeymoon and had stayed in the estate manager’s house, which had four bedrooms, four bathrooms and a family room with a fireplace that overlooked a lake. She loved that house. She had given birth to Liam in that house. She didn’t feel any affinity whatsoever for the palatial mansion.
Still, she knew she wasn’t being entirely rational. Just the sheer size of the place had intimidated her when she first saw it, but she might like it more if she spent some time there. After all, she had once felt funny about Cuelebre Tower and the penthouse, and familiarity had gone a long way to making her comfortable here.
She sighed. “He’s going to need the space, isn’t he? Especially when he learns to fly.”
“Yes, he will. The place up north is more private, with lots of greenery and open space.” He paused thoughtfully. “We can make it more secure too.”
“Two hundred and fifty acres would be a hell of a backyard for him to play in,” she murmured.
Pia had always followed her mother’s advice and stayed in the city, which was densely populated and easier to hide in. She had never seriously considered moving to the country, but now as she poked at the idea, she realized that two hundred and fifty acres would be a hell of a backyard for her to play in too, and her Wyr form approved. It approved most strenuously.
“We can get to the city in a couple of hours if we fly in.” Dragos angled his head, considering it. “That’s not so bad. When you’re stuck in traffic here, it can take a couple of hours just to get across town. I could have a complete office complex built on the property.”
She put a hand on his leg. His hand sewn Armani suit was made of lightweight woven wool that stretched taut over the thick, powerful muscle of his thigh. “We would need more than just the office complex. There will need to be living space for security and staff, and for the sentinels, because they’ll be flying back and forth. As spacious as that mansion is, it’s no Cuelebre Tower. We can’t all live there, nor would I want to try.”
He rubbed her back, his clever fingers following the curve and hollow of her spine. “We could build along the lake. There’s plenty of space to spread out. None of us would need to feel crowded.”
She broached another subject hesitantly. “I would want to redecorate the main house. Maybe even do some renovations.”
“You should,” he told her, smiling. “Hell, you can bulldoze the place if you want, and start over from scratch.”
That thought was a little too overwhelming. “I don’t know if we need to go quite that far.”
Dragos stroked a loose strand of hair away from her face. “But do we both believe that we need to make the move?”
She looked down. The weight of Liam’s body lay draped along the back of her neck and shoulders, and his slender, graceful white legs and tail curled around her, just underneath her collarbones. While it seemed like it might be an awkward position, he didn’t appear to mind at all. In fact he seemed perfectly comfortable, and he was sound asleep.
He was not a perfect white, but more of an ivory hue. His hide had the same iridescent sheen that Dragos’s did, but he had gotten his pale coloring from her. She wondered what people would think when they saw him. She put a hand lightly on one of his forelegs, and he stretched, flexing his paws, and sighed.
“Yes, we need to move. But we won’t have time to start building or redecorating until July. First we’ve got to get through all of the inter-demesne functions surrounding the summer solstice, and Graydon needs his vacation.”