She stood up cautiously, but she didn’t get dizzy this time, and she took a few steps to look more closely at the portrait.
“That’s me,” Gus said unnecessarily, following her over to point to his own image.
“And the boys: Laurence, who visits exactly twice a year for no more than three days at a time, so we had to schedule this around him—Radu and Sunny, the twins, and Teddy. Teo. He insists he’s all grown up and we should call him Teo now.”
“What a handsome family,” Cara said, to keep herself from asking about that little gap, and the fact that the big house was perfectly quiet around them and even Mouse didn’t seem to live here with Gus.
“But I’m the handsomest,” Gus insisted, smiling brightly. “Aren’t I?”
“Of course,” Cara agreed, and she realized as she reached out to touch him that she was still holding the chain in her right hand. “Oh—here.”
She held it out to him, opening her hand to give it back, and his bright smile suddenly dimmed. He looked down at it like she was offering him a bloody piece of bandage.
“Did I,” she said uncertainly, still holding it out. Had it gotten damaged somehow? Should she offer to replace it? How could she replace anything that belonged to the man who owned this house?
“No, it’s—” Gus shook his head sharply. “It’s fine.”
He took it gingerly from her hand, shook his head again as if it felt fuzzy, and then said, “I—I should go change my shirt. Excuse me. If you want a phone or a computer or anything, the office is that door. Use anything you need.”
And just like that Gus turned away and all but ran up the stairs, leaving Cara standing alone in his beautiful home.
***
Stupid, Gus thought, stupid, stupid, stupid. Of course she gave it back. She didn’t even know it was a gift.
Cara was human, and not a human acquainted with dragons. She wouldn’t know what it meant for him to let a piece of his most personal hoard leave his body, how special a gift it was.
She’d had no idea how much it pleased his dragon to see her adorned with a piece of his gold. Gold that was not only adorning her but protecting her.
And she’d given it back.
His dragon was torn between hurt and rage. How could his mate reject a gift of gold so sweetly, so carelessly?
Gus knew better than Cara see him reacting that way. He couldn’t scare her away. He couldn’t. She had to know him better before she found out about his dragon. She had to trust him, so that she would believe that his dragon would never hurt her.
His swallowed down his instinctive reactions, pushing away the rage, struggling to be human. Even if she knew what it meant, it’s her choice to make. She gave it back. That’s all.
But when Gus opened his hand, the chain she’d handed back to him was nothing but sparkling dust.
***
After a moment staring in the direction Gus had gone, Cara walked down to the door he’d pointed out. The office had shades drawn over the windows and bookcases lining the dark green walls. There was a desk with a shiny new computer, a sleek new smartphone lying beside it.
She sat down gingerly in the leather desk chair, but it turned out to be sinfully comfortable, and Cara rocked back the few degrees it moved, reveling in it. She would have killed for ergonomics this good back at the firm where she’d worked as a paralegal.
She picked up the phone curiously, assuming she wouldn’t get any further than the lock screen, but it opened right up. She was tempted to look through Gus’s contacts or text messages, but she settled for opening up a browser and googling him.
Gus really was the mayor Gray’s Hollow, so that checked out. He was also, according to a couple of uninformative articles attached to stuff like annual lists of the world’s richest people, an intensely private billionaire.
Cara looked around the room again, wide-eyed. She’d realized somebody with a house like this must be rich, but Gus apparently had an inherited family fortune no one could really guess the size of. Except the billionaire part.
“Okay,” Cara muttered, setting the phone down gingerly. “Okay, don’t freak out.”
“Funny,” Gus said, and Cara looked up, startled. He was standing in the doorway. His new shirt was a soft blue that made his eyes look even brighter.
“I was just telling myself that,” Gus said. Whatever sudden distance there had been in his expression before was gone now, and she felt that pull toward him again.
“You were?” Cara asked. What on earth did Gus have to freak out about? He had everything.
He stepped into the office and then came over to where she was sitting and offered her his hand. She took it and he helped her up, and they were standing so close they were almost touching, and she ached suddenly to be even closer.
“Yeah,” Gus said softly. “I was telling myself, okay, you really want this woman to like you, and you think maybe she does, but try to play it cool for a minute.”
“We, uh,” Cara said, her gaze dropping to his mouth. She licked her lips. “We did just meet.”
“Exactly,” Gus said. “So I thought—dinner?”
Cara blinked and looked up at him.
Gus was smiling a little, almost shyly. Hopefully. As if he were offering a lot more than dinner.
“Sure,” Cara said. Her stomach growled, and she was startled into a laugh.
Gus’s smile widened. “With no delay. Come on, the kitchen’s stocked with at least three things I know how to cook.”
***
The kitchen was on the same scale as the rest of the house, a huge high-ceilinged room. The sun had gone down fully now, but when Gus turned on the lights it somehow still felt like a kitchen, warm and comfortable. Cara perched on a stool while Gus assembled the makings of a stir-fry.
Gus casually apologized for not having an actual cook on hand to cook for her. “I don’t bother when it’s just me in the house.”
He had said that one of his brothers only visited twice a year—Radu? No, Radu was a twin. Laurence. But Radu refused to come live here either; she didn’t see any evidence of any of his brothers living in the house.
Except—hadn’t he called Mouse his brother’s dog?
“Who does Mouse belong to?”
“Oh,” Gus said. “Um. He’s Ilie’s. Ilie always wanted a dog when we were kids—” and before Cara could remember which one Ilie was out of the tumble of double names he’d told her, Gus launched into a story about Ilie and Gus’s misadventures in “rescuing” a raccoon. It didn’t take long before she was laughing so hard she couldn’t breathe.
“What about you?” Gus asked. “Any pets? Or siblings?”
“Only child,” Cara said, shaking her head and feeling the pang she felt sometimes when people talked about their siblings the way Gus did. It was like having built-in friends who never moved away—well, not until they were grown, apparently, although Ilie must live somewhere nearby if Mouse was his.
Gus was waiting for her to tell him about herself, though.
“We did have a dog when I was growing up,” Cara said. “Sadie—she was one of those big sheepdogs, like Nana in Peter Pan, you know?”
Gus nodded. “Did she look after you?”
“I usually wasn’t much of a challenge, I liked sitting in my room reading books—if I was really adventurous I’d go outside and read books, and Sadie would sit next to me.”
Gus smiled. “Very loyal.”
“Oh yeah,” Cara agreed. “But one time, when I was nine, I decided to run away from home.”
She and Sadie had made it maybe half a mile before Sadie sat down and refused to go further. Cara had still been standing there arguing with the dog when her parents found her.
She told the story the way she always told it, so it was funny—the image of nine-year-old Cara trying to reason with a dog—and Gus laughed at all the right parts. But sitting there with Gus, Cara was more aware than ever of the truth behind the story. She’d never been brave enough to just run off on her own—not until Sadie was gone, her parents had move to another state, and there was nobody to tell her to stay anymore.