by Zoe Chant
***
Amy tried not to gawk too obviously as she followed Cara through the huge house—mansion—where Teddy had grown up. She couldn’t help hesitating at the room that had made Sophia stop crying, and Cara laughed softly.
“It’s a lot, isn’t it? That’s the treasure room. That’s where they keep—”
“The presents,” Amy said, remembering it. There had been big tents set up in the park and a festival atmosphere throughout the town. The Mayor and his oldest son were each set up with their own line of people bringing presents. Teddy, standing by his brother’s side, had been the most exciting part of it all for Amy as she stood there with the other first-graders. “I remember. I... when I was six, I gave one to Teddy.”
“Oh!” Cara stepped into the treasure room, and Amy followed her, staring around at the carefully displayed objects: beautiful jewelry and sculptures side by side with children’s crafts. There were pictures liberally splashed with gold glitter, childish pieces of needlework heavily featuring gold and silver threads, structures of wire and beads that took her right back to her first grade classroom, rummaging carefully through the bins of supplies. She had wanted it to be perfect.
“You said you grew up in New York, though?” Cara asked.
Amy jerked back to the present. “Yes—sorry, I just...”
“It’s a distracting room,” Cara said. “Come on, we should go open up Teo’s room.”
Amy nodded, glad for the reprieve, but on the way up the stairs Cara asked, “So how long did you live here? You were six when you left?”
“It was just that year,” Amy corrected. “My dad was working in Germany for a year, and there were already four of us kids—I’m the oldest. Mom didn’t want to take us to Germany, but she didn’t want to be on her own with us for a year, either, so we lived with Gran, in this apartment above her florist shop.”
“Well, it’s vacant again, if you and Teo want a little more privacy,” Cara said, smiling at Amy over her shoulder. “I mean—a little more privacy from me and Gus. Probably a lot less privacy from the rest of the town, including your grandmother. People here can be intense.”
Amy tried to remember what people in Gray’s Hollow were like. She had vague recollections of a nice teacher, a first grade class full of mostly amiable and curious kids. She hadn’t been close to any of them—they’d all gone to kindergarten together, and pre-K before that, and had been born in this town. Anyway, not much had been able to shake her from her fascination with Teddy Gray, an exalted second-grader. Otherwise there were just the people at the shops up and down the street where she wandered and played, and...
“Everybody knew my name,” Amy recalled as Cara paused in the hall at the top of the stairs. “The day we came to town, everybody already knew my name, and my brothers’ and sister’s names, and that we’d come from New York, and...”
Cara nodded ruefully. “I was just passing through on a road trip, right? I met Gus when I took a tumble off a railing by the scenic overlook on the county road, and the next day he took me into town to buy a new phone. I’m pretty sure by lunch time everyone in Gray’s Hollow knew everything about me. Including the fact that Gus and I were fated for each other. I’d known him less than twenty-four hours, and the whole town knew as soon as they saw us holding hands that I was as good as the mayor’s wife.”
Cara crossed her hands in front of her as she spoke, touching the matching gold bracelets she wore on both wrists. Amy was more conscious than ever of the necklaces she wore—her Gran’s, which Teddy said must have been a gift from a dragon once, and the chains Teddy had given to her.
Amy had told herself not to read too much into it when Teddy said come home with me, when he said my mate, when he said love. She hated being apart from him and she couldn’t bear the thought of him leaving New York without her, but it was crazy, wasn’t it? A fantasy she’d had, a day or two ago, of some wonderful guy coming along to sweep her out of her life.
It was about as probable as, well... as dragons being real.
“Yeah,” Cara said softly, studying her face. “I thought maybe you hadn’t stuck around long enough to know that about dragons. And I think maybe Teddy assumes you understand all of that because you’re a McCullough, so I thought we’d better talk.”
Amy nodded slowly, feeling dazed. It was all real. Somehow, it was all real.
“He, um,” Amy touched her necklaces, glancing at Cara’s wrists. “He said dragons... he said when dragons give presents...”
“Oh, boy,” Cara said, looking Amy over from head to toe. “Gold? Yeah. That’s definitely a big deal.”
***
Amy looked a little shell-shocked when Teo saw her again. He and Gus were up in the nursery by then, watching over the girls while they played on the floor. Elena was crawling around everywhere, and once she gave up on convincing Sophia to come with her, Teo and Gus were busy entertaining Sophia with toys, trying to coax her to roll over.
Teo scooped Sophia up as soon as Amy and Cara came in, hurrying over to Amy to hug her.
Are you okay? Are we okay? he asked silently.
She looked up at him with wide blue eyes and giggled a little, and Teo caught the smell of a pre-dinner glass of wine. “Yeah. Um. Do you actually have a pile of gold in a cave somewhere around here?”
Teo closed his eyes and gathered her closer. “Cara, I’m really, really sorry for every indelicate thing I ever said.”
“You bet you are!” Cara said cheerfully. “But Amy’s not.”
Amy giggled against his chest, and Teo pulled her in tighter. Yeah, I have a great big pile of gold in a cave, he told her. Wanna see it?
Amy sighed and pulled back, looking up at him now with an almost shy expression.
I do want to, she told him. But... maybe not tonight?
When you’re ready, he promised her silently.
Sophia chose that perfect, tender moment to audibly fill her diaper, startling herself into crying and making Teo and Amy laugh harder than ever.
***
“I promise, I promise,” Teddy insisted, already standing on the roof and offering his hand to Amy, still perched in the window. “I won’t let you fall. Never.”
Amy looked past him, at the angle of the roof and then up, at the starry sky. “You promise?”
“Promise,” Teddy said again, but he still just held his hand out, waiting for her to take it.
Amy took a deep breath and laid her hand in his, the whole crazy day whirling through her mind. From waking up with Teddy in a luxe hotel in New York to everything Cara had told her and the promise of meeting more dragon shifter brothers and their happy fated mates... And now she was finally alone with Teddy, under a sky full of more stars than she’d ever seen.
“We can sit right here,” Teddy said, guiding her just a few steps away from the window to the place where ladder-like rungs were set among the slates of the roof, all the way from the gutter to the peak. Teddy guided her to sit with her feet braced against a rung, and flopped down beside her as casually as if they were at the beach. “Do you like it?”
He flung an arm out as he spoke, as if everything she could see was something he’d arranged just to please her. The night sky, and the darkness of the wooded mountainside, the mansion with a roof where they could stargaze privately, all for her. Gray’s Hollow.
“It’s beautiful,” Amy said softly. “It’s so... I don’t want to say it’s different from how I remember, exactly, but I was just a kid, and now it’s... real, somehow.”
Teddy nodded. “I think there must be some kind of actual magic to it,” he said casually. “People who leave—it’s not like they forget, but it becomes kind of a fairy tale to them, I think. Not us, obviously, but regular people.”
Amy couldn’t tell whether that us included her or not. But then she was on the verge of joining the Gray family, wasn’t she? She was never going to be regular people again.
“And speaking of regular people...” Teddy’s voice made Amy aware t
hat she’d been silent for a while, looking up at the stars and wondering what her life was turning into.
“Hard as it is to believe now that you’ve met some of my family, I do have a pretty good idea of how this stuff works for other people. Boy meets girl, they go on dates, meet friends, meet family... I know we’re moving really fast, Amy, and I know that Cara told you a whole bunch of stuff today that probably freaked you out.”
Amy’s face got hot just remembering—and not just her face. “She assures me that the thing with the pile of gold in the cave is a lot more fun than it sounds like.”
Teddy made a little noise, amused and frustrated at once. “Well, it’s gonna be great. But I’m sure you would’ve liked to hear it from me, that that’s something I want, and not just get it in the birds and bees talk from my sister-in-law.”
Amy smiled down at him. “She thought you might not think to tell me.”
“She thinks I’m five years old,” Teddy muttered, shaking his head. “But—I want to ask you a question, okay? I want to ask you a question, properly, because you deserve to be asked, not just told. And I know it’s still way too soon for a regular person, and I don’t want to rush you, but I really, really want to ask.”
He tilted his head so the starlight fell fully on his face. His eyes were wide and sweetly pleading as he looked up at her.
Amy wanted to laugh, and cry, and run away. She wanted to never be anywhere but here for the rest of her life. “Ask, then.”
Teddy grinned at her hugely, and then scrambled up to kneel on the rung below her feet, looking up at her as he pulled something from his pocket. A ring, gold and glittering, accented with diamonds and beautifully worked—it was a rose, the end of the stem curling around the blossom. It was enough like the design of Sophia’s anklet that she knew Teddy had made both, but the rose meant something very different from that chain of golden daisies.
“Amy, will you marry me?”
Amy pressed a hand to her mouth, blinking back tears.
This is happening. This is my life. Teddy Gray, on his knees under the stars, asking me to marry him.
“It doesn’t have to be right now,” Teddy added when she didn’t answer. “Even the dragon part can wait, I just—I want to be engaged. If you want to. Oh God, Amy, please say something.”
“Yes.” A tear got away and rolled down her cheek as she offered Teddy her left hand. “Yes, of course I want to, yes.”
***
Amy was a little scared that all of Teddy’s siblings would be at breakfast the next morning, waiting to pass judgment on her, her ring, and how much sleep she and Teddy had managed to get in between Sophia’s three night-time feedings and diaper changes. When they ventured downstairs, though, none of the Grays were in the kitchen at all. An older woman Amy didn’t recognize was there instead, surveying an enormous array of ingredients set out on the counter and worktable.
“Teddy!” The woman broke off from her preparations with a smile, spreading her arms wide.
“Mrs. C!” Teddy hugged her immediately. “Amy, this is Mrs. Campbell, she’s—”
“Your gran’s cousin,” Mrs. Campbell cut in, looking Amy up and down with eyes that saw everything, from Amy’s hair (in need of a proper wash and conditioning, curls starting to go wild) to Sophia tucked against the shoulder of a shirt that had come out of a drawer at the hotel. Her ring was new and heavy on her left hand and she was wearing a pair of Teddy’s socks.
“Your gran hadn’t heard you were coming to town.” Mrs. Campbell turned a surprisingly stern look toward Teddy, like he was a child in need of scolding. “You’d better be going over to the shop soon to say hello, young man.”
Teddy shot her a slightly alarmed look. It obviously hadn’t occurred to him to be scared of Amy’s family.
Oh, God, Amy was going to have to tell her parents she was marrying Teddy Gray. In Gray’s Hollow. Other than the year they lived with her gran, Amy didn’t think they’d visited the town more than twice; it was pretty obvious that her parents had been glad to make their escape to New York.
But now Amy was here, and she wouldn’t trade any city for Teddy and Sophia, no matter how much she missed it.
She was going to have to tell her boss.
But first, apparently, she was going to have to tell her grandmother.
Mrs. Campbell fed them breakfast, cooed over Sophia, and casually suggested that Amy should invite her gran, and maybe some of her closer cousins, to dinner that night. All the Grays in town would be attending. “Dinner for ten, dinner for fourteen—it’s no trouble to add a few plates.”
“I, um,” Amy tried desperately to remember who her cousins were while not freaking out too much about a dinner for ten (or fourteen) welcoming her to Gray’s Hollow as Teddy’s mate and fiancée. She vaguely remembered that there had been several cousins around when she was a kid, but none happened to be in her first grade class. There had been a pair of boys who were cousins in her class, and, bewilderingly, a girl and boy who were aunt and nephew, but Amy hadn’t been close to any of her Gray’s Hollow relatives except her Gran.
“Well, there’s Susan...” Mrs. Campbell started, and went on for a while, tracing relationships as she kneaded dough.
“Why don’t we ask your gran who to invite?” Teddy put in. “We should go down to town now—we can get some flowers for the table, maybe. You should pick out the colors, after all, you’re the guest of honor tonight.”
Amy nodded quickly, smiling in relief at Teddy, who squeezed her hand under the table.
“She’s not a guest of anything, Teddy Gray,” Mrs. Campbell said, shaking her head. “She’s family. She’s home.”
Amy kept smiling, and held on tight to Teddy’s hand.
***
Teddy was carrying Sophia as they walked down the street toward the florist shop. Amy was looking around, remembering more with every step she took. This really had been her home once—this town, this street. She could be at home here again, couldn’t she?
They hadn’t quite reached the door of the florist shop when a white-haired woman stepped out. For a second Amy just looked at her, searching for familiarity, and then all at once it clicked.
“Gran!” Amy hurried to her.
Gran laughed and hugged her, seeming strangely shorter and smaller than Amy remembered.
“Amelia Laine McCullough,” her grandmother said, pulling back to cup Amy’s face in her hands. “You’ve grown up lovely, haven’t you?”
Then her gaze dropped, finding the necklace Amy wore—the gold pendant her gran had given her when she went back to New York, because it was Amy’s favorite of all the ones she found in her gran’s jewelry box. Teddy had said it belonged to a dragon once. Amy knew a lot more now than she had known then about what it meant that her grandmother had received, and kept, such a gift from a dragon.
Her grandmother tapped one finger against the pendant, shaking her head as she smiled.
Her smile for Teddy was different, and when she reached up to pat his cheek, it was almost a slap. “Teddy! I hear my granddaughter has been kind enough to rescue you from yourself.”
“Me and Sophia both,” Teddy agreed cheerfully. “She’s even agreed to marry me!”
Gran raised her eyebrows. Amy mutely raised her left hand, showing the ring. She felt more nervous than ever even though she couldn’t hold back a wide smile.
“Well, well,” Gran said softly. “Isn’t that a lovely sight. And I suppose that makes me Gran to you, Teddy. And Great-Gran to the little one, goodness. I did think I’d have some warning before that happened.”
“She took us all by surprise,” Teddy said, smiling down at Sophia.
“That’s a story I haven’t heard yet,” Gran said. “Come in and tell it, won’t you? It’s chilly outside for a baby anyway.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Teddy curled his arm around Amy, looking down at her with an excited smile as they followed Gran into the shop. Amy smiled back, trying to ignore how this, like everything, felt t
oo easy. But if even her Gran thought this was perfectly normal, perfectly right...
Amy wandered around the shop as Teddy told the story of how Sophia’s mother had given her up, how Amy had called him to come and get her but Teddy had been unreachable on a yacht. Amy wondered what that would be like—warm and sunny, water for miles—as she breathed in the familiar flower shop smells. She remembered, suddenly, that as a little girl she had been determined to work in the shop one day—to take it over when her grandmother retired. She had loved to help behind the counter, arranging the brightly colored blooms. She had been so excited when she was allowed to join the daily trips to tend the greenhouses at her grandmother’s house on the edge of town.
Would this be her life now? She and Teddy had some house-hunting to do. She tried to imagine another house that could possibly seem sufficient to someone who had grown up in that castle on the hill and stayed casually in hotels like the one they’d slept in the night they met. Was there another mansion somewhere in this small town for her and Teddy and Sophia—and maybe children of her own someday?
She wouldn’t miss her tiny, dingy apartment in New York—but she would miss New York. She would miss the work that she did, helping all the other children who didn’t have fairy-tale fathers waiting for them like Sophia did. All those children needed her. She had known that she needed a break, but how could she give it up forever?
And yet she couldn’t even consider giving up Teddy and Sophia. She turned the ring on her finger, which already felt like it belonged there. She had said yes. She had promised, and she had meant it. She loved Teddy, and she felt that pull Cara had talked about, that certainty that she belonged with him. She just wasn’t sure that she belonged here.
But this was home, wasn’t it? Teddy had said so; everyone said so. This was what she had dreamed of when she was a child. She looked up to see Teddy leaning against the counter, her gran holding Sophia, tapping a daisy against the baby’s forehead and cheeks and smiling. Family. A quiet life, with everyone safe and everything taken care of. Wasn’t this what she wanted?