by Zoe Chant
"It looks sublime on you."
"It is a very beautiful dress. But ... it's not me. I like clothes I can be comfortable in. I'm afraid to take a deep breath in this thing, for fear I'll rupture a seam."
"After dinner we can—" Darius stopped himself. Took a breath. "I mean ... what would you like to do with it? We can return it to the store, or you could keep it. After all," he added with a ghost of a smile, "there are occasions when a very expensive dress is warranted."
"True. And you got it for me. That matters a lot, you know."
He looked at her, and suddenly she understood the meaning of a phrase she'd read in any number of romance books: with his heart in his eyes. His hand tightened on hers. "It does?"
Loretta was, for a moment, lost for words.
You really aren't used to being complimented at all, are you? Oh, flattery, I'm sure you get lots of that. But people saying truly nice things about you because they mean them ... does anyone ever do that for you?
And that made her realize something else. He wasn't just being a control freak. The only way Darius knew to show love was by buying people things. It might be incredibly annoying to have him suddenly show up with an expensive and impractical gift, but that didn't make the gift any less sincere—whether it was a very expensive dress or an alpaca for a small baby. Loretta wondered if even his children had figured that out.
"Of course it does." She squeezed his hand. "I'm not going to take it back. It's a present. And it's a beautiful present. I love that you like the way it looks on me. I don't know if I'll ever stop feeling self-conscious wearing it in public, but I'll very happily wear it for you sometimes."
Oh. And there was another romance novel cliché come to life. She actually saw his eyes darken with desire. The pupils expanded in his clear gray irises, and suddenly there was an intensity to his gaze, an urgency. She was all too aware of the warmth of his hand, the strength of the fingers wrapped around hers. She could imagine what else those hands could do ...
It was probably a good thing when the waiter showed up with their plates.
And unexpectedly, as they ate, she found herself beginning to relax. She'd been afraid that the cordon bleu would be awful and she'd have to pretend to like it, just like Aunt Matilda's terrible turkey dinners at Thanksgiving, but instead it was rich and tasty and actually (though she hated to admit it) better than KFC. She started to forget her earlier nervousness about dropping something on her dress or accidentally leaning forward too far and having a boob slip out. Even though the restaurant was fancy, they didn't have fifteen different forks (there were two forks, but they looked the same, so she figured it was okay to use either one for her chicken cordon bleu).
And Darius was actually good company when he wasn't trying to boss people around. He started relaxing too, helped along by another glass of wine, and he told her stories that made her laugh. She realized how much she loved the way his eyes crinkled up and sparkled when he was happy. He had a sly, dry sense of humor that she found herself liking very much.
They ordered a chocolate torte to share and ate it with two spoons, and then lingered over cups of really excellent coffee. Loretta still wasn't sure if she cared about the whole fine dining experience, but these fancy restaurants sure did have fantastic coffee. She could get used to that.
As Darius pulled out her chair and offered her an elbow up from the table, his hand warm and strong beneath her elbow, she thought, I could fall in love with this man.
And then: I think I might already be in love with this man.
***
Between their fight and the subsequent dinner, she had forgotten completely about picking up takeout for Maddox, so she was momentarily puzzled when Darius stopped to pick up a takeout box at the front. "Steak dinner," he explained, holding up the bag. "Best in town. I hope Maddox saved a good appetite."
"You remembered," she said in delight. "I didn't even remember."
The car was waiting for them out front. Maddox stepped out to open the back door and then looked flummoxed when Darius shoved a bag of takeout into his hands.
"Courtesy of the lady," Darius said. "One steak dinner. Medium rare. If that doesn't suit, I'm sure we can have them provide a new one."
Maddox looked even more baffled. "Boss, this is ... great, but I don't know how I can drive while—"
"Oh, I'll do the driving," Darius said cheerfully—and smugly. "Wouldn't want it to get cold."
Which was how, instead of the romantic drive back to the mansion that Loretta had pictured, cozied up in the backseat with Darius's arm around her, she ended up in the backseat with Maddox, who was carefully cutting pieces of steak from a box on his knees and looking highly uncomfortable about it. She was pretty sure she could actually feel the smugness coming from Darius in the front.
"You want some of this, miss?" Maddox asked, holding up his fork with a piece of steak impaled on it. "It's pretty good."
"No, thank you. I already ate inside. ... Maddox," she said suddenly, because Darius shouldn't be able to have the upper hand for the entire drive. "Tell me about yourself, if you don't mind. How long have you worked for Darius?"
"Oh ... about five years now."
Somehow she was surprised it wasn't longer. She'd already gotten a sense of his loyalty to Darius, which she thought went beyond that of simply an employee doing a job. "How did you end up working for him? It can't be easy for Darius to find people he can tell about his, er. Special condition."
"I already knew," Maddox said. "My family worked for him from the '20s to about, oh, the '60s or so."
"You mean your family worked for his family, right? Not him."
"No, for him. He's over 200 years old."
Loretta stared at him. "Two hundred years?"
"I don't think she needs all this information, Maddox," Darius said testily from the front.
Loretta was still in shock. Two hundred years? That was almost as old as the country itself! She'd guessed Darius was older than he looked. It was just she thought a couple of decades at most. Old enough to have grown children. But not this.
He's lived through the Civil War and both world wars. He's gone from horses and buggies to cars, and from telegraphs to—no, that's earlier than telegraphs, even. Earlier than steam trains. When Darius was born, the only way to contact someone in another part of the world was to send them a letter, and the only way to get there was to ride on a horse or take a boat.
Or to fly on dragon wings.
"You can say something anytime, miss." Maddox glanced nervously toward the front seat, where Darius's smug silence had taken on ominous overtones.
"I'm okay," Loretta said faintly. "Just ... thinking." She rallied, taking a breath. So he's older than I thought. I knew there was more to him than an ordinary man. If I wanted a regular boyfriend, I could go on OK Cupid and find one. "So what did you do before you worked for Darius?"
Now Maddox looked even more uncomfortable, if that was possible. "I was in prison."
"Um ... oh." This conversation was like walking through a field full of gopher holes. Every time you took your eyes off the ground, you risked going in to your knee and breaking an ankle. "My cousin was in jail once," she offered. "Actually two of my cousins. One of them knocked over a convenience store and the other was his getaway driver. Oh, and one of my uncles too, for, um." She cleared her throat. "Arson."
"You have an uncle who's an arsonist?" Darius said, glancing over his shoulder.
"It was a family dispute that got a little out of hand. He wasn't trying to blow up the propane tank out back of Aunt Jolene's trailer. It just sort of ... happened." She decided it was probably better not to go down the path of talking about her family just yet, not if she didn't want to scare off Darius for good. "Anyway, I do understand. Do you mind if I ask what you did?"
"Used to work for the mob." Maddox glanced toward the front, then back at her, and something in his gaze resolved itself and got steelier. "I didn't plan to go into the original family busin
ess, my granddad's business, running errands for his family. But I guess that kind of thing's in my blood. My old man went to prison when I was a kid, and I ended up running errands for the mob to get by, and then eventually I was a bagman and driver for a protection outfit in Jersey City. Got busted, part of a sweep-up of the whole organization. Ended up with a five-to-ten in the federal pen. When I got out ..." He shrugged uncomfortably. "I'm a felon. Nobody would hire me. Mr. Keegan took me on, no questions asked. Said I had skills he could use and he'd never ask me to do something I'm not comfortable with."
"It helps that your comfort zone is fairly broad," Darius murmured from the front seat, low enough that Loretta wasn't sure if she was meant to hear that.
"Well, I'm glad he has you," Loretta told Maddox. "He needs some people in his life who are willing to go the extra mile for him."
"He goes the extra mile because I pay him to," Darius said from the front. His voice sounded sharp-edged; Loretta wasn't sure why. "I pay him well enough to go an extra hundred miles if necessary. And at the moment I'm paying him to drive this car. How's dinner going back there, Maddox?"
Maddox stuffed another large bite of steak into his mouth, and said around it, "Good to go."
"Oh, Darius, don't rush him—"
"'m okay," Maddox mumbled indistinctly. "'s fine."
Darius pulled over to the side of the road and the driver exchange was made. Darius didn't seem upset, just amused. He put an arm across the back of Loretta's seat as Maddox pulled into the flow of traffic—much lighter now, since they'd left the city behind and were on a little country highway. It was dark outside the limo's tinted windows, with no lights except the occasional flicker of a farmhouse.
"Did you enjoy yourself, interrogating my driver?" Darius wanted to know. He was solid and warm, and she leaned against him, sinking into his touch.
"It wasn't an interrogation, just a friendly conversation." He smelled good too. She wanted to press herself all over him, but for now she had to content herself with his arm around her shoulders, the heat of his body against hers. "You're lucky to have Maddox, you know. You should tell him that occasionally."
"Do you feel under-appreciated, Maddox?" Darius asked, his voice as dry as a desert, with faint undertones of amusement curling through it.
"Not at the moment, boss," the answer came back after a moment.
Darius chuckled. Loretta could feel it vibrate through him.
***
There was another hour or so of driving on increasingly winding roads, and Loretta was drifting sleepily with her head pillowed on Darius's shoulder, before he nudged her and murmured, "We're almost there. Look out the window."
He touched the controls on his door, and the window on her side hummed down. Night wind flowed into the car along with clean outdoor smells.
They were high in the mountains now. The last light in the sky was gone, but she got an impression of mountains all around them, framed against a sky full of stars. Below them, the lights of the village glimmered along the lake, their smeary reflections making the water luminous.
"Look up," Darius murmured, pointing.
She looked.
Across the valley, high on a clifftop, light gleamed through the night. She thought at first it was some kind of hotel, with all those windows lit up, the grounds lit with floodlights. And then she recognized the entire scene, the lake and the town and the mansion. She'd seen it before from a dragon's claws, and again from a dragon's back. It was only that it looked so different at night.
"Home," Darius murmured.
His voice was filled with warmth and pride. He really loved this place, Loretta thought. And a sudden wondering thought came to her: if he was two hundred years old, he must have made this place. This was no ancestral mansion; nothing in these mountains was that old except for a handful of mining buildings and old cabins. Darius had built this mansion, and probably the town as well.
All of this was his kingdom.
Or ... more than that. In a world where dragons were believed mythical and forced to hide, this place must be Darius's entire world.
No wonder he sounded proud ... and no wonder he wanted to share it with her.
She nestled against him and watched the lights on the clifftop grow nearer as they crossed the lake on a high, narrow bridge. For a few minutes she lost sight of the house as they navigated their way up a series of steep switchbacks—and then it was there in front of them, blazing with light, as they drove out of the trees onto the mansion's wide, curving front drive.
Maddox let them out in front of the house. Darius gave Loretta a hand out of the car. She turned around, startled, as Maddox pulled away. "My things—"
"They'll be brought up to you." He offered her his elbow; she hooked an arm through it. "You never need carry anything ever again."
"Sometimes it's good for people to carry their own luggage, you know. It helps stop them from taking it for granted."
"I think you are good for me, Loretta Somers."
They went in the side entrance and up to the second level. She was actually starting to recognize some of the corridors now that she was no longer quite so dazzled by the richness of the place.
"Do you want to go back to the Daffodil Room, or would you prefer something different? Perhaps tonight you're in the mood for purple, or blue ..."
"Daffodil is fine with me. It suits me."
"You would be beautiful in a field of weeds, my love."
She had to laugh at that. "My mother used to say that weeds are just flowers growing in the wrong place."
"Did she? I believe I rather like the woman already."
He opened the door into the yellow and white room. For an instant she thought he might have picked the wrong door, because there was no sign she'd been here earlier. Her used towel was gone, and there was not even a dimple in the crisply smoothed comforter.
... but no, there were the hairbrush and toiletries the maid had brought her, arranged neatly on a shelf. It was only that Housekeeping had come while she was gone.
She sat hesitantly on the edge of the bed while Darius stripped off his jacket and threw it carelessly over the back of a chair with graceful, curving legs and an embroidered seat cushion. What must it be like living here? she wondered. It would be like living in a hotel all the time. And not a Motel 6, either. A beautiful, grand hotel that you personally owned.
As if to drive the point home, there was a light tap at the door. Loretta jumped up to answer it. She expected Maddox, but instead it was the maid from earlier, Malva, carrying Loretta's suitcase and a box from the trunk of the car. There was an older woman behind her that Loretta hadn't seen before, probably also with Housekeeping based on her uniform, carrying the rest of Loretta's stuff.
Loretta jumped to help them bring her things in. It was a little alarming to her how shabby her suitcase and boxes looked, all sitting in a pile on the plush carpet of the luxurious room.
"You want us to bring up anything, you just call downstairs," Malva said, and she left with a smile at Loretta.
"I ought to put things away," Loretta said with a look at the pile of boxes on the floor. It was making the room messier just by being there.
Darius hooked a finger under the strap of her dress, his fingertip drifting over her shoulder.
"You will do nothing of the sort. I have spent the entire drive thinking about taking this off you." He brushed his lips across the nape of her neck, sending a pleasant shiver through her. "You cannot compel me to sit and wait while you unpack every last pair of underthings that I have already been forced to sit and watch you pack up." Another kiss ghosted across the back of her shoulder, and he gave the strap another gentle tug, pulling it down to bare the top of her shoulder.
Loretta's breath fluttered in her throat. She leaned her head back as he slipped the dress's straps down and lightly kissed each newly bared inch of skin. Then his hand went to the fastenings of the dress's bodice, a series of small, cleverly concealed hooks up the side.
Loretta caught his hand, trapping his fingers against her waist. "Wait," she breathed. "I think this isn't quite fair. You already saw me with my clothes off once, after all." She turned around, twisting in his arms until they were face to face and she could see all the wonder and desire in his brushed-steel eyes. "I think it's my turn to see you naked. It's only fair."
"I am a full believer in fair trade," he murmured huskily as she began to undo the buttons on his shirt.
She had spent so much time imagining his broad shoulders and firm pecs that it seemed the reality couldn't possibly do justice to her fantasies, but as she peeled away his shirt, she discovered that it was even better than she'd imagined. Because it was real. Not a fantasy guy, but Darius, real and solid. His skin was warm and slightly salty under her lips. His scent made her dizzy, a lightly spicy man-smell that went straight to her head like fine wine.
She stripped away his shirt and peeled off his undershirt, kissing her way across his shoulders and his chest. When she reached for the button of his pants, however, he touched her hands, stopping her.
"Fair trade," he murmured, kissing her shoulder, and reached for the hooks on the side of her dress once again. This time, she didn't stop him.
"Fair trade," she whispered again, kissing his neck, drunk on the sight and the smell of him.
Chapter Eleven: Darius
If he didn't know better, Darius would think the damnable little hooks on the side of the dress were designed by a sadistic human out to make sure that he was driven into a state of such wild sexual frustration that he exploded.
One tiny hook at a time, luscious inch by luscious inch, her skin was bared. The bra she wore under the dress was pale tan, a few shades darker than her freckled skin. She put her arm forward so Darius could slip off the strap of the sleeve, then the other, pulling the bodice down. Her breasts overflowed the bra cups, and he was seized with a wild urge to press his face into them, burying himself in her bountiful flesh.