by Zoe Chant
Malva, the housekeeper, met him at the door. Darius handed Loretta off to her, and told Maddox to brief the others. It might be a good time to let go all but the most essential staff. Once he got through this, he could rebuild everything he'd lost. For now, small and streamlined was easier to take care of. Easier to protect.
He strode through the halls of the mansion toward his home office, and as he did so, he found himself reassessing the lair he'd been so proud of, seeing it with new eyes. All this gilt and gold, all these hallways and art objects—what purpose were they, anyway? It just gave him more useless things to protect, spreading him so thin that it made it harder to take care of the things that mattered most.
He opened the door of his home office and stopped dead.
In front of the large windows that looked down onto the valley, a tall, slim figure turned around to regard him. She wore a floor-length dark green dress and had her hands clasped behind her back. Her long red-gold hair was twisted back in a braid.
Darius recovered his composure. "Esmerelda." It just figured that his ex would choose a time like now to turn up. "What do you want? For that matter, how in the hell did you get in here?"
"You need to change your codes," Esme said, raising an eyebrow. It was eerie how much Darius could see Melody in her whenever she moved. Their daughter had inherited Darius's dark hair, but she had her mother's pale coloring and slim grace. Esme gestured to the wall. "You used to have a portrait of me. What happened to it?"
"I had a nice bonfire for all your portraits on the front lawn," Darius said with a thin smile. "We toasted marshmallows. Esme, as appalling as your visits always are, this is an unusually bad time. Just say whatever you want to say and go."
Instead she came forward. He stepped back instinctively. The absolute last thing he wanted was to have Loretta come in and find him talking to his ex. Though, being Loretta, she would probably just befriend Esme and have a nice cup of tea with her. It seemed like the sort of thing she'd do.
Or maybe she would push Esme through the window above the 300-foot cliff. That also seemed like the sort of thing she might do. Esme wouldn't be hurt, she'd just shift into her dragon and fly away, but the mental image made him smile.
"You've found someone new, haven't you?" Esme asked slowly, her head cocked to one side. "Did you find your mate at last?"
"How in the hell do you do that?" Darius demanded. He edged around to keep the desk between them. "Do I need to get Maddox in here to throw you out?"
"Oh, you kept him around, did you?" Esme shook her head. "I would blame women's intuition, but I don't even need to do that. You look satisfied, Darius. More satisfied than I ever could have made you, or any of the others. I hope she is suited to you. Believe it or not, I only ever wanted you to be happy."
"You had a funny way of showing it," Darius remarked.
"I'm a dragon, my one-time love. It is hard to make us happy." Her sphinx-like smile flickered.
Darius had cared a great deal for her once; he was reminded of that now. But he also realized that what he'd felt for Esme was only a pale ghost of what he now felt for Loretta. Loretta was his true north, his lodestone. Esme had only been a stop along the way.
He wished for a moment that he'd known Loretta years ago, before all his youthful indiscretions, all the times he'd thought he was in love, which were but pale shadows of the mate bond. All that baggage to carry into the one relationship that meant more to him than everything ...
But. No. He couldn't regret those affairs, not too much, because those affairs had given him his children. If not for Esmerelda, and Ben's mother Avril, he'd never have had Melody and Ben. No Tessa in his life, no Skye.
No. He couldn't regret it.
That still didn't mean he wanted to find her in his office, especially when Loretta could walk in at any moment. "So what do you want, anyway? I'm guessing you didn't come here to talk about a love affair that failed a long time ago."
"No, you're right. I've heard of your recent problems—"
"How? Are you spying on me?"
"Let's just say that I still have friends on your staff." Esme clicked her long fingernails together. "In any case, I came here to talk about Rodan Sharpe."
"Are you sleeping with him now?" Darius couldn't help asking.
Esme rolled her eyes. "Of course not. Let me guess. You don't know what he is, do you?"
"What he is?"
"You didn't think he was human, did you?"
"I've never even met the man," Darius snapped. "How am I supposed to know? What is he, then? A dragon?"
"Oh, no." She picked up a paperweight and held it out. "Take this."
Darius took it, scowling at her. The paperweight was made of soapstone carved into the stylized shape of a curled dragon. It was solid and heavy in his palm. "I'm holding it. Now what?"
"Now you need to think, Darius. Use that head for something other than holding up your hair." She stepped forward; he retreated again. The once-familiar smell of her perfume was heavy in the air. "Who do you think wishes you this kind of harm?"
Darius looked down at the paperweight in his hand. Another dragon clan? Maybe even hers? He wasn't sure why she was playing so coy, if so. He'd gone up against other dragons before.
"Stone," Esme murmured.
Darius's hand opened. The paperweight fell from his nerveless fingers and hit the polished marble floor with a loud crack. Chips of stone flew.
"The gargoyles," he said numbly. "No. They're gone."
"Are they?" Esme asked softly. "Like your clan is gone?"
Darius lunged forward. Claws curved out of his fingertips. He stopped just shy of grabbing hold of her. Instead he turned away and curled his hands on his desktop, the dragon claws scoring gouges in its black granite top.
"How do you know?" he snarled over his shoulder. "Are you spying for them?"
Esme raised her head and smiled at him. "Yes."
Darius stared at her.
"Oh come now," she said impatiently. "If I were double-crossing you, would I be here warning you? No, I've had business dealings with them, off and on, for some time now, though I didn't at first know who or what they were—"
"Leave," Darius said between his teeth. "Leave, now."
"Don't squander a resource," she told him, crossing her arms. "It's a new world now, Darius. Gargoyles are like us, hiding in the shadows of the human world—"
Darius slammed a fist down on the edge of his desk hard enough to crack the polished granite. "Get. Out."
"Your choice. I will tell you this first, though. The man who calls himself Sharpe approached me as a businessman and a potential friend. I only later learned that he was collecting information from me to use against you, and believe me, I do not like being used in that way. Watching you take him down will be a pleasure for me." She turned to his desk and scribbled something on a pad of paper. "There you go. His personal number. Don't say I never gave you anything."
Darius opened the window pointedly.
"Oh, really? Not the front door? Well, I suppose I'll take what I can get. At least you didn't decide to make this messy." She picked up her skirts and climbed up onto the sill, then paused and looked back. "Be careful, Darius. For the sake of your new love."
"Go!"
Esme stepped from the window, dropping into the void. A moment later, a green and gold dragon rose with spread wings, soaring against the sun.
Darius closed the window, latched and locked it. He stood for a moment with his fingers curled around the windowframe, shaking.
Then he turned to the desk and looked at the pad of paper where Esme had written the number. He gazed at it until the numbers blurred in front of his eyes. And then he took out his phone and punched in the number before he could lose his nerve.
It rang twice, and then a smooth, cool voice answered. "Yes?"
Darius's breath seized in his throat. The enemy. His dragon's wrath nearly choked him; all he could think about was tearing Sharpe in two.
; "Who is this?" the voice on the phone demanded. "I'm a very busy man, and I don't give this number out to anyone—"
"Sharpe," Darius husked out.
Silence. Then a short, cold laugh. "Darius. You are resourceful, aren't you?"
Darius had never heard such pure hatred in anyone's voice. It staggered him for an instant, hearing his own emotion returned in Sharpe's cold tones. He recovered, gripping the corner of the desk.
"I know who you are now," Darius snarled. "I know what you are. I saw your kind destroyed once, beast of stone. I'll do it again."
"Oh, not this time." Sharpe's voice was a winter wind coming down from the mountains. "You'll lose, Darius. But first you'll lose everything. And I'm closer than you think."
With that, he hung up.
Chapter Fifteen: Loretta
Darius hadn't reappeared since they had returned to the mansion. Loretta knew he'd come out of his office when he was ready, and she had already decided that she intended to drag him out of there for dinner, no matter what was going on with his Rodan Sharpe situation by that point.
But in the meantime, she figured the best thing she could do to help was leave him alone, so she wandered out to the pink-and-yellow rose garden. She checked in with Becky via phone, reassured her co-worker that she was dealing with her family situation, and was reassured in turn that the children had done no damage to the ballroom and were all being packed off back to their parents.
Loretta put her phone away and explored the paths in the garden. It was hard to believe Darius was in the middle of a crisis back in the mansion; everything seemed so peaceful and calm. The world was still damp from the earlier rains, making the air heavy and damp now that the sun had come out. Puddles steamed and every scent was heightened. Loretta pulled down a yellow blossom to smell it.
"You like the yellow ones, don't you?"
Loretta jumped and turned. There was a strange woman in the garden, a tall woman in a green dress with a long red-gold braid. Loretta instinctively distrusted her.
"Do you work here?" she asked. She didn't think the woman was one of Darius's servants. There was too much of an air of command to her for that. This woman looked like someone who was used to being obeyed.
"Oh, no. I'm Esmerelda. I don't suppose he's mentioned me?"
"Not even once." Loretta wasn't sure what it was about this woman that put her hackles up.
"Probably best. I just wanted to meet you." Esmerelda smiled. It was a warm smile, not unfriendly. "I wanted to find out a little more about the woman who has enthralled the unflappable Darius Keegan."
"If you're here to hurt him—" Loretta began, bristling.
"Oh, goodness no. Hurting him is the last thing on my mind. I just wanted to meet you, and to tell you that he could probably use you right now."
"Because of you?"
"Because of the past," Esmerelda said, and her eyes were suddenly sad. "He's in his office. Inside the garden door, up a flight of stairs, down the hall past the marble statues and the fountain. Sometimes he needs someone to shake some sense into him. I never could ... but I was not his mate."
"Are you his ex-wife?" Loretta asked cautiously. Jealousy surged in her, but in a strangely attenuated way. She could imagine Darius with this tall, elegant woman, but the way Esmerelda spoke of him was not in the way of a woman who had come to try to steal him. It was too wistful for that, the bittersweet nostalgia for something that had vanished long ago.
"Something like that, but I was never what you are, and could never have been," Esmerelda said. She gestured to the house with a graceful hand. "Go to your mate, Loretta. He needs you. And he will need you more if I'm right about what I fear is coming."
***
Loretta found Darius's office without difficulty; it was as if a magnet was pulling her there. She hesitated with her hand on the door, then gave it a nudge. It wasn't locked and opened on hinges oiled to whisper silence.
She had never seen Darius's office before. It was a giant cavernous cliché of a rich man's office. The high ceiling accommodated floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over the valley and towering shelves of books and ledgers. Flatscreen monitors inset in the walls between the bookshelves were silently playing news channels and a stock ticker.
Darius was at his desk, and Loretta's first impression was how small he looked there. Darius was not merely a tall man, but a man with an incredibly commanding presence beyond his actual size, making him seem larger than he was. When Darius entered a room, he took charge of it.
And yet this desk, this office, dwarfed him. It gave her the sudden impression that Darius was at the mercy of his life, as if his fortune ruled him rather than the other way around.
He also wasn't doing anything. He was just sitting there, staring vaguely at nothing.
"Darius?" she called.
He raised his head and seemed to come back from wherever he'd been inside his head. "Loretta?"
"I hope you don't mind me being here."
"Of course not." Some of that commanding presence returned to him, making him seem more like himself as he rose from the desk. "Anywhere I am, you will be welcome. Always."
She went into his arms with the feeling that she was meant to be there, put her arms around him and held him. He bowed his head to rest it on her shoulder.
"Are you all right?" she asked him quietly.
"No," he murmured back. "But I'm better now than I was."
After he had rested against her for a few minutes, she nerved herself to say, "I had a very interesting conversation in the garden just now."
She felt Darius tense in her arms. "If someone in this house has been giving you trouble—"
"No, nothing like that. I met ... I think her name is Esmerelda?"
"How dare she," Darius growled between his teeth. "She has no right to speak to you!"
"She just told me to come and see you. Who is she?"
"She's my daughter Melody's mother." He drew back and looked down at her sorrowfully. "I have a long past, Loretta, and I have searched long for my mate. If I had known I would meet you—"
"Oh, stop it," Loretta said firmly. "I have a past too. I'm forty-four, Darius. You don't actually think you're the first man I've dated, do you? Anyway, I knew you had grown children. Where did you think I thought they came from, a baby factory?"
He laughed softly. "You are one of a kind, Loretta. I knew she wouldn't stand a chance if she tried to deal with you."
"As much as I love listening to you say nice things about me ..." She touched his face lightly, running her thumb over the corner of his mouth. "What's going on? I understand this Sharpe guy is your enemy, but why? What does he want from you?"
Darius let out a long sigh.
"Let's not talk here," he said, and placed a hand in the small of her back. "Come, my love—walk with me. And I'll tell you about a part of my past I have told no one."
***
The sun was setting as he took her on a long path looping around the top of the cliff. The path curved through fragrant pines and came out on the mountainside above the mansion. Below them, the enormous house and its grounds were spread out in the serene evening light.
"I love it up here," Darius said quietly. "The house, the gardens ... all of that is beautiful, of course. But it's also shared with my staff and family. This place, however ... this place is for me alone." He sat on a large rock and patted it next to him. "And for you."
Still slightly out of breath from the climb, Loretta sat down and leaned against him. The air was still warm, but it held a hint of evening chill when the wind rose.
"How much of this is yours?" she asked.
"Nearly everything you see." Darius swept his hand slowly across the horizon. "The valley. The nearby mountains. A large enough piece of land that my children and I can fly freely here, needing to fear nothing from the human world."
"And yet you have the town here?"
"For the most part, everyone in the town knows about us. Most of them work for m
e. Many are shifters themselves. I don't know if I'd go so far as to say I trust them," Darius added, his voice quieter. "But money can buy a lot of silence."
"That's what money means to you, isn't it?" she asked, daring to speak aloud a thought she'd been increasingly thinking since she'd gotten to know him better. "It's not about money for its own sake. It's about being safe."
There was a silence, and she feared she'd overstepped, but his arm remained snug around her. He'd gone back inside his head again, she thought—reflecting back into the past.
"I still remember what it meant to me to buy this land," Darius said at last, his voice rumbling against her pleasantly as the sun sank below the edge of the world. "It wasn't the first place I lived, of course. But when I had earned enough to buy this land—yes. You're right. It was safety to me. Security. I never again needed to fear the human world. Or ... anything else."
A slight shiver ran through her that had nothing to do with the vanishing sun and the oncoming chill of the night. "What else is there?"
"There are the creatures who destroyed my clan when I was a child. Gargoyles."
Loretta found it unexpectedly easy to accept. There were real dragons, so why not real gargoyles too? "Are they like ... gargoyles on top of buildings? Or something else?" Like dragons, she thought but didn't say. The real thing was both like and unlike the stories she'd grown up with, the fantasy dragons of movies and books.
"Most are nothing more than mindless animals. But a few are like dragon shifters—gargoyles some of the time, humans the rest. Sharpe, I think, must be one of those."
"Why is he after you?"
Darius blew out a breath and gazed down over the darkening valley.
"I wasn't sure, in the beginning. I didn't even know what he was until today. But there used to be a feud between my clan and the gargoyles, going back thousands of years as far as I know."
His voice grew dark and distant. "I was a child when they destroyed my clan. I alone survived, because I had been fostered out to another clan at the time—Esmerelda's clan, as it happens, which is why she knows about it. I think my family knew it wasn't safe, that the gargoyles were after us. That's why they sent me away. At the time, all I knew was that my family was gone and I was alone."