He watched her long graceful neck muscles as she swallowed. “I’m twenty-five,” she said, her voice turning husky.
The predator in him noted she made no mention of the Wyr blood. But she gleamed with subdued Power, and he remembered in the dream she had been as luminescent as the moon. Had that luminescence been symbolic or literal? What Wyrkind or Fae would gleam like that? The Elves carried a light within them but not like what he had seen in the dream.
“Look at you,” he murmured, almost to himself. “You’re a baby, nothing but a moment, a heartbeat.”
She took a quivering breath. “I’m more than that.”
He quirked an eyebrow but otherwise ignored the faint protest.
For all her paleness she was rather jewel-toned. There were the gold highlights in her hair. The cream in her light skin was like pearls. Those large eyes that watched him with such frightened, perplexed arousal were a violet blue as deep as the midnight sky. Like sapphires. He could almost fancy he saw distant stars in those eyes.
He sat back on his heels and stood while he yanked her to her feet. “We’ll go now to wherever you are staying.”
She staggered a bit as she regained her footing, watching him with the wariness of a wild creature ready to bolt again. “Why?” she asked, dark blue eyes flashing. “You’re just going to kill me. Why don’t we get this over with already?”
“You have no idea what I am going to do,” he told her. That had to be true, because he didn’t know himself. He was awash in strange emotions and impulses. His lids dropped as he watched her face. He said, “I have a lot of questions. Just tell me what I want to know, and I’ll let you go.”
“You mean that?” She searched his face.
He laughed, a husky, wicked chuckle. “No.”
Fury flashed across her face and was dampened. “Fair enough,” she said, voice flat. She turned and strode toward the beach house.
Dragos followed, frowning. Just like he didn’t like the photo of her walking away from the camera, he didn’t like her voice dull and flat or her expression shuttered. It muted those jeweled tones. The fear and stress in her scent jangled, depressing the intoxication of her arousal, the addicting young wildness of her normal fragrance.
That flash of fury had been much more interesting. Fury also had a scent, like the crackle of a bonfire.
She scooped up a pair of sandals. He watched her trim ass and long slender legs as she climbed wooden stairs to a balcony and entered a beach house by sliding doors. She dropped the sandals again just inside. As he entered, he closed and locked the door behind him.
She went to the kitchen sink and focused on scrubbing the sand from the abrasions on her palms. The house was growing chilled, the kitchen floor tiles cold under her sandy feet. Her ponytail felt like a rat’s nest attached to the back of her head.
Still in that flat, dull voice, she asked, “Are you hungry?”
He paused, surprised again by her. He leaned against a wall. There was no telling what the lunatic in her body would say next. “What if I am?” he said.
She glanced at him, face tight. “If you are, I’ll need to order delivery. I’m a vegetarian and you’re rather famously not. Assuming I’m not on the menu for your dinner, I don’t have anything to feed you that you’ll like.”
She meant to feed him supper?
He had serious questions for this female, his property to locate and an outrage and fury he had set aside, not banished. He had justice to mete out and vengeance to claim, but first he had to map out this unfamiliar territory he traveled in.
He realized something. For the first time in a long time, perhaps even centuries, he wasn’t bored. From the moment he picked up that scrap of paper in his lair, his little thief had continued to surprise him.
Dragos rubbed his jaw and prepared to be entertained. “Get something,” he said.
She began thumbing through a telephone directory on the kitchen counter. She flipped past the yellow pages, and the red pages for business, to the green pages for Elder businesses. Her head was ducked as she muttered under her breath.
Dragos leaned forward, barely catching what she said. “What?”
She paused and looked at him, eyes wide. “What—what?” she asked.
“You whispered, ‘Get something, please,’ ” he told her. “What is it you want me to get?”
Despite the grimness of her situation, she was surprised to find amusement bubbling up. She kept a stern grip on it.
“It’s normal,” she told the dragon, “for people to say please when they make a request. You said, ‘Get something.’ Most people would say, ‘Get something, please.’ ”
“Ah.” Dragos folded his arms. “But I did not ask for anything. I ordered it.”
She pinched the bridge of her nose. “That you did.”
Her finger traveled down the green page and stopped at the number for an Elder restaurant. Hands shaking, she punched in a number.