Chapter Five

NATE

What a waste of a morning that had been. With Alex Teague there, I couldn't ask Ella any leading questions about the Fortescues, and with Ella there, I couldn't explore why Alex had been so eager to investigate James's emails.

As soon as I'd seen Alex at the breakfast table, I realised he hadn't been working the bar last night. The Fortescues were so hierarchical they made Downton Abbey look progressive. Staff would never be permitted to dine with the family. He was clearly part of the Cornish contingent, which helped me place the melodious accent he had, the ‘r's rolling when he spoke. He looked a little older than the rest of the visiting Cornish dragons, apart from their matriarch. I'd put him in his mid-twenties, and he was as devastatingly hot as he'd been last night.

If Ella hadn't tagged along to the theatre, perhaps I could have worked out my attraction towards him. Lost in a pleasant daydream of doing precisely that, I was unprepared to come face to face with Charlie when we returned to the Fortescues' house. He was pale and unshaven, his hair damp as if he wasn't long out of the shower. Ella's chatter faded into the background as I stared into his face, my heart doing something unexpected and unpleasant in my chest.

"Nate," he said, his voice gravelly. Hungover. There was no mistaking the signs to someone who'd been through God knew how many hangovers alongside him. "I want to talk to you."

My stomach turned over. I didn't want to be alone with him, to find out what else he had to tell me about my shortcomings as a dragon, a person, and a lover. No one had ever known me the way he had, which was how he'd known exactly what to say to leave my soul flayed and bleeding when he broke up with me.

I was frozen, staring at him. Ella squeezed my arm. "I'll see you later, Nate," she said, and disappeared upstairs. Alex followed her, with a backwards glance at me and Charlie.

With no conscious intention of doing so, I found myself trailing Charlie into the small parlour at the front of the house. I closed the door behind us. Whatever he had to say, I didn't want another living soul to hear it.

He threw himself into an armchair with his usual scapegrace grin. "I wasn't sure if you were really here or not. I must have been rat-arsed by the time I saw you last night. If I said or did anything I shouldn't have, it was the drink, okay?"

I leaned against the wall, arms folded, one leg crossed over the other at the ankle. My body language was announcing my unease, but I couldn't help it. I needed to protect myself.

"You asked me to suck your cock," I told him.

"That sounds about right," he said. "You always did give better head than anyone else."

The backhanded compliment was a slap in the face, waking me from the disconnected state I'd been in since seeing him in the hallway. "What do you want, Charlie?"

He picked at a thread on his trousers. "We shouldn't have broken up." He glanced up once he'd said the words, gauging my reaction.

My heart pounded as disbelief, hurt and hope swirled inside me.

He shrugged slightly when I said nothing. "We had fun, didn't we?"

Yes, we had fun. Looking back, we had so much fun over the six years we were together that I couldn't understand how we hadn't been kicked out of uni, arrested, or both. The fact we were rich and white was probably all that had saved us.

"That's it? Not because you miss me or love me, but because we used to have fun? Did you really—" I stopped because even I could hear the hurt in my voice.

He pushed up from the chair and came to me, his hand reaching to touch my cheek. I was hypnotised by him, the way I'd always been. The first time I saw him in the student union bar, I'd been transfixed, and I'd been under his spell ever since. No one looked like Charlie. He was a Greek god, blond curls framing a face so classically beautiful it almost hurt to look at.

But it wasn't his looks that had held me captivated—it was the mischief, the delight in being alive that made him impossible to resist. We'd had the invincibility of youth, added to the heady arrogance of being dragons among humans, and we'd done anything and everything we'd wanted, laughing all the way. With him, I'd felt alivein a way I hadn't since.

"You know I'm crap at saying the right thing," Charlie said at last. "But I have missed you, Nate. I just want things to go back to how they were."

For an instant, I was drowning in his blue eyes. I wanted, so badly, to believe that he loved me and regretted what he'd done. But he hadn't said that he did.

"It doesn't work like that," I said roughly. "You don't get a free pass on everything. Why the hell do you think I'd want to get back with you?"

"Because I was a dick then, but I'm asking nicely now?" He looked up at me through his lashes, the look of a little boy who'd done wrong, which had always earned my instant forgiveness. "And you've missed me, Nate. I know it. Why else would you be here?"

Rejecting him wasn't an option. I needed to stay in the Fortescues' house, and Charlie might tell me to pack my bags if he didn't like my answer.

I swallowed my pride and hurt. "I don't know, Charlie—there's been a lot of water under the bridge since then. I need to think about it."

The smile that dawned on his face looked genuinely happy. "So think about it. Just don't take too long."

After we'd swapped numbers, he left the room, leaving me dizzy with the possibility that we could work this out. Perhaps he had an explanation for what he'd done. We'd both grown up since then. Perhaps it had simply been a case of right person, wrong time, and now was our time.

But nothing could take away those things he'd said to me.

I sank into the closest armchair and dropped my head in my hands. I had no idea what I wanted, other than never to have come back to this house.

ALEX

Once up the stairs and out of sight of Nate and Charlie, Ella turned on me.

"I saw how you were watching Nate earlier, but Nate and Charlie are getting back together," she told me fiercely. "You're not to get in the way of that, or there'll be trouble."

The expression on Nate's face when he'd seen Charlie suggested that getting back together would be news to him. He'd looked trapped, and if he'd glanced my way, I might have been inclined to help him out of the situation. But he hadn't seemed able to do anything except stare into Chief Wanker's admittedly very attractive face, so I'd left them to it. Bankers deserved one another.

"I've no intention of getting between them" I said truthfully, before fighting back a grin at the thought of doing precisely that. I might loathe Charlie for being an entitled, rude, arrogant prick, yet I couldn't deny he was pretty. Gag him, and he might be fun in bed.

"Men!" she said disgustedly, and stalked away. I guessed she'd seen my expression and interpreted it correctly. Or perhaps it was simply time for another of her outbursts. She must be younger than she looked.

I went to my room and noodled about on my phone until lunchtime. I had nothing to pass on to Margaret, Nate was otherwise occupied, and I didn't want to risk running into any of the distinctly unpleasant Fortescue family. I hoped Margaret and James would swiftly reach whatever agreement they were dancing around so I could get out of here and go home. Away from the sneers, the superiority complexes, and this house that reeked of money.

Nate wasn't at lunch, as I saw within an instant of entering the dining room. Ella, of course, asked where he was. "He's gone for a walk," her mother said. "He wanted to absorb the atmosphere of the city for his book."

Both Charlie and Ella looked annoyed at the answer. I still couldn't believe Nate's idea for his book. It was the most outlandish concept I'd ever heard. And that's from someone who reads so much sci-fi that I dream of rocket ships. And aliens. Sometimes, those aliens have tentacles, and then those dreams get interesting.

"Alexander."

Oh, crap. Drifting off into a tentacle-porn fuelled daydream at the lunch table was not exhibiting the manners Margaret had demanded of us. She was looking sternly at me, and I wondered how many times she'd said my name.

"Do you want to come with us this afternoon? James and Anna will be accompanying us."

In other words, the coast should be clear for an attempt at James's study. "I've got some things to catch up on, if you don't need me," I said.

The group gathered in the hall after lunch, ready to leave for their private tour of the Roman Baths, where they'd meet the bulk of the Fortescue party. It appeared only I saw the bankers for what they were, because the youngsters, ranging in age from nineteen (Enyon) to twenty-three (Fiona), twittered with excitement. It was always possible there were some decent dragons among the extended Fortescue family, I supposed. In fact, the law of averages pretty much guaranteed it—something had to balance out the awfulness of the main Fortescue family.

This whole thing was like living in a Regency novel, with people shoved into an artificial atmosphere to pick a partner. There had to be a better, more natural way of doing this. The problem was, dragons were so territorial that casually coming and going on one another's turf wasn't an option, hence these excruciating arranged visits.

But this visit was different. The Teagues were so far outside the Fortescues' usual circles that it was hilarious. There was something more behind the invitation. Once I was alone in the house, I'd be able to get into that study and find what it was.