... hand, rather. He hardly ever used the one in the glove. Right now it was in his lap, lying there like an inert object with the fingers loosely curled.
Jess thought back once again to when she'd seen him change into a dragon. Had he used that leg as a dragon, either? She had been too caught up in OMG DRAGON to pay much attention to the details.
Thinking about that made her realize something she hadn't consciously noticed at the time. "You can keep your clothes on when you change into a dragon?"
Reive raised his eyebrows, and Jess remembered the last thing they were talking about was air conditioning, and blushed. "No, I, uh—I don't want you to get the idea that I was thinking about you with your clothes off," she floundered. Also, it wasn't true, because she sure was now. The blush got hotter. "I mean ... clothes. Dragon. Where do your clothes go?" In her flustered state, she almost got tangled up enough to blurt out that she didn't take her clothes with her when she shifted, but she managed to stop herself in time.
"Oh, that. It's just something that dragons can do. Other shifters can't, as far as I know."
Other shifters. Like werewolves. Like me. "Have you met a lot of, um ... other shifters?"
"Not too many. Dragons mostly keep to ourselves. We live in big family groups in secluded areas. A few of the mates—er, the people who married into my clan from outside are humans or other kinds of shifters, but normally we mate among ourselves."
Mate. What an odd, old-fashioned term. Yet she found it deeply charming when he said it, especially in this ultra-modern, mostly-white hotel room.
"Gargoyles, even?" she asked cautiously.
His reaction was clear from his face: a grimace, a sharp ripple of some dark emotion.
"Gargoyles are old enemies of my people," he said, and each word struck her like a dart through her heart. "Every time the hostilities seem to be dying down, something like this happens. I don't know what's wrong with them, why they won't leave us alone. I don't want to say they're inherently evil, but ..."
"I don't think anyone is inherently evil," Jess said, past the lump in her throat. I don't think I am. At least I hope not.
"Jess, those guys broke up your library. They almost killed you."
"You said yourself they were just after the book," she argued. And she had come around to thinking Reive was probably right about that: they were there for the book, not her. If that magic dude really could track her somehow, and was looking for her, the gargoyles would surely have found them at the airport if not sooner. And given the choice of getting her or the book, he'd gone for the book.
For now, they were almost certainly in no danger.
And she needed something to take her mind off what Reive had just said about gargoyles. If he only knew—
But he doesn't know. He will never know. Must never know.
"Speaking of the book," she went on brightly, "I think now might be a good time for me to start working on those page translations, don't you think? I only have my phone with me, but I can retrieve the scans that I have in the cloud and copy them for you. Unless you want to go out and see a little more of Rome before we crash."
Reive smiled, but it was weary. "If you'd like to, we can sight-see a little, but I don't mind staying in."
Now that the drink was hitting her, the jet lag was starting to catch up. "I don't mind staying in either. Let me find something to write with."
For a little while, there was a comfortable silence. She sat on the couch with the phone in one hand and a thick pad of creamy hotel stationery for making notes. She missed her laptop, but this worked all right. When she turned the phone sideways, she could work on a few lines of text at a time.
Reading the book for the gist of its meaning was much less work than trying to decipher it page by page. The vocabulary was strange and archaic, the Latin debased and different from the classical version she had studied. She often had to switch to the internet to try to understand a passage.
There was a basket of snacks next to the coffee things—not cheap candy bars either, but good snacks, biscotti and wrapped pastries. She nibbled on a piece of sweet, puffy bread while she paged through the scans. She wished now that she had bothered scanning the entire thing, but at the time it had seemed like a bothersome task that she kept putting off. She'd only scanned the pages that she wanted to contact other researchers to help her with, mostly the ones with Viking runes. But it was better than nothing, and some of the rest she had read often enough to reconstruct roughly from memory.
After a while, she looked up at Reive, and found him looking at her with a distant, soft expression on his face.
"What?" she asked, with a nervous laugh. "Do I have something on my face?"
"No, I just ..." He looked away, as if he'd been caught doing something wrong. "I like the way it looks when you're caught up in something."
"Well, that's good, because it's a look you'll be seeing a lot of." Now he looked puzzled. "What I mean is, I am a primo-class nerd, my friend. If we get in to see Signor Romano's library, I bet you'll see that look a lot. You won't be able to pry me out of there with a crowbar."
"Romano—your billionaire book collector?"
Jess nodded. "He's not mine. I even don't know him, I've just emailed him a few times. From what I can gather, he's an old guy with a lot of old money, and he collects rare, antique books for fun. He goes around to old-book auctions all over Europe and buys them. He is, essentially, living my dream life."
She could feel her pulse pick up just talking about it.
"I can see that," Reive said, his voice warm.
"He seems nice in email. He told me that he couldn't confirm or deny that he had the book I was looking for, but if I was ever in Italy, I could stop by and look at his library. I thought at the time that I'd never get to go. I couldn't possibly. But now, here I am. Like a dream come true."
"You deserve to have all your dreams come true, Jess."
He said it earnestly, leaning forward, his gaze intent on her face. Jess could feel a blush rising into her cheeks again. She hastily looked down at the laptop.
"Yeah, well, when you're an orphan who has to make her own way in the world, you have to make sure your dreams are practical ones."
She didn't mean for it to come out bitter. She really didn't feel bitter, most of the time. On the whole, leaving aside the "occasionally turns into a monster" issue, she was pretty happy with her life. She'd worked her butt off putting herself through college, and now she was starting to pay down on her student loans and save some money.
But a trip to Italy to look at a rare book definitely wasn't on the agenda. Not yet. Not for a while. Maybe not ever.
Except ... now, apparently, it was. Courtesy of an incredibly sexy and sweet dragon shifter with a rich family, whose interests and hers were going in the same direction for a while.
She sneaked a peek at him out of the corner of her eyes, just as he got up and went to the minibar. He came back a moment later with a newly opened cold beer for himself, and another greyhound for her, fresh and cold with ice cubes clinking in it.
"You looked like your drink could use a refresher," he said, smiling as he handed it to her.