"My favorite food, or do I like meat?"
"Either."
"Hmm. I do like meat, though I don't know if I like it more than most people do. And my favorite food is macaroni and cheese. But not the box kind. The gooey kind with crunchy toppings, made in the oven."
She closed her eyes in almost orgasmic bliss, making him miss a step.
"Sounds amazing," he said.
Jess opened her eyes. She was still holding his stone hand, but when she squeezed it, he could tell by the tug on his glove and sleeve. "Okay, that was my answer, so do you want to pick the next question?"
"Is that how this works?"
"Is that your question?" Jess asked playfully.
"Is that your next one?" He grinned. "I can keep this going all day." It was impossible to stay mired in gloom with Jess around. She lifted his heart ... his soul.
Jess kissed him quickly, a brush of her lips on his. "Fine, you lost your opportunity. I get to ask another. Favorite kind of music?"
"Uh ... rock and roll, I guess. What's yours?"
"Folk and country, probably."
"You listen to country?"
"No judging my answers, now."
"It wasn't judging," he promised. "Just interested. It's not what I would have expected."
"Rock music is exactly what I would have expected for you, though. It's nice to find out that you conform to expectation in one way, at least."
"I think it's your turn to ask a question now."
"Oh, you get a free one," she said. "I've lost track anyway."
The sun painted her face gold. Her hair was curling in the ocean humidity, and it floated around her head and down her back like a fluffy brown cloud. It was hard to remember how to speak, he was so captivated by her beauty.
"Reive?"
"Uh, right." Questions. The thing was, there wasn't anything specific that he felt that he really needed to know about her. He wanted to know anything she chose to tell him, but he already knew the most important thing.
She was his mate.
And she was beautiful, and shockingly smart, and so brave it took his breath away, and by far the most fascinating person he'd ever met, male or female, young or old.
What could he possibly need to know, other than that?
But she was still looking at him expectantly, so he scrambled to come up with something. "Uh ... favorite book."
"Oh, ask an impossible question, why don't you. How can I possibly choose one?"
"If it's hard, I could—"
"No no, fair is fair, I'll just have to figure something out. Um, Pride and Prejudice, maybe? I've certainly read it enough. And for comfort reads, Watership Down, the one about the talking rabbits."
"Rabbit shifters?"
Jess laughed, light and happy. He could have listened to that laugh for the rest of his life. "No, just ordinary rabbits. Are there rabbit shifters?"
"Probably. But I don't know any. I haven't met very many shifters other than dragons." He nudged her. "Your turn. I asked you a hard one; now you get to ask me a hard one back."
"Oh, hmm. I don't want to waste this opportunity." She smiled. "What do you most want out of life, Reive?"
"What?"
"I'm sorry. I—"
"No, you just threw me for a minute," he said. "I was expecting a question about ice cream flavors or my favorite kind of sports car."
Jess bit her lip. "I can change my question. I should change my question. I didn't mean—"
"No, no, don't." He reached over to clasp his flesh-and-blood hand over hers. "I don't want you to walk on eggshells around me. I never want that. You didn't upset or offend me. It's actually a different problem. I don't think anyone's ever asked me that. I'm not sure if I've ever asked myself that."
"Really? No one's ever asked? Not even your family?"
"I guess they just assumed," Reive said slowly. "I mean, the closeness of a dragon clan is great. Don't get me wrong. You always feel like you belong somewhere. But there's not a lot of choice. And especially for me ..."
He trailed off. The idea that she might hate or fear him if she knew everything he'd done was unbearable.
But not quite as unbearable as the idea of being less than perfectly honest with his mate.
"Reive?" She leaned into his side, wrapping her arm around his waist. "You don't have to talk about it. Really. It's just a stupid game. I'd like to know more about you, but you don't have to talk about anything you aren't comfortable with."
He hugged her back. "I know. But I want to. I haven't talked to anyone about this, not really. Outside the clan, no one would understand. Inside ..."
Everyone already knew, was the problem. Everyone knew, and nobody wanted to talk about it, because they were all still dealing with the fallout from those dark years themselves. It wasn't like Reive could expect special consideration when his great-uncle had spent twenty years in hiding after receiving a near-lethal injury, and so many others in the clan had died. His pain wasn't special, and that was part of what made it so hard to deal with.
"When I was a teenager, my clan was taken over. Our old clanlord was forced out, we all thought he was dead, and the new clanlord ruled us with a hand of iron. We had little freedom and next to no contact with outsiders."
He paused, and Jess waited with a quiet sense of expectation about her—listening, but not judging. They had continued on up the lane while they talked, and their slow, wandering progress had brought them to the bottom of Mace's garden, just outside the garden wall. Reive paused here; he was reluctant to talk about his past inside Mace's stronghold.
"The new clanlord was my grandfather," he said, tearing the admission from a still-raw place inside him. "Because of that, I was hand-picked to be one of his enforcers when I was still a teenager."
Jess leaned against his side, a warm and gentle presence. "What does an enforcer do?" she asked.
He tried to laugh. "Pretty much whatever he's ordered to do. It wasn't nice, Jess. My job was basically dealing with threats to the clan, whether from inside or outside. Sometimes humans, sometimes other dragons, sometimes rogue members of our own clan. On the bright side, it meant I got to leave and spend time in the outside world. I'm better able to deal with the human world than most of my clan because of that. Part of my job was blending in with humans, so I had to learn about human things to an extent that most of us don't. But it was all in the service of tracking down our enemies. And as time went on, my grandfather saw enemies everywhere."
"It wasn't your fault," Jess said quietly, and a shudder went through him, working its way outward from his core.
No one had ever said that to him.
After a moment, he said, "Some of it wasn't. Not at first. But after a while, I wasn't a kid anymore. I had a choice."
"Did you know that?"
He didn't have an answer for her.
There was another silence, broken only by the distant ocean sounds, before Jess went on, "And it's over now, isn't it? You don't do that anymore."