Hour of the Dragon - Heather Killough-Walden Page 0,75
make them for her all the time. He was the one who’d introduced her to them.
Annaleia gazed at the glass for a long time before she closed her eyes, exhaled, and slowly stood. She pinched the bridge of her nose in the hopes of staving off the swimming stars. “How do I break whatever spell this is that Sterling put me under… so I can see you? Or recognize what I see?”
But when she opened her eyes again, his expression had gone from one of quiet frustration and thin patience to one of vague amusement. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
Anna blinked. “Seriously? That’s what I wouldn’t believe in all this?”
Now he laughed. It was a pleasant sound. Very much so. He shook his head. “Come have a seat, Leia. I promise we’ll get to it.”
No one else called her Leia either. She’d always gone by Annaleia or Anna. Only Ares had called her Leia. Definitely only Ares called her Raindrop.
She took a deep breath and let it out in a shaky sigh. “I was taught never to take an open drink offered to me by a stranger,” she said, looking from him to the drink in his hand.
“I know,” he told her. “I’m the one who taught you.”
Fuck, she finally thought. Yes. Yes, he was.
“It’s clean,” he said as he moved around the sofas and took a seat at one, placing the drinks on the coffee table between them. “But of course you may feel free to help yourself to anything in the bar.” He leaned back, draping his sculpted arms over the back of the couch, and nodded at the bar across the room. It was a tall, pristine glass and marble structure that looked like it had been built into the architecture of the home. The cherub angel and dragon carvings along its edges smoothly transitioned into the stone of the wall behind it. The entire piece appeared exceedingly expensive, as did the rest of the villa.
“There’s a new sweater for you there,” he indicated, nodding at a white knitted garment that had somehow appeared on the cushions of the loveseat closest to her. It was carefully folded and looked as soft as distressed cashmere. “And I have beer,” he added with a killer smile. “It’s unopened. In the fridge.” He nodded a little lower, indicating the stainless steel ice box behind the bar.
Anna nodded absently but stayed where she was, hugging her frame and trying to figure out what to do. Strange that she wasn’t more frightened. Then again, there’d be no reason to feel frightened with Antares. Dragon or no dragon.
He watched her silently, his eyes glinting over the rim of his own glass, as she deliberated her choices. Finally she pulled out her cell phone and looked down at the bars. There were none of course.
She got an amused little smile from him for her efforts.
In the end, she returned her phone to her pocket, grabbed the folded sweater off the end of the sofa, and asked, “Where can I go to change?”
His smile became a grin and a chuckle, because he knew damn well she was using it as an excuse to leave his sight. But what could he do? He wanted to be a good host, didn’t he?
He was still grinning when he said, “Down that hall and to the right.”
Anna turned on her heel and followed his directions. At least it would give her time to think.
Chapter Twenty-three – Santorini, Greece
There were three doors on the right side of the wide, marble hallway, and one open archway. Anna had no idea which one was the “right” that Ares had suggested would be a good place to change. For that matter, she wasn’t sure what the man considered a good place to change, either.
The open archway was the first exit to the right. It led not to a bedroom, but an inner courtyard that was enclosed like a conservatory. In fact, that’s what it appeared to be. Anna stood at the entrance to it and tried to take it all in, but it was rather enormous. Oddly enough, it didn’t radiate trapped heat the way greenhouses normally did, yet everything planted inside seemed to be thriving. A walkway had been paved through the conservatory, laid with yellow bricks, of all things. And true to the movie they referenced, the bricks wound their way in a spiral toward the center of the room, until they disappeared behind plants Anna couldn’t see