Deven and the Dragon - Eliot Grayson Page 0,47

his bedroom and ate while gazing out the window. The last crumbs brushed off his shirt, he didn’t have any further way to stall. Fiora was surely as recovered from the night before as he was going to get. Deven had to face the music.

Carefully dressed, because Fiora cared about such things and Deven needed any advantage he could get, he made his way to the tower. He passed two housemaids about their dusting and polishing, but there was no sign of Andrei, neither on the way nor when Deven climbed the stairs.

Fiora’s study was empty.

Frowning, Deven slowly took the next flight of stairs, feeling even more like an interloper than he had the night before when he put Fiora to bed. The tower was silent. A faint shushing of wind echoed down the stairs from the rooftop; perhaps the door up there had been left open.

Fiora’s bedroom was also empty. Had he gone flying? Deven’s frown deepened. He trusted a dragon to know his draconic business, but was it safe for Fiora to take flight, as hung over as he likely was? Would he wobble about and crash into a tree?

Could even a dragon survive a fall from the heights Fiora usually reached when he flew?

Deven strode into the room, caution lost to worry. “Fiora?” he called out, too loudly in the silence of the tower.

There was a thump and a rustle from his left: Fiora’s dressing room, perhaps? And then Fiora appeared in the doorway, lavender-cheeked and breathless, his coat unfastened, with slippers on his feet and no cravat. The little vee of bare skin at the top of Fiora’s shirt drew Deven’s eyes like a magnet to a lodestone.

Deven forced his eyes up. “You’re all right,” he said. “Thank God.”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Fiora sounded more confused than angry, which was something of a relief, but…oh, fuck, Deven hoped he hadn’t lost what little ground he’d gained.

“I was afraid you wouldn’t be feeling so well today. And I was afraid you’d gone out flying, and maybe you weren’t feeling up to it.” Which sounded unbearably stupid, said aloud and outside the turmoil of his anxious thoughts. A dragon wouldn’t be put off soaring through the sky by a few bottles of ale, and imagining otherwise was idiotic. Deven swallowed the lump in his throat. “I was worried about you.”

“I’m fine,” Fiora said, lifting his chin and drawing Deven’s attention right back to the hollow of his slender throat. “I wasn’t feeling quite myself this morning. But I’m better now. I was just getting dressed. In my dressing room. Where I keep my clothes.”

“That sounds reasonable,” Deven said after a moment, at a loss for the proper response to that. “I mean, that’s where I’d keep mine, if I had a dressing room.”

Fiora blinked at him owlishly. “Oh.” He let out a soft, embarrassed-sounding laugh. “Yes.”

They stood in silence for a moment, and finally Deven dared to step closer. He stopped only a few feet away, near enough that he could see the jump of the nervous pulse in Fiora’s throat. He wanted to taste it.

“Are you angry with me?” he asked abruptly. “If you are, I’d rather you said so outright. I know I overstepped, putting you to bed. But I could hardly just leave you there on top of a miniature temple to sleep it off. And I didn’t want to leave you long enough to fetch Andrei, either. You might have fallen off, or been eaten by the mermaid.”

Lies, lies, despite the sad attempt at humor, and they made Deven’s throat tight. This all sounded perfectly rational in the light of day, but the night before, under a full moon, surrounded by the scent of roses? Any option but carrying Fiora’s warm, pliant body in his own arms hadn’t even occurred to him.

“I’m grateful you didn’t leave me alone with her,” Fiora said with a forced little smile. “I’m sorry you had to — to be burdened with —”

“You weren’t a burden,” Deven cut in hotly, memories of the way Fiora’s head had felt drooping against Deven’s shoulder returning far too vividly. “Or if you were, I didn’t mind. At all. I shouldn’t have gotten you so drunk.”

His voice had lowered to an intimate pitch that seemed to vibrate in the air between them. Fiora sucked in a breath, his eyes wide.

“I think I enjoyed it,” he said. “Did I seem like I was enjoying it?”

Deven couldn’t help laughing. God, but Fiora had been different,