The Platinum Dragon's Mate - Zoe Chant Page 0,10

also a parent. Perhaps a single parent? He certainly hadn’t seen any evidence of Rhiannon’s father around.

She shrugged. “Either I do it, or it doesn’t get done. No one else wants to cook.”

“I like cooking,” he offered, and only realized a second later how inane he sounded.

But her brows drew together. “You do?”

“Well—sort of,” he had to confess. “I don’t really like mundane everyday cooking that much, if I’m being honest. But every so often I like to pull out all the stops and try to make something really gourmet, like—soufflé or coq au vin or braised short ribs with homemade kimchi. Something like that.”

“I don’t know what any of those are,” Sage said, frowning. “Are they human dishes?”

“Well—maybe,” Reid said, taken aback. “Shifters might have been involved in coming up with them. It’s hard to say, when humans mostly don’t know who’s a shifter and who isn’t, and shifters don’t write too many history books. The records aren’t there, so there’s no way to tell what humans did and what shifters did.”

Her frown deepened. “It seems like you should just be able to tell.”

“In my experience, you can’t.”

“I guess I don’t know that much about what humans are really like,” she said, thinking. “But surely we have to be pretty different. I mean. I can turn into a dragon, and that affects how I see the world pretty strongly. I can’t imagine what it would be like if I couldn’t.”

Her upbringing was showing, here. This must be what they taught their children in this clan—that humans and dragons were too different to live together.

“Not as different as you might think,” Reid said, thinking about his own experience. “Humans still get angry and territorial. A lot of them still hunt and gather—before they had the technology, everyone did. They still protect their young. They have most of the same instincts that we do.”

“Hmm.” Her forehead was still wrinkled. Watching her think, Reid was once again caught by how striking she was—she had the same bold features as her brother, softened a bit with femininity, but still arresting: those bright gold eyes, a long, aquiline nose, a wide mouth, with a mass of dark hair. She had it pulled back into a thick braid right now, but wisps had escaped to frame her face, and Reid had a hard time looking away.

“I suppose I’d have to see for myself,” she concluded, and Reid had to scramble to remember what they’d even been talking about. The differences between shifters and humans. Right. “But I don’t know when I’ll get a chance to do that, if ever. We don’t see humans much out here.”

“On purpose, from what I understand,” Reid ventured.

She nodded. “Well, we wouldn’t want to live among them, would we? We’d have to hide when we shift, and obey all of their laws. There’s too many of them to fight them all, if they wanted to lock us away.”

“That’s true,” Reid said slowly. “But in Oak Ridge, the local humans all know about shifters, so we don’t have to worry too much about that. And the laws are everybody’s—our sheriff is a shifter, and my father’s the local lawyer. We’re just as integrated into the community as the humans are.”

“But how does it work?” she asked, looking frustrated. “Are the humans just—fine, if you do something dangerous? What if you get into a fight?”

“We don’t do anything dangerous,” Reid said mildly. “We shift and fly, but we don’t fight. If we have a dispute, we settle it with words.”

With words, she mouthed, as though it was a strange incantation in a foreign language. “I just don’t see how that would work.”

“Do you fight Shiloh, then, if the two of you have a disagreement?” he asked, genuinely curious.

“Well—not since we were kids. But it’s different for women. Or. For some women.”

Athena, Reid gathered, would be more likely to get in a fight. “But if shifter instincts are as powerful as you say, how can you and Shiloh possibly avoid fighting?” he pressed. “Wouldn’t you have to, sometimes? Even if it is different for women, Shiloh’s a man. Obviously he can control himself sometimes.”

“Sometimes,” she repeated. “He couldn’t do it all the time. In a big settlement? No.”

It was Reid’s opinion that people tended to rise to the expectations that were placed on them, but Sage knew Shiloh and he didn’t, so he wasn’t going to argue the point.

One point, though, he did want to argue.

“Fighting doesn’t make you more of a man,”