second from his flared nostrils and mouth. “I meant no offense. It was just a way of describing it. The mating,” she amended awkwardly.
He looked unmoved by the apology. “You will eat and listen while I talk, and keep any further rude remarks or questions to yourself until I have finished,” he bit out icily.
“You are partly dragon,” she defended.
A nerve pulsed in his tightly clenched jaw. “I am my dragon and my dragon is me. There is no part anything.”
“Humans are animals too. We just don’t live in caves anymore.” She eyed him curiously. “In all the fairy stories of dragons, they’re reputed to keep a treasure hoard that they like to wallow in…”
“Yes?”
Tanya refused to be daunted by the aloofness of his tone, especially when he hadn’t actually denied the question as being inaccurate. “I was just wondering where you and your brothers keep yours? If you have one, of course.”
“Are you planning to steal it?”
“No.” She glared at his amusement. “Let’s just agree that I’m not a thief any more than you’re a liar.”
Some of the tension eased from his shoulders. “I apologize.”
“So where do you keep your treasure hoard?”
“You really believe I have one?”
Tanya looked at him searchingly, noting the unblinking dark eyes and the slightly amused tilt to his lips. “Yes,” she answered.
His smile deepened. “Treasure comes in many forms.”
“And you’re avoiding giving me an answer.”
“Because until a few months ago, I would have told you that I keep my treasure of jewels and gold in the vaults beneath the Mikhailov Palace.”
“And now?”
“Now I would like you to enjoy your meal and listen while I talk,” Vladimir repeated.
Tanya couldn’t say she was exactly thrilled by that answer, but Vladimir gave her little choice but to accept it as he began to speak.
She forgot to eat several times during the next hour as she listened to him, and had to be reminded several times by Vladimir to do so.
He talked of the Pendragon dragon shifters before moving on to the lives of his own brothers and then his first meeting with Grigor Pendragon a year ago. Until that time, neither family had known of the other’s existence.
Tanya could see how that might have been possible. The two dragon shifter families weren’t related, and Russia had been a pretty closed country until 1991, and even then it was still something of an enigma to the outside world, as the outside world was just as much of a mystery to the majority of Russian people. The internet, the font of all knowledge at the click of a few buttons, had winked into existence in the same year, but it hadn’t been used in the worldwide way it was now until years later.
The two of them had somehow managed to reach the dessert course of the meal, served by the silent Dmitri, by the time Vladimir neared the end of his explanation.
An explanation Tanya was reluctant to admit she found utterly fascinating.
Reading her parents’ journals was one thing, but literally hearing of those events straight from the dragon’s mouth, so to speak, gave a completely different slant on them.
There were no female dragons left in existence, as far as the Pendragons and Romanovs knew, only a small number of females they’d recently discovered who possessed dormant dragon DNA. The Pendragon brothers had all been lucky enough to find and mate some of those women.
Some of the more intimate details of the Pendragons’ mating, including an aphrodisiac which caused the woman to fall into a sexual frenzy, and the barb on the dragon shifter’s cock that locked inside the female during lovemaking, caused Tanya to blush.
“So, your brother Karl died after he mated, and the woman, once she knew he was a dragon shifter, refused to stay with him?”
“Yes.”
“But none of the rest of you have met your mate yet?”
To Tanya, the air in the room suddenly seemed thin and barely breathable, as if something had sucked out all the oxygen and tension now filled its place.
“Vladimir?” she asked, increasingly uncertain at his continued silence.
That nerve once again pulsed in his clenched jaw. “I have been lucky enough to meet my mate.”
“Then what are you doing here explaining all this to me?” She frowned her puzzlement. “The way you’ve described it, mated couples find it extremely difficult to be apart from each other.”
“Yes.”
“So I repeat, why are you here with me instead of…?” Tanya’s words slowed and then trailed off with a gasp when Vladimir continued to look at her