“He’s not here, the bastard!”

The bathroom door opened, and Jim’s face peered into the room, an almost comical expression of wariness on its face. “What happened? You guys were all lovey-dovey last night. I thought Drake was happy about the baby?”

“He is, although he’s not happy I refused to let the doctor tell us the gender,” I snarled, pulling up the sheet and rubbing my arms as I glanced at the clock. It was just barely morning, my skin still tingling as if in response to Drake’s fire. I shook my head at my foolishness—of course our lovemaking hadn’t been real. I couldn’t share Drake’s fire. If the scene melting from a club to our bedroom hadn’t been a clue, the fact that I could share his fire should have raised all sorts of red flags in my head. What was worse was that, if he had to resort to a dream rather than making love to me in person, it meant he wasn’t here. Sometime during the night while I was sleeping, he’d left me. “God damn him!”

“Well, if that’s all you’re going to say, I might as well go back to bed,” Jim said, padding over to give my arm a quick swipe with its tongue. I patted its head, reminding myself that it wasn’t fair to take my bad humor out on Jim.

“You didn’t happen to hear Drake leave last night? He told me to go to bed because I was tired out after the long day, but if something happened and he had to go take care of a sept member or beat Chuan Ren’s head in or something, he would have told me.”

Jim cocked its head at something on the floor. “Looks like he decided you and the baby needed your sleep. There’s a letter.”

I pushed Jim aside to pick up the creamy envelope bearing the sept emblem, ripping it open to read the note inside.

“You’ve been hanging around sailors too much,” Jim said a minute later as the blue streak I was swearing came to an end. “Although I liked the bit about stinky, slimy weasel poop.”

“You’re right, he says he didn’t want to disturb my rest, the bastard,” I growled, wrapping a sheet around me as I stormed into the bathroom.

Jim, wisely, stayed where it was.

I emerged a few minutes later wearing my favorite bathrobe, a soft, comfy velvet garment that made me think of Victorian dressing gowns, but which Drake disliked because he said it covered up too much flesh. I buttoned it now with defiance as I marched to the closet that contained my clothes. “He says he had to go help someone in a desperate situation. Who, exactly, he refuses to say. He doesn’t know when he’s going to be back, but suggests we put off the wedding for a few days. The rotter! How dare he just zoom off and not tell me where he’s going, or who he’s going to help, or what exactly he’s up to!”

“Yeah, how dare he go out and be all heroic and stuff when you want him here slobbering over your big boobs.”

I shot the demon a look that warned of retribution. “Leave my boobs out of this. They have nothing to do with this extraordinary lack of trust that Drake is exhibiting by doing this. The rat! I thought we were to the point where we shared everything. He’s not supposed to keep secrets from me! Lord knows, he makes me tell him everything!”

“Everything?” Jim asked, raising one doggy eyebrow.

I froze as I thought over a few facts I’d decided to keep to myself. I’d told Drake that I had seen Gabriel, but I hadn’t recounted the entire conversation, not wanting Drake to get so annoyed that he went after Gabriel. That could be excused as a desire to keep any more of the dragon septs from warring with us, but the fact that I’d downplayed to him the involvement the dark power had in my life was less easily explained away. He knew it spoke to me, he knew I could easily wield it, but until the previous day’s demonstration at the Guardians’ Guild, I don’t think he fully realized just how much power I had at my fingertips.

Admit it—you love me.

I swore under my breath as I thought over what effect that realization might have had on him. Had he been so disquieted, felt so threatened because I had more impact using the dark power than his own dragon fire that he left me on a flimsy pretense? I ran over the events of the past evening, mentally shaking my head. He’d been quietly pleased when the ultrasound had proven beyond all doubts that the next generation of green dragons was a half-year away. He had treated me with his usual blend of courtesy and arrogance, laying down a series of ridiculous laws ranging from me not being allowed to lift anything heavier than ten pounds to an outright refusal to let me keep the meeting with the blue dragons.

Things were a bit dicey for a short while when I told him what I thought of his silly rules, but by the time he’d escorted me upstairs to our room, we’d come to a compromise whereby he’d stop being unnecessarily protective, and I wouldn’t light his hair on fire while he slept.

Then he slipped away during the night without a word and sent me the most erotic dream of my life.

“Damn him,” I said, banging my forehead gently on the closet door.

8

“Cara!”

I turned at the familiar voice that called down at me, looking with a dispassionate eye at the man who walked to ward us.

“That him?” Uncle Damian asked, giving Fiat the same jaded eye.

“Yup.”

“Looks like a porn star.”

“Do I wanna ask how he knows what a porn star looks like?” Jim asked Rene.

“I do not think so, my friend. Aisling, I have my little companion with me, if there is any trouble with the blue wyvern,” Rene said, touching my arm as he patted the breast of his jacket. “Him, I do not trust farther than I can spit.”

“How on earth did you get a gun smuggled into England?” I asked, surprised.

He gave his trademark Gallic shrug. “I did not travel by conventional means.”

“I don’t think I want to know,” Uncle Damian muttered, shooting me an odd look.

I smiled and tried to look as normal as possible, which, given that I was standing on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral, surrounded by my uncle, a daimon, and my demon dog, wasn’t very successful. “Oh, Traci!”

The demon steward popped into view in front of me holding a cup of coffee and a croissant. Its startled expression changed to one of resignation that morphed almost instantly to irritation. “My lord Aisling. I wondered when you were going to summon me. The situation is most urgent, I assure you. If you had just warned me ahead of time that you would be summoning me, I would have had the paperwork in my possession—”