Dragon Bound (Elder Races #1)(70)

Pia translated that to mean Beluviel had known, and loved, her mother. Her eyes misted and she nodded.

Dragos stepped forward and pulled her behind him. The gesture was unmistakably possessive. Even from her limited view behind his shoulder, she could tell that the Elves had stiffened. “Stop that. What’s the matter with you!” she whispered to him. He was going to unravel all the good she tried to do for him. She shoved at his arm. It was like trying to move a boulder. He twisted to glare at her. She leaned sideways to look around him and she promised the Elves, “I’ll talk to him.”

The Elven High Lord raised his eyebrows. Ferion’s face was the picture of offense. Beluviel looked startled. The Elven woman had just begun to smile when the screen went blank.

Dragos rounded on her. He looked furious. “You are not going to visit with the Elves!”

“Did I say I was going to visit the Elves?” she snapped. “I was being polite! You might look that word up sometime in a dictionary!”

He glared around. “Out.”

The room emptied. Thistle gave Pia a gleeful ear-to-ear grin, eyes sparkling. The faerie held her hand up to her cheek, thumb and pinkie out, mimicking a phone. “We’ll talk,” she mouthed as she bounced out the door.

Pia tugged hard. Dragos refused to let go of her arm. She sighed and put a hand over her eyes as her shoulders sagged. She muttered to herself, “How did I get here and what the hell am I doing.”

Beside her, Dragos took several deep breaths. She could feel the air around him burning with Power. He was very angry with her, maybe for the first time since the beach. He dropped her arm and began to pace around her.

“The Elves know more about you than I do,” he snarled in her ear as he passed by. “Unacceptable. They know who your mother was. Also unacceptable. They want you to come live with them. They’re enemies of mine.”

The exposure, the constant stress, the uncertainties of her present situation, all became too much. “All I wanted was to try to help you!” she burst out. She threw her arms over her head and burst into tears.

He started to swear, a steady stream of vitriol. His hands came onto her shoulders. She jerked away and turned her back to him. His arms came around her from behind. He pulled her against him, curving around her, and put his head down next to hers. “Shh,” he said, still sounding angry. “Stop now. Calm down.”

She sobbed harder and hunched her shoulders, resisting his hold.

His body clenched. He said, “Pia, please don’t pull away from me.” He sounded strained.

It caught her attention so that she let him turn her around. He leaned back against the conference table, pulled her arms down and held her tight. She leaned her body against him and rested her head on his shoulder.

“I wasn’t supposed to tell anybody anything about me,” she said. The tears streamed down her face and soaked his T-shirt. “I was supposed to live my life in secret. But I didn’t want to be alone. All I told was one damn secret and it keeps snowballing on me. First Keith, then you, then the Elves, then Goblins, then the Fae King, then more Elves again, and all the people in this room watching, and you just keep digging and digging at me and you won’t stop until I feel like I’m going to scream.”

He rested his cheek against her head and rubbed her back. “I am cursed with a terminal case of curiosity,” he said. “I am jealous, selfish, acquisitive, territorial and possessive. I have a terrible temper, and I know I can be a cruel son of a bitch.” He cocked his head. “I used to eat people, you know.”

If he meant to shock her out of crying, he succeeded. A snort burst out of her. “That’s awful,” she said. Her nose was clogged. “I mean it, that’s awful. It’s not funny. I’m not laughing.”

He sighed. “It was a long time ago. Thousands of years. Once I really was the beast the Elves call me.”

She closed her eyes, took a deep, shuddering breath and rubbed her fingers along the seam of his T-shirt. “What made you stop?”

“I had a conversation with somebody. It was an epiphany.” His voice was rueful. He rocked her. “From that point on I swore I would never eat something that could talk.”

“Hey, that’s kind of your version of turning vegetarian, isn’t it?” she said.

He laughed. “I guess maybe it is. All of that is a long, roundabout way of saying I’m sorry. I don’t always get the emotional nuances of a situation and I didn’t mean to make you cry.”

“It’s everything, it’s not just you.” She turned her head and put her face in his neck.

He held her closer. “I want you to trust me more than you trusted that dumbass boyfriend of yours.”

She sighed. “When are you going to let go of that? Ex-boyfriend. Ex. And anyway, he’s dead.”

“I want you to tell me what and who you are, not just because I want to know but because you want to tell me.”

“Why?” she whispered.

“Because you’re mine,” he snapped.

“I’m not just a possession, like you’d own a lamp.” She pulled back and glared at him. He just looked back at her, face hard and eyes unapologetic. She sighed. “I guess that’s the possessive and territorial bit, isn’t it? You know, I don’t want to fight with you.”