She came to appraise a tapestry.
She stayed for the dragon who owned it.
Elara Moreau drives the narrow ridge road to Embercrest expecting three quiet days with a seventeenth-century weaving and a client who prefers legends kept close. The storm hits before she clears the gates. Kael Ashford is waiting—tall, silver at the temples, amber-eyed, and already watching her like the bond has already chosen.
What begins as cataloguing thread counts becomes heat she cannot write off as altitude. He tells her the gates will open in the morning if she wants them. She tells him not to stop. On the table in front of the fire, against the glass that protects the dragon's eye, in the open aerie above the eastern wing, he takes her exactly as the bond demands: mouth, cunt, ass, the thick stretch of a knot when the partial shift rises. He talks about filling her. Breeding her. Keeping her. She answers by staying.
