Page 87 of The Dragon's Mate Proposal

“Thank me when you just made me rich?”

“Yes. For taking away the temptation from me, among other things. But I trust you to do the right thing with it. Besides, you deserve it.”

“I …” I took a breath. Nobody had ever trusted me that much. “I won’t let you down, Cade. Though, I think you’re crazy.”

He smiled. Big, broad, and as truly happy as he could be at that moment. “No, I’m not. I’m thinking straight, Sam. About the one thing that means more to me than all the money in the world.”

I didn’t need our bond to hear the one unspoken word at the end.

He was talking about me.

“I love you,” I whispered, moving slightly so I could rest my head on his chest. “My big dragon-man.”

The love that poured forth from him was all the answer I needed.

Chapter Forty-Two

Cade

Everything had to be just right. There would be no second chances, no do-over. I was going to have one shot to make it absolutely perfect for her. Something she would always remember.

And it wasn’t something I had any experience with. Almost no dragon did, which only added to the tension that had me snapping at the slightest issue or snag.

“It’s going to be fine,” a soft, feminine voice reassured me as we worked in the soft light provided by several torches nearby.

I looked over my shoulder. “How do you know?”

Laura Lillies put her hands on her hips and stared down at me. “Because I told you it would.”

Resisting the urge to glare at Vicek’s mate, I returned to adjust the layout of the objects in front of me.

“The point is for it to look natural,” she said. “Stop fussing so much.”

“I’ll fuss as much as I want,” I growled, annoyed at myself more than anything. “It has to be perfect.”

“And it will be,” Laura said. “She’s only going to have eyes for you, Cade. She’s going to remember the emotions of this moment, the thought you put into it and how it makes her feel. She’s not going to care if one rose petal is there instead of there. It makes no difference. Two inches left or right will not be what she gives a shit about.”

“For a scientist, you sure do curse a lot,” I muttered, shaking my head.

By then, everyone knew the story of Vicek and Laura—the scientist human who’d fallen in love with the imprisoned dragon and fled back to the Dragon Isles with him upon his rescue, thus ending the war.

“First off, I’m not a scientist anymore,” Laura said as she scattered a few more rose petals on the other side of the pathway. “Secondly, we scientists swear a lot.”

“I think it’s a bad habit you learned from Vicek.”

“Don’t you go bringing me into this,” the heir to the dragon kingdom grumped from where he was working on the latticework archway, threading more roses through its openings. “I didn’t even want to be here.”

“But I do,” Laura said. “And when Cade came to me asking for help on how to do this, that means he came to you.”

“I don’t remember anything about that in the ‘mating’ handbook,” Vicek pointed out.

“That’s because you read the male version, with popups and pictures,” Laura told him. “Not the actual one.”

Vicek and I shared a look.

“It would be so easy,” he remarked.

“Very, very easy,” I concurred, glancing at the slow-flowing river to my left. “We could say it was an accident. Nobody would argue with us. ‘Oh, I don’t know. She just fell in, I swear. It definitely wasn’t because she was making fun of our reading comprehension. Not at all!’ Everyone would believe us. They’d call her a silly human.”

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