Page 34 of Never Flirt with a Dragon

A tense moment passed between us, and I realized I hadn’t answered his question.

“I’m texting Elodie.”

My phone buzzed with a message from her, and I turned the screen toward him so he could see that I’d told the truth.

Jasper’s face twisted in a snarl, and I turned the screen back to me so I could read the message.

Elodie

Telling her the truth is against dragon laws. They’re all about keeping their secrets. They could put you in prison for it, and that place is a shitshow. You’d die fast

“They’d have to rip you from my cold, dead arms to get you anywhere near my prison,” Jasper said, his voice rough and animalistic.

He was going to lose control of his instincts and get all beastly again.

Fabulous.

I took a bite of my pancake and put my phone down. “Do you have a girlfriend?”

The question caught him so off-guard that his anger vanished.

He stared at me for a long time, as if the question was so insane that he didn’t even know how to respond to it.

But I wanted to hear what Elodie had told me from him. To see what he said and learn what was really true.

“I’ve never had a girlfriend,” he finally said, cutting into his own food. “Dragons don’t… date. Or sleep around. Heat can ignite any time, even with someone you’ve seen a thousand times before. Any interactions with humans would put us at risk, so we don’t interact unless there’s no other choice.”

“So you’ve never had sex before?”

His throat bobbed as he swallowed.

My gaze followed the motion.

“No. And as far as I’m concerned, you haven’t either.”

I rolled my eyes.

His bare foot brushed mine under the table, and my entire body relaxed at the sudden relief of heat’s symptoms. “You aren’t surprised by my answer.”

“I’ve been texting Elodie for a while. She told me. I just wanted to hear it from you too.”

His forehead creased. “You didn’t believe her?”

“I don’t know what to believe in this situation, Jas.” The shortened version of his name slipped out. I didn’t try to stop it, either. “All I know is that I’m trapped in a little apartment inside a mountain, with a guy who may or may not be sane, who happens to turn into a scaly monster from time to time.”

His jaw clenched.

I braced myself for his anger.

A moment passed before he finally let out a slow breath. “I have a solution for the space problem. There’s a large living area a few floors above us. It belongs to the head of the thunder, which is me. It has a large balcony. Multiple spare rooms, too. We could make one of them a library.”

I frowned. “You have a large living space and don’t use it?”

“It belonged to my parents. They were the last to live in it.”

I didn’t know a whole lot about his parents, but I did know that they’d died when his younger sister was born, somewhere around thirty years earlier. Jasper and his brothers had all raised Brynn in Scale Ridge.

“If it will bring back difficult memories or emotions for you, I don’t want to stay there,” I said.

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