Page 69 of Asher

“So… take your time deciding what you want to do, as long as I can keep loving you in the meantime. And I’d appreciate if you’d let me maim your cousin a bit.” I keep my plot to have Grandmother murder him to myself. There’s no need to give away secrets.

“That’s not nice,” Alistair protests. I barely hear him, too busy staring into Garrett’s pretty brown eyes. “I’m on your side. I was just about to tell him that it sounds like he’s already in love with you, just too boring and stupid to know it.”

I growl and start to turn toward him, but Garrett grabs my face between his hands and pulls me into another kiss. When he finally lets me go, we’re both breathless.

“I love you,” he says. “I’m in love with you. I’m in love with my husband. This is amazing!”

The sound of someone clapping breaks into our happy declarations. “It certainly is! David, you never mentioned anything about this. We would have moved faster—I love a good romance.”

CHAPTERTWENTY-NINE

Garrett

“I didn’t knowit was happening,” David says dryly as I extricate myself from Asher’s arms—keeping hold of his hand—and turn to see the newcomers. Aside from David and Caolan, there are two dragons. At least, I assume they’re dragons. They have the same nonhuman features as Caolan, but there’s something… different. “Nobody was making passionate declarations of love when I left. Can’t I leave you in charge for twenty minutes?” David asks Gideon.

Asher’s cousin shrugs. “I took the ladder away from them. The love thing didn’t seem that dangerous. Also, I wanted to see my cousin make a sappy fool of himself.”

“Not a sappy fool at all,” the older dragon says. He’s the one who spoke before, and he’s smiling delightedly. “I want to hear all about your romance—I sense there’s a story. But perhaps first we should…”

“Yes, of course.” I drag Asher away from the wall. “It’s such an honor to meet you. I’m Garrett Smythe. Professor Smythe. I wonder, could I make an appointment to speak with a dragon at some point? I have so many questions.” The words tumble from me in an unprofessional deluge, and I hear Alistair snicker behind me.

“Smythe?” the other dragon says. He’s got dark hair and eyes and a suspicious expression that seems to be carved into his face. “You have the same name as Alistair?”

“We’re cousins,” Alistair says, coming up beside me and slinging an arm around my shoulders. “Garrett’s cool, Stef. He’s an anthropology nerd, so he’ll have a lot of questions, but he’d never hurt anyone.”

The dragon still looks suspicious, but a tiny bit of the intensity fades. His gaze skims past us to the wall/door. “What the actual fuck?”

“What the actual fuck, indeed,” the older dragon, who I assume is Brandt, murmurs. “I never would have imagined…” He shakes his head.

“Can you identify who it belongs to?” David asks, and Brandt laughs.

“Yes, but I’m afraid that doesn’t help. The dragon who created this was one of the first who ceased to exist during the anomalies on our world.”

I frown, trying to process that. “But… I thought that before you all migrated, no dragons had come here for a long time.” We were told the dragons and elves stopped visiting at the time of the species wars, about nine thousand years ago.

Brandt nods. “That’s correct.”

“Fuck me,” I breathe.

“I don’t get it,” Zac confesses.

“If the dragon who made this died before the migration, and none of them came to Earth between the species wars and then, that means—”

“Fuck me!” he shouts. “You’re saying this isnine thousand years old? No way. It’s dry in here, but those crates would have been dust millennia ago.” He sucks in a breath and calms down. “But that does mean I didn’t miss the signs of someone coming and going from this cave.”

Asher snorts, coming up beside me, and I lean against him. Partly for support after this shock, but also because we’re in love and going to stay married. I get to spend the rest of my life with Asher.

“Actually,” Brandt says, “it’s significantly older than nine thousand years. I’d say closer to fifteen.”

Now I’m leaning on Asher because my knees have gone weak.

“As far as the crates go, both they and the door are protected by excellent preservation spells. They can’t completely stop aging, but they slow it down a lot.”

“A whole hell of a lot,” Asher says, voice heavy with awe. I glance toward the crates, which look like they were made within the past decade. Are they really so old?

“Can we hand this over to you, then?” David asks, and my stomach sinks. I hadn’t thought of that—if this all belongs to a dragon, we don’t get to play with it anymore.

“Nope,” Brandt says cheerfully. “Finders, keepers. It’s going to take an expert to solve this puzzle, and I don’t want that headache.”

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