Page 764 of Love Bites

NEW WALES DRAGON CLAN

Bethany stood inside the Dragon Palace, waiting for an audience with the Dragon King and Dragon Queen.

From the outside, the Dragon Palace wasn’t so much an antique European castle as it was a beautiful Spanish mansion from the 1920s, perched on cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. She estimated the square footage at twenty thousand feet, with maybe ten bedrooms and a few extra bathrooms, plus the enormous ballroom and entertaining rooms.

Inside, however, it looked exactly like an antique European castle.

Enormous paintings of people wearing ball gowns and tiaras or tuxedos and royal honors filled the walls all the way up to the high ceilings. Subtle tattoos—dragonmate markings—peeked from under the glittering necklaces and starched collars of the depicted people, and the irises of their eyes held a thousand colors, as close as an oil paint artist could come to the distinctive eye characteristic of the mated dragon.

Bethany was sure that Math could have transformed into his airplane-sized dragon in the ballroom they’d walked through, and he probably could have sat up on his hind legs in this vast, cavernous waiting room. The tufted furnishings were upholstered in rich, sumptuous velvets and trimmed with thick fringe.

And now, they stood in a white hallway, waiting for the Dragon King.

Across from where they sat on a tufted couch, an enormous portrait of the two monarchs loomed, making them appear twelve feet tall. The Queen wore a gold and sapphire tiara with her cobalt blue ball gown, while the king wore a black tux. Royal honors, which looked like military ribbons, formed a solid block over the left side of the king’s chest, and he wore a glittering medal dangling beneath the many ribbons, a scarlet sash across his chest and under his coat, pinned with a five-pointed, gemstone-lined star on his hip, an eight-pointed gold and ruby star below his white bow-tie, precious-stone-encrusted buttons on his coat, an ornate livery collar that looked like a wide, flat necklace but was laid wide on his broad shoulders, three rings, and a gold watch.

Her mate, Mathonwy Draco, sat beside her, leaning back on the settee with his long legs crossed at his ankles. He must have seen that she was inventorying the king’s jewelry. “I must have mentioned that dragons like to give pretty rocks to their mates.”

“That’s a lot of pretty rocks, he’s wearing,” Bethany mused.

“It’s one of our few redeeming traits. I remember that you were wearing those shoes when we first met in the HR office. The sparkle caught my eye.”

Bethany regarded her violet witch boots, turning her ankle to let the glitter catch the sunlight. “They’re comfortable. I didn’t know that sparkly shoes were dragon bait. Wait, isn’t the king a dragon?”

“No. Queen Bronwyn is the dragon. King Llywelyn is her dragonmate. He’s a mage, I think.”

Bethany frowned. “Is that weird?”

“What?” Math asked.

“That your king isn’t a dragon?”

“Queen Bronwyn is a dragon.”

“Yeah, I know. But the king isn’t a dragon.”

“Because he’s her dragonmate.”

“Okay. Nevermind.”

Math shrugged. “It’s been pretty evenly matched, the last few centuries, as to which mate in the Royal Couple is the dragon. But the monarchs are chosen by a magical item, the Dragon Scepter. No one understands how it chooses.”

“Ah! There. That’s what I was looking for. Are dukedoms inherited the same way?”

“No. So far, at least in my generation, dukedoms and earldoms are still absolute primogeniture. Oldest kid gets it, whatever gender they are. It makes it easy that mated pairs rarely have more than one child.”

“That’s so sad,” she said.

Math shrugged. “It’s just the way it happens, I guess.”

“You should have told me you were ‘Your Grace Mathonwy, the Duke Draco’ before we walked into the palace. I almost corrected that guy who greeted us. ‘Oh, no. He’s not a duke. You must be mistaken.’ Holy magic, I would have looked like an idiot.”

“It didn’t come up,” Math said, smiling gently.

“It should have. It totally should have come up,” Bethany fretted.

“Did you like my house?”

“Well, yeah! It’s the perfect blend of a cozy residential area and a fantastic area for dinner parties. I didn’t know I’d have to deal with astaff,however. But it is nice not to have to worry about cleaning all seven bathrooms.”

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