Light Dragons 01 - Love in the Time of Dragons

now?”
    “I . . . we’ll talk about that later.”
    “What’s Gareth going to say when he finds out your first husband is still alive?”
    I sighed again. “We’ll talk about that later, too.” I looked up to where Maata and Tipene approached. “I’m not really happy about this.”
    “We won’t let anything happen to him,” Maata said, giving Brom a little punch in the arm. He grinned and punched her back. She pretended to flinch, which made him grin all that much harder.
    “We were just reunited. I don’t like being separated again.”
    “It is just a precaution, and will not be but for a day or two. Aisling and Drake will take very good care of Brom,” Gabriel said in a soothing voice that did nothing but make my jangled nerves more jumpy. “Drake takes his security very seriously now that his children have been born, and I would not be honest if I didn’t admit that your son will be safer with them than he would be here should Baltic attack.”
    I waited until Brom and the two silver bodyguards left, waving with as cheerful a smile on my face as I could put there, but the second the car drove off, I turned on Gabriel. “Why do you persist in the belief that Baltic is going to attack your house?”
    He took my arm and escorted me back inside, making sure the elaborate security system that monitored the doors was set. “He’s done it before. He blew up our previous house, and destroyed much of the entryway of Drake’s. You were there that day—that is how your head was injured.”
    I touched a little scar in my hairline. I’d wondered how I’d come to get that.
    “Now that he knows you are alive, he will put two and two together and arrive at the conclusion that we have taken you in for protection, and he will do everything in his power to steal you from us.”
    “But that’s just the point,” I said tiredly, rubbing the headache that throbbed in my temples. “There’s no need for him to steal me, as you put it. I want to speak with him. No, I need to—I need to talk to him in order to clear up all the things I don’t understand.”
    “I don’t think that would be terribly smart right now,” May said softly. “Baltic is . . . I hate the use the word ‘insane, ’ but he’s not mentally balanced, Ysolde. You don’t remember the things he’s done to the silver dragons, to his own people, but Gabriel was there two months ago when they discovered the corpses that Baltic had left when he cut a deadly swath through the blue dragon population.”
    “No sane being, dragon or otherwise, could have done the things that were done to them,” Gabriel said grimly.
    His normally bright gaze was dark with remembered pain.
    I looked down at my fingers, unable to justify that I was bound to a man who was homicidal.
    “You said he looked surprised to see you,” May said. “That means he didn’t know you were alive, so he’s probably frantic to find you now. And you can take it from us that an emotionally upset Baltic does not make for a pleasant companion.”
    “All I know is that I must have some time to talk to him. I realize you want to capture him so he can face the charges that are now hanging over my head, but isn’t there some neutral ground where we can meet him and talk to him, find out if he really is deranged?”
    They were silent for a minute before Gabriel finally said, “I will present that suggestion to the weyr.”
    What he didn’t say was that it would do no good.
    I nodded, still rubbing my temples.
    “You are fatigued,” Gabriel said. “You should rest now. You may have a disturbed night if Baltic chooses to attack tonight.”
    “Would you like me to send some supper up to you?” May asked.
    “Actually, I’m famished. I’d love some food.”
    “You go upstairs and get into bed, and I’ll have Renata whip something up for you.”
    An hour later I was full of ginger chicken, fresh snow peas, and an intention that I prayed Gabriel and May would never find out. Dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, I slung my bag over my back, pressed a red button that blinked slowly in a tiny little panel set into the corner of the windowsill, and cautiously opened the window, bracing myself for a siren.
    Silence greeted me. I sighed in relief that the switch deactivated the alarm on the window, and peered out. I was three stories up, with no convenient drainpipe, balcony, ivy stuck to the building, or ladder casually leaning against the side of the house. There was literally