Light Dragons 02 - The Unbearable Lightness of Dragons

you doing in Dauva?”
    His face went blank for a few minutes before he slid me a steamy look. “Do you have fantasies about making love in Dauva? Out in the open, perhaps? It is heavily forested now, and not visited by the locals because they believe it is haunted, so I would be willing to take you there if it would drive you to a new level of pleasure.”
    “If that’s some sort of a crack about me having voyeuristic tendencies . . .”
    He raised a hand and looked out the window. “I make no judgment, mate. I was simply offering to allow your strange new tastes some freedom; that is all. If you wish instead for me to make love to you in the lair, that is more reasonable, although we would need to bring in a blanket at the least, since the ground is quite rocky there after the centuries of disuse. Perhaps a mattress.” He paused for a few seconds and thought. “I suppose we could build a bedchamber in there if you really liked, although Kostya has stolen all of my treasures, so there would be no gold to rub all over your body.”
    “An underground love nest doesn’t appeal to me in the leas—Rub gold all over me?” My eyes went a bit glazed as I considered that thought. Although the dragon that slumbered within me must have shown the same preference for gold over all other forms of treasure, heretofore it hadn’t triggered any response in me. Now, however, just the thought of draping Baltic’s naked form with chains of gold had me shivering with arousal. “Maybe that would be nice. How much gold do you have now?”
    His smile was filled to the rim with smugness. “Not as much as I had, thanks to Kostya, but enough to satisfy your lustful demands. It is safe in my Paris lair.”
    “Perhaps—” I shook myself, dissipating the erotic images that danced so tantalizingly in my head. “We got sidetracked somehow.” An abbreviated gesture had me shooting him quick little glances as all sorts of warning bells went off in my head. “You did that deliberately, didn’t you?”
    “Brought up the subject of making love to you? I frequently discuss my desire to mate with you, Ysolde,” he said, but he couldn’t look me in the eye. He pretended to be interested in the passing scenery, which made a few more bells chime.
    “Yes, you do, and I appreciate that fact, but I also know that you don’t like saying you won’t answer a question I asked you, which is why you try to distract me with thoughts of you all warm and naked with gold chains draped across your chest and belly and . . .” My voice trailed off into a little whimper as I swallowed back a sudden wave of desire and need. “What was I saying?”
    He slid me another look, but sighed and slumped back into the seat, shaking his head. “You’d never let me hear the end of it,” he muttered. “It would be just like in Milan, when Antonia called me to her side, but I could not tell you because you would have instantly been jealous and likely lopped off my stones with the nearest sword. I had to tell you I was away on sept business just to keep you from following me.”
    “I am not the sort of person who gelds other people without due cause,” I started, then realized what it was he hadn’t said. “Wait a minute—are you saying you went off to see your former girlfriend after we were together?”
    “Not in the sense you are thinking,” he said blithely.
    “How do you know what I’m thinking?”
    He pointed to the steering wheel. “Your fingernails have dug into the leather a good half an inch.”
    I loosened my death grip on the wheel, spun it when I was about to plow us into a guard rail, and got a grip on my emotions. “What did Antonia want to see you about?”
    He was silent.
    I glanced at him. His expression was stony.
    “I see.”
    “I’m surprised you haven’t had a vision about that episode,” he said after a few more minutes of silence, during which I lovingly reviewed various forms of torture dug out from the shattered remains of my memory. “You came as close to killing an archimage as anyone ever has. It would be a worthy vision to experience.”
    An echo of a voice shouting in my head had me signaling and pulling over to a shoulder. Jim looked up inquiringly, but sighed and returned to its skin magazine when I turned to face Baltic.
    “Mate?” Baltic asked, one eyebrow raised.
    “Shush. It’s there, right on the edge of my mind. I can hear an echo of it. I want to know what happened. I want to see it. I want to be