3
Simeth
Simeth
She was beautiful.
When I first saw her, a few stories up with her hair in a braided and tied up mess, focusing on her canvas ahead of her … I wanted to fly up and take her into my arms. Kiss her. Claim her. I had to restrain myself. Keep my cool so I wouldn’t scare her away. She’d just been wearing shorts and a tee-shirt, but those shorts showed the smooth curve of her legs, and that tee-shirt clung to her chest in the most tempting way.
I needed her to want me as much as I wanted her.
The way her eyes had traced over me, I could tell that wasn’t going to be hard.
The coffee shop she’d suggested was busy the next day. A full line was pouring out the front door, full of people happily chatting with each other about their mornings. I’d never had to wait in line for anything besides the throne, so peering in, I reminded myself of the etiquette of cities like this.
There were so many people—countless compared to Crystal Glass.
We were already a small country before infertility struck down so many of our women. I wondered, for the first time in years, if we should open our borders. These people didn’t even know Crystal Glass existed just a handful of miles south of them.
Would it change anything if they knew?
I’d heard that they thought dragon shifters were rare. What would happen if they realized a few thousand of us were hidden away just over Purple Ridge?
I toyed with the thought a little, until I sensed her.
She smelled like a lemon cake: vanilla and sugar with that sweet citrus bite. It made me want to eat her whole, taste every inch of her, and make her feel so good she wouldn’t want to leave my sight ever again. I knew I needed to behave myself, though, and so I didn’t even reach out to touch her when she walked into the bakery.
Her hair was a messy braided bun again, and I wanted to pull it loose and see her with her guard down.
“Good morning,” I smiled.
“Morning,” she greeted me back. “How’s Ember Abyss treating you so far?”
“It’s great. I ended up renting a room in that hotel you painted yesterday,” I explained. The room had been tiny yet thankfully clean and updated. I couldn’t understand how they’d fitted both a bedroom and a bathroom in only five hundred square feet.
That felt like nothing.
My driver seemed to have had a different experience, seemingly overjoyed at the measly amount of space.
I wondered how big her home was.
“I love that hotel,” she smiled. “I drank in that bar on my twenty-first birthday.”
I wanted to ask how old she was now but thought better of it. I needed to try and maintain some kind of emotional distance.
We got to the front of the line eventually. I followed her advice to order the bear claw donuts, and we topped it off with a couple of coffees.
“So, do you take every random worker you see out to breakfast?” she teased.
I held back a laugh and smiled instead. “No, you caught my eye. I saw you up there and knew I needed to see how the sign turned out. Then you saw me and called down—” I made myself stop talking because I was saying too much.
When she looked down at me from up on that contraption, my heart had felt like it was reaching up to her.
She was breathtaking.
A soft blush was spreading over her face, and it felt good to know I had that effect on her.
“Have you been in Ember Abyss your whole life?” I asked.