Find out what she likes, find out about her life. Mikhail could do that. He very much wished to do exactly that.
In fact, he wished he could summon the local Guardian, an old campaign colleague named Cang, and dump his mission on him, so Mikhail could concentrate exclusively on courting his mate. If his orders had come from anyone but the empress, he would have been very tempted indeed.
But he didn’t need to spend all his time searching for the treasure. And the eldest of the four women had already invited him to an event at which his mate would be present.
An image of Bird sprang into his mind, vivid as life: her sweet face and its sudden smile, as bright and kind as dawn. The lushness of her gently rounded form. Her hands, square, experienced, honest. Even the peculiar garment covering her hair, the even more peculiar tie, and the red paint stains could not diminish her beauty.
Oh yes, it would give him great pleasure to find out about her life. He hoped that she might be interested in his.
But first he must discover something about his mysterious Bertie Wooster. Though his dragon could discover where she lived, he sensed that it would be wrong to suddenly appear there—not when she was unfamiliar with the mate bond. No, he must meet her in a place she would consider safe, a public place. The writers’ group would be perfect.
Whatever it was that the empress had sensed in that cave had waited for many centuries. It could wait another day.
THREE
BIRD
It was all Bird could do to keep herself from being distracted as her friends drank their coffee, and Bird her tea. Fresh tea. After these expeditions to create the murder scenes, Godiva always treated them. Otherwise Bird got hot water for free and dunked a tea bag from home.
The nice thing about a community, she thought as she sipped the excellent Osmanthus Green tea the coffee shop offered, is that people know all your quirks and still like you. But how would her quirks, like keeping tea bags in her purse, look to the eyes of a stranger?
There she was again, thinking of Professor Mikhail Long.
She wrenched her mind back to the conversation. The others chattered about Godiva’s latest murder plot, then moved to Doris’s next high school play, which Bird looked forward to seeing, and from there to high school football, a subject Bird could never scrape up more than a superficial interest in. Her eyes wandered to the seascapes on the wall, which had been painted by her landlord, Mr. Kleiner. Odd, how different times of day—different kinds of light—would pick out the shades in one painting over another. But they were all beautiful, each one well established in the Beautiful Things bank.
Bird glanced around the booths full of people chatting, texting, watching devices. Did no one else look at those gorgeous paintings? Maybe they had when they’d first come into the Strand. It was fun to see tourists come in and stare around in wonder. Bird always got a shiver of vicarious delight on dear Mr. Kleiner’s behalf. She found herself wondering what these paintings would look like through Mikhail Long’s silver eyes . . .
“Ack!” Doris yanked her watch closer to her eyes, as if that might change the time. “School! TGIF.”
“Time to roll,” Godiva declared. “Gotta get my daily pages in early, since we have group tonight.”
Bird blinked her mind back to the present, glad nobody had noticed her lack of participation in the conversation. She waved a farewell and biked the short distance to her tiny cottage.
When she walked inside, her thoughts arrowed stubbornly back the subject of her daydreams, and she wondered what her place might look like to a pair of silver eyes.
Oh, what an awful mistake.
She gazed around, appalled. Here she’d been smugly pitying the regulars who never glanced at the seascapes at the Strand, and somehow she’d never noticed how her comfortable nest had become . . . be honest, shabby. Her current batch of library books were piled on one end of the couch, and her knitting basket was on the other. The center, where she sat, had a noticeable sag, sad evidence that a single person had lived here long enough to wear a butt well into that one cushion. As for the rest of her furniture, not one piece had been new when she got it a quarter of a century ago, and now—
She clapped her hands over her eyes. No! She was not going down that road! Her place was fine. No one ever saw it. No one was ever going to see it. Definitely not a certain tall, handsome man who carried a dragon-head cane...
She got into her gardening sweats, wiped off a dab of stage blood she’d missed earlier, then went to her little kitchen garden to pick some green beans for dinner. The heavenly fragrance of roses drifted on the soft spring air.
Mr. Noko was hard at work among the fabulous roses in the garden of the big house, where their landlord Mr. Kleiner lived. Though perhaps landlord wasn’t quite the right word, considering that Mr. Noko worked for Mr. Kleiner rather than paying rent, and that the two of them were close friends. Mr. Noko had stumbled onto the property during WW II, a terrified, deaf teenager who’d escaped from a Japanese internment camp. He had lived in the second cottage ever since, transforming a wild mess of a garden into the living work of art it was now.
He wouldn’t hear a greeting, so Bird waited for him to glance up and then waved at him. He waved back. She went back inside to toss the beans into the crockpot, then cast a guilty look at her desk, as she did every Friday.
She really ought to at least try writing. She’d promised her agent, a faithful friend for all these years, that she would. But there was so much to do: laundry, cooking, cleaning, gardening. She could finish the blue and white afghan, which she could then throw over the loveseat to hide the faded cushions. Anyway, what the others at the book club truly appreciated most was an audience.
Besides, you’re nothing but a scribbler.
The thought came to her mind in Bartholomew’s voice. Whether he’d been right or not, it didn’t matter. Her stories had died inside her, there was no other word for it. There was no room in the world for silly stories about animals anyway. At least she could make local people happy by doing drawings for them.
She began to chop an onion as she considered her Professor Long drawing. He was so graceful and strong, a mere man somehow didn’t seem to be enough to portray him as he truly was. Perhaps he could be a . . . centaur? No, that wasn’t right. Well, half the pleasure of painting was creating an image in her head before she first dipped her brush into the watercolors.
Bird kept herself busy with chores until it was time to get ready for the writers’ group. When she got out of the shower, she caught herself eyeing her little closet speculatively instead of putting on her usual outfit, chosen for being sensible, long-wearing, and practical.
Annoyed with herself for expectations that could only get her hurt, she deliberately put on an ugly pair of stretchy pants that she usually only wore when everything else was dirty, and a boring print top that didn’t match. She added clunky sensible shoes, yanked a brush through her hair, refused to look at herself in the mirror, and started out.