A Way to a Dragon’s Heart (14 page)

Kryssa wiped at her smile and rubbed her forehead. “Yeah, so?”

“I’m just saying I’ve been there. I know the draw of the familiar and the temptation of trying to get back that bit of yourself someone takes with them when you break up. In this case, Landon is a bigger temptation than most. I still wish you’d let me and Dominic drop him so hard he bounces a few rungs down the evolutionary ladder, but even while hating the man, I must marvel at his awesome exterior. You loved him so it’s ten times worse. Don’t be swayed, Krys.

“Xander’s a great guy, and Caleb brings him into himself the way Aaron does for Drew. You’re not going to get a more perfect, hand-picked couple to build a triad with, Baby Girl. I took the only other one.”

“I could join yours.” Kryssa grinned.

“True, you could leave Xander for his twin brother—if they hadn’t canceled Jerry Springer ten years ago. Now you lack a platform to legitimize it.” The baby made a gurgling sound. “Uh oh, I know that sound and that face. Someone’s all messy.”

“Go on and embark on the more daring aspects of parenthood. I’ll call you when the dust clears.” Kryssa waved to them both and took the baby’s expression for a smile no matter what anyone said.

She turned on the wall unit and brought up the file of baby pictures. She chose her favorite close up and walked over to the wall. Ryssa stared up with big, bright thyme-colored eyes dominating the perfect little face—Xander’s eyes. Well, Andrew’s, but same thing. Her hand drifted up to touch the familiar nose and chin. So what if she had considered it? That didn’t necessary mean anything. Women had babies with friends all the time. It wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t like—

A melodious voice carried from the door. “Our children would be as beautiful.”

The joy drained from the moment, replaced by frustrated confusion. Kryssa clicked off the unit and turned a professional smile toward the bearer of such an uninvited, ill-advised, unfortunately accurate observation.

“Did you find the proposal suitable, Landon?”

He flashed a smile that promised the world. “It’s more than suitable; it’s perfect.

Kryssa took a hopeful breath.

“I just have some questions,” he continued.

And let out a sigh of frustration.

Chapter Twenty

He stood with a regal bearing born of millennia of proper breeding. Streamlined muscle crafted a perfection of strong arms, broad shoulders, a narrow waist, and powerful thighs and calves. It was all covered by an exquisite, black, handmade suit, yet not hidden beneath it. The aura of virility couldn’t be stifled by anything as mundane as clothing. A heartache lined the handsomeness of the face, as if only a touch of pain could give flavor to the depth of pleasure in looking upon him. No fault could be found in the flawless smile, cobalt eyes or the shock of thick dark hair that fell into them. He was DRAGON, and Kryssa could not be unmoved.

She could, however, be pissed to no end.

“What questions could you possibly have?” She sat on her desk and crossed her arms. “You have two masters degrees for All’s sake! It’s written in the plainest language possible. It might as well be titled
Tech Deals for Dummies
. You’ve got to let this go, Landon. We hit ridiculous two weeks ago, and absurd waved as we passed yesterday. We’re closing in on insane with downright certifiable sitting on the adjacent property. If we don’t close this deal soon, they’ll start prescribing meds.”

“It’s just a few points.” He closed the door behind him and took a step in her direction.

Kryssa held up a hand. “No, stay over there. I’m not in the mood right now, and if you come within arm’s reach, I
will
get hostile.”

A smile spread over full lips, shaping a generous mouth into something sinful. “Thank you for the warning. I’d like to avoid a hostile moment if possible.”

“Then why are you smiling?”

He struck a look between abashed and aroused. “It is the first time you’ve threatened me in these proceedings. You’ve been nothing but professional and courteous until just now. I can’t help but smile that you’ve finally acknowledged me. I don’t however wish to fight with you.” His gaze moved over her. “You look beautiful in the brown and white. Those should have been my first words. Did you change for your lunch date?”

She touched the collar of the three-quarters sleeve cropped blazer. It had caught her eye because the dark cinnamon color mirrored Caleb’s spinal markings. She tried to focus on the compliment. There were so many things wrong with everything he’d just said that she didn’t know where else to start. “Thank you, it was a long morning, and I wanted to change.” She took a deep breath and shook her head. “What do you want for signing the deal and ending the games, Landon? We have other clients involved in this, and you’re holding everyone up for personal reasons that you should be handling on your own time.”

“A difficult thing to accomplish when you won’t see me without a valid appointment,” he countered.

“That doesn’t give you the right to delay everyone else to get your way. A way, I might remind you, you still haven’t gotten so you’ve wasted everyone’s time for nothing.”

He leaned against the door and looked pleased. “This is what I wanted, for you to talk to me like a person instead of a client. If I had known it would require the presence of your friends, I would have invited them weeks ago.”

Kryssa wondered if Human Resources could make her go to anger management while on sabbatical. She counted to five before she spoke, just in case. “So you’re saying Caleb’s right? If I’d put you through a door the first time I landed in Sydney this would all be over now?”

“Not quite where I wanted to go with things, but we’d likely be much further along, yes,” he admitted.

She snatched up her tablet from her desk and opened the documents. “Everything is in order; I just need a thumb print.” She looked up. “What do I have to trade you for it?”

“Can we set this aside a moment? I’d like to—”

“No,” she interrupted. “We can’t set it aside. This is business, company business. I want to do my job. If you want to have some sort of ridiculous rehash of things, fine, but first let’s settle this. Drake Enterprises and the Strix Corporation have nothing to do with the things between us. Let’s take the deal out of the equation, and we can settle the rest as adults.”

He pulled a datapad from his pocket, let it sync, and pressed his thumb in the signature box. “I’ve authorized a preliminary agreement. I’ll press send if you promise to hear me out.”

She counted to ten, then fifteen. “Why can’t we settle the full agreement?”

“We can if you agree to come and stay in my guest house for the first month of your sabbatical and give us a chance to work on things,” he offered.

“Preliminary agreement it is,” she replied. “I’ll schedule reassessment in ninety days if a full agreement hasn’t been filed before the deadline.” She scrolled through, verified the preliminary, sat down the tablet, and looked at him. “Okay, go, I’m hearing you out.”

He slipped the device into his pocket and held his hands out. “Permission to approach without inciting violence?” He smiled.

“I don’t know what you’re going to say yet, so no promises, but knock yourself out.” His stride ate up distance quickly, and she held up both hands. “Within reason. Touching distance is off the table until you start talking and we know whether or not I’m inspired to look for a weapon.”

He gave a princely nod. “As you wish.” He pulled out a chair and sat a symbolic distance away. “What happened to your flowers?”

“They’ve been sent to clinic and donated to a few charity events.” He reached toward his pocket, and she nailed him with a gaze. “And if you inundate my office again, the next ones to arrive will be part of your funeral arrangement.”

He held up his hands. “Duly noted.” He sat back, and his face grew serious. “As you know, I have apologized numerous times and I continue to regret everything that led to our premorse engagement. I would like the opportunity to go beyond apology and regret and be given the chance to make it up to you, Kryssa.”

It took a half minute to be sure that he’d said what she thought he’d said and then ten extra seconds to believe he’d been serious. “Landon, you can’t make it up to me.” She walked over and took the chair closer to him, as if distance might correlate to comprehension. “You stated your honest, uncensored opinion, an opinion that clearly conveyed that you found me beneath your family’s standards.” Her voice remained matter of fact. “I didn’t live up to your breeding program parameters, and your initial reaction left no doubt of that. You
can’t
make up for it. It can’t be made up for, Landon.”

He leaned forward, his hands on his knees. The length of his reach put him within touching distance, but they both pretended otherwise. “If sincerity is at the root, and both parties still live, anything can be made right with the opportunity to do so.”

Kryssa sat back. “Those are Dominic’s words. Did you really just quote my brother to me? The man who contemplated helping my friends stuff you into a shoebox not an hour ago?” She waved a hand, erasing her questions from the air. “Never mind, the point is valid. It’s the premise that’s flawed. You can’t make up for being
you
, any more than you can make amends for two plus two equaling four or try to give a personal
mea culpa
for gravity. Some things just are, and
you
just are who, and what, you are.”

“People can change, Kryssa.”

“Of course.” She sighed. “The right amount of time, the right circumstance, the right people… It can all change us—to a degree. We learn about ourselves, we broaden our horizons, and we overcome our flaws, sure. But no amount of reflection can make curly hair straight or blond hair black. Some things are just in our genes, and the only changes we ever make to them are purely artificial.”

“Nature may be difficult to overcome, but how we’re nurtured can be remedied with knowledge,” he insisted. “I was wrong, and I’ve learned better since.” She looked away, and he moved to kneel in front of her, his hands carefully touching only her chair. “I’ve done extensive research on your family line and on our history in general. There was a time when your particular permutation was among the highest of sought-after traits. It proved our Sylvan heritage and the first strains to truly call themselves Dragon. Everything I was taught was wrong. Your line is clearly older than mine and perfectly compatible. I had a stupid knee-jerk reaction, and instead of getting my facts straight and making a coherent apology, I bungled that too. But I want to start over from a place of accurate information and preparation to make this all work.”

Kryssa tried several times to form words. She finally just blurted her uncensored thoughts to practice speaking, least she be left permanently mute by shock. “Did I just have a mini-stroke or did you actually apologize for being a gene snob by declaring that my genes are in fact more snob-worthy and acceptable than your own and thus all should be forgiven? Where does a sane person start with that? You’ve given me nothing to work with, and I’m lost. I mean I know you’re not an idiot, so this has to be some telethon-level condition that we can fix with enough funding and grassroots participation. What do I say to this?”

He laughed a soft, deep rumble that echoed at its hollow center. He laid his forehead against her knee and let the laugh loose again. The second version held the flavor of unshed tears. “I’m a product of my environment and caught in the language of my elders. This is why I need at least a month.” His hands slid from the sides of the chair to rest against her thighs. “I can make this right if you give me time. I’ll learn the right words. If you can meet me where I am, I’ll do the work to get where I need to be. I just need an incentive to cross the distance. I need a bridge to help me over the waters of the past.”

Kryssa pressed her lips together against the first genuine smile she’d felt in Landon’s presence since that morning just before he proposed. “You’re in therapy?”

He lifted his head. “How did you know?”

“Someone you’re dating?”

He gave his own soft smile. “Almost six months.”

She shook her head and took his hands in hers. “Landon, I’m glad that you’re getting a broader perspective on the world and your place in it. You keep at that, and I want you to be happy.” She paused, taken aback at how much she meant it. “But looking at your tactics proves my point on this one. I know you, I loved you, and I say this from knowledge without a bitter trace to be found—you’re an ass, Landon. You’re a brilliant, funny, handsome, well-bred, highly skilled, genetically bigoted, self-centered, spoiled ass who happens to be great in bed. There will be women lining up to fix you, and many who’ll take you as you are if you’ll just hold still long enough. There’s no need to go backwards to prove you’re going forward. Cross me off your twelve steps and consider us good. I forgive you, and there’s nothing more to be done here. We’re good, we’re done. You can go home to Sydney or back to L.A. or wherever you wish and not worry about me anymore.”

His jaw clenched, and he pulled his hands free. “You’re right, but I’m also more than that, and I’m not trying to prove anything to anyone but you.”

“This was not the way to do it. You don’t hold the ability to do my job hostage to get your way. You don’t mix business and relationship issues and let the mess splash on everyone else. It’s not only sloppy but, in this instance, incredibly selfish and juvenile.”

“But ignoring me and avoiding me to the point of training interns to deal with my specific cases are somehow more mature methods?” he countered.

“In that it didn’t disrupt business, yes. And I didn’t let it ruin this deal; I stepped up.” She closed her eyes and took a moment. “I’m not saying I’m not complicit in this. I eliminated all of your other choices. But we could have had this conversation six weeks ago when I landed and looked you in the eye. Instead of pretending you wanted to understand all of it, you could have put this ultimatum down day one and been done.”

His hands settled on her thighs, his palms rubbing against the fabric of the skirt as he visibly searched out his words. “I did want to understand it all. If business is the only way I can see you, then I want to do it right. And I had every intention of signing and asking to speak with you the moment the brief finished, but then I saw you.” His gaze rested on the curve of her throat. “I realized I didn’t have the same kind of time, or as clear a path, as I had hoped.”

He put his head in her lap and took a deep breath. “Your whole body shut down when you first saw me. The light in your eyes dimmed, your smile faded, you wrapped your arms around yourself as if braced for a blow. I’ve never felt so small and petty and worthless for how I affected another living being, let alone someone I love. I stalled because I thought that in dealing with me day in and day out for long enough you’d eventually look at me and it wouldn’t hurt. You might be angry, frustrated, even hostile, but not hurt. Once I stopped being just a source of remembered pain in a suit, you’d see me as a person again and we could talk.”

She stroked his hair. “You’re right. It has changed but not because of your plan. Dealing with you so often took the sting out of seeing you, but Xander and Caleb get any credit for me being able to see you as a person. The more I talked to them and wanted to be with them, the less it mattered that I had to see you the next day and the more I resented you were at the table and they weren’t. The flaw in your plan is that you’re a person, but not one I particularly like right now. Dragging me to Sydney, keeping me from them, stressing Nicky—none of it put you on the list of people I want to talk to.”

He nodded against her. “But it did help with them. I watched it happened. You wondered about the relationship on some level, and the longer you were apart the more sure you seemed to become. Not my hope, just the truth.” He sighed. “I miscalculated the stress this would put on Dominic and underestimated how that it would affect your viewpoint. I know the indoctrination began when you were just a week old.”

“What?”

“He was on his own sabbatical when you were born and still showed up every day. He wore you like watch, of course you’d—umph.”

Her hand clenched a handful of his hair in her fist. “Don’t talk about my brother in that tone. Period.”