The Billionaire Dragon Shifter Meets His Match: BBW Paranormal Romance (Gray's Hollow Dragon Shifters Book 6) (17 page)

Jane started giggling as she tried to extricate herself, their efforts to control the gold colliding with each other and tangling them worse. They were both laughing hard enough to shake the bed by the time they got entirely unhooked, and when they stood up it was to the accompaniment of various small beads and coins falling off them where they’d been briefly glued to skin by sweat or something stickier.

Bath
, Laurence decided, still giggling as Jane brushed her hands over her derriere to check whether all the gold was gone. There were still a handful of beads stuck to the backs of her thighs, and he couldn’t bring himself to brush them away. They were too lovely right where they were.

Bath,
Jane agreed, and slipped into the sumptuous bathroom just as a knock on the door indicated the arrival of lunch.

Laurence halfheartedly covered himself with the nearest piece of clothing—Jane’s shirt, as it happened—while a straight-faced hotel employee brought in the cart laden with their lunch. Laurence dispensed a tip without really noticing how much it was until the woman’s eyes went wide. Still, he couldn’t feel any sting of loss when he had gained so much today. He waved her off cheerfully and pushed the lunch cart into the bathroom, parking it beside the tub, which was already half full of hot water.

Better yet, Jane was already lounging in it. He climbed in next to her, dropping a fistful of gold beads among the plates on the lunch cart to help carry things when they wanted them.

“Ohhh,” he sighed, as the water covered him. “I’d been wanting a bath ever since I changed back. Oh, that feels good.”

“Careful,” Jane said, settling herself between his legs and leaning back against his chest. “I’ll get jealous of a bathtub in a minute.”

“You’ll notice I didn’t actually bother with the bath until after I’d paid plenty of attention to my mate,” Laurence murmured, sliding his hands up from her hips to her breasts, which were beginning to float as the water rose.

“Mm,” Jane agreed, arching back against him. With her head tipped against his shoulder, she finally seemed to notice what he’d brought in with him. “Oh,
lunch
.”

Laurence muffled a laugh against her shoulder and started bringing down plates where they could reach. They lounged together in the water, soaking up warmth and gold and each other as they ate, sharing the most enticing bites with each other and pausing often for kisses.

When they were down to the tray of two dozen bite-sized desserts, Laurence held a chocolate-covered strawberry to Jane’s lips. “What happens now? Do you have to go back to work right away?”

Jane opened one eye to glare at him for interrupting her pleasure in the strawberry with such a practical question, but her only retaliation was to pick up a cheesecake bite and feed it to him. Laurence’s eyes fluttered shut at the decadent richness of it.

Jane said, “Not right away. I really do get some mating leave—properly, now that everyone knows we’re actually officially mating and not just, um...”

“Careening toward tragedy and scandal?” Laurence offered.

Jane snorted, and Laurence picked up little piece of dense chocolate cake to offer to her next.

Something like that
, Jane allowed as she moaned around the chocolate.
My mother is going to stay a while, cover things for me, so I suppose you can meet her with pants on—and meet my father, too. And we’re already mated, so you won’t get any ideas about challenging him for my hand, will you?

Laurence’s eyes went wide at the thought. “Is that... I suppose, when you’re both dragons, that’s...?”

Jane shook her head quickly and picked up a tiny fruit tart, its filling gleaming like jewels. She popped it into his mouth and watched avidly as he groaned in appreciation of the buttery pastry and sweet-tart fruit.

“It’s not a thing people do anymore, or not in a serious way, but I wasn’t sure what your family...”

Yes,
Laurence said.
About my family. I think maybe we should run away a little after all.
It’s been too long since I was home, and I know my brothers will all want to meet my mate.

And with Jane at his side, he need not be afraid of what he might do, or what he might bring with him back to the safety of Gray’s Hollow. He could stay longer than his customary couple of days—visit more than twice a year. He could be a brother to his brothers and sisters-in-law like he’d never dared to be before—an uncle to his nieces.

And I can be the first to see your enclave,
Jane pointed out cheerfully.
And make sure you’re all ready to have the Georgian Corps turn up and start asking questions.

“So it’s settled?” Laurence asked, reaching for the next sweet bite on the tray. “We’ll have a honeymoon back home?”

“Oh, yes,” Jane agreed. “I want to see this cave of yours, especially—you do know, when the mother is a dragon, there’s more than one way to get a dragonet.”

Laurence’s eyes went wide, and Jane laughed with delight, and took the sweet from his fingers when he couldn’t do anything but stare.

*****

Epilogue

“Oh, my,” Jane said, as the mansion—
castle
—at the top of the hill came into sight. Filling its porch were all of Laurence’s brothers and sisters-in-law, his two little nieces, and an enormous dog with curly gray fur. “The Grays do make quite a welcoming committee.”

“This is nothing,” Laurence assured her with a shy smile. “I asked Gus and Ilie to keep everybody in town from mobbing us until we’d had a chance to introduce you to the family. They might hold a parade or something, I’m not sure. Some kind of town-wide party is unavoidable.”

Jane’s eyes went wide, but she could sense that he wasn’t joking at all.

“Well,” she said, looking out at Laurence’s family again. “Let’s get started, then.”

Laurence held her hand tightly as they walked up toward the house, and one of his brothers detached from the pack and hurried down to meet them, the gray dog on his heels.

“Ilie,” Laurence said, and he kept hold of Jane’s hand while he wrapped his other arm tightly around his favorite brother.

Ilie held on to him tightly, and Mouse crowded in close to them. Jane caught just a whisper of the dragon speech between the brothers:
So glad, so happy for you, welcome,
and
Missed you, sorry, missed you so much
.

When they parted, there were tears on Ilie’s face that he wiped away with no sign of shame. Laurence was blinking rapidly. Jane squeezed his hand, beaming at him.

He smiled back at her before he cleared his throat and said, “Jane, my older brother, Ilie. And his dog, Mouse. Ilie, my mate, Jane.”

Jane laughed and stepped into the hug Ilie offered with open arms, accepting a quick squeeze before she turned to give Mouse the petting he obviously required. Laurence had told her a little about how his visits home used to go; when Ilie was keeping to his dragon shape, Laurence had always slipped out to the woods in the middle of the night to talk to him alone, and usually spent the night curled up with Mouse to keep warm.

Jane privately thought that he’d also been catching up on his obvious deficit in cuddling, but she hadn’t bothered to point that out. They were pretty close to clearing that shortage for good.

When she looked up from Mouse, she found that Ilie had his arm around his mate, a blonde woman whose generous curves didn’t camouflage the new swell of her belly.

“Jane,” Ilie said, beaming proudly. “Please meet my mate, Becca. We’re expecting our dragonet in a couple of months.”

“Carefully timed for school summer vacation,” Becca explained with a smile, reaching out to squeeze Jane’s hand. Laurence leaned in to give her a kiss on the cheek.

“Congratulations!” Jane glanced up at Laurence, and he
blushed
, quite charmingly. They’d visited his cave, pleasantly private and separate from the house, on their way up. It was really a quite suitable location for keeping an egg safe for nine months, but they hadn’t decided for sure whether, or when, they might be using it.

Still, it had been quite enjoyable to look around and imagine the possibilities.

Jane was brought back to the present by a tiny squeal of excitement, and she looked down to see that a baby girl dressed in peacock blue had crawled down the lawn to get to Mouse. The dog was standing very patiently still while she grabbed at his fur to try to pull herself up.

“Sophie!” Her father caught up with her a second later. “Be gentle with Mouse, princess.”

He scooped his daughter up and grinned at Laurence and Jane. “Welcome home, big brother. Although you know you could’ve called me, it would’ve been nice not to be the one needing to get bailed out of trouble for once.”

Laurence rolled his eyes but smiled. “Jane, my youngest brother, Teo, and his daughter, Sophia. Teddy, this is Jane.”

“You’re not allowed to call me Teddy,” Teo informed her, smiling to take any sting out of it. “Nobody’s allowed to call me Teddy anymore!”

“Except me,” Teddy’s mate put in, stepping up from behind him. Teddy shifted his grip on Sophia to put an arm around her. “I’m Amy. But really, no one else is allowed to call him Teddy.”

“Teo, then,” Laurence agreed. “If you’re going to behave like an adult. And it wasn’t a matter of bailing out. I had to solve this one for myself.”

He looked down at her as he said it, though, and Jane squeezed his hand. “You did it magnificently.”

“I think the magnificent part is that you persuaded him to come home,” said a red-haired woman, coming over to meet them with her twin mates trailing more slowly after her. Laurence had most often clashed with the twins, his next-younger brothers; he was more worried about making peace with them than anyone else.

“I’m Hannah,” the redhead introduced herself. “And my mates are Radu and Sunny. I—”

“Hannah,” Laurence cut in, reaching out a hand to hers. “I want to apologize for what I said to you the night Elena was born. It was—”

Laurence shook his head helplessly, and Hannah stepped in to kiss his cheek. “Forgotten,” Hannah assured him. “And besides, it looks like you’ve learned your lesson, haven’t you?”

Laurence exhaled and smiled. “I have. Hannah, this is Jane. Jane, my sister-in-law Hannah, and by far the most beautiful of the town’s three co-mayors.”

Hannah glanced over her shoulder, and the twins, Radu and Sunny, stepped up around her. Each shook hands a little formally with Laurence; Radu offered his hand to Jane as well, while Sunny followed up with a kiss to her cheek.

“Anybody who can make Laurence smile is a welcome addition,” Sunny assured her with a grin. “You’ll fit right in here.”

Jane couldn’t help grinning back at him, and then Laurence was tugging on her hand, towing her toward the house. Laurence’s oldest brother, Gus, was head of the family. It was for Laurence to come to him.

Gus stood on the lowest step of the porch with his daughter, Elena, on his hip, his wife at his side. Jane felt as if she should curtsey for a moment as they stood there, but then Gus burst into the widest smile and reached down to pull Laurence into a hug, holding him tight just as Ilie had. Little Elena even wrapped her arms around her father and uncle to help, and smacked a kiss against Laurence’s shoulder for good measure.

Laurence was startled into pulling back to look at the toddler, who said, “Hi!”

Her small bright voice broke the silence that held the adults. Jane laughed, and her sister-in-law—Cara, by process of elimination—laughed along with her.

Cara opened her arms and Jane stepped into another hug, stepping back to Laurence’s side as Gus said, “But, really—you could have called for us. We would have come, all of us. I’d have taken up the challenge for you, or at least dragged it all out in negotiations. Radu was busy making up Dragomir customs to claim you were bound by. You know that, don’t you? You could have called us. We’re your brothers. We would have helped.”

Laurence squeezed his eyes shut and ducked his head, holding on hard to Jane’s hand. “I... I had to...”

Gus stepped down off the porch and slung an arm over Laurence’s shoulders. “We all remember Uncle Laurence the same as you do,” he murmured. “We would have understood.”

Laurence nodded a little and then said, “I had Jane. Gus—my mate, Jane. Jane, this is my brother Gus, my sister-in-law, Cara, and—oof,” Laurence’s breath went out in a puff as his niece abruptly threw herself from her father’s arm to Laurence’s chest. He caught her awkwardly and then steadied her grip, letting her lean against him to get a closer look at Jane.

“My niece,” Laurence finished, turning toward Jane. “Elena.”

“Hi!” Elena chirped again, waving excitedly.

“Hi,” Jane returned, waving right back at the toddler.

“Come on, come inside,” Cara said, taking a step back up onto the porch and waving them closer. “It’s so good to have everybody home at once.”

Laurence looked around and Jane looked up at him, watching the expression of wonder bloom on his face as he held his niece and looked around at the rest of his family, all gathered here to welcome him. He looked down at Jane, and she couldn’t help giving him a quick kiss before she told Cara what they were both thinking.

“We’re glad to be here.”

*****