Page 141 of Nobody Told Me Thrift Shops Sell Stolen Dragon Heirlooms

I stayed in the doorway until he vanished from sight, then I closed the door and let out a giddy sigh.

Max opened one eye.

“I know,” I whispered.

He huffed and went back to sleep.

I leaned against the door in Rafe’s coat, still cold and too warm everywhere that mattered, and tried to remember all the reasons I was supposed to be careful.

For once, none of them felt big enough.

18

QUINN

SOLD TO PADDLE TWELVE

By Sunday evening, I had repeated the phrase client first so many times that it had started to sound like a cult mantra.

Client first. Future first. Professional reputation first. Dragons with emotionally devastating flight privileges a distant, legally complicated never.

My plan had several strong points, including career stability, moral clarity, and not becoming a woman who lost her mind because one man had shown her Manhattan from the sky and then wrapped her in his ridiculously soft, ridiculously expensive coat.

Unfortunately, my brain had other opinions.

It had opinions about the way Rafe’s scales had warmed under my hands. About the city spread beneath us like a spilled jewelry box. About his estate glowing in the distance, grand and private and loved. About the heat he’d coaxed through my skin on the roof when he realized I was cold, his hands careful on my arms, his face tightening because he had forgotten I was human in the most literal, shivering way possible.

He had said it was only heat.

It hadn’t felt like that.

So, I had spent the intervening hours being extremely reasonable. I’d dropped Max with Avery, who had listened to my carefully edited version of events and said, “You flew on a dragon, and you’re still pretending this is about work? Seek help, girl.”

I had prepared my notes for the auction. I had reviewed the lot materials Helena Wallace sent over. I had eaten lunch because Avery had given me a Tupperware container of her famous sausage and potato soup.

Now, I was standing in a private auction house on the Upper East Side, wearing a black silk dress and embroidered green jacket, trying not to think about Rafe’s coat still hanging over the back of my blue chair at home.

My left side felt too empty without Max, my purse too light without his collapsible bowl and emergency treats. My entire nervous system seemed offended by the lack of one elderly Malinois providing moral oversight.

I forced myself not to think about that as I focused on the auction house.

The front room had paneled walls and low lighting. The staff were all dressed in black, and there was enough discreet security to make me think I might have stolen something. Guests moved through the preview space with catalogs in hand, murmuring over glass cases and pedestals. Nobody here looked shocked by money. To them, it was a climate they were accustomed to living in.

Rafe stood beside me, severe in a dark suit, one hand resting lightly on the back of the chair in front of him. He had the auction catalog open to the page with the shrine mirror, though his attention kept moving around the room.

The man was shockingly handsome, even when he was completely focused.

The shrine mirror was Lot 47. We were on Lot 19, a bronze basin from a minor kelpie court, and an old man in the second row had just won his fifth item of the evening.

He looked harmless in the way extremely rich old men sometimes did when the world had stopped requiring them to prove anything. White hair, neat beard, elegant suit, cane topped with carved amber. He smiled mildly, his paddle relaxed in his lap until the last possible second, and then he lifted it with infuriating calm and ruined someone else’s evening.

“Sold to paddle thirty-two,” the auctioneer called.

The gavel came down.

The room produced a polite ripple of applause.

Two seats ahead of us, a younger man in a dove-gray jacket lowered his paddle and gave the old man a look sharp enough to open mail. I recognized him from the catalog reception earlier: Luke Gildstein, a private collector from an old sorcerer family with a reputation for expensive instincts and eclectic taste. He had won one minor lot the old man had ignored and lost two directly to him. Every time he lost, his mouth compressed like someone had stepped on his very expensive shoe.