Soul of Fire by Sarah A. Hoyt Page B

stayed aloft. And we should never have come here.”
    St. Maur shook his head sternly. “We had to, don’t you see? If we hadn’t come here, then as far as Marty and Fanny are concerned, I’d simply have disappeared. And if I disappeared at the same time that rumors of dragons flourished, at the same time that a disturbance indicated a dragon had fled town in some hurry . . . My dear child, I might as well have sent an invitation to the Royal Were-Hunters and invited them to hunt me down. And though I’ve been all over the world and often very much the pauper, my name is something I’ve never had to abandon. In fact, my name and family connections are often the only things that have allowed me to survive. I have to leave a note to account for my absence.”
    “But now we’re going to be killed for it,” Sofie said, her heart beating at her throat, her voice a strangled bleat. “Oh, I can’t let him catch me. I can’t!” She stooped to grab her carpetbags, and started toward the door.
    But St. Maur grabbed her arm. “No. Not that. They’re in the garden, can’t you hear? Quite soon they will be on the staircase, inside the house.”
    “I will not be caught,” she said. “I will run. How can you stand there and—”
    Only, Peter wasn’t standing there. Instead, he was, with efficient, cool calm, undressing himself. Was he insane? Did he think the tigers would be balked by finding her in a room with a naked man? Did he think that would be enough to cause him to drop any idea of marrying her? But then, he’d never seen the man, and couldn’t imagine the animal ruthlessness in those yellow eyes.
    St. Maur might be a dragon, but in human form he was a man and a gentleman. He simply did not have the resources to imagine what a true villain would feel and think. He had no way at all.
    She shook her head at him, but he spoke calmly, in a stage whisper. “There is no way to avoid it. I’ll try to make it quick, but I have to shift in the air. Or shift and leap at the same time, from the balcony. Then I will circle and come back to get you.” He removed his cuff links and put them, carefully, inside his bag. “Bring the bags with you, though the dragon . . . I will take them, once we are airborne. It’s what I usually do when I travel. If you just leave them on the edge of the balcony as you climb on his—my—back, I will be sure to grab the bags.” He removed his shirt to reveal his smooth, muscular torso, covered in golden skin and glowing, faintly, with the magic glow that she imagined prefaced his changing. “The dragon will be very hungry,” he said. And she thought he seemed to have the oddest relationship with his other shape, talking about it as though it was something quite other, something quite separate from his human self. “And I must stop just outside town and let it feed—as soon as we can be sure of finding some wildlife. But I will try to make it brief and I will stay aloft as much as possible, till we’re far away from the city.”
    In her mind, slowly, she was processing that he meant to shift here, on the balcony. That he was actually trying to do something to save her.
    He was now completely naked, and she tried not to look at him. Yet, even with the approaching roars of the tigers, even with the panic welling up in her, Sofie could not help looking him over and thinking that he was magnificent. Smooth and golden, like a statue carved in gold—he didn’t look like someone any woman could ignore, unless she were dead. Thoughts came to her mind, unbidden, of running her hand along his shoulders, of feeling the smooth strength of his muscular arms. She wondered what it would feel like. She’d never touched a man before. She’d never seen a man naked before, save a crazy beggar in London who was wont to remove all his clothes and walk around proclaiming that his body didn’t belong to him.
    “Miss Warington,” he said, recalling her to herself. “No point being frozen in fear.