“I love you,” she mouthed at him.
Then he was being frog-marched into Scarlet’s office, and thrust down into a chair.
She settled opposite him and glared across the desk. The early morning light starting to color the sky behind her made her hair look like fire. Green eyes snapped in her shadowed face. “Is this your idea of more professional?” she demanded. “Was there some confusion about what it is I hired you for?”
“Scarlet…” Breck’s shoulder began to throb where Scarlet had gripped it as the blood returned.
“I have been very generous accepting your extracurricular activities these past few years, and I have been very tolerant about your friendly behavior. I assumed you understood and respected certainly boundaries, and knew the difference between a harmless vacation dalliance and sleeping with the daughter of a very important client.”
“Scarlet…” Breck attempted again.
“She’s getting married, Breck! You had your choice of bridesmaids, cousins, society dilettants, even groomsmen… and you had to sleep with the bride?” The air in the room was getting hard to breathe. “Did you think about anything before you let your libido loose? Did you once consider what the repercussions would be for letting your cock lead you around?”
Her fists came slamming down onto the surface of the desk and everything on it jumped several inches. “My insurance doesn’t cover my staff being unable to keep it in their pants, Breck!”
“I’m not sorry!” Breck roared back.
The office was suddenly silent.
Even the insects and frogs were quiet, and Scarlet’s fury threatened to choke him from across the desk.
“She’s my mate,” Breck snarled into the stillness. “She’s my mate, and she’s going to marry someone else because she’s got a bigger heart than this whole island, and I got to spend three gorgeous nights with her and I am not sorry for a single second of it even if it means you toss me out on my ass and I never know a moment of happiness again.”
The pressure seeped from the room like a waterbed with a slow leak and Breck might have been able to breathe again if it hadn’t been for the pain in his chest.
“She’s my mate,” he repeated helplessly. “And we’ll never be together after this.”
If he hadn’t expected pity on Scarlet’s face, he certainly hadn’t expected the sorrow that chased it. Her eyes softened and she let out a held breath like a sigh of wind.
One brave frog gave an experimental croak into the silence.
“Why are you letting her marry Liam, then?” Scarlet asked, and her voice was gentle and full of complexity.
Breck told her. He told her about the home that would go under, and about the formal challenge for Darla’s hand that dragon custom required. He told her about the arrangement with Liam, and how he was keeping the odious Eugene from coming forward with his own challenge. He told her about the spell-protected hoard and the magical fertility bracelets.
“Unbroken line,” he mourned. “I couldn’t even give her children if she wanted them.”
Scarlet, who had been listening intently, stood up abruptly. “I can’t help you with that,” she said. “Nor the challenge for her hand. But the home…”
Breck thought she was coming around the desk, but she stopped halfway, and turned instead to the wall. There was a giant map of Shifting Sands hanging there, half-shrouded in the vines that draped around most of the room and merrily snaked among the beams. “Did you ever wonder where the staff housing was supposed to be?”
“... Yes?” Breck had wondered many times. For many years, they had been housed in the hotel building intended as a budget option for the resort. As business picked up and those rooms were required for guests, it made sense to house the staff in the big mansions along the cliffs that had stood empty so long — too expensive for anyone to rent in whole, too awkward to subdivide into individual rooms.
But he didn’t really see what that had to do with his dilemma.
Scarlet moved aside some of the vines, revealing a beach past the cliffs where the mansions stood, past the vegetable gardens that Graham snarled at anyone visiting. There was a clus
ter of buildings drawn there, a sprawling community of small and medium-sized buildings nestled between the jungle and a crescent of sand. It wasn’t as grand as the rest of the resort — there were no pools or event halls or restaurants, by the looks of it, but it was nearly as large.
“Are those all cottages?” Breck asked, puzzling over the shapes of their roofs. “Was Shifting Sands supposed to expand over there?”
“Most of them are cottages,” Scarlet said. She pointed at one of the larger ones. “This was intended to be a school.” Breck could make out playground equipment, now that he knew what he was looking at. “This was a daycare next to it, a little general store, and ...a retirement home.” Her finger touched a square building near the center.
For the first time that week, Breck had a stab of hope.
It hurt.
“Shifting Sands was intended to be a haven for shifters,” Scarlet continued, almost to herself. “It was never meant to only be a luxury escape for those who could afford it. It was supposed to be a place for families to work and grow, with the resort to support it. A safe place, where they didn’t have to keep secrets.”