Free The Billionaire Dragon Shifter Meets His Match: BBW Paranormal Romance (Gray's Hollow Dragon Shifters Book 6) by Zoe Chant

bearings, and realized that they actually were in the Gold Coast—the hotel was one of the big towers on Lakeshore. She went to one of the windows, draped in heavy velvet to give the oversized room a pleasantly cave-like darkness. When she drew the curtain back, she was dazzled by the pristine blueness of the sky, stretching out for miles over the glittering blue of Lake Michigan.
    Laurence came up behind her while she was drinking in the soaring view, wrapping his arms around her as he snugged up against her back. She could feel the longing in him, wordless and buried as it was.
    Me too, she agreed. It’s too clear a day to fly, but the first day we’ve got cloud cover, we’ll go.
    He held her tighter, pressing his face against her hair, and didn’t say yes or no. Still, she could feel him wanting to fly, and to fly here, with her. That was something to go on.
    “Come on,” Jane murmured, tangling her fingers with his where he was holding on to her. “It’s not far to my place.”
    Walking hand in hand with Laurence through the familiar neighborhood, Jane wanted to show him off to everyone who passed, wanted to yell at the top of her lungs. My mate, my mate! I’ve found my mate! Look at him, he’s amazing, and he’s all mine!
    “You know I can hear you,” Laurence murmured out loud, and Jane had to stop and kiss him right there on the corner of the block where she’d grown up, knowing full well just how many of the neighbors would see. They could go right ahead and tell her mother. Laurence was her mate, and no one could argue with that.
    Jane eventually let go of Laurence enough to keep walking, and led him to a house of reddish-brown stone toward the north end of the row. She hesitated on the front walk, letting him look; she could see him noting the way the houses all adjoined here, so that only the house itself—and the postage stamp of grass or plants by the stoop, if there was one—could be secured as a dragon’s territory.
    Still, the houses were sturdy and stately, stretching three and four stories up.
    “Welcome to my ancestral home,” Jane said, tugging on his hand. Laurence smiled at her, hearing her certainty that it was nothing compared to his ancestral home, even if it was quite something in human terms. “It only goes back a hundred years—the Fire, you know.”
    Laurence raised his eyebrows, looking around again. “There were dragons already settled in Chicago then?”
    “In the words of the great poet Billy Joel,” Jane said, unlocking the front door with a twitch of her fingers, “No, we didn’t start the fire. Although we had more success protecting our possessions from it than most humans, which put a lot of dragons in the market for fine new homes afterward with the ready means to pay for them, so a lot of us wound up clustered here.”
    She watched Laurence anxiously as they stepped into the foyer. Her father had passed possession of the house, and a great part of the ancestral hoard, to her when he and her mother went down to Arizona. Still, they weren’t anywhere near the level of Laurence and his lordly family in their enclave. Barely any gold was on display in the main parts of the house, being saved for the cellar hoard and her bedroom.
    Laurence looked around appreciatively though, admiring the antique furniture and the art on display—mostly items from her great-grandfather’s extensive porcelain collection, which were only sparingly decorated with gold leaf.
    Laurence raised a hand—not touching, even with a dragon’s ability to manipulate gold, but sensing how much was there to be manipulated.
    “Not enough to catch one if it falls,” Jane informed him with a rueful smile. “I broke a three-hundred-year-old vase when I was
    just starting to fly—I loved this part of the house for that.”
    Jane gestured up, where the stairwells made the center of the house open all the way to the roof, four floors of stairs and railings making irresistible perches for a