Page 109 of Nine-Tenths

"Precisely."

"This isn’t just to get into my pants?"

"That was part of it," Dav says, and slides said hands down the back of said pants, giving me a healthy squeeze. "But I never could quite figure out how to broach the topic. 'Oh, pardon, Colin—I've barely spoken a paragraph to you, but would you like to come to my farm, which I've redesigned wholesale to fulfill your designs for an eco-conscious utopia?’ That's a step beyond 'creepy regular'."

"Yeah, maybe." I scan the horizon, taking in all the vegetation, the smell of the barnyard, the sounds of the goats tinkling their way to the back fields, the soft cluck of the chickens, the warmth of the growing heat of the day on my face. "But, man. This is…"

"Is it a grand enough romantic gesture for you, Colin Levesque?"

"What?"

"Remodeling my farm is not quite the same as saving your sister from ruin, but if it's not enough, I am willing to go jump into the duckpond in only my linen shirt."

I laugh at the thought and cling to him. "This isso much."

I feel breathless.

"I wasn't lying when I said I had hoped, Colin. That I had…wanted." He pulls me tight against him, the long, lean line of him. I'm feeling overwhelmed, if I'm honest, and I'm learning that the grounding force of this embrace is a hundred times better at keeping me connected to myself than any weighted blanket. "Dragons play the long game."

"I'm getting that."

"Withoutany expectation of reward," he adds, making sure I meet his eye, that I understand that he did all of this knowing that I might sayno thanks, and he would respect that.

But Christ, how could anyone ever honestly believe that I wouldn't…

I had spoken.

And he hadlistened.

I had dreamed.

And he had made it areality.

"You know, I think this is the sexiest shit I've ever seen." I push him, gently, around the fence and back against the wall of the chicken coop, where we’d definitely be hidden from any lingering paparazzi. "I should thank you. Hm. I think I owe you a few."

Dav groans. "If we start keeping score, I'll—"

I don't know what he'll do, because I yank his jeans and underwear down all in one go, and kneel in the grass.

After, we're both flushed and panting, sitting in the lee of the coup. Dav is eying the empty upper windows of the house with mortification and no small amount of suspicion. I link our pinkie fingers and say, simply, honestly: "Thank you."

Dav gifts me with one of those sunrise smiles. "No, thank you. My land is what makes me a Marquess, as much as my military service. And when you saw it all yesterday, and called it good, and innovative, and clever, without realizing I did it all to yourspecification, it was the first time I've been proud of it in a very long time."

"What's not to be proud of?"

"It employs hundreds, and feeds a community, I see all that. But I also see… what it used to be. Who it used to belong to. This should be Onatah's."

"Your estate?"

"And beyond—the Dutchies of Windsor and of Toronto, Lord Hamilton’s holdings, the lot. The whole peninsula, really. From the Grand River in Upper Canada to Glenwood Lake in Dutch North America. Before… beforeus, before this terrible, all-consuming need to subjugate the world, this was the territory of Hinon the Great Thunderer, the Serpent Behind the Falls."

"What, like the Maid of the Mist?"

Dav does laugh, now. "Onatah tells me that the colonialist interpretation of Lelawala is, ah, shall we say 'sensationalized'?"

"So, what, Simcoe stole all this and gave it to you?"

"The polite term is 'to annex'," he sneers. "The fighting with the Americans wiped out or pushed off the Indigenous dragons, and the elder Simcoe was… opportunistic. I was gifted this piece of it and charged with the protection of a vitally important location against Jefferson's 'mere matter of a march'," Dav says. He scoffs an unimpressed lick of flame. "For spearheading the Presidential Mansion incident."