Dragon's Honor by Mina Carter

get to her in seconds. But now that his dragon had decided she was theirs, who was going to protect her from him?
    He shook his head and carried on. The plushness of the place still astounded him even though he’d had a couple of hours to get used to it. His dragon huffed, giving the sculpture on the occasional table at the end of the corridor a covetous glance, which was out of character for the creature. Baron was not a hoarder, not like Duke, but perhaps his dragon had more expensive tastes than the magpie hoarder of his brother who liked to collect any cheap old shit.
    When he reached the door to his room, muttering from the room within made him pause, and frown. Opening his senses he could find nothing untoward, just the large mass of dry energy that indicated his brother. Pushing the door open, he stopped dead. There in the window, tangled in the drapes, was Duke. Quickly, Baron stepped inside the room and shut the door.
    “What the hell are you doing, you great idiot?” He strode across the room to untangle his stupid brother. Duke had managed to get one arm free, and started to extend his claws. “Don’t you dare! How the hell will I explain you shredding the fucking drapes, numbskull?”
    It didn’t take him long to extract his twin from the drapes, muttering the whole time. How the hell Duke got himself into crap like this, he had no clue, but he always managed to do something. As Duke stood up, smoothing his clothes down, Baron frowned. There were new scrapes on the side of Duke’s face, and a purpling bruise that looked for all the word like someone had smacked him in the mouth.
    “What happened to you?”
    “I crushed some of the pebbles and something came looking.” Duke walked past him and flopped on the bed, sprawling all over it. He folded his hands behind his head and watched Baron.
    Despite his relaxed attitude, Baron wasn’t fooled. Duke had that excited gleam in his eye that said he knew something his twin didn’t. “And?”
    Duke grinned, the expression broad and totally at odds with the injuries to his face which must have been serious to leave a mark even after a change. “It was a dragon…one like us.”
    The floor yawed beneath Baron’s feet. There were few things that could rock his world. Finding his mate, in the room down the hall, had been one of them. Another was finding out that they weren’t as alone as they’d thought they were. “How like us? A shadow dragon? Where? What did he look like?”
    “Very. Yes. Led me a right dance all over the city, then entered the old sewers west-side and bloody disappeared.” Duke answered the questions quickly and to the point, also very unlike him. “And not he… she .”
    Baron sat down heavily in the chair by the window. “She? A female dragon?”
    Duke nodded, sitting up with an eager light twinkling in his eye. “Yes, I think so. She kept herself shrouded in shadow but she felt like you do in that form, dry energy…but feminine. Not as coarse and prickly as you are. She was… glorious .”
    The sly smile started small then spread over Baron’s lips. His brother sounded smitten…which would make things so much easier when he admitted Honor was his mate, and he didn’t plan on sharing. “Glorious, is it?”
    “Uh-huh.” Duke stretched out again and yawned widely. Exhaustion was written into every line of his body, upping Baron’s estimation of the chase the female had led him on. Despite their joking words about workouts earlier, both brothers worked hard at their physical fitness. For someone, especially a female, to get away from him, she had to be good. “What are the chances huh? Both of us meeting our mates in the same day?”
    The words, falling so carelessly from his brother’s lips, took Baron aback. He’d been trying to figure out how to tell Duke about Honor, started to lay up all his arguments against how they’d always thought things would go…and now he didn’t have to.
    “You know, don’t you? She’s