“You’ll like the pizza better,” Sarah stated confidently. “He puts everything on it. Anytime I have friends over for dinner, they always want Dad’s pizza.” As she continued to clear the table, Lee tried to imagine Hunter competently preparing meals for several young, chattering girls. She simply couldn’t. “I think he was a cook in another life.”

Good Lord, Lee thought, did the child already have views on reincarnation?

“The same way you were a gladiator,” Hunter said dryly.

Sarah laughed, childlike again. “Aunt Bonnie was a slave sold at an Arabian auction for thousands and thousands of drachmas.”

“Bonnie has a very fluid ego.”

With a clatter, Sarah set the cups in the sink. “I think Lenore must’ve been a princess.”

With a damp cloth in her hands, Lee looked up, not certain if she should smile.

“A medieval princess,” Sarah went on. “Like with King Arthur.”

Hunter seemed to consider the idea a moment, while he studied his daughter and the woman under discussion. “It’s a possibility. One of those delicate jeweled crowns and filmy veils would suit her.”

“And dragons.” Obviously enjoying the game, Sarah leaned back against the counter, the better to imagine Lee in a flowing pastel gown. “A knight would have to kill at least one full-grown male dragon before he could ask for her hand.”

“True enough,” Hunter murmured, thinking that dragons came in many forms.

“Dragons aren’t easy to kill.” Though she spoke lightly, Lee wondered why her stomach was quivering. It was entirely too easy to imagine herself in a great torchlit hall, with jewels winking from her hair and from the bodice of a rich silk gown.

“It’s the best way to prove valor,” Sarah told her, nibbling on a slice of green pepper she’d snitched from her father. “A princess can’t marry just anyone, you know. The king would either give her to a worthy knight, or marry her off to a neighboring prince so he could have more land with peace and prosperity.”

Incredibly, Lee pictured her father, staff in hand, decreeing that she would marry Jonathan of Willoby.

“I bet you never had to wear braces.”

Cast from one century to another in the blink of an eye, Lee merely stared. Sarah was frowning at her with the absorbed, absorbing concentration she could have inherited only from Hunter. It was all so foolish, Lee thought. Knights, princesses, dragons. For the first time, she was able to smile naturally at the slim, dark girl who was a part of the man she loved.

“Two years.”

“You did?” Interest sprang into Sarah’s solemn face. She stepped forward, obviously to get a better look at Lee’s teeth. “It worked good,” she decided. “Did you hate them?”

“Every minute.”