“No, no,” Marci said. “Waffles are perfect, it’s…” She stopped and scrubbed furiously at her face. “I’m sorry, I’m not normally this emotional. It’s just, it’s been a really hard week for me, and you’re being really, really nice.”
Julius flinched instinctively at the word nice. Before he could hide it, though, Marci whirled back around to face him.
“I can’t accept this,” she said, holding out the phone. “The payment for my work is one thing, but the lamprey money and the phone and getting me an ID and the room and, and…” She trailed off, swiping at the tears that were still rolling down her cheeks. “Sorry,” she whispered in a shamed voice. “I don’t mean to be such a fountain, but I can’t tell you how nice it is to be clean and safe and not surrounded by cats or afraid the house is going to fall on my head. And I know you saved my life back in the sewer when you bounced that blue fireball. No one’s ever done that for me before—saved my life, I mean—but now you’ve done it twice in one night, and I don’t know how I can ever pay you back. I will, though, I swear, but I owe you so much already, and if I take this, I’ll—”
Julius’s hand landed on her shoulder, grabbing her so hard she jumped. He felt guilty immediately, but he couldn’t let her say another word. “Stop,” he said. “Please, just stop and listen. You don’t owe me anything. There is no debt between us.”
She blinked at him. “But…”
“I did this because I wanted to,” he said firmly. “Because we’re a team, and how are we supposed to work together if I can’t call you? As for the money, you earned it fair and square. You were the one who found the nest, and it was you who pointed out the lampreys had value. We wouldn’t have any money at all if you hadn’t been there, so I’m not accepting it back. If you don’t want it, you can throw it away, but you need to understand that we are even.”
Even as he said it, he knew he was being ridiculous. A human would never make such a big deal out of this, but Julius had spent his entire life watching dragons use debts as leverage to gain power over others. He’d been there numerous times himself, but always as the one on the bottom, the one being squeezed. Now, when he was finally in a position to be the indebted instead of the debtor, he wanted nothing to do with it. He’d told Justin he was through and he meant it. He didn’t even want to pretend to be a good dragon anymore, especially not if it meant holding money over Marci.
“You are my ally,” he said earnestly, filling the word with all the conviction he had so she would know just how rare such a thing was for him, and how much it meant. “Everything I do, I do because of that. Because I value your help and your company and because it makes me happy to see you happy. So please don’t ever think that you have to pay me back, because you don’t, and you never will.”
He could have said more. He could have gone on forever until he was positive she understood. But instead of being relieved by his reassurances, Marci looked like she was going to start crying again.
The sight sent Julius into a panic. His mind whirled frantically, searching for the right thing to say that would undo whatever he’d done to cause this. In the end, though, it didn’t matter, because Marci didn’t cry. She did something different, something completely unexpected.
She kissed him.
Chapter 10
If Marci hadn’t put her hands on his shoulders, Julius would have jumped out of his skin. But she held him in place, gently sliding her arms up to encircle his neck as she tilted her head, slanting her lips against his own. Her body followed, pressing against his, and Julius jumped again, because she was soft and warm and pretty and she was kissing him and…and that was as far as he got before his mind started fogging over and his hands sank down to rest on her hips of their own accord.
Vaguely, in a tiny, dusty corner of his brain that hadn’t gotten the message to shut down yet, it occurred to Julius that this was his first real kiss. Oh, he’d had a girl’s lips on his before. Thanks to Bethesda’s love of attention, the Heartstrikers weren’t exactly secret, and there were lots of humans who came to the town at the foot of his mother’s mountain in hopes of sleeping with a dragon. Julius had been jumped several times, once in his own room while he was asleep by a girl who’d wandered in after one of his sisters had sent her away. But while other dragons accepted such attentions as their due, Julius had always found the setup extremely distasteful. He had just enough pride to resent being chased after solely because he was a dragon and for absolutely no other reason. Marci, on the other hand, had no idea what he was, but she was kissing him anyway, and it was very, very nice.
Cautiously, Julius lifted his hands to her face, cradling her head as he started to kiss her back. Her breath hitched at his touch, a little gasp of pleasure and surprise that set his heart pounding wildly. Emboldened, he leaned closer, pressing his body tighter against hers as he breathed her in. Not surprisingly, Marci smelled of human and magic, but also of soap and casting chalk and deep down, the smell that was just Marci, a warm, welcoming, feminine scent enhanced by the faintest tang of tears.
He stopped cold, fingers stuttering to a halt against her skin. What was he doing? Marci was upset. She’d been crying not thirty seconds before, and now he was groping her?
At this point, the part of him that really wanted to keep going loudly reminded Julius that she’d started it, but the rest of him knew it wasn’t that simple. Marci had just lost her father and had her life turned upside down. She’d been alone, basically homeless, living off barter and whatever money she could scrounge for the last four days, and that was before he’d made her stay up all night chasing dragons. Now she was exhausted, overwhelmed, and feeling excessively grateful to him, and if Julius took advantage of that, if he took advantage of her, he would be the absolute worst user in his entire family.
That thought was the kick that finally made Julius let go. He took a full step back, snatching his hands off her face. From so far away, he had an excellent view of Marci’s dazed expression turning to confusion, then horror as she realized what had just happened.
“Oh,” she said, looking down at the carpet as her cheeks got redder and redder. “I, um, I don’t suppose you could just forget that happened? Because I’m really sorry.”
“You don’t have to apologize,” he said lamely. When she didn’t respond, he felt like kicking himself. He knew he needed to say something else, something better. Before anything came to mind, though, Marci turned away to face the window.
“I just ruined everything, didn’t I?” she whispered, biting her nails.
“You didn’t ruin anything,” he assured her quickly, but she didn’t look convinced. He ran his hand through his damp hair, scrambling to think of a way to explain his logic that wouldn’t sound like he was pitying her, but his brain was a complete blank. He was exhausted, his mind still soft and stumbling from the kiss. So with no solution in sight and Marci pulling further away by the second, Julius went with the only out he could think of: procrastination.
“Let’s just get some sleep,” he said softly. “We’ll talk about this in the morning.”
He knew that was the wrong thing to say when her shoulders stiffened, but he didn’t know the right thing, and she wasn’t looking at him. So, with no ideas left to try, he grabbed his plate off the breakfast tray and quietly went back to his room.
Back in his suite, he sat down at his own table by the window and ate his food mechanically, shoving the eggs and bacon he’d ordered for himself down as fast as he could before drawing the blackout curtains and falling face down into the huge and strangely lonely hotel bed. But tired as he was, sleep refused to come.