Nice Dragons Finish Last (Heartstrikers) (28 page)

“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

I
f 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.

He lay in the dark with his eyes open, trying not to listen for Marci moving on the other side of the wall, trying not to think about the possibilities that kiss opened, or how badly he’d bungled them, trying not to think at all. Unfortunately, his brain refused to shut up. Two hours later, he was still wide awake and buzzing with nervous energy. So, since sleep was clearly impossible, Julius got up, stripped off his new shirt and jeans, and dropped to floor in a plank position to set about trying to recover the ground he’d lost during seven years of hiding.

Thirty minutes later, he was panting like he’d never done a day’s work in his life. If Justin had been there, the I-told-you-so’s would have gone on for a month, but at least the lack of oxygen stopped his brain’s constant obsessing over kissing Marci.

Mostly, anyway.

***

One of the nice things about being a dragon was that, with a little food and effort, you could recover just about any amount of lost ground. It would take a lot more than one morning’s work to get his speed and endurance back to where it had been when Justin had moved out, taking all of Julius’s motivation to stay fit with him, but six hours, multiple exercises, three more calls to room service, and one power nap later, Julius was showing marked improvement.

By the time noon rolled around, he’d actually managed to get back enough speed to pull off his favorite trick of all: pouring out a full cup of water and then dropping down fast enough to catch it in the cup again before the stream hit the floor. Of course, back when he and Justin were in their prime, they’d done two cups at a time. Justin could probably do three by now, but one definitely wasn’t bad, especially considering where Julius had started, and he felt quite accomplished as he grabbed an armful of towels from the closet and set to work mopping up all the spilled water from the practice runs off the bathroom floor.

He’d started exercising as a way to get his mind off Marci. Now, though, Julius was genuinely glad he’d done it. He hadn’t thought about it in years, but for a while there, he’d actually been the fastest dragon of his age group. Even faster than Justin, who’d been the undisputed king of J clutch from the moment he’d hatched. Back then, he’d actually wondered if his speed was a sign of true talent. His mother, however, had been quick to knock him back down, pointing out (correctly) that the only reason Julius had gotten so fast was because he spent so much time running away. By that point, all of his siblings had discovered other, more subtle ways to torment him anyway, so he’d traded running for hiding, and his speed had correspondingly fallen off.

Julius didn’t feel much like hiding now. For the first time in his life, things actually seemed to be going his way. Not only had he gotten his reflexes back to a respectable level, but he was closing in on Katya. True, the trace he’d bought from his old guildmate hadn’t turned up anything yet, but it was still early for a dragon who’d gone on the run late last night. She was probably still asleep wherever she’d gone to hide. Eventually, though, she’d wake up, and the moment she used her phone to buy anything, he’d be able to find and talk to her at last. He still wasn’t sure what he was going to say, but he was absolutely certain he wouldn’t use Svena’s chain on her, and reckless as it was, that made him happier than he’d been in a long, long time. And then, of course, there was Marci.

His eyes flicked yet again to the door connecting their rooms. He’d practically memorized the woodgrain by this point, but while Julius knew for certain he’d made a mess of things earlier, he was just as sure now that he could fix it. After all, Marci was a reasonable, clever, practical human. Surely once Julius explained that he hadn’t been rejecting her when he broke their kiss, she would understand. She might even kiss him again, which was
definitely
something to look forward to.

That happy thought was enough to send his already soaring optimism through the roof. He actually started whistling as he mopped the last of the water off the tile. When he was done, he tossed his sopping towel into the bathtub and grabbed a fresh one to dry himself. He was still toweling off his hair when his phone began to ring.

It was a sign of how crazy his good mood had made him that his first guess was that it was the tracker calling in at last with Svena’s location. A hope that fizzled when he walked over to the bed where he’d tossed his phone to see Bethesda’s name shining up at him from the screen.

Fast as it had risen, his optimism took a nose drive straight through to his feet. It was such an intense reversal that, for a moment, Julius seriously considered not answering. But ignoring Bethesda was practically begging for disaster, and so, wrapping the tattered remains of his good mood around him like a blanket, he grabbed his phone and lifted it to his ear with a deep breath.

“Good morning, Mother.”

“Try afternoon,” she said, the disdain in her voice so ingrained it was almost lazy, like this was her default setting and she just couldn’t be bothered to put in the energy for anything more. “Really, Julius. Sleeping in is a luxury reserved for those of us who’ve done something with our lives.”

“Actually, I wasn’t sleeping,” he said, draping the towel over his bare shoulders. “I was working on the water glass trick. You know, the one Justin used to make me do? He reminded me last night that I’ve been slacking, and since I’m out of the mountain now, I figured I’d better get back in shape.”

There was a moment of stunned silence. “Julius,” his mother said at last, drawing his name out into something between a growl and purr. “Is this some kind of shock left over from your little adventure last night, or have you finally learned how to lie?”

“Neither, I hope,” he replied. “I just thought it was time I started taking more responsibility for myself.”

“Really?” Bethesda said, her tone loading the word with so much skepticism he was surprised it didn’t collapse. “You’ll forgive me if I have trouble believing that after the hissy-fit you threw last night, begging Ian for money and generally making a spectacle of yourself.”

Julius winced. Of course his mother had heard about that. Bethesda heard
everything
. “Yes, well.” He stopped to clear his throat. “I followed Ian’s advice and took initiative. Justin came to help, too, and together we turned things around. Now I’m just waiting for my lead to come in and, barring disaster, this Three Sisters business should be finished on time.”

He paused, holding his breath as he waited for—not a compliment, of course, since it wasn’t the end of the world—but some sort of acknowledgment of his lack of failure. He might as well have been waiting for his mother to announce she was starting a charitable institution, because all Bethesda said was, “Oh, so you’ll have everything tied up by tonight, then?”

Julius started to sweat. Like the rest of his family, he’d learned never to give his mother a deadline. The moment Bethesda had a date, it became an iron-clad requirement you were expected to meet, preferably beat, at all costs. But then, Ian had already demanded Julius find Katya today, a fact that his mother almost certainly knew, which meant this whole line of questioning was nothing but a tactic to intimidate him. It was a classic Bethesda maneuver, and the fact that he’d actually seen through it ahead of time for once made Julius feel almost confident.

“I told Ian tonight,” he said. “Therefore, I’ll have it done tonight.”

His mother chuckled, a cold, light sound. “My, my, so self-assured. Did I call the right son?”