Hope and joy flared in his eyes. He tilted her head back, and pressed his lips to hers.
“My mate,” he whispered.
She expected to spend the rest of the day in a fluster of uncertainty and arousal. Instead, as she turned over rooms at the bed-and-breakfast and reset Mrs. H’s passwords again after she got herself locked out of all her accounts, she felt … calm. At ease.
Safe.
Even when she thought of Corin waiting for her to get off work, she didn’t feel the usual tremors. No anxiety. No cliff’s-edge panic that she might lose her balance and fall, or throw herself over the edge. She’d already done her time falling. Now she had her feet on the ground, and Corin was there with her.
Waiting for her.
She kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. She wasn’t like this. Her brain wasn’t like this. It didn’t look at things that were surface-level going well and thinkAh, job done, time to stop worrying.It dug down until it found the inevitable problem, then got busy fixing that.
Maybe things weren’t just surface-level going well. Maybe things were … good?
That couldn’t be right.
Okay, they still had to find out who had stolen the treasures from the Blackburn hoard. She should probably be concerned about that. And she was! But it was a job-worry, she realized as she ironed sheets and folded them for storage. Like worrying that a new hire was struggling, or suspecting that thecatering company wasn’t going to be able to fulfill her detailed requirements. It wasn’t a personal-worry. It didn’t cut into her heart the way thinking about Corin used to.
Thinking about Corin now didn’t hurt. It was the best sort of daydream.
Then her mom rang.
She stared down at the call notification.Talking to my mom is not the worst thing in the world,she reminded herself. After all, she’d talked to Corin’s mom.
For longer than she’d talked to her own mom anytime recently.
She swallowed a lump in her throat. “Hi, Mom!”
“Maya!” Her mom sounded relieved. “You’re sounding well. And how is my favorite grandson? He must have grown so much since I saw you all last.”
Maya grimaced. “He’s at his daycare. If you want to call back around six, we can do a video chat before his bedtime?”
“Oh, well, yes, I can call back then too, of course.” Gabriela paused; the sort of pause that Maya knew very well meant the conversation had a long way to go. “But maybe it’s a good thing I’ve caught you while you have a moment to yourself! We can talk just the two of us. There are a few things—well…”
Her voice faltered, and guilt beat down on Maya’s shoulders. How long had it been since she and her mom had sat and talked? Her job had taken up so much of her time since college. When she had Tomás, her mom had been her rock. They’d started figuring out how to be in each other’s lives again, as mom-and-abuela and daughter-who’s-a-mom-now-too.
Then Tomás had turned into a dragon for the first time, and that had been the end of that. No more grandma-grandson hangouts without Maya dangling anxiously over them, ready to whisk Tomás away at the first hint of scales.
And then Maya had moved them both hundreds of miles away.
Her chest twisted, and she took a deep breath. “I’ve got time to talk now, if you like?”
“Really? I’m not interrupting you?”
“I’m at work, but … not busy.” Not doing anything that required more than a fraction of her brain, at least. “We’ve got a full house at the moment, but they’re behaving themselves.”
“Nobody snuck their dogs into the rooms this time?”
Maya bit her lip. Her mom remembered that? It had been her first week of the job: a family of chow chow shifters. Dad and two kids. The kids had been so excited for their vacation to somewhere they could be in animal form, they’d spent practically the whole trip in puppy form.
And had shedeverywhere.
From the way the dad had looked as he sorta-kinda apologized, Maya had suspected he timed the vacation for their shedding specifically so his own home wouldn’t be full of big, fluffy drifts of chow-chow hair.
She’d been so annoyed about having to clean up after them that she’d complained to her mom—an edited version of what happened, where the guy had smuggled in his pets instead of letting his kids run wild. And her mom had remembered?
“Um, no, no one’s smuggled in their pets this time. But it’s still a whole lot of laundry and breakfast stuff to keep on top of.”
