“Eeoo.” Maggie looked over her shoulder at Moss. Her tail lashed. He blinked. He’d never known a creature with a lizard face could look so… dismissive.
Carol made a choking noise. “Oh… it’s okay if Moss goes swimming, though?” She looked up at him, amusement barely held back behind dancing eyes and twitching lips. “I don’t know how much of that you caught, Moss, but…”
“She doesn’t mind if I chuck myself in the big, scary ocean?”
“Prrr-eep!”
“Wow.” He crouched down in front of the little dragon. “You don’t beat around the bush about playing favorites, do you?”
He glanced up to meet Carol’s eye and share an amused look, and she was… naked.
He knew she was naked. Of course he fucking knew that. He’d kept his back to her while she undressed and listened to every piece of clothing fall to the ground, and he’d gone and pulled her out of the water, holding her in his arms. Naked. He’d been so busy listening to the ocean sing about her, he hadn’t fully registered…
He gritted his jaw. That small cave was going to getreallyawkward tonight.
12
Carol
She had her clothes on again, which felt like a step forward and a step backwards at the same time.
A step filled with an irritating amount of sand, either way.
“Prr rrr?” Maggie chirped curiously as Carol picked at her bra strap and brushed more sand off herself.
Carol sighed. “A problem you won’t have to deal with for a long time.” She paused, wincing, as though the universe might hear her and decide that was another problem she needed. Maggie spent most of her time in dragon form, and bymost, she meant ninety-nine percent.
In dragon form she was mobile, could scamper and fly to her heart’s content, and digest almost anything. If she turned back into her human baby form?
She would be the equivalent of a three-month-old human infant. And Carol’s stress meter would go so high her head might explode.
Better not to think about it.
Moss was out on the rocks. In human form. He hadn’t said anything about it, just stripped down to boxers and strode outinto the waves, like it was the obvious thing to do. Maybe it was. He’d tied his shirt to use as a bag and was filling it with shellfish. Harder to do that as an octopus. Probably.
She narrowed her eyes. The more she heard about his octopus, the less she believed it. And not only because every time he mentioned it, a flash of grief passed over his face like a cloud over the sun.
If he wasn’t an octopus shifter, what was he? And why was he hiding it from her?
“What do you think, Maggie?” she whispered. “Should I be afraid of him?”
Maggie chirruped and peered up at her, then turned and stared out to where Moss was diving in the waves. “Pree-ooo,” she whistled dismissively.
Carol snorted. “Yeah. Webothnoticed how you freaked out when I went in the water but couldn’t care less if he went in.”
And it wasn’t as though he was the only one hiding things. Her mission to reunite Maggie with her uncle was technically asecretmission. She told herself that was why she hadn’t explained any of it to Moss.
Not because she was worried the minute she started telling him the truth, she wouldn’t be able to stop.
“Pffft.” Maggie wriggled on her back, digging herself into the warm sand. Her head flopped back, then popped back up. “Eeoo?”
“Hmm?”
Golden eyes focused on hers, and an image flashed into her mind: the warmth and brightness of the sun on the sand, somehow rolled up and tucked into the shoebox Maggie kept her treasure hoard in.
“I don’t think sunlight works that way, sorry.”
Disappointment radiated from every slumping spine on Maggie’s head. She curled herself up into a ball and startedthinking about what shedidhave in her hoard box, to reassure herself.
