“Keeley.”
“She can sense them, too. Because they’re part of her…” He frowned. “Hoard?”
“Right. Did I not warn you about that? Be careful, or she might decide you belong to her, and that she gets to put you in a little box with the rest of her treasures.”
Moss snorted. “Small chance of that, I reckon, the way she threw me to the fishes earlier.”
Maggie made a small, dismissive noise, and he laughed outright. “We’re distracting ourselves from the important thing here,” he announced.
Carol nodded. Now that she knew for sure Lance and Keeley were still alive, and what direction to find them, it was even more important that she swim to find them, without letting Maggie see and freaking her out more.
But before that…
“Food?” Carol suggested, and Maggie’s eyes opened wide.
“Food,” Moss agreed.
13
Moss
Raw mussels.
He was a chef with so many prizes under his belt, he could pile them up in a hoard and sit on them like a dragon, and he was reduced to serving his materaw mussels.
With nothing to cook them over and no knife to shuck them, the meal was more seagull frenzy than haute cuisine. He and Carol experimented with smashing the mussels on rocks, and smashing rocks onto the mussels, and Maggie became an expert in darting in to snaffle up the meat from the shattered shells before either of the adults got a look in.
The few morsels the baby dragon deigned to let them eat were delicious. And gritty with pieces of broken shell. And half-smushed from being pounded with stones—not in a carpaccio way; in a hit-with-a-rock way. And…
Food was hisjob.He was meant to begoodat it.
Carol caught him looking. Staring? Scowling? He rallied his expression, but it was too late.
She put a hand to her mouth. “Sorry. Was I…?” She trailed off, her face turning pinched.
Fuck.
She was still trapped partially shifted. Her teeth sent a guilty, delicious thrill through him every time he glimpsed them—it must be weird as hell, trying to eat through a mouth that was suddenly a different shape inside.
“It’s nothing you did,” he reassured her. “It’s what I didn’t do. Cook.”
She kept her mouth covered, but her expression relaxed. “I’m not complaining. Neither’s Maggie.”
“I’ll complain enough for the three of us, then.”
Carol laughed. A weight seemed to have lifted from her since they figured out they knew the same people. If he let himself think about the number of near-misses they must have had—the chances there had been that they might have met before now, before the kraken took hold of his soul…
He shook his head. If he started down that hole, he’d never escape it.
Carol was happy. He would be grateful for that, for as long as he was around to bask in it.
“I don’t know what you would do about it, though. Unless you’re hiding a lighter in your pocket with your keys and flashlight?”
“I’d hope that if I did, I would have remembered it by now. Bit embarrassing if I didn’t.” He stripped the beard off another mussel, cracked it open and downed it while Maggie’s back was turned. The shellfish was sweet and chewy, and still salty from the sea. It was delicious.
But was this all he was going to offer her? Lunch and dinner and however long they stayed here, meal after meal of raw shellfish? She’d have a better feast shifting into shark form and hunting out her own food.
He had so little time to live up to what a mate should be, and so far he was doing a shit job.
