Forbidden Honor (Dragon Royals #1)(45)

I understood how he felt. “Sometimes people tell you lies about yourself, and you know they’re lies and yet… part of you still believes them. No matter how much you try to keep their poison from seeping into your skin.”

“What lies do you believe, Honor?”

He’d let down his guard with me and it touched my heart. But I wasn’t ready to offer him the same vulnerability. “Hmm. That Branok and Lynx will continue to kick my ass?”

His lips quirked, although his gaze was still shadowed by sadness. “Not if I can help it. Go on and shift. I don’t shield flames as well as a dragon, but I can do it well enough to keep from turning to toast.”

I backed up, giving myself space to grow. He nodded encouragingly at me as he set down my sheathed sword and drew his own.

A moment later, I lurched a step in the unfamiliar huge body, catching myself with claws that scraped the ground.

Caldren smiled at me and urged me closer, his sword in one hand. As soon as my head swung toward him, he leapt onto my back. I tried to shake him off half-heartedly, but he finally pestered me into a true fight, whacking me with his sword and generally acting like an asshole. Apparently, his true self wasn’t that different from the dragon royals.

I finally turned around and snapped at him. He leapt free, transforming into the wolf in midair. A snarling dark gray wolf, larger than any I’d ever seen in a zoo, lunged for my throat. I slammed my horns into him, knocking him halfway across the yard.

The two of us sparred back and forth. Finally, I trapped him against the ground with my snout, little curls of smoke rising around us both.

He shifted back, grinned up at me. “Good girl.”

Caldren put his hand on my snout, scratched my head beneath my horns. It felt good, and his eyes lit up when the two of us were this close. “You’re going to destroy the dragon royals,” he murmured, giving me a pat.

In my dragon form, the words barely registered.

But the rest of the day, I kept coming back to those words.

Destroy…as in, embarrass in the yard?

Or did he mean something else?





Honor



That night, I frantically mopped the floor of one of the classrooms, already late to see Head and late to dinner in the banquet hall.

A tingle ran up my skin as if someone were watching me, and I looked up to find Jaik stalking toward me.

“Watch out, it’s slippery,” I called.

“I’m not afraid of slippery,” he scoffed, kicking my mop bucket out of his way. Soapy water flooded across the hardwood floor.

I looked from it up at him, and maybe anger flared in my eyes, because he seemed to pause for a millisecond before he started toward me again.

“Why are you like this?” I demanded. “Do you want to mop?”

I offered him the mop. But Jaik knocked it out of my hands, and it clattered to the floor.

I stared at him, thinking I was about to knock out the nation’s greatest hero and the heir apparent to the kingdom, and that was going to be hard to explain.

But the next second he grabbed my shoulders, pushing me against the wall, and his lips met mine. I was so startled I couldn’t breathe. His hands were hard on my body but his lips were tender.

His scent—that faint smokiness that clung to his skin even when he was in human form—washed over me, and my traitorous hips swayed toward him. My hand stroked up the fine material of his shirt, felt the hard angles of his chest and his heart beating wildly. By the time my palm reached his shoulder, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to push him away or fist the material and yank him closer.

Then I thought of the dismissive way Talisyn had spoken of the girls who tried to get their attention.

I shoved Jaik away, and he stumbled, confusion flooding his face.

He was confused? I was the only one who had a right to be confused at the moment.

“What was that?” I demanded.

He took a step back, his expression suddenly cool, and shrugged.

“No,” I said. “You can’t come along, ruin my handiwork and kiss me like that, and then think that we’re not going to have a conversation afterwards.”

“I can do what I want.”

“In many ways,” I said, “and thanks for that reminder that you’re a spoiled-rotten prince and not exactly lover material.”

His eyes widened, then his nostrils flared, his lips parting.

I slapped my hand over his beautiful mouth. “You can do what you want, but you can’t do anything you want to me and then expect that I’m going to shut up and take it.”

He grabbed my wrist and yanked it away from his lips. I thought he might slip his boot around my foot and drop me to my knees like he had Lucien, he looked so furious. But he folded his hand around mine, his chest rising and falling. The two of us were tethered together, and I didn’t understand why.

“I just wanted to kiss you,” he said.

“Why?”

His frown deepened. “Why?”

“Why? I’m nothing to you. I’m a maid.”

“I never said that.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Did someone say that to you?” He somehow looked even more angry. “That you were nothing?”

He didn’t need to be furious on my behalf. I was pretty sure there were more serious injustices I’d like to point his attention to, as the future king. My hurt feelings were nothing.