Page 33 of The Discount Damsel

“She’s been drinking all day! I-I mean, a few sips here and there, but frequently enough from her flask.”

Flask? Since when had this aspiring pirate procured herself a rum flask? Bradley searched her skirts for pockets and found none (such was the curse of women’s fashion) then spied the carpet bag wedged under her hip. Inside, he found the flask and cursed. It truly was only a hip flask of six-ounce capacity, hardly enough to keep a human hydrated even after multiple drainings in this desert heat.

With quick, deft movements, he unscrewed the flask and dumped the remaining water all over the princess’s head and face. She flinched, eyelids fluttering, but remained in her overheated stupor.

“I can splash her.” The dragon twirled, sucking moisture out of the dry desert air. His magic yielded about as much as the flask, which wasn’t nearly enough. “Oh, Bradley, what are we going to do?”

Bradley dropped the flask, hauled the princess into his arms, and began the climb for the kitchen.

“Fan,” he ordered, cursing himself that he couldn’t manage more detailed instructions.

But the luck dragon was an intuitive creature and flared his feathered tail tuft. He maintained a hover as he fanned the princess, his scales rippling with light as he poured his luck out for a positive outcome.

The princess wasn’t exactly light, and the tower was blasted hot, so he when he reached the kitchen, he was panting and on the verge of overheating himself. Yet he managed to ease Millie into a chair before dropping to his knees.

Normally he would never deign to look at a lady’s ankles, but certainly as a matter of survival, he could be forgiven. Finding her barefoot, he shoved her skirt up to her thighs and peeled off her silk stockings. He would’ve loosened her corset next so she could breathe more easily, but found the strings infuriating. Briskly but gently, he leaned her forward so he could get her hair off her neck. The long mane was as thick as a carpet, each silky strand soaked with sweat. Where was her blasted hairpin?

The princess’s forehead slumped against his shoulder, head lolling to the side. At another time, in another life, he could’ve sworn those lips pressing softly against his neck were giving him a kiss. His whole body shuddered, an ache he had buried long ago igniting.

Flushing, he twisted and coiled her hair into a bun and leaned her back against the chair far, far away from him. He couldn’t afford any distractions, not even that faint smell of jasmine lingering in the air, teasing his senses.

“Wouldn’t she cool off faster if she was naked?” Dirk asked.

Flushing, Bradley jerked away from the princess. “Fan,” he told Dirk again, and the little luck dragon added more oomph to the sweeping of his tail.

“Are you okay?” Dirk panicked. “You sounded really choked up there. You need to be okay. I can’t take care of both of you at once. I’m not a human caretaker—I’m just a baby dragon!”

“Calm.”

“Okay, okay,” he sniffled, fanning even harder. “Why aren’t we using ice?”

“Too cold too fast,” were all the signs Bradley chose to explain himself with before he grabbed the bean pot from the dish drainer.

He set it under the faucet to fill then snatched the coffee pot, as there was no lemonade pitcher to be found. Bradley hurried around the kitchen on an electrolyte scavenger hunt, added a fistful of salt from the barrel, the juice of two oranges, and—“Don’t ruin my sculpture! Take from the base!” Dirk cried—a large lump of brown sugar to the coffee pot. Water dissolved the salt and sugar and diluted it all to a palatable level of salinity. The bean pot was full of water now, so he dumped it over the princess’s head.

She came awake with a sputtering start.

Millie rocked forward, catching herself before she could fall out of the chair, and wiped the water from her face. It took only a second to assess the state of her skirts, her stockings, and her shoes.

“You scoundrel,” she shrieked.

Bradley rolled his eyes.

“Master Dirk, as I have yet to acquire a cutlass, I demand you retrieve me my hairpin. One prick is as good as another!”

The baby dragon didn’t budge from his hover. “You were burning up and he was doing everything he could to cool you down without getting you naked!”

Millie’s hand flew to the pearls at her throat, flicked her gaze towards the sorcerer apprentice. He was flushed, his mop of dark curls like a damp halo about his head, robe a-wrinkle. Fog from exertion was actively dissipating from his spectacles like mist from a morning-warmed sea.

She’s never been in the arms of a man before, and she’d certainly never been carried anywhere after the age of two. Her mother has insisted she learn the proper way to walk as soon as she could toddle, and that meant no more riding on her papa’s shoulders.

So, nearly eighteen years later, she was wholly unprepared for the host of emotions racing like greyhounds along the track of her veins. The apprentice had carried her halfway up the tower. She knew she wasn’t a waif; Lady Belinda, one of Rosamund’s snooty ladies-in-waiting, had never lost an opportunity, real or fabricated, to comment about the roundness of Millie’s hips as a cautionary tale to the younger princess. So the man had to be very strong and coordinated indeed, and that set her mind buzzing with curiosity as to what Bradley Donmarin had been before a sorcerer apprentice.

Curiosity was a dangerous thing for her, for the more she explored the object of her curiosity, the more she grew to enjoy its secrets and layers and nuances. Which would be most inconvenient with the sorcerer apprentice because they were very much at war.

So Millie looked away and folded her hands in her lap so she wouldn’t be caught fidgeting. “Well, um, thank you.”

The sorcerer apprentice was rubbing a spot on his neck when she conveyed her gratitude, and somehow her words seemed to draw attention to the action, for he yanked his hand away as if the spot had burned him. More rosy than before, he seized a cup, poured out a measure of the orange juice mixture, and set it on the table next to her. Bradley had chosen to use Dirk’s teacup this time instead of the Lip Cutter, but only this one time. “Drink.”