Page 36 of The Dragon’s Good Girl

Not enough of one to make me take it back downstairs.

Chapter Seven

Margot

By the second week, breakfast has stopped feeling like homework. Thursday morning, halfway through eating, it occurs to me that I haven’t once wondered whether I’m doing it right, and I can’t decide whether that counts as progress or should worry me slightly.

My phone buzzes on the counter. Richard's name appears on the screen above a message asking if I can come in early, which would be more compelling if I weren't already expected at my desk in forty minutes.

I turn the phone facedown and finish my coffee.

Richard finds me less than an hour after I arrive.

"Margie, I need the Miles numbers pulled together for a four o'clock. Can you make that happen?"

The answer almost comes automatically. I feel it there, ready to leave my mouth before I've even considered what he's asking, but these days I'm getting better at catching it.

"The Miles deck isn't due until Wednesday. Alan pushed it back."

Richard pauses. "Did he?"

"He emailed us the other day."

"Right." He leans one hand against the edge of my desk, coffee in the other. "It might still be useful to have it today."

Normally, that would be enough to make me drop whatever I was doing and get started, even though nobody actually needs the numbers until next Wednesday. Richard would get what he wanted early, and I'd spend the rest of the afternoon trying to catch up on everything I'd pushed aside to make it happen.

I look at the presentation already open on my screen. "I'll have it ready Wednesday morning, like Alan asked."

There's a brief pause while Richard adjusts to the unfamiliar experience of me not immediately making his life easier.

Then he nods. "Okay, fine. Wednesday."

He goes back into his office.

I return to my presentation.

It takes me nearly ten minutes to realize I'm not anxious.

The first time I said no to something I would normally have agreed to, my heart hammered afterward. I spent the next hour waiting for some consequence that never came. Now Richard has asked me to rearrange my afternoon for no real reason, I've declined, and my body no longer considers this an emergency.

That should probably feel like progress.

Instead, the first thing that comes into my head is how Soren will react when I tell him.

I can already picture those gold eyes fixed on me while I tell him I followed his rules again. I know what he'll say, and some deeply inconvenient part of me is already looking forward to hearing it.

Good girl.

Heat creeps up my neck.

"Oh, shit."

"Everything okay?"

I look up to find Dan standing on the other side of my desk.

"Fine."