19. Maya

19

Maya

My world.

She’d bared her heart to him, and he’d accepted her, taking all her broken pieces and holding them together like the most precious of gifts.

“To be clear,” she began, her words seeming to come from a long way away, “you—”

“I love you, Maya Flores.” His voice was mock-stern, a teasing echo of the arrogant face he always showed the world. But there was still a sliver of uncertainty in it. Perhaps the first she’d ever heard. “Will you allow that?”

Would she allow him to love her?

“What sort of question is that?”

“The most important.” He waited, a huge, dark crow of a man, hesitant and stiff, as though she could possibly give him any answer except yes, yes, yes.

“I’ve always loved you,” she told him. “I didn’t know it, before. I didn’t know what it meant. But now I do, and it makes me love you even more. And—”

Here they were again, back at what she wanted .

“I want us to figure this out. All of it. Together.”

Hope and joy flared in his eyes. He tilted her head back, and pressed his lips to hers.

“My mate,” he whispered.

She expected to spend the rest of the day in a fluster of uncertainty and arousal. Instead, as she turned over rooms at the bed-and-breakfast and reset Mrs. H’s passwords again after she got herself locked out of all her accounts, she felt … calm. At ease.

Safe.

Even when she thought of Corin waiting for her to get off work, she didn’t feel the usual tremors. No anxiety. No cliff’s-edge panic that she might lose her balance and fall, or throw herself over the edge. She’d already done her time falling. Now she had her feet on the ground, and Corin was there with her.

Waiting for her.

She kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. She wasn’t like this. Her brain wasn’t like this. It didn’t look at things that were surface-level going well and think Ah, job done, time to stop worrying. It dug down until it found the inevitable problem, then got busy fixing that.

Maybe things weren’t just surface-level going well. Maybe things were … good?

That couldn’t be right.

Okay, they still had to find out who had stolen the treasures from the Blackburn hoard. She should probably be concerned about that. And she was! But it was a job-worry, she realized as she ironed sheets and folded them for storage. Like worrying that a new hire was struggling, or suspecting that the catering company wasn’t going to be able to fulfill her detailed requirements. It wasn’t a personal-worry. It didn’t cut into her heart the way thinking about Corin used to.

Thinking about Corin now didn’t hurt. It was the best sort of daydream.

Then her mom rang.

She stared down at the call notification. Talking to my mom is not the worst thing in the world , she reminded herself. After all, she’d talked to Corin’s mom.

For longer than she’d talked to her own mom anytime recently.

She swallowed a lump in her throat. “Hi, Mom!”

“Maya!” Her mom sounded relieved. “You’re sounding well. And how is my favorite grandson? He must have grown so much since I saw you all last.”

Maya grimaced. “He’s at his daycare. If you want to call back around six, we can do a video chat before his bedtime?”

“Oh, well, yes, I can call back then too, of course.” Gabriela paused; the sort of pause that Maya knew very well meant the conversation had a long way to go. “But maybe it’s a good thing I’ve caught you while you have a moment to yourself! We can talk just the two of us. There are a few things—well…”

Her voice faltered, and guilt beat down on Maya’s shoulders. How long had it been since she and her mom had sat and talked? Her job had taken up so much of her time since college. When she had Tomás, her mom had been her rock. They’d started figuring out how to be in each other’s lives again, as mom-and-abuela and daughter-who’s-a-mom-now-too.

Then Tomás had turned into a dragon for the first time, and that had been the end of that. No more grandma-grandson hangouts without Maya dangling anxiously over them, ready to whisk Tomás away at the first hint of scales.

And then Maya had moved them both hundreds of miles away.

Her chest twisted, and she took a deep breath. “I’ve got time to talk now, if you like?”

“Really? I’m not interrupting you?”

“I’m at work, but … not busy.” Not doing anything that required more than a fraction of her brain, at least. “We’ve got a full house at the moment, but they’re behaving themselves.”

“Nobody snuck their dogs into the rooms this time?”

Maya bit her lip. Her mom remembered that? It had been her first week of the job: a family of chow chow shifters. Dad and two kids. The kids had been so excited for their vacation to somewhere they could be in animal form, they’d spent practically the whole trip in puppy form.

And had shed everywhere.

From the way the dad had looked as he sorta-kinda apologized, Maya had suspected he timed the vacation for their shedding specifically so his own home wouldn’t be full of big, fluffy drifts of chow-chow hair.

She’d been so annoyed about having to clean up after them that she’d complained to her mom—an edited version of what happened, where the guy had smuggled in his pets instead of letting his kids run wild. And her mom had remembered?

“Um, no, no one’s smuggled in their pets this time. But it’s still a whole lot of laundry and breakfast stuff to keep on top of.”

“Still like a vacation compared to working for that Mr. Blackburn?”

“…Yeah. Way easier. I have so much more time for Tomás.” That was the excuse she’d given for why they’d moved so far away. Lower cost of living, shorter working hours.

“Well, I’m very happy for you. Maybe I’ll be able to come visit you soon! My job is—well, that’s one of the things I wanted to talk about. I might be taking some extended leave soon.”

“Extended leave? Are they cutting your hours again?”

“No, no, it’s for—personal leave, let’s say…”

“Is it a health thing?!” Maya swallowed as panic made her voice go shrill. “Mom—”

“No, no, it’s not a doctor thing. It’s…” She sucked in a breath through her teeth. “You know how everyone is doing these DNA things these days, finding all their secret half-siblings or all sorts of things their families have been hiding?”

Is she going to suggest I do one for Tomás? Her jaw clenched. Her mom had never said anything about Tomás’s mystery father. “I’ve heard of them, yeah.”

“And, well…”

Maya frowned. What had got her mom so worked up that she was forcing herself to talk about something embarrassing, instead of the normal Flores household activity of completely ignoring difficult conversations?

Gabriela heaved a breath. “You know my parents never went back over the border after they immigrated, and then—when I met your father, and we moved so far away, and there were never many opportunities to go back, especially after your father passed away. There are a lot of … gaps. And I don’t know if all this DNA stuff is a good idea, you know, sending it who knows where, but some of my friends from my evening classes, they’ve been finding things online! It’s amazing, the things that have been digitized.”

“You’re looking into our family history?”

It was like her mom had opened a door that had been kept locked so long, she’d given up wondering what was behind it. Almost her whole life, it had only been Maya and her mom. Her father had passed away when she was too young to remember. And there had never been enough money or enough time to go and find the aunts and uncles and grandparents who lived states away, let alone a whole country away.

And … they’d never talked about it.

For the first time, Maya wondered whether the reason her mom never reached out to the family she’d left behind was because she felt so guilty about moving her life away from them. The same way Maya felt guilty about the way she’d left her. And as the years went on, it got harder and harder to rebuild that bridge.

She swallowed. “If you’re thinking you might go visit them, I’d love to—I mean, if I can make it work…” Her stomach sank. “It would be difficult, but…”

“No! No, not visit, I don’t think traveling is a very good idea right now, but…”

They both collapsed into awkward silence. Maya’s heart twisted. If her mom was going to travel to meet family, she would love to come with her—but that meant traveling with Tomás. A toddler who could turn into a dragon.

In public.

On a plane.

In a city where she knew nobody, in front of family she’d never met. In front of her mom, who she’d hidden so much from.

Tears prickled behind her eyes.

“Anyway, I have to come and see you first!” her mom said, overly cheerful. “Maybe next weekend? Or the next few weeks?”

“Oh—” She stopped herself before she could say No! “I’d—I’d like that. Once—once things have settled down.”

Which might as well mean never.

“And I can tell you about the other thing then,” her mom decided, and said goodbye so quickly Maya barely had time to worry what the other thing was.

The conversation nagged at her for the rest of the day. She felt worse than she would have if she’d ignored the call, which had to be some sort of horrible first.

But at the end of the day, when she had picked up Tomás from his carer, Corin was waiting for her outside her front door.

Her heart thudded like she was a teenager. Not that teenaged Maya had ever imagined having someone like Corin in her life. Even the non-dragon version. Her dreams had been thoroughly within the bounds of what she’d thought reality was back then. Good grades. A good job.

A breathtakingly handsome man who could turn into a dragon? Hadn’t featured.

“Hello,” she said, coolly as she could. Corin’s eyes burned into hers. He smiled as she approached, but—oh. Something was pissing him off. “I can’t leave you alone for ten minutes, can I?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Uh-huh.” She unlocked the door and Tomás practically flew out of her arms. He tottered a bit, seemed to remember he could actually fly after all, shifted, and whirled up the stairs.

Corin glanced after him. “He’s checking his hoard.”

“Well, a big, scary dragon was waiting outside his front door. He needs to make sure it’s all safe.” She hung her bag on the hook inside the door and beckoned Corin in. “What’s got you in such a mood, anyway?”

“What mood?” he growled.

She snorted and gestured the length of his body, ending with his face. He was trying hard, but there was still the trace of a scowl at the corners of his mouth. “This one. Bad day?”

“I had an exceptionally productive day, as it happens.”

“That bad, huh?”

“How can you—” He relented, his whole body softening. “Yes. A bad day. What’s the old saying? When the cat’s away, the mice will get themselves thrown out of the most exclusive nightclub in the country, and run shirtless around the financial district as a chaser.”

“Only shirtless? The Dans must be losing their touch.”

“And now they’ve vanished off the face of the earth, which probably means they’re hiding in their duskfire, destroying more of their usual haunts. They’re…” He growled wordlessly.

“Hold that thought.” She slipped her arm into his and tugged him into the house. “We have a whole evening of talking business ahead of us.”

“I didn’t come here to talk business. ” This time, the growl in his voice was an entirely different flavor. A shiver of anticipation zipped up Maya’s spine.

“But before that, we have what is, I’m sorry to say, probably at least most of an evening spent wrestling a tiny dragon shifter through dinner, a bath, and bedtime. I hope you’re ready for this.”

“I can say with absolute confidence that I am not.” He straightened his shoulders. “But I intend to be a part of your life, Miss Flores. And that means I will be a part of your son’s life, as well. I told you. You don’t have to do this alone anymore.”

She couldn’t find the words to reply. “You—”

“I want to be part of your family, Maya. If you will let me.”

Her breath rushed out, taking with it a tension she hadn’t known was still clenched in her shoulders until it was gone. “The three of us?”

“You’re a package deal, Maya. Tomás is your child. I will care for him as though he were my own.”

She had a chance to be happy now. Time to grab it with both hands.

“As though he were your own, huh? Does that include wiping more food off the ceiling? Because if so, I have great news for you.”

Corin braced himself as though they were heading for battle, not dinner. “Lead on. I’m ready.”