Page 18 of The Discount Damsel

“Thank you for clarifying.”

“First she takes my mug and my seat, then my dinner companion, and now my bed? It’s insufferable!”

The baby dragon yawned and scratched the feathered mane behind his left ear. “Can you blame her? Your bedroom’s the only clean one in the whole tower. What woman is going to deliberately choose to bed down in dust and decay when there’s a nice feather mattress and quilt to be had? She’s a princess, not a swamp hag.”

“You told her she could take any room she likes. You tell her to get out.” Bradley glared down at the dragon who wasn’t moving a muscle in the employment of rectifying this egregious error. “Now.”

“Your bedroom, your problem.” The baby dragon turned back to the treasure in his claw-foot tub. With a flick of his tufted tail, he sent a gust of wind to shut the bathroom door right in Bradley’s face.

Double the audacity!

Fists balling, it took every ounce of willpower to not bang on the door until the dragon emerged. Because, as Bradley knew full well, he wouldn’t. Nothing was more stubborn than a dragon who’d made up its mind.

With a frustrated snarl, the sorcerer apprentice stomped back up the stairs to his suite. He retrieved his book and, mindful of the tray, entered his bedroom.

Now the princess had her arms crossed over her chest. “Excuse you,” she finished from earlier.

Bradley gestured to the room as a whole. “Mine.”

Millie drew her knees up to her chest, tenting the quilt, and didn’t move. She was familiar with how pushy sorcerers could be—they thought themselves so superior to everyone because they could command a bit of magic. She’d been a fool to hope someone like him might want to befriend her. Apparently being locked up alone in a tower didn’t temper one’s arrogance as she would’ve thought.

Well, Mutineer Millie had had enough of being pushed around for one lifetime. She thrust her nose into the air in the superior way of princesses and declared, “Dirk said I could pick any room I liked.”

“Wrong.”

“What is it that pirates say? Oh, yes. Finders keepers.” It served him right for his horrible treatment of her at teatime.

In three long strides, the apprentice moved to the end of the bed. There was no footboard there, nothing but the linens to impede him from snatching her by the ankles and hauling her out his bed, out of his room, and out of his life down to the dungeons.

Millie yanked the hairpin from where it rested on the bedside table and, in her haste, knocked the sole decoration upon that table. A little wooden carving of a sailboat, polished to a dull shine from years of handling. It spun like a child’s bauble, bow chasing stern.

If it fell and broke, Bradley would well and truly lose it.

But it didn’t, and Millie whipped back towards him with her hairpin and jabbed the air between them. “Try it.”

Bradley’s father would whip him if he ever set a hand upon a woman in anger, but his father was not here right now and surely Mr. Donmarin would make an exception for such an insufferable brat as this princess. She deserved a hearty spank across her plump backside at the very least.

He set a large hand flat against the quilt.

“I’m naked under here,” she blurted. “Surely you’re not such a mannerless beast to strip a woman of her dignity, are you?”

When he reared back with an appropriate level of shock, Millie hid her smirk and burrowed down deeper into the bed. Of course she wasn’t naked, but with how her unbound hair hid the thin straps of her chemise, he’d never know. “You’re welcome to the floor.”

“Bed,” he growled.

Millie’s eyes flashed wide for only a heartbeat before her expression turned cavalier. “Fine. The bed’s big enough to share.”

Was this princess calling his bluff? Well, she would be in for a massive surprise when Bradley called her on it, right after he had his soak in his tub with his book. Propriety could pound sand—this was his bed, not a reed mat on a hard floor in a fisherman’s hut.

He slept like the dead, too, an immovable block, so when he bedded down tonight, spread-eagle, the spoiled princess would discover she lacked the strength to move him. Then she would either compromise her own reputation by remaining in bed with him or admit defeat to guard her modesty and curl up on the rug.

Pleased with his plan, Bradley sauntered into the adjoining bathroom and stopped in his tracks.

The tub was full of water. Spent water. The drain plug must’ve swirled back into position, preventing the water’s egress. His towel was off its hook, too, draped lengthwise over the rim of the tub, the hem soaking up the stagnant water. And the collection of bath oils, bubbles, and soaking salts on the adjacent ledge that he relied upon to relax and hydrate his skin after spending his days in the drying dessert? Half gone. All of them, half gone. Like that candle on the nightstand. The fact that all the bottles and jars were stoppered and more or less in their correct positions was a detail his irate brain chose to ignore.

Hells of the deep! He’d have to drain the tub, scrub it out from all the scuzz leftover from that obscene use of bath accessories, then draw another one before he could have his own soak. While it was doable, he was in for one heck of a wait time. Pumping all that water two hundred plus feet above where it wanted to be yielded only one thing: crap water pressure. (Unless it was to the kitchen sink, which made no sense at all, but Bradley was a sorcerer apprentice, not a plumber.) And no doubt the water heater was already depleted, which meant the reservoir needed refilling, reheating, and then pumping, which only would delay his relaxation time further.

The vein in his temple began to throb a tempestuous cha-cha.