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“Nah. They’ll stay in there now. They won’t bother anyone.”
“They could eat people or bite them or sting them with those jellyfish tentacles. Their stings really hurt.”
His head whipped around, dark hair moving, and he looked down at her. “Did one of those jerks sting you?”
“While I was running.” She lifted her trouser leg, revealing an angry burn that wrapped her ankle and up her shin. When the air hit the wound, worse pain lanced into her muscles and skin. Red lines were spreading from the edges into her surrounding flesh. “It’ll be okay, though. Right?”
“Jeez, Bethany.” He whipped her up into his strong arms again and carried her over to a tall sculpture in the shade of the casino, setting her down on the wall around it. “Let me see.”
“It’s fine. I’ll call my friend Willow. She can whip up a potion to heal that.” Assuming Willow’s potion worked like it was supposed to, rather than turn Bethany’s foot into an enormous raven’s claw.Again.
Math sat beside her and lifted her leg in his hands, carefully peeling her pant leg back to expose the raw flesh.
Bethany leaned back on her hands, balancing because he was holding her leg in the air. “Um, don’t touch it, okay? It kind of hurts.”
He glanced at her out of the corners of his eyes. “Dragons don’t have much magic other than the shifting thing, but there are a few things we can do.”
Yeah, she’d heard the stories. They were specific and explicit. “Oh? Like what?”
Still gazing into her eyes, Math lifted her leg to his lips and kissed her ankle.
Good thing Bethany had shaved her legs that morning. Otherwise, Math would’ve gotten a mouthful of shin bristle.
Soothing energy flowed over her skin and sank into her flesh. The wound rippled and closed, healing with clean, new skin and only the faintest of scars.
She said, “That feels so much better. You’re a healer?”
“Not with anything else. Sea serpents are a type of dragon. I can neutralize their venom.”
He examined her leg as the skin healed, watching it turn pink and smooth. A few faint lines marked where the wound had been.
One lash near her knee had formed an open sore.
He rolled her trouser leg up farther, lifted her leg, and brushed his lips over that spot, the skin up by her knee, on the inside of her leg, where her skin was maybe two inches from being classified as her thigh.
He opened his eyes and looked at her, his lips still almost caressing the inside of her thigh.
Bethany held his gaze, her lips open, and she couldn’t think of a word to say, certainly nothing likeStoporDon’t.Those words seemed to have entirely fled from her vocabulary.
Math raised his head, still staring into her eyes. His irises were about half sparkling gold.
His lips were still an inch from her knee.
The wound was gone.
She didn’t say a word, even though they were sitting out in the middle of a courtyard in the shadow of an enormous casino, just a dozen yards from where a crowd was rushing by on the Las Vegas Strip.
Math finally shook his head a little and lowered her leg. “I suppose I can put this down now.”
“Yep, it seems to be entirely healed. We could probably stand up, if we wanted to, and go do something else. Probably. If we wanted to.”Dammit,she was blathering.
“Yes, that would probably be the best option. I have meetings scheduled, and you probably have an agenda to see to.”
“Yeah, that’s what should probably happen. We should go to our meetings and agendas.” Her prattle made no sense. She should stop talking.
Math hadn’t let go of her ankle, and she hadn’t pulled away.
He ran his fingers up her calf, sending shivers farther up her leg. “It feels better now, right?”
