I shrugged. “Maybe.”
Honestly, I couldn’t tell you if I left a mess in the bottom of my coffee cup or not. I barely ever finished the coffee.
Normally, I would get my fill on cookies and put the cup into the sink. It was rare if I ever finished it.
Even rarer if I ever washed it.
“Is it that hard for you to rinse it out once you dump it?” she asked.
I shrugged.
“I pay you to clean up after me. Why would I bother to do something so menial as that?”
She narrowed her eyes at me.
“Did you just call my profession menial?” she asked carefully.
“No,” I said, standing up and taking one last sip of my coffee before I dumped it into the sink and sat the cup in the basin. “I’m calling me doing it menial. I have a hundred other things I need to be doing every morning, and rinsing my cup out is menial compared to the other things I have to do. Such as go see why the fuck Keifer’s been calling me all morning.”
She narrowed her eyes.
“It takes, literally, five seconds of your time to rinse the cup,” she said, picking the cup up, rinsing it, and then placing it back in the sink. “It takes about ten seconds longer to place it in the dishwasher, or even better, to fucking wash it and set it out to dry in the drying rack.”
I shrugged.
She narrowed her eyes.
“You’re not expecting me to continue cleaning, are you?” she asked.
I stopped my forward progress to the door and turned.
“If you don’t, someone else will have to come clean,” I told her honestly. “So that’s completely up to you.”
She threw her hands up in the air in exasperation.
I turned before she could see the smile that overtook my face and started walking.
I’d nearly made it to the door when a thought occurred to me.
“You really want to come with me?” I asked as an afterthought.
Something came and went over her face, and she shrugged.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
I smiled.
“To the sanctuary,” I said.***“This is like that place on Jurassic Park, where they kept all those birds,” she said.
“The aviary?” I guessed.
She nodded.
“There’s a shield surrounding the sanctuary that protects it from view, satellite and human alike,” I explained, taking my own quick glance around.
Seeing it through her eyes, I could see where she got that from.
The entire place looked like it had a glass dome over it, and although it allowed anything that was supposed to be there to pass easily through it, anything that wasn’t didn’t get the same pass.
The grounds were large and sprawling.
There was about thirty manicured acres that the house—and I say house loosely because it was more of a mansion on steroids—sat on. On the backside of the house, there was a large pool that any of the dragon riders were free to use if they so wished it.
And then there were the dragons.
They were anywhere and everywhere.
Wherever they wanted to be, they were.
“But, I can see it,” she interrupted my contemplation of the grounds.
I nodded. “You and I share a bond.”
My explanation obviously distressed her.
Her mouth thinned. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
She fingered the handprint at her throat, and I found myself doing the same.
“We’re going to have to talk about it sometime,” I told her none too gently.
She shrugged.
“Then, when the time comes, we’ll talk. My nap wasn’t long enough to process this situation. So, for now, we’re not going to talk about it. Got it?” she stated.
“Oh, snap,” the thick Cajun voice belonging to Jean Luc, bawled. “She’s feisty.”
“Doesn’t matter if she’s feisty. She’s an outsider. What’s she doing here?” Derek, Keifer’s adviser and another dragon rider, growled.
We both turned at the same time, and Derek, as well as Jean Luc, inhaled sharply.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out that they’d seen the handprints on both of our throats, causing the two of them to make the connection.
“Oh, mon loup. You’re so screwed,” Jean Luc said succulently.
I ignored the both of them and grabbed Wink’s hand and urged her through the door.
“Are you sure I’m allowed in here?” she asked worriedly. “They didn’t look too happy to see me.”
“If you weren’t allowed in here, you wouldn’t have made it through the shield,” I muttered.
She yanked on my hand and I stopped, turning to look at her in exasperation.
“You’re telling me I could’ve not made it through?” she asked.
I shrugged.
“If you weren’t supposed to be here. But you’re with me, so you are,” I said, not understanding why she was getting so upset.
“I think you need to tell me about this bond,” she said suddenly.
I sighed.
“When we get back to my place later tonight, we’ll talk,” I promised her.
“And where’s your dragon, if you are actually a dragon rider?” she challenged.