Dragon Lord by Kaitlyn O'Connor

of a job. The day before, she’d almost been ready to let it go. The thought had occurred to her to just walk out. She wasn’t cut out for this kind of work. She’d thought it would be easy. She knew how clean. What was complicated about that?
    But it was obviously more complicated than she’d realized. Mrs. Higgenbottom had lost her temper and if there was anything Raina had learned in the short time she’d been at the place, the woman was inclined to be unflappable.
    She supposed it didn’t really matter why Mrs. Higgenbottom was so stuffy about who got served first--undoubtedly it was some custom from where ever the men were from-- she was going to have to figure it out.
    She just wished she’d known before she’d taken the job that she was going to be expected to serve the meals. She’d never lied when she applied for a job. She would’ve told Mrs. Higgenbottom that she didn’t have any experience in waiting tables.
    Actually, she had had some--all bad. Her first working years had been spent waiting tables. She’d bounced from one restaurant to another for several years before she’d realized waiting tables was not only never going to get her anywhere, she wasn’t any damned good at it. She was too absentminded to remember everything she’d been expected to keep up with--who ordered what, what the daily special was, what sides came with this dish, etc., etc.--and then on top of that, she wasn’t the most coordinated person in the world. The first day she’d waited tables, she’d poured four tall glasses of iced tea all over two men and their dates because she couldn’t balance four glasses on a tray in the palm of her hand, and then remove one.
    Luckily for Mr. Draken and the Quints, Mrs. Higgenbottom hadn’t expected her to try to balance the tray on the palm of her hand or they would’ve been wearing their soup.
    Two meals a day, Mrs. Higgenbottom had said. They ‘broke their fast’ in the morning with a breakfast buffet-- strange way to refer to breakfast--so she didn’t have to worry about bad memory, lack of coordination, and not being able to unglue her eyes to see because she’d never been a morning person. She didn’t come fully awake until around nine or ten o’clock, and she doubted they ate breakfast that late.
    A sharp rap on the door roused her enough to sit up in bed just as Mrs. Higgenbottom opened the door. Instead of looking at her, the woman stared down her nose at the tray Raina had set outside the night before when she’d finished eating. “You will start on the front parlor this morning. It you want to eat before you get started, you should be downstairs within the next twenty minutes. Bring the tray to the kitchen.”
    Raina lay back down when the woman left.
    Twenty more minutes of sleep!
    She’d already rolled over to go back to sleep when it dawned on her that if she skipped breakfast, she was going to be starving come lunch time, and she wouldn’t get to eat until she’d served lunch.
    “Damn it!” she muttered, rolling off the bed and staggering into the bathroom.
    The shower roused her enough to open her eyes a sliver. She wasn’t much more awake, though, when she headed out of the bathroom to get dressed.
    Audric was standing at the closet, stark naked.
    That opened her eyes. It jump started her heart, too.
    She stared at him in disbelief for many moments, trying to crank her brain into gear, wondering, since it was virtually a replay of the scene the first day, if she was only dreaming it.
    “Audric?”
    He looked disconcerted. “ You were in the shower. I thought I could change before you got out,” he said with a shrug.
    “Don’t talk to me in … whatever language that is this early in the morning. I can’t handle it,” Raina said tiredly.
    Moving to her suitcase, she grabbed some clothes and went back into the bathroom to dress. Thankfully, he’d dressed and left before she got out again. She managed to wolf down a few bites of breakfast before