Page 11 of Dragon Cursed
His gaze locked on her, a physical hunger that gnawed at his insides.
She reached for the hem of her simple linen dress and pulled it over her head in one smooth motion.
The firelight caught her, painted her skin in gold and shadow, and Alsander forgot how to breathe.
She was perfect.
A masterpiece of life and vitality his cursed eyes had no right to behold.The gentle curve of her hips.The soft, full swell of her breasts, tipped with rose-pink nipples that drew tight in the cool evening air.The graceful line of her neck — exactly the line where a dragon's mate should bear his mark.Each detail seared into his memory.A beautiful, agonizing torture.
Mine.
The dragon's voice.Low.Hungry.Patient as stone.
Look at her.Look at what is ours.Look at what you keep telling yourself we cannot have.
Alsander watched, mesmerized, as she sank into the steaming water.A soft sigh of contentment escaped her lips, and his cock jerked beneath the rough black trousers his magic had woven for him.The sight of her — naked, wet, vulnerable,unguarded— was a torment beyond any the curse had devised.
He imagined himself in that water with her.His hands sliding up her thighs beneath the surface.Her head tipped back against his shoulder.Her gasps catching in the steam as he slipped two fingers between her legs and discovered her slick and ready for him, the way he knew with absolute certainty she would be.
His fingers gripped the branch above him with such force, the wood split.
He was a beast.A voyeur.A monster crouched in the dark watching a woman bathe.
He couldn’t look away.
He was starving and she a feast.
And then he saw it.
Nestled between her breasts, resting against her pale, wet skin, was a pendant.
A simple thing — a single uncut emerald, rough-hewn and unpolished.But it was the setting that made the blood freeze in his veins.Silver, intricately woven, shaped into the unmistakable spiral of a dragon's coiled tail.
He knew that pendant.
He had held it in his own hands three centuries ago.He had placed it around the neck of his sister, Mairin, the divine feminine dragon that carried the goddess in her blood, Banríon na Síol,Queen of Seeds, on the day she died.The day she made her final stand against Laoch na Corraí,The Warrior of Decay.The emerald was hers.A sacred relic, a conduit of her power, lost to the decay of her fallen forest.Lost to the decay of her fallen forest, lost to history, lost tohim—
And it was hanging around the neck of a wet, naked human female who was bathing in herbs and humming to herself like a child.
Rage, cold and absolute, obliterated desire.For the first time in centuries, man and dragon were in complete accord.A tidal wave of fury washed away every shred of control, every thought of honor and restraint.His sister's relic.His sister's relic.Worn by this mortal as if it were a common trinket.
He didn’t remember moving.
One moment he was in the tree.The next, he stood beside the tub, water sloshing violently from the force of his arrival, and the dragon was so close to the surface, his breath churned with fiery sparks and smoke in the cool evening air.
Poppy shrieked.She scrambled to cover herself, eyes wide with shock and terror.
Alsander saw none of it.
His gaze was fixed on the pendant.On the blasphemous sight of it resting against her perfect skin.
His hand shot out — fingers like iron — and wrapped around her upper arm.He hauled her from the tub.Her naked, wet body slid against his clothes.
The scent of herbs and her own sweet, female fragrance flooded his senses.He paid no mind to her struggles, to the cry of distress that escaped her lips.He backed her against the rough stone wall of her cottage, his body a cage of fury.
"Where did you get this pendant?"
His voice was a low growl.A dangerous rumble that vibrated through his chest and into hers.He reached out with his other hand, fingers closing around the emerald — the metal cold as ice against his cursed skin.
