Page 16 of Dragon Cursed
She turned her head and pressed her lips to his temple.
"Don't."Her voice was just as wrecked."Don't take it back.Don't youdaretake it back."
He shuddered against her, made a sound halfway between a laugh and a groan."I couldn’t take it back if I tried."His arms tightened around her."It is in me now.Youare in me now.There is no version of me that does not carry this until the day I die."
Why shouldn’t they have done that?She didn’t understand, not after what they’d just shared.
She was in him?It wasn't enough.
The fire inside her hadn’t died.It had only banked, waited for more.She wanted him again.
She rolled him over and straddled his hips.Her hands came to rest flat on his chest.His eyes widened in surprise — then darkened with renewed desire as she reached between them and guided his cock, already hard, deep inside her again.She began to ride him with a slow, deliberate rhythm that made him groan beneath her.
His hands found her hips.Not to control.To hold on.Like a man clinging to the only solid thing in a storm.
"Until I die," he rasped.His emerald gaze devoured her in the moonlight — her breasts swaying with every roll of her hips, the pendant glowing faintly between them, her hair wild around her shoulders."Look at what you do to me,a chuisle.Mine.Say it again."
"Yours."
"Again."
"Yours."
He growled and surged up beneath her, his arm banding around her waist, and the rhythm exploded into something hungrier, dirtier, slicker.
They fucked like wild animals.Again and again, under the light of the moon.In the tub.On the grass.In her bed.Each time, their bodies came together in a desperate, passionate frenzy that defied reason and logic.He took her on her back.He took her on her hands and knees with one big hand fisted possessively in her hair and the other gripping her hip hard enough to bruise.He took her against the rough stone wall of her cottage, her legs around his waist, his cock buried so deep she swore she could feel him in herthroat.He whispered things in the old language she couldn’t understand and didn’t need to.The meaning was in his voice.In his hands.In the way his magic flooded her every time he came and the way the heat of her flooded him in return, and somewhere across the long, dark hours of that night, the line between them blurred into nothing.
He was a dragon.She was — what?A one-night stand?His salvation?She didn’t know.
She only knew she couldn’t stop.Wouldn’t stop.The fact that he was a dangerous, mythical creature only made her desire spiral higher — a forbidden thrill she was powerless to resist.
5
Poppy
The first thingPoppy registered the next morning was his absence.
The space beside her in her small bed was cool.The sheets tangled and empty.She blinked against the soft morning light filtering through her cottage window, a dull ache settling low in her muscles — a pleasant reminder of the night before.
Her thighs were sore.
So was her mouth, where his teeth had caught her lip.So was the place at the curve of her shoulder where he hadn’t bitten down but hadalmost, where she could still feel the ghost of his teeth pressed to her skin.
Her dragon was gone.
She didn’t even know his name.
A flicker of disappointment went through her — sharp, unexpected, and bone-deep.He’d come to her last night; she’d lost count how many times.Each possession more desperate and overwhelming than the last.A frantic dance of need and solace under the moon.After the third time, he had carried her inside, his body a warm, heavy weight against hers, and she had fallen asleep with his arm wrapped possessively around her waist and his face buried in her hair.They slept, only to wake and start again.
She’d never felt so safe.So claimed.Socherished.
And now he was gone.
She rolled onto her side, into the hollow his body had pressed into the mattress, and breathed in.His scent still clung to the linen.Smoke and stone and something older than the sea.
Mine, something whispered in the back of her mind.
She sat up so fast the room tilted.
