Page 36 of Dragon Cursed
She came again.
Slow.Cresting.A long wave that broke against his mouth as he kissed her through it.
He didn’t stop.He didn’t slow.He kept moving inside her, gentler now, working her through the orgasm and then immediately starting to build her toward the next one.She felt his hand close around her throat — firm, not frightening, his thumb stroking her pulse where it leapt against his palm — and his eyes locked on hers andheldher there, watching,watchingher, as he drove into her over and over.
"Look at me when you come for me," he said.Voice low.Dragon-rough."I want to see it.I want toseeyou."
She came on him a minute later, with his hand at her throat and his eyes burning into hers, and she didn’t look away.
She thought he might break apart watching her.
She felt his cockjerkinside her.Felt the great cursed strength of him begin to lose its rhythm.His thrusts went harder.Deeper.Less controlled.And underneath them —underneaththem — she felt somethingnew.
A heat at her hairline.
A heat at her sternum where the pendant lay glowing softly between them.
A heat along the back of her shoulders, the curve of her hips, the place where his hand still held her throat.
Fire,something inside her whispered.Dragonfire.He is going to bind you.He is going to wrap you in fire and make you his forever, and the only thing holding him back —
"No." His voice was a torn, broken thing against her ear."No,a chuisle, not without — not without youaskingme, not without youknowing—"
She didn’t understand all of what he meant.
Her body did.
Some old, deep place inside her — the place that had known his name when she woke up, the place that had known the wordDraquonirbefore he spoke it —understoodwhat he was holding back.And though her conscious mind didn’t yet have the words, her body knew that he had just refused her something for her own protection, the way he had refused her everything for her own protection from the moment they had met.
She wrapped her arms around him.She wrapped her legs around him.She pulled himdeeper.
"Then come for me," she whispered against his ear."Just come for me.The rest later.Justcome."
He came apart.
He came inside her with a sound that had all his years of grief and isolation pressed into it.A sound she felt vibrate through her own bones.His cock pulsed inside her, hot and endless, and she felt the rush of his release fill her up — felt the cold of his magic and the heat of his seed mingle into something new inside her body, something her ancestors might have had a word for.
She held him through it.
She held him through the shudder and the ragged breath and the long, broken aftermath when his body went heavy on hers and his face turned blindly into her neck, seeking the only refuge he had ever found.
For a long time they didn’t move.
His weight on her was immense and right.He didn’t pull out.His face stayed buried in the curve of her neck, breath ragged, and she felt — though she didn’t yet have the words to name it — that some part of him had broken open in a way that would never close again.
The pendant between them glowed faintly.Then dimmed.Then went still.
"You were supposed to run," he whispered into her throat.
"I know."
"Poppy —"
"I know, Alsander."
She turned her face into his hair.The smell of him — smoke and stone and ancient magic — filled her lungs, and she understood with a quiet, settled certainty that this was now the smell ofhome.
"You are not running."
