Page 35 of Dragon Cursed
She was still shaking when he finally rose up over her.
He had shed his own trousers somewhere — she didn’t remember when, she had been too far gone — and the heavy length of him hung between his thighs, thick and ready and wet at the tip.
He lined himself up at her entrance.
He stopped there.
His forehead came down to rest against hers.She could feel him trembling — the great cursed strength of him shaking like a man at the edge of a cliff — and one of his hands found hers on the furs and laced their fingers together, and the other smoothed back her sweat-damp hair from her forehead.
"Look at me," he said.
She opened her eyes.
His were green.Only green.The dragon wasinthere — she could feel it now, a coiled power thrumming under his skin, present at every point where their bodies touched — but for her he had pulled it back.What looked down at her was the man.Only the man.The man who had carried her out of the shrine.The man who had sat in the dark for hours rather than touch her without permission.The man who had stood in front of her as a beast and shown her every black thing about himself in the hopeless hope that she would run.
"I am yours," he said.The words were a raw, shattered confession."I tried not to be.Tried to protect you from myself.But I am forever yours."
"I know," she whispered.Her heart ached with a love so vast it hurt.“And I am yours.”
She lifted her hips.
He sank into her with a slow, careful inevitability that was nothing like the desperate fucking in the moss behind her cottage.
This was different.
This was homecoming.
He pushed into her inch by inch, every muscle in his body locked, and she felt every ridge and vein of him as her body opened and made space for what had always been hers.The stretch was too much and exactly enough.When he was finally seated to the hilt, deeper than she had thought a man could be, he stopped.
He held there.
For a long moment neither of them moved.
His cock throbbed inside her — a thick, hot pulse that matched her own racing heartbeat — and the cold-dark current of his magic flowed out of him into her in a steady current and she took it, felt something deep in her own bones knit itself to him in a way she didn’t yet have language for.
She felt the dark go still inside her, found nothing to feed on, then dissolve into something warm and quiet that her own body absorbed without effort.
She was the place where it stopped.
The prophecy had been right.
A small sound of wonder escaped her.
"Mo chroí."His voice was barely a breath."Mo chroí, mo chuisle, mo bheatha.It is gone.I felt it.The curse is gone.I don’t know how, but your love has saved me."
He pressed his forehead harder against hers and a single hot tear fell from his face onto her cheek, and she didn’t know which of them it had come from.
He moved over her with the long, held attention of a man who had no intention of finishing soon.Who wanted to memorize every inch of her.Who had three centuries of denial poured into every slow, deep, grinding stroke.
The firelight ran along his shoulders.Her hands tracked it.Learning the landscape of him by heart.
He whispered things into her hair.A constant stream of praise and need.She didn’t catch all of them.Some were in the language she didn’t know, ancient and melodic.Some, she thought, were prayers.Some were her name, repeated over and over, as if her name were the only word in his language that still meant anything.
He shifted.Changed the angle of his hips.A bolt of pure pleasure shot through her so sharp she cried out.
He did it again.Again.He found the rhythm that made her sob his name and he held it there, not letting her come, not yet, building her toward something that had no end.
His hand slid down her body.His thumb found the swollen bundle of nerves at the apex of her thighs and circled it in time with his deep, steady strokes.The pressure inside her built.An impossible, tightening coil of pleasure that was both agony and ecstasy.
