Page 5 of Dragon Cursed
Poppy glanced back over her shoulder.
He hadn’t moved.
The wind stirred through the clearing, dragging dark strands of hair across his forehead while his gaze remained fixed on her with unnerving intensity.Something in his expression shifted.
Hardened.
The grief she’d seen there moments ago receded beneath something far more dangerous.
Predatory.
Every instinct inside her screamed at once.
Run.
2
Alsander
Alsander stoodmotionless in the clearing where his curse had imprisoned him for three hundred years and watched the small human woman disappear between the trees.
His trees.
His silence.
His tomb.
Mine.
The dragon's voice.Thunderous.Absolute.A god demanding tribute.
The word surged upward from the ancient place inside him where his dragon had slept for centuries beneath layers of pain and fury.Slept until three days ago, until this frail human woman had crossed the boundary of his forest and stirred the beast toward wakefulness.
His dragon wanted to pounce.Toclaim.To bind her to him with dragonfire and bury its face in the curve of her throat and taste the salt-sweet skin where her pulse beat hardest.To mark her as his until the stars fell from the sky.
Desire surged through him, uncontrollable and all-consuming — a primal urge that threatened to drown every shred of honor he possessed.He felt the shift beginning, the tingling in his spine that signaled the change, the prickle of scales surfacing along his forearms before he forced them back.The dragon was fighting to break free and take what he knew was his.To scoop her into his massive claws and carry her back to his lair.To lay her down on furs and seduce her with passion and lust and need until she begged him to mark her.Until shewantedthe bond.Until his dragonfire lived in her veins and her scent lived on his skin and there was no part of either of them the other hadn’t tasted.
Mine.
Alsander understood then — with the cold, sick certainty of a man hearing his own death sentence pronounced — exactly what she was to him.The knowledge slammed into him with the force of a tidal wave.His dragon, the ancient, noble beast that had shared his suffering, had found his mate.
Pain, unlike anything he’d endured before, struck his heart.
This couldn’t be happening.He was Draquonir — born of dragonfire and ancient magic, a creature capable of reducing kingdoms to ash in either form.His kind only mated once.For eternity.It was a bond of souls, a joining of life forces that transcended time and space.
No!She cannot be our true mate, Dragon.We are twice cursed.Dying.
To find his mate now, when every sunrise brought him closer to oblivion — it was the cruelest twist of fate the gods had ever devised.Worse, she was human.To the best of his knowledge, no Draquonir had ever taken a human mate.Knowledge of his kind was forbidden.Worse, should they fully bond, she couldn’t survive without him.And even if she could, he would never allow his mate to suffer the same cursed fate that trapped him in the forest.
Suddenly, Poppy’s scent reached across the clearing and wrapped him in its warmth.Sun-warmed skin.Crushed herbs.Wild rain and woodland moss.
He breathed her in, memorized her scent, and closed his eyes in torment.She was right there, so close, yet he couldn’t reach out.He knew he had to let her go, yet every step she took from him scraped against something primal inside him.
His dragon hated the distance.A low growl vibrated through his chest.
“She already knows,” he muttered hoarsely.
She was human.She had seen him shift.
