Page 81 of Dragon Cursed
He waited.He gave her exactly what she had asked for — the silence, the stillness, the long careful patience of a man who had been controlling himself for longer than she could imagine.
She lifted herself up onto her toes.She pressed her lips to his.
The kiss was slow.
It wasn’t the brutal claim of the moss outside her cottage.It wasn’t the desperate joining of the lair.It was something else.Something she didn’t have a name for — a kiss that had inside it every kiss she would never give him after tomorrow.Every kiss across breakfast tables he would never sit at.Every kiss in firelit beds that would never be theirs.Every kiss across the years that would have been their life.
She poured all of it into the press of her mouth on his.
He made a sound against her lips.A small ragged sound.He had felt the difference.He hadn’t understood it yet — but he had felt it.
His hand came up to the back of her neck.
The kiss changed.
He took it from her gently — not a wrench, not a claim, but a slow taking-over the way a stronger swimmer takes over a tired one.His tongue swept into her mouth, and she let him in, opened to him, gave him the weight of her body to hold up because her own legs were not steady.His other arm wrapped around her waist and he gathered her against him, and she was small against his chest, and she let herself be small.
She let herself be held by a man who didn’t know he was about to lose her.
A small, tortured sound escaped her.She hadn’t meant to let it out.
He heard that too.
He pulled back.His eyes searched her face in the dim light.His thumb dragged across her cheekbone and came away wet.
"Poppy."
"It's nothing."
"You are crying."
"It's nothing, Alsander.I'm —" she breathed in, breathed out — "I'm just glad we’re here.Together.I am glad to be in a small bed with you in the heart of a city my aunt loves and to have one night where no one is dying."
He looked at her a long beat.
She didn’t know what he saw.She didn’t know how she was maintaining a calm face, only knew she had to do it.If he saw through her, he would ask questions she couldn’t answer.
He bent his head and kissed the tears from her cheek instead.Then the other cheek.Then her mouth again — softer now.Tender.The kind of kiss a man gives a woman when he has decided, for reasons he cannot name, that whatever is happening tonight is something to be careful with.
His hand had found the tie of her wrap dress.
He pulled it free.
The fabric whispered down her shoulders.Pooled at her feet.Undergarments came next.She stood naked before him in the lamplight and his eyes — the fierce emerald of a deep forest — devoured her.But it was the look on his face that made her breath catch.A mixture of raw hunger and profoundtendernessthat was more potent than any touch he had ever given her.
He had looked at her this way before.
She wasn’t sure he knew he was doing it.
He sank to his knees before her.
A king at his altar.
The sight of this powerful, ancient man humbling himself sent a jolt of pure, unadulterated need through her — and underneath the need, an ache so vast it stopped her breath.He was kneeling at her body.He was kneeling at the body of the woman who would not be his by sundown tomorrow.He didn’t know.
His hands — warm and calloused — gripped her hips.He held her steady.
He looked up at her."Tell me what you want,a chuisle."
