Page 85 of Dragon Cursed
She could see the green-silver light of it through her closed eyelids.
He drove into her one last time.He shuddered.He came inside her with a roar that tore from the deepest place in his chest, and the fire poured out of him with the last of his release, and she felt the whole vast weight of him pour into her at once — body, magic, soul, fire, every particle of him dragged into her on the wave of his orgasm.
She came on him a heartbeat later.
A blinding white flash sent her arching off the bed, her body locked around his, her cry muffled against his throat.The fire and the orgasm and the bond all crested together, and she felt — for a single suspended moment — that she could see herself from outside her own body.A small woman on a brass bed in a Dublin guest room.A great cursed dragon coming apart inside her.A pendant blazing between them.A binding settling into her bones.
A binding that would hold past death.
He collapsed against her.
His body heavy.Trembling.His face turned blindly into her neck.His cock still pulsing inside her with the last of his release.
The fire receded.Slowly.Leaving a warm, humming glow in its wake — under her skin, in her hair, behind her eyes.The room was quiet again, save for the sound of their ragged breathing and the distant cry of a night bird.
For a long time neither of them spoke.
She held him.
She held him with her arms locked around his back, with her legs still wrapped around his waist, with her face pressed into his hair, and she didn’t let go because letting go was exactly what she would have to do tomorrow and she couldn’t bear to start practicing now.
His breath was warm against her throat.
His weight was the right weight.The exact right weight.The weight of the only thing that had ever fit her body the way she had been built to be fit.
"A chuisle."
"Hmm."
"What just happened?"
"You bound me."
"Yes."His voice was very low."I bound you.I have bound you in dragonfire.There is no breaking it now.Every Draquonir who lives or has ever lived would know you for mine in a single breath.Mine.Forever."
"Yes."
"My dragon says it took deeper than it should have."
She didn’t answer.
She didn’t have an answer.She thought it must be the magic she carried — Mairin's piece in her blood."It's me," she whispered."I think it's the line.The magic Mairin gave us.The pendant."
"Perhaps."
"It is."
"Perhaps,mo chroí."
He didn’t sound convinced.He didn’t press.He pressed his face deeper into her throat instead and breathed her in — long, shuddering breaths, like a man who had decided to memorize her by smell because he might not get to memorize her any other way ever again.
She held him.
She held him while the lamp burned down in its dish.
She held him through the slow soft hour after, when his cock slipped from her body but he hadn’t let her go — when the fire-glow in her bones had quieted to a steady warm hum, when his breathing had slowed almost to sleep, when the only sounds in the room were his breath and her breath and the small sounds of an old Dublin house settling into its night.
She didn’t let herself sleep.
