Page 11 of Dragon Kissed

Nica went still. He was hyper-aware of all of it: the small involuntary inhale, the lift of her shoulder as her body registered his nearness, the half-second hitch in the flutter of her hand toward the missing button. She wasn’t afraid. She was aware. Her body was answering his, the way his answered hers, the pull running both directions across those six inches of cold scholarly air. And gods help him if she wasn’t feeling it too.She will be mine. I will seduce her, pleasure her, earn her trust. When it comes to claiming his mate, there is nothing a dragon will not do.

He leaned forward, set both forearms on the table, laced his fingers loosely, and said in the gentle register he’d used downstairs, “Show me what you’ve been doing here.”

She exhaled. The breath left her in a small, relieved rush, as if she’d been bracing for something she couldn’t name, and he watched the tension go out of her chest, the color rise in her cheeks. Her gloved hands settled on either side of the book — the practiced gesture of an expert. Her gaze focused on the page, and she smiled. Not the shy, embarrassed smile from the storage bay. A different one entirely, one that had nothing to do with him at all. The nerves fell away, and what remained was a woman looking at a thing she loved.

He needed her to look at him like that. Needed it more than he’d ever needed anything in his life. The knowledge arrived whole and shameless, and he didn’t bother to deny it.

Demetri.The dragon dropped to a low purr in Demetri’s head.She loves it. She loves the book. Obsesses over it. She will love us. Obsess over us the way she obsesses over the book.

Is that all you can think about? How she might obsess over the things she loves?He refused to admit he was literally just doing the same thing. One of them needed to be rational. Obviously, it wasn’t going to be the dragon—he was already hopelessly besotted.She could be colluding with the human hunters.

Demetri knew he had to remain objective. Yet he, too, saw the obsession, the awe of her gaze, in the way she leaned toward the page. He didn’t want to believe she was anything but what she seemed. Surely a woman working with hunters would not be so — so what? Beautiful? Fragile? Clumsy?Did she fall off that ladder to test our reflexes?Perhaps he should kill her, take the book, and be done. Perhaps he was a fool.

No. She is mine.

The dragon wouldn’t let him harm her even if he wished to — which he did not. What he wanted to do was taste. Touch. Claim. Make certain every dragon and creature and human man alive understood she was his. He wanted her safe and far from here. In his home. In his bed.And the fact that she is my mate does not,he reminded himself again,mean she isn’t working with my enemies.

His dragon scoffed at the very idea.A hunter would not love the book. A hunter would see evidence. Bait. A weapon. A hunter would not greet the page like an old friend. She is not pretending, Demetri. She is mine. Take her —

He cut the dragon off, which made no difference at all, because the beast simply shoved the images into his mind anyway — vivid, erotic: Nica naked and reaching for him, her hair fanned across his pillow. He set his jaw and let the images sear into memory, yet not once did he let one of them change hisexpression. She would see only what he wanted her to see. The dragon was relentless.

No.He could not leap into this blind. Pretending was the most basic skill of any operative; he had pretended to be a dozen men, had wept on cue at funerals he’d ordered himself. He could not afford to assume anything about her.

She turned her head a little to look at him, and he stopped breathing.

Six inches. Her lips were six inches from his. He could see the fine hairs near her temple, a single freckle on the slope of her cheekbone he hadn’t caught across the warehouse floor. He could smell her — soap, something floral, the chemical hint of glove powder, and beneath all of it a warm skin-scent that was simply her, that had no name in any language he knew, that the dragon was already filing away in some deep place from which it would never be erased. It would be very easy, he thought, to close those six inches. To find out if her mouth was as soft as it looked. The dragon leaned toward the thought like a hound to a scent, and Demetri held them both still by force of will.

“I don’t usually have an audience for this part,” she offered softly. “Tell me if I’m boring you.”

“You will never bore me.” He hadn’t meant to say anything so true; he’d meant it as a courtesy, and heard, with some detachment, his own voice drop half a register on the wordnever.

Her color came up another shade of pink, and she turned back to the book. “Okay,” she said, a little breathless. “Okay. So. This is — Mr.Vasiliev, I have to tell you —”

“Please. Call me Demetri.”

She swallowed hard, her gaze dropping to his mouth and climbing back to his eyes, and he catalogued every flicker of it as his cock hardened under the table.If she keeps looking at methat way she is going to end up naked and spread across her desk.

She licked her lips, shifted a fraction closer. “Demetri.” His name on her lips set him alight. She looked back to the page. “I was saying — I have to tell you up front, this is the single most extraordinary thing in the entire Crowe collection, and I am not going to be objective about it. I’ve tried. I failed. Miserably.”

“I would not want you to be objective.”

He saw the reaction because he was already obsessed with her: a small inhale, a softening at the corner of her mouth. She hadn’t expected him to answer like that.

“It’s a Russian manuscript. Hand-illuminated, vellum, pre-revolutionary script. Most cataloguers in this country would read it as Old Church Slavonic, which is wrong; it’s secular Russian using pre-1918 orthography. The letters they cut in the 1918 reform — the yat, the i-decimal, the fita — are all here. Single scribe, probably late nineteenth century by the ink. Though the imagery —” she paused “— the imagery is much older. I believe the scribe was copying an older source.”

She was a different woman when she talked about the work. In the storage bay he’d noted she was beautiful; now, watching her describe the manuscript from six inches away, he understood she was more than that. She was competent. Intelligent. He like her voice. It wasn’t girlish. When she talked about the book, her voice lowered in register, like she was sharing a secret with a friend. It was pure seduction; if she said his name in that voice he’d do anything she asked. He wanted to hear it in the dark. He wanted to hear it break.

Mine, the dragon reminded him — she already owned them both. He shut the beast away and asked his first real question. “You read it fluently?”

“I do.”

“How?” He kept it light, the way a wealthy buyer might ask — not the way a Draquonir guardian investigating the former owner’s murder would.

She didn’t flinch. “My grandmother.”

“Your grandmother taught you?”

“I started when I was six. The power was out for three days one winter, so we had to read by candlelight. After that I was hooked.” She laughed, a small, surprised laugh, as if the memory had reached up and grabbed her. “She said it was a sin to lose the old languages. So she taught me — the pre-reform letters too, because that was how she’d been taught. I didn’t know they were obsolete until I was eleven and tried to use one in Russian-language school in Richmond.”