Page 16 of Dragon Kissed

He groaned against her mouth, wrecked. “So wet,” he murmured. “All of this. For me. Only me.” His teeth grazed her lower lip. “Say it is only ever me.”

“Only you.” The words spilled out of her, helpless. “God, only you —”

She couldn’t say more. She could only arch into his hand, and he gave her exactly what she needed — two thick fingers parting her, gliding through the slickness, sinking into her with a slow, knowing curl while the heel of his palm ground against her clit with a pressure her own hand had never once managed alone in the dark. He stroked her like he’d been made for it, like he’d spent centuries learning the exact rhythm her body wanted before it knew to ask. The heat built and built, coiling tighter with every pass of his hand, and through all of it his mouth neverleft hers, swallowing every gasp, every whimper, every broken plea.

That’s it,the doubled voice rumbled into her, felt more than heard.Let me feel it. Give it to me. Come apart on my hand, and know it is mine that took you there.

The coil drew so tight it had nowhere left to go.

She broke on a silent cry into his mouth, her whole body clenching around his fingers, the pleasure rolling through her in long, pulsing, endless waves — and he did not stop, wringing every last shudder out of her, his forehead against hers, his red eyes burning into her own while he murmured something low and reverent in a language she didn’t know, the words rough with a hunger that felt older than the city she slept in.

The fire in him rose. She felt it gather where his hand still cupped her, a heat that wanted to pour into her, to mark her, to make the dream true —

She woke gasping.

Her body was on fire, her core still pulsing from the orgasm the dream had given her, her thighs slick, her nipples tight and aching against the sheets. The taste of smoke lingered on her tongue. The phantom of his hand still burned between her legs, and low in her belly something pulled toward him — toward a man across a bridge she’d met for two hours, a stranger with impossible eyes — a pull that had no business being that strong, that felt less like wanting and more like beingcalled.

It was official. She was losing her damn mind.

Nica rolled over and punched her pillow in frustration, her heart still racing, her body still humming for a man who wasn’t there. Sleep was a long time coming.

CHAPTER 6

Margaret: are you at the estate

Nica: there’s a private road. and iron gates. and no house numbers

Nica: also a butler who looks like a shampoo ad

Margaret: photograph the manuscript binding before you do anything else

Nica: margaret i think something is very wrong here

Margaret: photograph the binding, Veronica

The house did not look like a prison.

Nica decided, as the black SUV climbed the last curve through the fog, that this was probably the point. Real cages didn’t announce themselves. They came with warm light behind tall windows, and a man who carried your suitcases, and a voice that saidyou are safe nowin a register your whole body wanted to believe.

She had a smear of someone else’s blood drying brown on the cuff of her good blouse, and she could not stop seeing the knife.

It had been lying on her pillow. Not dropped, not forgotten — placed, centered, the point aimed at the headboard, on a bed whose mattress had been opened corner to corner with something very sharp. Her drawers pulled out and overturned. Her books swept to the floor. The broken lock on her own front door had still been swinging when Demetri stepped past her into the wreckage, gone so still she’d felt the temperature in the room drop. He’d looked at the knife for exactly one second, then turned to the two men who’d appeared from nowhere behind him and said, in a voice with no heat in it at all, “Find them.” Both men left without asking a single question.

She hadn’t seen the rest clearly, and that was the part that frightened her now — not the violence but the gaps in it. There had been more men in the stairwell. A sound she had no word for, a crack and a roar of displaced air. Demetri putting his body between her and the dark, and a blade catching the bad hallway light, and blood — his blood, a great deal of it, soaking through the shoulder of his shirt — and then his hand pressed flat over the wound, and then, somehow, no wound at all by the time he’d folded her into this SUV.

Human bodies don’t do that.She knew it the way she knew her own name. She’d been telling herself a great many comforting, threadbare things for the last twenty minutes, and that was the one that would not stick.

Now she sat beside him with her bag at her feet and her laptop clutched against her ribs, and the fog moved between cypress trunks twisted by a century of Pacific wind, and somewhere below them the waves struck rock with a deep, steady violence she felt through the floor of the car. He’d offered to have someone pack the rest of her things; she’d declined. He’d offered a hotel; she’d asked whether the hotel would be safe — and he’d only looked at her, which had been answer enough. And under all of it, threaded through the fear like a wire she couldn’tcut, was the fact ofhimbeside her in the dark of the car: the heat coming off him across the seat, the cedar-and-scorched-air scent of him that her body had decided meantsafeeven while her mind was still filing him underdangerous.She hated that her nerves and her wanting had gotten so tangled she couldn’t pull them apart.

Out of habit, because her hands needed something to do, she reached for the pendant at her throat. She didn’t realize she was touching it until she realized he’d gone still in the seat beside her.

Alarm drew her hand back down to her lap. He looked away, out at the road, and when he spoke his voice was soft, as though afraid of startling her. “May I ask about your necklace?”

She glanced down. The pendant had slipped free of her collar, the cobalt and cream bright even in the gray light.

“It was my grandmother’s.” For now, that was all she was willing to give him.

“I mean the maker. I recognize the enamelwork.”