Page 36 of Dragon Kissed

“That does not mean I want this to end before I am inside you.” Heat swept through her at the raw need in it. She lay back. Demetri settled between her thighs, the blunt broad head of his cock pressing against her entrance, and stopped there. Every muscle in his body locked. A fine tremor ran through him. His arms braced on either side of her head, caging her, and his red eyes bored into hers.

“Nica.” Her name came out of him wrecked.

“Yes.”

“Choose.”

She understood — not the full weight of the word, not yet, but enough. She reached up and touched his face, the hard clenched jaw, the mouth she’d wanted since the storage bay. “I choose this.”

Demetri pushed inside her. Slowly.

The stretch burned, thick and deep and relentless, and Nica’s breath caught and her nails bit into his shoulders as her body opened around him inch by inch. He watched every flicker of her expression, holding himself in brutal check, feeding himself into her only as fast as she could take him. Halfway, he stopped, jaw tight, a bead of sweat sliding down his temple.

“More,” she whispered.

His eyes closed. He sank the rest of the way home, and filled her completely, seated to the root, and for one suspended heartbeat neither of them moved. She had never felt so full. So taken. So impossibly matched.

His forehead lowered to hers. His skin burned against her, and something hotter than skin moved beneath it — fire, livingheat, gathering low in him and rushing toward the place where their bodies joined, seeking her, reaching —

Demetri went rigid. “No.” The word came out like a command aimed at himself, and the heat vanished, wrenched back down. He would not give her that. Not yet. Not until she knew what she was choosing.

He drew back almost all the way and drove into her again, and Nica gasped, the bed shifting beneath them. He found a rhythm — deep, steady, controlled thrusts that dragged along every nerve she had — and his mouth moved over her throat, her breasts, the scar above her eyebrow, and everywhere he kissed her, he told her what he saw.

“Beautiful.” A thrust. “Perfect.” A thrust, angled deeper, and she cried out.

“Mine.” The word escaped him, low and guttural, and Demetri froze, and Nica’s heart kicked hard against her ribs.

His face changed — regret, hunger, fear, all at once — and he started to pull back, to take the word back the way he took everything back. She wrapped her legs around his waist and locked him inside her.

“Don’t.”

“Nica —”

“Not now.” She kissed him, hard, and whatever control remained in him broke like a snapped chain. His hand slid beneath her hip and lifted her into every thrust, faster now, harder, the headboard cracking against the wall, the room filling with the sound of skin on skin and their ragged mingled breath. Nica clawed his back, and beneath her fingers ruby scales rose through his skin — she felt them, smooth and hot and real under her nails — and Demetri buried his face against her neck, and she felt the scrape of his teeth against the join of her throat and shoulder.

Sharp. Wanting. Pressing.

Not biting. Holding back.

The restraint in it — the sheer straining effort of a creature denying itself the thing it wanted most, for her — made her clench hard around him, and he groaned into her skin, a broken, tortured sound.

“Again,” he ordered, wrecked. “Do that again.”

She tightened around him deliberately, squeezing, and his thrust broke rhythm, stuttered, and she smiled against his cheek, drunk on the power of it.

“That was not kind,” he gritted.

“You’ll survive.”

His head lifted. His red gaze bored into hers, and beneath the heat there was something else, something raw. “Will I?” The question carried far too much — two hundred years of surviving, of enduring, of outliving — and she couldn’t answer it with words, so she answered it with her body, rolling her hips to meet him.

Demetri reached between them and found her clit with his thumb — two strokes, three, tight fast circles — and the pleasure rose too fast, too high, her nails digging into his scaled shoulders.

“Demetri —”

“I have you.” The words undid her. “Let go. I have you.”

She came around him, hard enough to lose sound, her mouth open on a silent scream, her whole body clamping down on his cock in wave after wave — and Demetri followed her with a roar muffled against her throat, his body locking, his cock jerking deep inside her. Heat surged through him — a blast of fire without flame, cresting, reaching the boundary between their bodies — and stopped. He shook with the effort of holding it back, every muscle rigid, the fire straining to pour into her and finding the door shut. Then it receded, banked, denied.