Page 37 of Dragon Kissed

He collapsed beside her and dragged her against his chest.

For several minutes neither of them spoke. His heartbeat slowed under her ear, still too fast. The scales faded from his skin, and Nica traced the place they’d been with one fingertip — smooth skin now, no explanation, too many questions.Not tonight.His hand moved slow along her spine.

“You are unharmed?” he asked, low.

She laughed into his chest, wrung out. “Is that how you ask if it was good?”

“It was not what I asked.”

“I’m fine.” His hand tightened, gathering her closer, possessive even now. She lifted her head, and the intensity in his face made her wish she hadn’t. This had not been casual to him. He’d warned her it wouldn’t be. It was there in the raw open way he looked at her, stripped of every wall — and Nica felt her own walls rising in answer, fast and automatic, the old reflex, the drawbridge going up.

Demetri saw it. Of course he did. He touched her cheek.

“You are the only woman I will ever want,” he said.

Her chest closed. The room became too warm. And she moved away from him before she’d decided to, out of the circle of his arms, sitting up with the sheet clutched to her chest.

“That’s not something you can know,” she said.

“I know.”

“We met three days ago.”

“Yes.”

“You don’t get to say things like that after three days.”

“Why?”

Because people left. Because they died. Because every promise she’d ever believed had turned into a weapon in her chest the moment she let herself trust it.Nica looked toward the windows, where fog pressed against the glass. “I need a shower.” Demetri did not try to stop her, and that hurt more than it should have — more than if he’d fought her. She crossedthe room with the sheet wrapped around her and closed the bathroom door behind her, and only then, alone, did she let herself breathe.

On the other side of the door, something heavy struck the wall. Once. Then silence.

CHAPTER 9

Lirien: I left tea outside your door.

Lirien: He is not as composed as he appears, you know.

Nica: i don’t want to talk about it

Lirien: I know. The tea is still there.

Demetri stood naked in the center of his bedroom and listened to Nica cry in his shower. Quietly. A hitch in her breathing, water on tile, the faint drag of her palm across glass. No sobs. No words. Nothing another human would have heard through the closed door.

Demetri heard everything. The dragon heard more.

Go to her.

No.

She is hurt.

Because of us.

Because she is afraid. Of us. Of losing us.

Demetri pressed his bleeding fist to the wall. The stone had cracked where he’d struck it. The pain did nothing — pain had stopped being a thing that reached him a long time ago, andthe one ache he could not heal was on the other side of that door, muffling itself against the tile so he wouldn’t hear. He’d frightened her — not with claws, not with scales, but with words.You are the only woman I will ever want.The truth had driven her from his bed, and he should have known better. Nica carried abandonment in every defensive smile; he’d seen it from the first day, in the way she minimized hunger, made jokes when anyone noticed her, went rigid whenever tenderness lasted long enough to become dangerous. And still, with her warm and open against his chest, the taste of her still on his mouth, he’d handed her forever as though it were a gift she knew how to receive, and watched it settle over her like a sentence.