Page 59 of Dragon Kissed

Her hands pushed the ruined clothing from his shoulders. He let her. Then his patience broke, and he dragged her sweater over her head and tore the fastening of her bra with a snap of his fingers — and stopped.

She stood bare before him from the waist up. Smoke on her skin. Blood at one knee. Firelight from the ruby sigils moving gold and red across her.

His.

His eyes had gone dark, the gray drowned in black, and as she watched, a thread of ruby kindled at the center of each one. His nostrils flared. His chest heaved once, hard, dragging in the scent of her.

“Last chance,” he said. His voice had dropped into a register that was more the dragon’s than the man’s, rough as gravel over stone.

“To run?”

“To remain only yourself.” He said it like a man handing her a blade and baring his own throat. “Once I have you, Nica, there is no undoing it. No taking it back. You will be mine, and I will be yours, and the whole of me — the man, the beast, all of it — will belong to you until the world ends. Be certain.”

Nica touched the center of his chest, over the heart that had beat for two and a half centuries and had never once, he’d toldher, wanted anything the way it wanted her. She felt it slam against her palm. “I will always be myself,” she said. “And I choose to be yours too.”

The dragon surged. She felt it move through him under her hand, felt the heat spike, and a word pushed through the bond that was just beginning to open between them, doubled, more rumble than voice.Ours.

Demetri removed the rest of her clothing with hands that would not stop shaking. Not hunger alone. Reverence. Two hundred and seventy years of certainty arriving inside one impossible moment, and his fingers trembled against her hips as though she were something that might vanish if he gripped her too hard. Nica stood naked beneath the ruby symbols and lifted her chin.

“Your turn.”

He had nothing left to remove; the shift had taken his clothes when the dragon rose in the hall. Her gaze dropped anyway — down the broad chest, the hard plane of his stomach, the dark hair, the heavy jut of his cock, thick and flushed and already leaking for her — and heat flooded her face despite the war thundering somewhere above them, despite the blood, despite everything.

“You’re staring,milaya,” he said. Smoke curled from between his lips as he said it. Actual smoke.

“So were you. For four days.”

“I intend to stare at you for the next several centuries.” His mouth almost curved. “Starting now.”

He lifted her — effortless, one arm beneath her thighs — and Nica wrapped her legs around his waist, and he carried her to the center of the sigil and lowered her onto the black rock. It was warm. It should have been cold and hard against her bare back, and instead it was warm, the ancient stone waking under the two of them.

“Comfortable?” he asked.

“It’s a rock.”

“I can change it.”

Silk flowed beneath her, ruby-red and soft as water, conjured out of nothing. Nica looked down at it, then up at him, one eyebrow raised. “You made that. With magic. You let me sit on industrial vinyl at the auction house for two hours.”

“I was distracted.” His gaze moved down the length of her, slow and greedy, drinking her in. “You have no idea, Nica, how badly I wanted to lay you across that little desk and make you forget the book existed.”

She laughed — breathless, wrecked already — and the sound reached every fractured place inside him and knit it.

Demetri knelt between her thighs. Nica touched his face, her thumb dragging over the sharp edge of a cheekbone. “No more hiding.”

“No more.” He turned his head and kissed the center of her palm, then her wrist, the thin blue vein there where he’d wanted his mouth since the first day. “No more walls. No more locked doors. No more holding back from you.” His eyes lifted to hers, ruby bright now. “I have held back from you every moment since you fell into my arms. Tonight I do not.”

And he set his mouth to her body and began to take her apart.

He worked down her slowly, relearning every inch of her now that she knew his name — his true name, the one two centuries of false identities had buried. His lips found the hollow of her throat, the slope of one breast. His mouth closed hot over one nipple, and Nica arched off the silk, her fingers fisting in his dark hair, a cry breaking out of her that echoed off the curved stone walls. He drew on her, tongue flat and then flicking, until the peak stood hard and aching, and then he did the same to the other, unhurried, thorough, a man who had waited long enough that he refused to rush a single second of this.

The dragon fire rose in him. She felt it — a wave of heat gathering at the base of his spine, pressing toward her.Not yet,he told it, and held it at the edge.

He kissed down her ribs. The soft plane of her belly. The sharp jut of one hipbone, where he lingered, scraping his teeth over it until she shivered. And then Nica opened her legs for him — an invitation, a choice, her own hands drawing her knees wide — and Demetri looked at her spread open and wet and flushed for him, and a sound tore out of his chest that had no human shape at all.

“Moya.” The word came ragged. Mine. “Look how ready you are. All of this. For me.”

“Demetri —”