Page 60 of Dragon Kissed

“Say it is for me.”

“It’s for you,” she gasped. “Only you. God —”

He lowered his mouth.

Her cry rang through the chamber. He tasted her — heat and salt and the scent that had called him across two centuries and a burning city, the scent his dragon had filed away the instant she hit his arms and sworn never to lose — and her thighs clamped around his shoulders. He held them open with both broad hands, patient, ruthless, and licked into her slow and deep. Her hips bucked. He pinned them. He dragged the flat of his tongue up to her clit and closed his lips around it, and Nica sobbed his name and pulled his hair hard enough to hurt, and the small sting of it went straight to his cock.

“Demetri — Demetri,please—”

The dragon rumbled against her, a vibration that rolled up through her core, and she felt his mouth curve. Enjoying this. Enjoying her.

He slid one thick finger inside her. She was soaked, clenching, and he groaned into her flesh at the tight wet heat of her. He curled the finger and found the place that made her backleave the silk. Added a second. Stretched her, worked her, his mouth never leaving her clit, and Nica came apart with a scream, her whole body seizing, her heels digging into the stone, wave after wave rolling through her while he drank down every pulse and did not stop until the last tremor left her shaking.

Dragon fire rushed toward her, toward the place where his mouth still gentled her through the aftershocks. Ruby light gathered at the seam of them.

Demetri stopped it.

Nica felt the withdrawal, the sudden cold absence of something that had been about to pour into her, and her hand caught his wrist. “You’re doing it again. Holding back.”

“Until you ask.” He rose over her, his mouth wet with her, his eyes blown black and ringed in ruby.

“For the fire?”

“For everything.” He said it against her lips. “For the fire. For the bond. For the mark. For all of me. I will not take one thread of it that you have not given me freely. Ask, Nica. Or I will spend the rest of the night making you come and never once let it inside you.”

She sat up. Demetri rose with her. And Nica touched the scales that had begun to bloom across his ribs — ruby, hot, smooth under her fingertips. “Show me,” she whispered. “All of you. I want to see what I’m choosing.”

Ruby spread beneath her hand. Not a full shift — enough. Scales sweeping up his sides and over his spine, his pupils narrowing to black vertical slits, claws lengthening from his fingertips and then stopping, held, before they could become weapons against her skin. Smoke ghosted from his parted lips. He was terrifying. He was beautiful. He was hers.

She leaned in and pressed her lips to a single scale above his heart.

The dragon shuddered through the whole of him.Mine,it said, and this time she heard it clearly, a second voice layered under Demetri’s own.

Nica lifted her head. “Was that him?”

“You heard?”

“Not words.” She touched her temple. “A feeling. Like heat behind a door.”

“The bond is beginning.” His voice had gone thick. “It will open all the way when I take you. You will hear us both. There will be no more secrets between us, ever again. Are you certain, Nica? Last time I ask.”

“Then finish it.” She looked him dead in his inhuman eyes and said it clearly, so the man and the dragon and the ancient magic in the stone would all hear. “Take me. Bond me. I choose you — knowing what you are, knowing it’s forever. Now stop asking andgive it to me.”

Demetri rolled onto his back and drew her over him.

Nica straddled his hips, and the broad head of his cock nudged against her wet heat, and she reached between them and guided him, then stopped, poised over him, her hair falling around them both like a curtain. “Do we need —”

“No.” His hands flexed at her hips, careful of the claws. “There is no child unless we both will it. The bond governs conception. I would have to want it. You would have to want it.” His ruby gaze burned up at her. “Someday I will want it. Not tonight. Tonight I only want you.”

“You’ve never done this. The bond.”

“Never.” The word came out reverent and rough. “Two hundred and seventy years, Nica. I never wanted it. Never once. Not until a woman fell off a ladder into my arms and the whole of my life reorganized around her.” His hands tightened. “Only you. There has only ever been you, waiting at the end of all that time.”

“Only you,” she echoed, and she lowered herself onto him.

Heat surrounded him — slow, tight, unbearable — and Demetri’s head pressed back against the silk, the cords of his throat standing out, and he gripped the fabric on either side of him rather than her hips because his claws would cut. She sank down by inches, her breath catching at the stretch of him, the sheer thick length of him filling her by degrees, and when she was halfway she stilled, trembling.

“Look at me,” he ordered, wrecked.