Chapter Seventeen
MARIUS
“Not a good idea,” I barked, first at Mina, then at Roux. “Do you know how dangerous this could be?”
Roux opened his mouth, but Mina stuck up a hand. “Don’t even start.”
“Dammit, Bene…” I growled as I followed Mina out of the room.
“How is this my fault? I was just brainstorming.”
“Brain-farting is more like it,” Henrik — the only one of us who found any of this amusing — quipped.
Chairs scraped the floor, shouts broke out, and Mina came stomping back in.
“Oh no, you don’t. Not anywhere near my grandmother’s china, dammit!”
Bene and Henrik paused, though they kept their hands on each other’s throats. Bene looked around.
“China?”
She pointed to a single teacup and saucer on a sideboard. “China.”
I was starting to suspect she’d placed pieces of her grandmother’s vast collection in strategic locations to have an excuse for sending us outside to fight.
“Take it outside, dammit,” she boomed loud enough to make the china shake. Then she spun around and marched away.
I fell into step behind her. Well, I tried. But she quickly opened a gap on me, flying down the hallway in huge, angry strides that said Leave me the fuck alone.
And boy, did she mean it, because she kept that up all the way down the hallway and up the far stairs.
Spiral stairs, my dragon hummed happily. Perfect place to kiss.
A perfect place to chew me out was more like it, given her pissy mood. But fool that I was, I rushed after her anyway.
“Hey!” I ducked when she ambushed me at the top with a wild, angry look.
“Stop following me!”
“I will when you start listening.” And, crap. The words came out half snarled.
Not the way to woo our mate, my dragon snipped.
She might be my mate, but this was not about wooing her. This was about keeping her safe.
“How about you listen?” she growled. “I make up my own mind. I decide what I will and will not do.”
I opened my mouth to argue — to tell her she didn’t get it, that she underestimated the danger — but she jabbed a finger into my chest hard enough to make me take a step back.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t much stair left to step onto.
“So when I say—” she started.
I lurched, flailed, and grabbed for the doorway but got Mina instead.
Her eyes went wide as we toppled over. I pictured us crashing from wall to wall, around and around, all the way down to the ground floor.
Clenching every muscle in my body, I dragged us to one side while Mina grabbed the edge of the doorway. My back smacked into the curved stone wall, and Mina smacked into my front.
Oof. I winced.
On the bright side, we hadn’t tumbled down the stairwell.
Also on the bright side, my hands landed on her hips, and she stayed nice and close.
“Whoa. Are you hurt?” Mina asked an inch away from my lips.
“Yes,” I gritted, touching my ribs. “See what happens when you don’t listen?”
“See what happens when you recklessly chase me up a damn staircase?”
“Reckless?”
“Reckless.” Her face was so close, our noses almost brushed.
There was a long, charged beat. Her chest heaved against mine and her eyes blazed, glowing like the blue heart of a fire.
She’d make a great dragon, my inner beast whispered.
She would, and I could make her one if she accepted me as her mate.
Dangerous fantasies filled my mind. Fantasies I’d never entertained before but desperately wanted now.
Now and forever, my dragon agreed.
Mina glanced over her shoulder. “Good thing I caught you before you fell.”
I scoffed. “I caught you.”
“Sure. Right. That explains why I’m on top.”
And, whoosh. Her word choice woke the wrong part of my brain — the part with a hotline to my cock.
“No, you’re there thanks to these.” I brought her hand to my stomach. “I believe they’re called abs.”
She snorted but didn’t remove her hand. She kept it right where it was, nice and warm and teasing.
“So refreshing to find a guy who’s not full of himself.”
I shrugged. “How else should I put it?”
“You could try agile as a cat.”
I grimaced. “Agile as a dragon.”
She chuckled. “Making you jealous, am I?”
“You want Bene? You can have him. Or Roux, for all I care.” I said, lying through my teeth. If she so much as looked at either of them, I would kill them — in or outside the house, grandma’s china be damned.
Her eyes made another orbit. “I don’t want Bene. Or Roux.”
Silence ensued — heavy silence, punctuated only by our panting breaths — making me hyperaware of her warm hand, resting comfortably on my ribs. Ribs that felt a lot better now, though the ache hadn’t disappeared. It had just migrated south, where my cock swelled against my jeans.
“Who do you want, then?” I whispered.
She moved her lips, and I braced myself for her retort.
Wrong way to brace myself, as it turned out. Because a split second later, she covered my mouth in a deep, bruising kiss.
A-plus answer, my dragon hummed.
I kissed back just as hard in a furious, messy clash.
Destiny, my dragon crooned, though my brain was running on two cylinders, at best. Not a good time to analyze whether this was destiny, pure chance, or plain old lust.
Destiny, an earthy voice grumbled in my mind.
Her hands fisted, crushed, and released my shirt — only to repeat the cycle all over again. I inhaled her rose-and-lilac scent while doing a little fisting and crushing of my own.
When I pushed my hips against hers, she gasped against my mouth. I caught that sound and swallowed it, deepening the kiss until her fingers dug into my shoulders.
I broke away. “You want me to stop?”
“Absolutely not,” she panted, diving straight into another kiss.
My inner dragon roared in approval, and my last shreds of control tumbled away in the hurricane Mina unleashed.
We’d been tiptoeing around each other long enough. Pretending we didn’t have chemistry, when the truth was, we had enough to blow the roof off a research facility.
The stone wall at my back was cool, but her body was a wall of heat, pressing against my chest. My stomach. My hips…
We broke off for air and ended up staring into each other’s eyes.
“You still mad?” I murmured, my lips moving against hers.
“Furious,” she whispered.
I chuckled, a low, rumbly sound that made her shiver. Sliding her arms behind my neck, she pulled me into a deep, hungry kiss. I leaned forward greedily. Too greedily, because we teetered on the edge of the stairs again.
She clutched at me. “Oh! Watch out.”
Nice of her to think I was capable of such a thing, given the haze that had taken over my mind. Especially now, with her scent curling around me, spiced with sweet frustration.
“Hang on,” I ordered. Without waiting for an answer, I hustled her up the stairs and into the safety of the upper hallway.
Relative safety, I decided when we crashed into a bookshelf. Paperbacks rained down, bumping off my shoulders and onto the floor. Better that than grandma’s china, though.
“Sorry,” I murmured.
“You will be if you stop now,” Mina growled, spearing her fingers through my hair.
Good thing I had no such plan. Hell, everything about this was improv and instinct. I was operating by the seat of my pants.
Speaking of which… my dragon hinted.
I lifted her, prompting a muffled squeak, though she didn’t break the kiss. I carried her down the hall, hunting for the nearest flat surface. She wrapped her legs around my waist, making me groan with need.
The east wing of the house was a mirror of the west wing, and her bedroom called to me like a beacon. But this was a fucking chateau, not a house, and that hallway stretched endlessly. One by one, portraits of her ancestors blurred by, and I felt the disapproving gaze of each.
Young people these days, I practically heard them scold.
Like they’d never careened down these hallways in a lust-blinded rush.
We passed four…five…six portraits and a haughty, Greek-style bust. Another four portraits separated us from the El Dorado of her room in the distance.
I groaned. What I wouldn’t do to trade this chateau for a bungalow.
“Tired already?” Mina teased, hanging on to me like a baby baboon.
I shook my head. “It’s not the weight. It’s the wait.”
She chuckled, angling her head to one side. “Well, there is the floor. The wall…”
“The hallway, carrying every sound to the assholes downstairs…”
She groaned, burying her face in my neck. God, that felt good.
But, shit. Wrong thing to say, because a moment later, she gulped and loosened her legs.
“Put me down,” she ordered.
My heart stopped. My cock groaned. A thousand emotions — want, need, shattered hopes — hammered in my head as I dipped and loosened my grip on her side.
“On second thought…” She clamped her legs back around me, and I held her tight.
Her face was so close, my eyes nearly crossed. She studied me, looking through my eyes and into my soul.
Can I trust you? Will you hurt me? Will this change things?
My heart cracked at the questions I sensed zipping through her mind — and at a world that forced women to consider such things more than men did.
It hurt, too, because I’d had those questions aimed my way so many times. Can I trust you? Will you hurt me?
Yes, dammit. I could be trusted. And, no — of course, I wouldn’t hurt her.
Yet the same unspoken interrogation came up every fucking time.
Renegade dragons like me drew women like moths to a flame.
But once a woman ventured close — if she ever worked up the nerve to — fear set in, delivering a cold, hard slap to my soul.
If she didn’t trust me, how could I trust her? Had she been teasing me all along, when I hadn’t been teasing at all?
But my heart ached for Mina as much as my body did, so I hung on.
“Made up your mind yet?” I finally asked, doing my best to hide desperately thin hopes.
Her eyes softened, and she cupped my face gently.
“Yes.” Her lips brushed against mine, then pressed in harder. “Yes…” she murmured, turning the whisper into a plea. “Yes…”
Time and space blurred, and the next thing I knew, we were falling into her bed. Desperately touching, tasting, stripping each other bare. Consuming each other.
“Oh…” Her breath hitched when I left her mouth to migrate south. I lashed my tongue against her breast, then nipped the straining bud.
She groaned, guiding me from left to right.
Eventually, I slipped away, zigzagging the edge of my jaw down her smooth skin. Lower and lower until—
She gasped, then groaned as the first, tender touches of my tongue turned to deep, hungry licks.
A damn good thing we’d closed the door, because the sounds we made…
My dragon preened. We…
The haziest, furthest corner of my soul registered that. Not me, not she. We.
Every time I moved, Mina moved too, bucking, surging, heaving. Every time I gasped for air, she did too. We were that in tune, that perfect together. More perfect than I’d felt with anyone.
Listening, my dragon hummed. The key is to listen.
As in me listening to her — the opposite of what I’d demanded back at the stairs. What, where, how did she like it best? I tuned in to the quaver in her voice, the tension in her body, the tenor of each shaky breath.
My tongue and fingers brought her higher and higher until—
She gasped, shuddered, then arched sharply against me. “Yes!”
Her cry hung in the air, and her body tensed for a good minute. Then she went limp, except for her heaving chest. I snuggled in beside her, holding her close.
“Oh. My. God,” she whispered between breaths.
My cheeks stretched in a huge grin despite the ache in my groin.
“Good?” I asked as casually as I could.
“Very…er…very…” She waved vaguely, searching for words. “Very good.”
I propped myself on an elbow and smoothed back the strand of hair stuck on a corner of her mouth.
“Just good?”
She stuck a finger against the middle of my chest. “Don’t let this go to your head.” Then her eyes took on a sly sheen, and she slipped a hand around my stiff shaft. “Plus, I’m saving amazing for later.”
“Later?” What started as a growl turned into a choked stutter.
“Maybe sooner than later.” She grinned, running her hand up, then down as she rolled onto her back.
My brain didn’t play any part in how quickly my body followed her cue. It just happened, and a short time later—
I slid into her hot, tight sheath, and my dragon’s roar thundered through my mind. Mine. Mine. Mine!