Drakken #2
All four of us wore an armguard now, but none of us could command it or change its shape. Our Coldiron could shield against another Coldiron weapon, block a Coldiron blade. She’d explained as much to the others before I got back.
After the archdemon sent two Coldiron arrows toward Aelindor, arrows that would have killed my big brother if she hadn’t thrown herself into their path, she’d decided the heirs needed protecting.
She’d folded me onto that list because of the other three, most likely.
Even so, something in my chest gave an inch it hadn’t given in a long time.
The rage in her eyes hadn’t cooled. My mock charge had lit it, and it was still burning, hot enough that she was fighting not to shake with it.
Every male instinct I had wanted to drag her into my arms. The cold part of my head, the part that had kept me alive this long, told me not to make a fool of myself.
She wanted to hit me. Smash me. I could see it written in every line of her. But she kept her hands to herself, because I was her superior officer, and no one struck their better without paying for it. She didn’t curse at me for drawing on her either. Just held my eyes and kept her mouth shut.
Smart girl.
Few veteran officers could’ve held that line. A first-year cadet holding it was something else.
She was waiting me out, waiting for me to speak first. I was tempted to turn on my heel and leave her hanging, just to see the look on her face. I might be a bastard, but I wasn’t that kind of bastard. And I wasn’t done with her.
I went for the book she’d flung aside. She lunged. I was faster. It was in my hand before her fingers closed on air.
I studied the cover. Slow. Deliberate. Some bare-chested alien hunk clutching a swooning, naive woman.
To my satisfaction, her horror at me catching her reading smut curdled into mortification.
Her face went red as a struck tomato. She was the most striking thing I’d ever laid eyes on, even as she looked ready to claw a hole in the floor and vanish into it.
And that flash of helplessness only made my cock harder, granite behind my fly.
The picture slid into my head with no effort at all: shove her back against the shelf, cage her in, and when she fought me, take her mouth.
I’m a good kisser. She’d open for me. We’d go at it like a brawl, and a moan would tear loose from her throat.
My hand would map her—the heavy weight of her breasts, then down, dragging between her thighs.
She’d be wet for me. I’d yank her pants halfway down, hook her leg over my arm, and bury my cock in her dripping cunt. I’d fuck her against those shelves until the wood rattled, harder than I’d ever fucked anyone.
Shit.
I stepped back before I lost the thread between what was real and what wasn’t.
To get my head straight, I opened the book, thumbed to the middle, and read.
He fisted a hand in her hair and bent her over the desk. “Say it,” he growled, dragging her slick folds apart. “Tell me who owns this greedy cunt.”
She sobbed his name, so he drove into her to the hilt, every thick inch splitting her open, and he didn’t stop, didn’t slow, impaling her brutally over and over until she made such a hot mess. Came apart screaming around his massive cock.
I lifted my eyes from the page to her. The words did nothing for me.
Her reaction did everything. Her face couldn’t have gone any redder, and now the color had crawled to the very tips of her ears.
She’d pressed her lips into a thin line and dropped her gaze to the floor, like the tile might open and save her, and it sent another hot pulse straight to my crotch.
“It’s not what you think,” she muttered.
I tilted my head, savoring it. “And what do I think?”
Let her talk under pressure. Let her squirm. People squirming made mistakes. She’d held her tongue through three days in my interrogation cell, but back then I’d had nothing on her. Now I did.
She bit her lip. She wanted to run; I shifted, just slightly, to close off her angle of escape.
I needn’t have bothered. She held her ground and held my eyes.
I’ll give her that much: Max never lacked for nerve.
She didn’t bolt from a fight or a fear; she walked straight into it.
Respect rose in me before I could stamp it out.
I was here to put her in her place, not admire her.
“What are you even doing here?” she said, going on the attack. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were stalking me.”
“You don’t know better,” I said. I was stalking her, and now I had to dig my way out. “Look what I caught. You skipped your training to hide up here and read filth.”
“It’s not filth. It’s…romance,” she protested in her low, husky voice, and my cock strained against my pants.
“Romance?” I retorted. “Then it’s a dirty romance.” Closing the book, I held it up between us, driving it home. “Should we make an example of you in front of the whole academy, cadet? Showing them this book as well?”
It made me an asshole. I knew it and couldn’t stop. The truth was I didn’t know what to do with her, or with this gnawing, burning need she’d lit in me, so I did what I knew. I struck.
Something shifted in her eyes. She burned off the embarrassment with pure temper, like she’d seen exactly what I was doing: boxing her in, cornering her.
Her lips peeled back in a snarl. Shit, my cock ached badly. Even her fury got me going. Lucky for me the long coat hung past my thighs, because they’d gone tight as a drawn bowstring.
“Why not, sir? You’ll make that author very rich, and she’ll thank you and probably hire you as an influencer.
” She paused to let it land. “For my part, you already stripped me bare like the day I was born in front of a thousand of my fellow cadets. And I lived through the Sorting you cooked up to finish me off. What worse could you pull off, sir? Pick your poison, please. Discipline me in front of the whole academy, with a speech about how you stalked me, then drew a sword on me, trying to cut me to bits, all because I happened to pick up a romance novel on my way to do research on the four warring kingdoms.” Her chin came up, a defiant light glinting in her midnight eyes.
“By all means, read the dirty lines out of that book to every cadet in the assembly like you read to me. I challenge you, sir.”
I stared at her, knowing exactly how badly I wanted that smart mouth.
Wanted to know how it would feel wrapped around my cock.
I blinked to hide the heat pushing up behind my eyes, gone gold by now, most likely, the dragon riding that close to the surface.
He always did love a woman who’d square up to me.
A smirk got loose at the corner of my mouth before I could wrench it into a snarl.
“If I’d tried to kill you—as you said, cutting you to bits—you’d be dead,” I sneered.
“I’m flawless with every weapon ever forged.
My control is perfect.” It wasn’t a boast. Exactly one man in this fortress was better than me with a blade, and Aelindor had a century of practice on me. Nikolai? We’d land a draw.
“I was testing you, cadet. Teaching you a lesson so you stay sharp. Even behind these walls, safety is never a promise. There are still enemy agents inside them. You’re quick on your feet, I’ll give you that. Though you’ve got Coldiron doing half the work.”
And she’d handed me a piece of that Coldiron to keep me alive in case one of those edges ever came for me. But thanking people wasn’t in my nature. She was my cadet. Serving the Covenant and its heirs should be a soldier’s whole purpose; she didn’t need a medal for doing her fucking duty.
“Keep at it, cadet,” I lectured. “Don’t idle. Don’t read trash. Be diligent. Stay alert, every hour of every day.” As I realized that I’d started to repeat myself, I added a punch to conclude the business. “And don’t be a disappointment!”
I turned on my heel and left her there, seething behind me between the shelves.
If I didn’t get myself out of that room in the next breath, I couldn’t promise I wouldn’t shove her against those shelves, or drag her to the nearest desk and bend her over and fuck her right there in the stacks.
My control was hanging by a thread, which was obscene, because no other woman could ever make me lose my shit like that. Somewhere down in my bones, I believed that Max Morning carried something stronger than the deadliest charm ever cast, and it was coursing right through her fucking witch blood.