Chapter 21 #2
When Caz had come roaring into the terrarium, I hadn’t had time to focus on his nudity.
Now it was partially in my face. And not just his abs and his powerful quads but his cock. The same cock he had been stroking to the thought of me not half an hour ago.
Fuck.
Knowing he had gotten that hard, that desperate for me, was a powerful aphrodisiac. Now we were alone. On the top of his castle, with a beautiful view, he was naked.
Things started stirring in me that I did not want to stir. Heated desire curled its claws around my core, stoking the embers of the fires within and bringing them to life in seconds. Anxious need poured through me, livening every nerve ending as I stared at Caz.
“Caz,” I whispered.
“Yes?” he growled, looking up, his eyes glowing. His dragon was still near the surface, but there was no danger this time. Not to me.
All I saw was desire. My body was doing all the things, trying to find the weak chink in my armor, the flaw that would shatter my flailing resistance and send me to him.
“Why did you run away from me?” I asked, trying to maintain cohesive thought.
“I had to keep you safe,” he said. “My dragon was losing its mind. It wanted to kill everyone who had ever looked at you wrong, or with anything at all resembling appreciation of your body. Anyone. I would have torn the citadel down block by block. I had to leave. For everyone’s sake. My dragon is a monster.”
A monster. There was that word.
“I don’t think it is,” I said gently, stepping toward him.
“How can you say that? You saw it. It was ready to hurt you. To hurt you of all people.”
“I think you’re wrong.” I bit back a smile at his surprise. People probably didn’t tell him that often. “Your dragon could have easily hurt me. Killed me. Power wise, I’m a nobody compared to you, Caz. But it didn’t. Even the ice was just trying to scare me off. It stopped well short of me.”
“I don’t want to hurt you again.”
“Who says you hurt me?”
“Well, I …”
I shook my head, stopping him. “I’m not the one who has been hurt,” I said softly, locking eyes with him.
He didn’t flinch. Not precisely. But the very corners of his eyes and mouth did tighten. Just enough to reveal he knew what I meant.
“Turn around,” I ordered in that same gentle, quiet tone. “I want to see you.”
I was asking a big thing of him—not just to show me the scars but also to put his back to me. Dragons were predators. They hunted. Turning their back on a fellow predator was not lightly done.
But I was no predator. I was his mate. I wouldn’t hurt him. Couldn’t hurt him.
“Anna …”
I took another step forward, surprised at my brazenness. Where had this come from? Why was I the one making advances when, until now, I’d been so adamant about keeping my distance?
But in that moment, none of it mattered. Ella, Milly, the fact that I was standing across from the ice tyrant. It all vanished. There was only me, Caz, and his pain. I could do nothing more for my friends right then.
Caz, though? I could help him. I could ease his pain.
“Let me see,” I whispered, ignoring the growing thickness of his cock between his legs and the matching drive in my body. “Please.”
He shuddered as I said that and pushed gently on his shoulder at the same time. After a brief resistance, he folded, turning to show me what I had glimpsed before.
“By the orb,” I whispered, stunned.
It was so much worse up close. Lines of different sizes were visible everywhere, some thick and deep, others thin and curved, each one piled on top of the next in an endless mass of scars.
“What happened to you?”
Caz was silent for some time. “Life,” he said at last.
I reached up, tracing one of the largest, ugliest ones from his right shoulder down toward his left hip. Caz hissed in surprise but didn’t pull away.
Without thinking, I leaned in and pressed my lips to the center of his back, where so many of the lines met and passed one another, leaving only a broken, rippling mess.
He growled deeply enough that the vibrations reached my lips and spread out through my body. My nipples hardened under my shirt, but that was nothing compared to the eruption from my core, culminating in a deep throbbing need. That need pushed me toward Caz and our eventual, inevitable, mate bond.
Leaning forward, I kissed another line.
Again, Caz rumbled from the depths of his chest.
He had more scars than I could count, and my lips sought them out, one by one. I wanted to take some of the pain of them, to ease his burden.
“Anna.”
My name poured from his lips like molten lava, searing its way across my body. It sounded like it had in the shower. When he’d moaned my name as he stroked his cock to me. For me.
Just like he’d come to the terrarium for me. To my rescue. Somehow he had known I was in danger. That I needed him. And he had been there.
Never in my life had that happened. I was always the one in danger, always running. Nobody ever came. No protector appeared at the last second to thwart the bad guys. That wasn’t the life for a clippy. We didn’t have that.
But now I had Caz, and everything was different. He had given me so much and promised me a future full of much more. I just wanted to give him something back. To show my gratitude, however I could in the here and now.
“What do you need?” I whispered, running my hands down his back and feeling the muscles underneath the scars. Strength underneath the pain. “Tell me.”
He turned, towering over me, his hair falling over his ears and shoulders to frame his face as he stared down at me. His eyes were aglow with his dragon, the green the same as the mark on my chest.
His mark.
“You.”
He whispered that word, but the three letters meant something much, much bigger than they seemed.
I hadn’t expected that. We had barely kissed. So much had happened, but we had barely even hugged apart from that one time. I wanted to help him, but jumping that far, that fast?
“I …” I bit my lip. “I don’t know if I can give you that yet.”
I waited for him to get angry. To ask me why I had told him to speak up, only to shut him down. To make it my fault.
The frustration never came. It never entered his eyes.
“Not that,” he growled, leaning in closer to me.
“T-then what?” I whispered, the nearness of his presence weighing on my lungs and making it harder to talk.
“I need to taste you. To feel your lips on mine,” he said, lifting one hand to my jaw. “Here.”
I shuddered as he ran a thumb softly along my lower lip, gently pulling it down ever so slightly. His touch was warm and sensual, unusual for someone so large and raw and fierce as my Caz.
“And here.”
His other hand caressed my stomach and dipped lower, below my belt line. My lungs froze in nervous anticipation, but he stopped short of the heated button at the center of everything, dipping low but not so low as to take what had yet to be offered.
“That is what I want,” he growled, leaning in closer, his eyes locked on mine, boring deep into my soul with his stare.
“I know you can’t give me all of you. Yet.
But I crave your taste. My dragon wants more.
Pleasuring you is the only thing either of us wants, and it’s killing us to stay away. I need to know you feel it too.”
Fuck. It was so intense, being wanted that thoroughly by someone. Let alone Caz. He wasn’t shy at all about telling me what he desired. And every time, the answer was the same.
Me.
I rose up on my tiptoes and kissed him. Hard.
He growled triumphantly, snatching me from the ground and holding me tightly to his naked body as he carried me back inside, his cock pressing firmly between my legs with every step and driving me wild with lust for more of his touch. More of his kiss.
More of him.