Chapter 4
P oppy
Alsander’s mouth branded hers.
A brutal, desperate claim that stole the air from her lungs.
One moment Poppy stood naked, wet, and terrified — hauled from her bath by a furious mythical creature. The next, her body betrayed her. It melted against his. Her hands fisted in the rough fabric of his tunic, and she kissed him back with a ferocity that shocked her.
A dragon. A dragon had followed her home.
A dragon was kissing her now.
The thought screamed through her mind, a frantic warning bell drowned out by the roar in her blood. This was insane. Dangerous. Every instinct for self-preservation she had told her to shove him away, to run, to scream for help.
But she couldn’t. She didn’t want to.
The villagers in Cuanfirth had always kept their distance, their smiles tinged with a wary respect that bordered on fear. They’d whispered that her grandmother's magic was too strong, that Poppy was too strange.
The only lover she'd ever had was from another village. A man who didn't know who she was. Who her family was. A man who had enjoyed her body but never bothered to learn anything about her.
No one had ever touched her like this.
No one had wanted her with such raw, desperate intensity.
It was a drug, and she was instantly, hopelessly addicted.
His kiss was all fury and possession. But underneath it, she tasted a loneliness that mirrored her own. She recognized the flavor — the hollow ache she had carried in her own soul for as long as she could remember.
She wanted more. She wanted to soothe that lonely ache. To banish it forever.
Her hands, which had clutched his shirt, moved with a will of their own. They tore at the fabric, fingers clumsy with urgency. She needed his skin. She needed to feel the heat of him against her, to know this was real.
He groaned into her mouth — a deep, guttural sound that vibrated through her entire body — as her hands finally found the hard, hot plane of his chest. His skin was velvet over steel, and the touch sent a fresh wave of liquid heat between her thighs.
Her fingers curled around hard, hot muscle.
" A chuisle.” The word was a ragged accusation. "You are a fever in my blood."
She didn't know what the word meant.
The way he said it made her wet .
Before she could answer, he swept her into his arms. Her back met the soft, damp carpet of moss and heather behind her cottage, the cool night air a shocking contrast to the fire of his skin.
He loomed over her — a predator in the moonlight, his expression a mask of raw hunger and a struggle for control he was clearly losing. The danger was a palpable thing, a thrum in the air that should have sent her fleeing. Instead, it made her heart hammer with a wild, primal excitement.
He was a myth. A legend. A beast of nightmare and fantasy.
A dragon.
And he was hers, if only for this moment.
His gaze traveled down her body — lingering on her breasts, her stomach, the curve of her hips, the dark thatch of curls between her thighs. The look was so possessive, so full of raw need, that it made her arch up toward him. An offering she could no more resist than the beating of her own heart.
" Beautiful. " He breathed the word. A reverent curse. "I have lived three centuries and seen nothing like you. Nothing. "
His voice broke on the last word.
Then he lowered his head, and his mouth was on her breast. His tongue swirled around the hardened peak before he sucked it deep into the heat of his mouth. A cry tore from her throat. Her hands flew to his hair, fingers tangled in the dark, silken strands.
He worshipped her body with his mouth and his hands, his touch both reverent and demanding.
He traced the lines of her stomach with his tongue.
Nipped at the sensitive skin of her inner thighs — sharp little bites that made her gasp and arch and beg without words.
His every touch stoked the fire inside her into an inferno.
His teeth scraped the soft skin where her thigh met her hip.
His growl vibrated through her, straight to her core — a sound more dragon than man — and pleasure crashed through her in a sudden wave, fierce enough to arch her spine.
Every nerve lit at once, the tremor rolling through her again and again until she could hardly tell where her body ended and the shaking began.
" Mine. "
He said it against her skin.
She didn't think he knew he had said it out loud.
And then his mouth was on the most intimate part of her.
His tongue delved into her folds with a practiced expertise that made her eyes roll back in her head.
She lost all coherent thought. There was only sensation.
His tongue stroked. His lips sucked. His teeth scraped — gently, gently — against her sensitive flesh.
He made a sound against her, a low rumble of pure male satisfaction that zapped every nerve ending she had.
The pressure built. An impossible, tightening coil of pleasure that was both agony and ecstasy. Her hips bucked against his face. Her body strained, sought a release she couldn’t name but desperately needed.
"Look at me."
His voice was a low growl against her flesh.
She forced her eyes open and met his intense green gaze in the dim light.
His pupils were slit. Vertical. His dragon was in charge and wanted her to know it.
The sight should have terrified her. Instead, it only made her hotter.
He held her stare as his tongue flicked out and circled the sensitive bundle of nerves at her center.
Once. Twice. A tendril of pure magic hit her clit.
That was all it took.
The coil inside her snapped, and her orgasm shattered through her with the force of a tidal wave. She cried out. Her body arched off the ground. Her fingers dug into his shoulders as wave after wave of exquisite pleasure washed over her.
He didn’t let her come down.
Before she could come back to herself, he was over her, his body covering hers.
He fumbled with the laces of his trousers, hands shaking with a desperation that mirrored her own.
His cock sprang free — thick, heavy, and longer than any man's had a right to be, the head already wet at the tip — and he fisted himself once at the base, a sharp, controlling stroke that made him snarl through his teeth.
"I cannot be gentle." It wasn’t an apology. It was a warning. "Three hundred years, a chuisle . Three hundred."
"I don't want gentle."
His eyes flared green-fire bright.
He pressed the broad, blunt head of his cock against her entrance, and she was so wet, so ready, that he slid in an inch on nothing but the slick of her own body. He stopped there. Forehead against hers. Breath ragged.
She took a deep, shuddering breath and tried to relax. He was almost too big.
He didn’t give her more time. Didn’t warn her or ease his way in.
He drove forward. All the way in.
A thick, hard invasion that stretched her, filled her, completed her in a way she had never known was possible.
She cried out. He swallowed the sound with his mouth.
He’d buried himself to the hilt and held there, every muscle in his body locked, his cock throbbing inside her like a second heartbeat.
His magic flooded her again — that ancient, hollow dragon-cold, only now it was inside her, deeper than his cock, deeper than any place a man had ever reached.
It poured through her in waves, filled her, nearly choked her.
Three centuries of loneliness. Three centuries of grief.
Three centuries of a beast pacing the cage of his own body, waiting.
She wrapped herself around him. Took it. Took all of it.
"Are you —" He cut himself off, his voice strained. "Tell me. Tell me you are well. Tell me I have not —"
She told him what she needed the only way she could. She opened her legs as wide as they would go and tilted her hips. The move sank his hard cock impossibly deeper. Her inner muscles clamped around him like a vise.
They both groaned.
"Move, dragon man . Don't you dare stop."
He needed no further encouragement.
He moved. His stroked hard and deep — a relentless rhythm that pushed her toward the edge again. There was no gentleness now. No finesse. Only a raw, primal claiming that spoke of centuries of loneliness and desperation. He was wild. Untamed. A force of nature.
And she was the ground he broke apart.
The danger was still there. A wildness in his eyes that suggested he hovered on the verge of total loss of control. It only fueled her desire. She wanted his wildness. Wanted his loss of control. She wanted all of him.
"Mine." He growled it against her throat. Against her mouth. Against the pendant that lay between them, still warm from her bath. " Mine. Say it."
"Yours —"
" Say it. "
"I'm yours. "
The word broke him.
His rhythm changed into something deeper, harder, more primal.
He drove into her again and again with the desperate urgency of a man who had nothing left to lose, who was finally taking what three centuries of curse and silence and grief had stolen from him.
His teeth scraped her shoulder, desperate to mark her. He shook with the effort to resist.
They came together in a frantic, desperate explosion.
He made her scream her release again and again, until she shook with exhaustion, her cries ringing in the night air.
When she could take no more, he poured into her, hot and endless, his cock pulsing with every wave of release.
She reveled at the heat of him filling her while the cold of his magic flooded her, the two opposing forces meeting somewhere deep inside her body and settling .
Something clicked into place.
He collapsed against her. Body heavy. Tremulous. Face buried in the crook of her neck.
For a long moment they lay there, bodies slick with sweat, breath ragged in the quiet darkness. His weight pressed her into the moss, and she had never in her life felt more like she was exactly where she was meant to be.
And then she felt it — a strange, shocking cold bloomed where her skin met his — a chill utterly at odds with the fire that raged between them. A deep, ancient cold, like the heart of a glacier. For a startled moment she flinched and almost pulled away.
Then the cold shifted. Changed.
It wasn’t just an absence of heat. It was a presence. A dark, hollow ache that felt intensely, intimately him. The sorrow she had sensed in the forest. The loneliness she had seen in his eyes. Now it was a tangible, physical thing flowing into her through her palms.
This must be the source of his dragon magic, she thought. A wild, untamed power unlike anything she could have imagined. Power and pain.
He groaned. A guttural sound of pure, ragged pleasure that vibrated through his chest and into her hand.
Her fear dissolved into a heady sense of power.
She flattened her palm against his skin and deliberately chased that shocking cold.
His head fell back like a bomb had detonated. He moaned, deep and low. His expression was one of intense pleasure. Relief.
She closed her eyes and focused all her energy on the ancient magic. Every time the dark energy connected with her, he shuddered. Groaned. His body wracked with unmistakable, desperately needed relief.
She did this to him.
Her touch was a balm to his wounded soul. A healing force. The realization intoxicated her — a drug more potent than any herb. She wanted to give him more. She wanted to give him everything.
She opened her eyes.
His emerald gaze burned into her with an intensity both terrifying and exhilarating. He breathed hard. His chest rose and fell beneath her hands.
He spoke into her throat.
"I should not have done that." His voice was raw. Wrecked. " A chuisle , I should not have done that."
She turned her head and pressed her lips to his temple.
"Don't." Her voice was just as wrecked. "Don't take it back. Don't you dare take it back."
He shuddered against her, made a sound halfway between a laugh and a groan. "I couldn’t take it back if I tried." His arms tightened around her. "It is in me now. You are in me now. There is no version of me that does not carry this until the day I die."
Why shouldn’t they have done that? She didn’t understand, not after what they’d just shared.
She was in him? It wasn't enough.
The fire inside her hadn’t died. It had only banked, waited for more. She wanted him again.
She rolled him over and straddled his hips.
Her hands came to rest flat on his chest. His eyes widened in surprise — then darkened with renewed desire as she reached between them and guided his cock, already hard, deep inside her again.
She began to ride him with a slow, deliberate rhythm that made him groan beneath her.
His hands found her hips. Not to control. To hold on. Like a man clinging to the only solid thing in a storm.
"Until I die," he rasped. His emerald gaze devoured her in the moonlight — her breasts swaying with every roll of her hips, the pendant glowing faintly between them, her hair wild around her shoulders. "Look at what you do to me, a chuisle . Mine. Say it again."
"Yours."
" Again. "
" Yours. "
He growled and surged up beneath her, his arm banding around her waist, and the rhythm exploded into something hungrier, dirtier, slicker.
They fucked like wild animals. Again and again, under the light of the moon.
In the tub. On the grass. In her bed. Each time, their bodies came together in a desperate, passionate frenzy that defied reason and logic.
He took her on her back. He took her on her hands and knees with one big hand fisted possessively in her hair and the other gripping her hip hard enough to bruise.
He took her against the rough stone wall of her cottage, her legs around his waist, his cock buried so deep she swore she could feel him in her throat .
He whispered things in the old language she couldn’t understand and didn’t need to.
The meaning was in his voice. In his hands.
In the way his magic flooded her every time he came and the way the heat of her flooded him in return, and somewhere across the long, dark hours of that night, the line between them blurred into nothing.
He was a dragon. She was — what? A one-night stand? His salvation? She didn’t know.
She only knew she couldn’t stop. Wouldn’t stop. The fact that he was a dangerous, mythical creature only made her desire spiral higher — a forbidden thrill she was powerless to resist.