Chapter 9
P oppy
She kissed him before he could utter another word about her leaving. Every word he spoke was a hand on her chest, pushing her away, prying her fingers off his soul.
She refused to let go. It was her choice, not his, whether she was going to stay.
She pressed her lips to his slowly. Deliberately. The way she had wanted to kiss him from the first moment in the forest clearing, before the fury and the desperation and the snarl. She let him feel her choice in the way she moved.
She was his true mate. She knew that now. He was just going to have to accept it and stop pushing her away. She wanted her dragon man —good, bad, body, mind and soul —forever.
She was unashamedly not above seducing her mate to get what she wanted. And right now, what she wanted most were his arms around her and his hard cock buried deep inside her.
The soft press of her lips turned into a possessive, claiming thing.
Mine, she thought, with a clarity that startled her. You are mine. You have been mine since the moment I saw you. Stop fighting me.
He held himself rigid for one long heartbeat — as if he still expected her to bolt, to finally see the monster and run.
Then he gave.
He gave the way a dam gives in the moment before it floods the valley. Catastrophic. Total. Absolute surrender.
His arms came around her. Not gentle. Not hesitant.
Crushing. He pulled her into the long, hard line of his body and she gasped against his mouth at the sheer size of him — at the way her whole body fit against his with so much of him still left over, at the heat that radiated off his bare chest, at the way his hands spanned her ribs as if she had been built to be held by exactly these palms.
He was warm everywhere. A furnace in the cool stone air of his lair.
And underneath the warmth, that strange ancient cold she had felt the first time she touched him moved over her skin again. Like a slow, dark tide. Like a winter river running beneath summer earth.
She understood it now.
The cold was the curse. It was the grief and solitude he had carried alone, every season he had bled into the roots of a dying forest and watched the rot spread anyway.
Her body drank it in.
A thirst, unknown to her before that moment, rose up to meet it.
She wanted to devour his darkness. She wanted to take all of it into her own body, every black inch, every cold drop.
Come into me , she told it, told him , with every place their bodies touched.
Come into me. Let it die in here. Let me be the place where it stops.
"Poppy." Her name in his mouth was wrecked. A ragged sound of disbelief and agonized desire. "Poppy, you don’t know what you —"
"I know."
Her voice was a fierce whisper against his jaw. She did know. She knew what she wanted. Him. Inside her. Now. All of him, every cursed and beautiful inch.
"I don’t want to hurt you." His forehead pressed to hers. His breath shook. "The more I touch you, the more danger you are in. You don’t understand —"
"I know enough."
She caught his face between her hands. Her fingers dug into the rough stubble on his cheeks. She made him look at her.
"I know, Alsander. I know you are cursed. I know you have been alone too long. I know the bee on my doorstep died because of you. I know the prophecy. I know your sister is dead. I know you think you are killing me."
His eyes squeezed shut. A sound came out of him like he had been struck.
"I am telling you," she continued, undeterred, "I don't care."
" Poppy —"
"I am telling you yes ."
He made a sound then. A deep, ragged groan that was half-sob, half-roar — a sound she would remember for the rest of her life. It was the sound of a man whose last defense had just been pulled out from under him.
Then his mouth was on hers in earnest.
The slow, careful kiss was incinerated.
It became a desperate, hungry thing. A clash of tongues and teeth.
His tongue swept into her mouth and took , claimed the taste of her, claimed the heat, claimed what she had just given him.
She moaned into him — she couldn’t help it — and the moan was half-swallowed by his next kiss and half-broken into a gasp as his hand slid up her ribcage and closed over her breast through the wool of her sweater.
The sweater was suddenly an enemy.
He must have felt her think it. He yanked the hem up. His hands fumbled with the fabric — his hands fumbled , she thought with wonder, this man who had stood at the heart of a shrine and spoken to gods, his hands were shaking on her sweater — and then he gave up trying and simply tore it.
The sound of the wool tearing was the most erotic thing she had ever heard.
She laughed. She couldn’t help that either. He growled against her throat — a sound more dragon than man — and dragged the ruined sweater off her shoulders and threw it aside. Her bra went next. Then his hands were on her bare breasts and she stopped laughing.
" A chuisle ." His voice was wrecked. His thumb dragged across her nipple and she arched off the floor toward him. " A chuisle , look at you. Look at what is mine ."
His mouth was on her breast a heartbeat later.
She arched again. Cried out. His tongue was hot and demanding, his teeth caught the edge of her nipple and tugged, and she felt it in the pit of her belly, between her thighs, in the place where her body had already begun to ache for him.
Her hands fisted in his hair. Held him there. Demanded. He gave. He sucked her nipple deep into the heat of his mouth and the world narrowed to that single point of pleasure and the cold-dark current of his magic flowing into her with every place his skin touched hers.
He moved to her other breast. Worshiped that one too. Then his mouth started moving lower.
He kissed his way down her body slowly. The hollow of her sternum — where the pendant lay warm against her skin, where she felt it pulse once when his lips passed over it — and the soft skin of her stomach, to the bend of her hip where her jeans were still in the way.
He stopped at the waistband of her jeans.
He looked up at her over the line of her body.
His eyes were green-fire bright in the dim chamber.
His mouth was wet from her skin. He looked like a beast at the foot of an altar, and the altar was her , and Poppy felt something inside her own body — something deeper than thought, something her grandmother had whispered to her on her deathbed — recognize him and answer.
"May I?" he asked.
The formality of it nearly undid her. A dragon. An ancient dragon, asking permission, on his knees on the floor of his own lair, his eyes burning like green fire above the line of her hips.
"Yes."
Her voice didn’t sound like her own.
" Yes. "
He slowly undressed her the rest of the way.
Reverently. He unbuttoned her jeans with hands that were shaking again.
He drew them down her legs an inch at a time, his mouth following the path of bare skin, his lips brushing the inside of her knee and the hollow behind it and the soft skin of her calf as if he were learning her body in pieces and committing each one to memory.
By the time her jeans were gone she was trembling.
By the time he had nudged her thighs apart with his shoulders and looked at her — actually looked , his gaze devouring the place where she was already slick and waiting — she was crying, and she didn’t know when she had started.
His voice was a low rasp. "Poppy. A chuisle . Why are you crying?"
"Because no one has ever —" Her voice broke. "No one has ever looked at me like that."
His face changed.
Something old and savage rose up behind his eyes, and for a moment she saw the dragon plainly — vertical pupils, the slow flare of his nostrils, the way his shoulders rolled with a tension that wasn’t entirely human.
"They were fools ," he said.
Then his mouth was on her.
His tongue stroked through her wetness with the slow, savoring patience of a man who had been hungry for too many years and had finally — finally — sat down to a feast. He licked her like he had all the time in the world, like there was nowhere else he ever wanted to be.
He pleasured her until her hands were fisted in the fur beneath her and her hips were rolling helplessly up against his mouth.
His tongue circled the bundle of nerves at the top of her sex. Once. Twice. He sucked it gently between his lips and her vision went white at the edges.
" Alsander —"
He hummed against her. The vibration traveled up through her body like a current.
Her thighs trembled around his shoulders.
He slid one big finger into her wet heat, then another — gods , he was thick, even his fingers stretched her — and curled them against the place inside her that no man had ever found before.
She came apart.
Her first orgasm broke over her like a wave.
Long. Slow. Cresting. Her body bowed off the furs, and her hands flew to his hair.
She sobbed his name as his tongue and his fingers worked her through it, and when she finally collapsed back against the furs, trembling and wet and utterly wrecked, he kept going.
He didn’t stop.
His mouth gentled but didn’t leave her. He worked her through the aftershocks and then, before she had caught her breath, before she had fully come back to herself, he was building her toward another one.
"Alsander —" Her voice was wrecked. "I can’t — I can’t. It’s too much —"
"You can." He pressed a kiss to the inside of her thigh. His finger curled against that place inside her and her whole body convulsed. " You can , a chuisle . You will give me everything tonight. Every cry. Every drop. Every shudder of this body that is mine . And then you will give me more."
She came on his hand a minute later. Harder than the first time.
She was still shaking when he finally rose up over her.