Chapter 18
P oppy
He was waiting for her in the corner. A shadow that resolved into the solid powerful form of him as she crossed the room — the line of his shoulders against the dim wall, the dark fall of his hair, the way his eyes caught what little light there was and held it.
He hadn’t undressed. He had been waiting for her.
His shirtsleeves were still rolled. The high-vis jacket was draped over the chair by the door.
He was Alsander.
Not the dragon. Not the postman. Not the cursed thing in the lair.
Just Alsander, in a Dublin bedroom, waiting for her to come to him.
She crossed the room.
She put her hands flat on his chest. She felt his heart through the linen of his shirt — slow and steady and enormous ; the heartbeat of a creature who had outlived empires and was about to outlive her too, though he didn’t know it yet.
She tipped her face up to his.
"Don't speak yet."
His brow furrowed. " A chuisle —"
"Don't. Just — let me have this for one minute. Without words."
He didn’t speak.
He waited. He gave her exactly what she had asked for — the silence, the stillness, the long careful patience of a man who had been controlling himself for longer than she could imagine.
She lifted herself up onto her toes. She pressed her lips to his.
The kiss was slow.
It wasn’t the brutal claim of the moss outside her cottage.
It wasn’t the desperate joining of the lair.
It was something else. Something she didn’t have a name for — a kiss that had inside it every kiss she would never give him after tomorrow.
Every kiss across breakfast tables he would never sit at.
Every kiss in firelit beds that would never be theirs.
Every kiss across the years that would have been their life.
She poured all of it into the press of her mouth on his.
He made a sound against her lips. A small ragged sound. He had felt the difference. He hadn’t understood it yet — but he had felt it.
His hand came up to the back of her neck.
The kiss changed.
He took it from her gently — not a wrench, not a claim, but a slow taking-over the way a stronger swimmer takes over a tired one.
His tongue swept into her mouth, and she let him in, opened to him, gave him the weight of her body to hold up because her own legs were not steady.
His other arm wrapped around her waist and he gathered her against him, and she was small against his chest, and she let herself be small.
She let herself be held by a man who didn’t know he was about to lose her.
A small, tortured sound escaped her. She hadn’t meant to let it out.
He heard that too.
He pulled back. His eyes searched her face in the dim light. His thumb dragged across her cheekbone and came away wet.
"Poppy."
"It's nothing."
"You are crying."
"It's nothing, Alsander. I'm —" she breathed in, breathed out — "I'm just glad we’re here. Together. I am glad to be in a small bed with you in the heart of a city my aunt loves and to have one night where no one is dying."
He looked at her a long beat.
She didn’t know what he saw. She didn’t know how she was maintaining a calm face, only knew she had to do it. If he saw through her, he would ask questions she couldn’t answer.
He bent his head and kissed the tears from her cheek instead. Then the other cheek. Then her mouth again — softer now. Tender . The kind of kiss a man gives a woman when he has decided, for reasons he cannot name, that whatever is happening tonight is something to be careful with.
His hand had found the tie of her wrap dress.
He pulled it free.
The fabric whispered down her shoulders.
Pooled at her feet. Undergarments came next.
She stood naked before him in the lamplight and his eyes — the fierce emerald of a deep forest — devoured her.
But it was the look on his face that made her breath catch.
A mixture of raw hunger and profound tenderness that was more potent than any touch he had ever given her.
He had looked at her this way before.
She wasn’t sure he knew he was doing it.
He sank to his knees before her.
A king at his altar.
The sight of this powerful, ancient man humbling himself sent a jolt of pure, unadulterated need through her — and underneath the need, an ache so vast it stopped her breath.
He was kneeling at her body. He was kneeling at the body of the woman who would not be his by sundown tomorrow. He didn’t know.
His hands — warm and calloused — gripped her hips. He held her steady.
He looked up at her. "Tell me what you want, a chuisle ."
"Everything." Her voice was wrecked. "I want everything you have to give me tonight."
"You have it."
He leaned in.
The first touch of his tongue was a shock — a slow, deliberate swipe against her slick folds that made her knees tremble.
He wasn’t rushing. He was worshiping . He explored her with a patient, thorough intimacy that was almost unbearable in its intensity, learning every curve and sensitive spot as if committing her to memory.
As if he, too, knew this was the last time.
He didn’t know.
He didn’t know and yet his body knew. His mouth knew. The way his hands tightened on her hips when she gasped — knew. Some deep place below his conscious mind registered something his conscious mind hadn’t, and it was taking everything in .
She put her hands in his hair and she let him do it.
Her fingers tangled in the soft black waves as his mouth settled over her, his tongue delving deep.
The pressure coiled low in her belly — a tight, hot knot of pleasure that grew with every expert flick of his tongue, every gentle scrape of his teeth.
He built her up slowly. Relentlessly. He was in no hurry.
He had decided — she could feel it, the slow patient certainty of it in the way his mouth moved on her — that he had all night, that nothing else mattered, that this small Dublin bedroom and this naked woman trembling under his hands were the only things in the world.
She was shaking when he sucked her clit between his lips.
She cried out — quiet, into her own hand, because the walls were thin and Niamh was somewhere downstairs — and he made a sound against her, a low rumble of pure satisfaction that vibrated up through every nerve she had.
His tongue circled her. Once. Twice.
"Look at me, Poppy."
She forced her eyes open.
He was looking up at her from between her thighs. His mouth was wet from her. His pupils had gone full vertical-slit dragon, and the green around them was burning. The man and the dragon were both there. Both wanted her. Both were claiming her with their tongue.
"Come on my mouth, a chuisle ."
She came.
The knot inside her snapped and her orgasm shattered through her with the force of a tidal wave.
She cried out into her own hand. Her body arched against his mouth.
Her fingers dug into his hair as wave after wave of exquisite pleasure washed over her, and he held her hips steady through every shudder, drank her down, didn’t stop until she was trembling with overstimulation and couldn’t stand.
He caught her as her knees gave.
He lifted her — effortlessly— and laid her down on the brass bed.
She watched him stand over her in the lamplight.
He waved a hand.
The soft rustle of his clothes was the only sound before they vanished.
The dragon-magic he had used to put on the postman uniform took the postman uniform away.
Then he was naked, and she was naked, and the lamp threw warm gold light across the long line of his body — the cliffs of his shoulders, the carved planes of his chest, the heavy thickness of his cock already hard and ready and wet at the tip.
She had seen him naked, yet each time her body remembered him a little differently.
Tonight he looked like grief — the shape of every night she would never have, walking toward her on bare feet.
He came down over her.
His body was a warm, heavy weight. His skin slid against hers, the friction of bare bodies meeting after a long absence, and she made a small involuntary sound of pure relief at having him on her again.
He didn’t enter her.
Not yet.
He began, instead, to kiss his way up her body. A slow, torturous journey of reverence . He kissed the inside of her knee. The sensitive skin of her inner thigh. His lips a brand against her flesh.
He paused. His breath was hot against her core.
She thought he was going to put his mouth on her again. He didn’t. He continued his ascent — his mouth tracing a path over her stomach, the curve of her ribs, the hollow of her throat. He was mapping her. Claiming every inch. He pressed a kiss to the place between her breasts where the pendant lay.
The pendant was warm.
The pendant was always warm now.
He kissed the pulse at her throat. He kissed her jaw. He kissed the corner of her mouth, the bow of her upper lip, and only then — finally — he kissed her mouth .
It was a slow deep kiss.
A tasting.
A sharing of the very essence of her desire.
He pulled back just enough to look at her. His eyes had gone full green. The dragon was still present, under the surface but the man was fully here, and the man was looking down at her like he was trying to understand something he couldn’t name.
"You are different tonight."
Her breath caught. "How?"
"I don’t know." His thumb dragged across her lower lip. "You are — you are letting me have all of you. You are not holding anything back. You have never not held something back, a chuisle . Tonight I cannot find the place where you hold yourself."
She had to close her eyes.
She had to close her eyes because if she didn’t, he would see her break. He would see what tomorrow was. He would understand.
"It's the wine," she whispered. "It's the wine, Alsander. Go on."
“I don’t believe you, but I won’t force you to tell me something you don’t want to share.” He looked at her another long moment.