Chapter 18 #2
Then he settled between her thighs and the thick, hard head of his cock nudged against her entrance, and she stopped having to lie because she stopped being able to think.
He didn’t push in. Not yet. He rested there, his forehead against hers, his breathing ragged.
She lifted her hand to his face.
She had to say it.
She had to say it because she might not get to say it again, and the last time she had said it to him she had said it on the back of his dragon, with the wind taking the words, and she didn’t know if she had said it since.
She thought about the days they had shared.
The mornings. The kitchen. The flight. She had said it twice, perhaps. Three times.
It wasn’t enough.
It wasn’t nearly enough.
"I love you."
A shudder ran through his powerful frame — a tremor of an emotion so vast it terrified them both. He groaned. A low, guttural sound of pure surrender.
"I love you, Alsander. I love you. "
" Mo chroí. " His voice broke on the old word. " Mo chroí, mo chroí, my heart, my heart — "
"I have loved you since the moment I saw you. I will love you past — past anything that comes for us. Whatever happens. Whatever happens. Do you hear me?"
"I hear you." His forehead was pressed to hers. "I hear you, a chuisle . I will love you until the world ends. I will love you past it. Whatever I am, whatever I become — if this thing tomorrow takes me, if I die in that shrine, I will die loving you."
She realized with a start that Alsander was saying his own goodbye . He thinks he’s going to die. But it is not him it takes .
She couldn’t tell him the truth.
She kissed him instead. She kissed him with everything she had. She pulled him down, and lifted her hips, and he —
He pushed inside her.
Slowly.
Reverently.
A thick, hard inevitability that stretched her, filled her, completed her in a way she had only ever felt with him. She was so wet he slid in on the slick of her own body. She was so ready her own pulse throbbed against him before he was halfway in.
He buried himself in her to the hilt and stopped there, his cock pulsing inside her, his face buried in the crook of her neck.
Pure heaven. A homecoming.
Her body around him, holding him, keeping him.
The bond magic — the cold-dark river of his curse, the warm-bright tide of her foremother's gift — meeting somewhere deep inside her body and settling .
The same way it had settled the first time.
The way it would settle for the last time, tomorrow, when the pendant broke and her body broke with it.
Then he began to move.
There was no slow build this time. There was only the raw, primal fucking of a man who had been told, by some deep place under his conscious mind, that this was the last time.
The brass bed — too small for their passion — creaked and protested with every powerful thrust. He was wild. Untamed. A force of nature.
She was the ground he was breaking apart.
She could feel the dragon in him. A thrumming power just beneath his skin.
The heat of his magic. The fire he was fighting to hold back.
It was rising in him now — she could feel it rising under his skin, in the heat building between their bodies, in the way the air in the small room had begun to charge .
She wanted it.
She wanted all of it.
"Let go." Her nails dug into his shoulders. "Alsander. Let go. Give it to me."
He made a sound she had never heard from him before. A pained, desperate growl. His thrusts went harder. Deeper. The relentless rhythm of a creature on the edge of its own control.
" Poppy —"
" Do it. " She pulled his mouth down to hers. "Bind me. Claim me. "
His eyes flared green-fire bright above her.
The dragon was full at the surface now — the man behind it, the man inside it, both of them looking down at her as she lay open under him on the brass bed. He hesitated for one half-breath, the last shred of his three centuries of restraint, the last but you do not know what you are asking for .
She did. She did know.
She knew better than he did.
She arched her hips up to meet his next thrust and she whispered the words she wanted to shout. “Bind me, Alsander, bind me, I am yours, I have always been yours.” Claim me before the world takes you back —
He let go.
The fire came up out of him in a hot scorching wave.
It wasn’t painful. It was glorious . It was the dragonfire that bound a Draquonir's mate to him for as long as either of them drew breath, and it poured out of his body into hers, and her body — her body — opened to it, drank it down, took it deeper than fire was meant to go.
It settled in her bones.
It settled in her blood .
It settled in places she didn’t know magic could settle, in spaces inside her body that she would have said weren’t there.
The fire wrapped itself around her ribs and her hips and the long curve of her spine.
It threaded through her hair. It sank into her belly and stopped there — settled there, deep and warm, in a way that shouldn’t have happened with mortal women at all.
The pendant between them blazed with dragonfire.
She could see the green-silver light of it through her closed eyelids.
He drove into her one last time. He shuddered.
He came inside her with a roar that tore from the deepest place in his chest, and the fire poured out of him with the last of his release, and she felt the whole vast weight of him pour into her at once — body, magic, soul, fire, every particle of him dragged into her on the wave of his orgasm.
She came on him a heartbeat later.
A blinding white flash sent her arching off the bed, her body locked around his, her cry muffled against his throat.
The fire and the orgasm and the bond all crested together, and she felt — for a single suspended moment — that she could see herself from outside her own body.
A small woman on a brass bed in a Dublin guest room.
A great cursed dragon coming apart inside her.
A pendant blazing between them. A binding settling into her bones.
A binding that would hold past death.
He collapsed against her.
His body heavy. Trembling. His face turned blindly into her neck. His cock still pulsing inside her with the last of his release.
The fire receded. Slowly. Leaving a warm, humming glow in its wake — under her skin, in her hair, behind her eyes. The room was quiet again, save for the sound of their ragged breathing and the distant cry of a night bird.
For a long time neither of them spoke.
She held him.
She held him with her arms locked around his back, with her legs still wrapped around his waist, with her face pressed into his hair, and she didn’t let go because letting go was exactly what she would have to do tomorrow and she couldn’t bear to start practicing now.
His breath was warm against her throat.
His weight was the right weight. The exact right weight. The weight of the only thing that had ever fit her body the way she had been built to be fit.
" A chuisle. "
"Hmm."
"What just happened?"
"You bound me."
"Yes." His voice was very low. "I bound you. I have bound you in dragonfire. There is no breaking it now. Every Draquonir who lives or has ever lived would know you for mine in a single breath. Mine. Forever."
"Yes."
"My dragon says it took deeper than it should have."
She didn’t answer.
She didn’t have an answer. She thought it must be the magic she carried — Mairin's piece in her blood. "It's me," she whispered. "I think it's the line. The magic Mairin gave us. The pendant."
"Perhaps."
"It is."
"Perhaps, mo chroí ."
He didn’t sound convinced. He didn’t press. He pressed his face deeper into her throat instead and breathed her in — long, shuddering breaths, like a man who had decided to memorize her by smell because he might not get to memorize her any other way ever again.
She held him.
She held him while the lamp burned down in its dish.
She held him through the slow soft hour after, when his cock slipped from her body but he hadn’t let her go — when the fire-glow in her bones had quieted to a steady warm hum, when his breathing had slowed almost to sleep, when the only sounds in the room were his breath and her breath and the small sounds of an old Dublin house settling into its night.
She didn’t let herself sleep.
She would not waste any of the hours she had left.
She held the man she loved against her chest in a guest bedroom of her aunt's house, and she watched his face by lamplight, and she made herself memorize him — every line of his jaw, the soft fall of his black hair across her collarbone, the slow rise and fall of the powerful chest that had borne her up through so much — for the small handful of hours she had left to remember him in.
She had tasted dragonfire.
She was bound to a Draquonir for as long as she drew breath.
She had loved him with her whole body and her whole soul, and she had given him every word she could find before she ran out of words.
Tomorrow, she would give him her life.
She closed her eyes against the wet on her cheeks. She kissed his hair where it fell across her throat. She held him.
The lamp burned down and out.
In the dark, she stayed awake.