24. Elara
Elara
Maybe they did.
The words are still hanging in the steam and I can’t believe I said them, except I can, because tonight I’m just saying things now.
You moved in on a Tuesday. Out loud. To his face. Wet-haired and naked in a copper tub in a castle, I told him the one thing I swore I would never tell him.
And the world didn’t end. He didn’t laugh. He said none of them were you and then he washed my hair.
So. Facts, since I’m doing facts now.
He wants me. He has wanted me. Not recently. Not since the sky, not since the clearing, not since dragons entered my picture. From the first time we met. Across-the-hall, before-any-of-this, back-when-I-was-just-the-neighbor the whole time.
And I want him. God, I want him. That’s been true for years.
And there is nothing — not a deadline, not a hallway, not an entire realm — standing between me and doing something about it.
Huh.
Erik stands, unrolls his soaked sleeves like that’s going to accomplish anything, smiles at me, and heads for the door.
“Where are you going?”
“I was going to let you enjoy the rest of your bath,” he says. “Until it gets too cold. If you want, just yell and I’ll come back and help you out.”
I don’t say anything for a long moment. The story keeps circling back through me — the winter, the basin, the time it took — and there’s something wrong in it that keeps nagging at me, and he’s almost to the door when I realize what it is.
“Hey, Erik?”
“Yeah?”
“Your story can’t be us.”
He frowns. Comes back a step, then another, like the frown is walking him. “Why not?”
“Because…” I gesture, and water goes places. “You weren’t dying when I met you. And I certainly didn’t nurse you back to health. I once watched you carry a couch up three flights of stairs alone. You were fine.”
He kneels down beside the tub. Takes my hand out of the water and doesn’t let go.
“Elara. Every male dragon alive grew up knowing how his story ended. No female. No mate. Not for us, not ever — there hasn’t been one in so many generations that wanting it stopped being sad and started being stupid.
I made my peace with that ending. I had my team and my work, and I told myself it was enough, because it had to be. ”
“Erik—”
“You’d spoken maybe forty words to me,” he says, “the day you heard I needed a place to live. You lit up, and you told me there was one open right across from yours, and you walked me to the manager’s office yourself and vouched for me.
A stranger. You didn’t ask who I was. You didn’t ask what I was doing there.
You didn’t ask for anything back. You gave me a home, and you forgot you’d done it within a week.
” His thumb crosses my knuckles. “I never forgot. She took in a broken stranger, cared for him, and never once asked him for anything — and that was how he knew. You have been her since the day I met you. Just knowing you existed. Just knowing you?”
He shakes his head, slow.
“You brought me back to life.”
I make a sound. It isn’t a word, it isn’t dignified, and I’m leaning forward before the water finishes moving, and I kiss him.
He kisses me back — warm and careful. One hand coming up to my wet jaw, so careful. All of tonight’s terrible relentless respectfulness in it — and then he starts to pull away, because of course he does, because this man has spent the entire evening being good and he plans to die that way.
Not today.
I grab his arm. He’s mine now.
And he absolutely knows it. He just doesn’t know that I know it.
“Get in the tub, Erik.”
“What?”
He’s genuinely shocked. Actual blinking like I said something in a different language. Years of watching me and now knowing I can do that to his face? It goes straight to my head like wine.
“You heard me.” I raise an eyebrow at him, which takes everything I have. “Unless you didn’t mean what you said.”
For a second he doesn’t move at all.
Then he grins — the real one, the one I’ve seen maybe five times in all these years — and he stands and reaches back over his shoulder and pulls his shirt off, and I try to look away.
I want the record to reflect that I tried.
I did not succeed.
I have read a thousand descriptions of the male body.
I am a professional. I have opinions about pectoral adjectives that I have defended in writing, and none of it, not one overwrought paragraph of it, prepared me for the reality of him.
Shoulders that block the candlelight. The long muscled line of him going down and down, damp where I soaked his shirt, and a dark trail of hair below his navel that my eyes follow like it’s load-bearing.
He drops his clothes on the stone floor of this ridiculous royal bathroom one piece at a time, unhurried, watching me watch him, and Xaviar — Xaviar, I’m so sorry, but you had exactly one advantage, which was being fictional, and you’ve lost it.
Utterly.
Completely.
Compared to the man standing in front of me, Xaviar looks like a bad Tuesday.
And I am the leading authority on good ones.
The last of the clothes go, and the candlelight does to him what he claimed it was doing to me, and there is — a lot. Of him. All of him clearly done waiting, and, okay. Okay! Great. Wonderful. Terrifying.
Because that goes where?!?!
He steps into the tub. Water surges up the sides and takes two candles as casualties, and neither of us looks. He sinks down across from me with the steam moving around his shoulders and just — waits. Hands on the rim. Being good.
That won’t do.
I move through the water and climb into his lap.
His breath leaves him in one long line. His hands land on my waist and stop there, fingers spread, gripping me like his life depends on it. His jaw is tight and his eyes have gone almost black.
Skin. So much warm wet skin under my hands, and it’s his, and I’m allowed.
I kiss him again. Slower. His mouth opens and his hands tighten and pull me flush against him and yes, that, more of—
“Elara.” Against my lips. Wrecked already. “I can’t—”
“Erik.” I pull back just far enough to see him. “Please.”
“Fuck.” His forehead drops to my shoulder. “You can’t do that.”
I grin into his hair.
“You’re going to be the death of me,” he says into my skin, and I feel it more than hear it.
“That’s why I made you feel alive, Erik.”
Oh my God. I said that. Out loud. With my whole mouth. Somewhere Ashley just felt a disturbance and doesn’t know why — and the worst part, the worst part, is that he knows it too. He goes still.
Then he stops being good.
His hands move. Up my back. Into my hair. His mouth on my throat, my shoulder, down, and he’s not hurrying, he’s not hesitating either, and I had a thought, I definitely had a thought, it had words in it—
His palm slides up my ribs.
Over the tattoo.
The spark hits like a struck match, deeper than skin, deeper than anywhere I knew I had, and I gasp with my whole body, and his breath punches out of him at the same time. He feels it. His hand presses flat over the little dragon like he’s holding the heat in.
“There,” he says, rough, against my ear. “There you are.”
“What is— why does it—”
“Later.” His palm moves and the match strikes again. “Right now, just this.”
Everything runs hotter after that. His mouth is on my collarbone and the water is moving and my skin feels turned all the way up, everywhere at once.
At some point my hips picked up a slow rhythm against him all on their own, and he groans like he never wants me to stop, and then something starts up in my chest.
A vibration, low and rolling, and it doesn’t stop.
Erik pulls back and looks at me with an expression I have never seen on his face before.
“You’re purring.”
“I’m not—” I am. I can feel it now, humming up through my sternum like it’s been waiting there my whole life for a reason to start. “Dragons purr?”
“You do.” He says it like it’s the best thing he’s ever heard. “Don’t stop.”
I couldn’t if I tried, and I’ve officially stopped trying. I lift up in the water and reach between us and take him in my hand, heavy and hard and somehow hot even in the hot water, and his whole body jerks, his head tipping back against the copper rim, and the sound he makes is not entirely human.
I did that. Me.
I line us up and sink down onto him, slow, because I have to be, because there is a lot of him and my body needs a minute to believe this is actually happening.
My thighs are shaking by the time I’ve taken all of him, and his hands are shaking harder, holding my hips, letting me set every inch of the pace, and when I finally settle we’re both just breathing.
I have read a thousand versions of this moment, and not one of them came close.
“Ella.” It’s barely a voice at all. “Look at you.”
I look at him instead, and his eyes are gone, all the way gone, and I did that too.
I start to move.
Slow at first, learning it — the rise and the long drag of him inside me, the way the water lifts me half-weightless so that every stroke gives everything.
I can be greedy about it, and I am immediately, thoroughly greedy about it.
And he follows me. I wasn’t prepared for that.
I set the pace and this enormous, ancient, dangerous man follows it, rising to meet me exactly as hard as I ask and not one bit harder.
His hands spread over my hips like I’m giving orders and he’s taking them.
“Like that,” he says, low, watching me move on him. “Just like that. Take what you want, Ella.”
So I do. I roll my hips and find the angle that makes the edges of the room go white, and then I do it again, and again, because I found it and it’s mine now, and he makes a sound against my throat that I feel in my teeth.
His hands slide up from my hips, over my waist, and his thumbs sweep the undersides of my breasts a breath before his mouth follows, hot and unhurried even now, even with me riding him, like he refuses to rush a single part of this, and every pull of his mouth lands somewhere much lower than where it starts.
The water moves with us, warm up my back every time I sink down, cool air on wet skin every time I rise, and between the heat of him inside me and the spark every time he grazes my tattoo, I lose track of everything in the world that isn’t contact.
He’s coming apart under me and trying to hide it, and he’s failing, and I have never felt anything like watching him fail.
His jaw is tight. The cords of his neck stand out when I grind down and stay there.
One of his hands leaves my hip to grip the rim of the tub, and the copper gives a small groan of protest under his fingers.
An actual sound of metal reconsidering its life choices, and he doesn’t even notice, because his eyes are on me like I’m the only thing that has ever existed.
Powerful doesn’t cover it. There’s no shelf at the bookstore for this.
“You have no idea,” he says, rough, half to himself, hips rising into me, “how many nights — Ella — you have no idea.”
“Tell me later,” I manage, and ride him harder, and somewhere in the middle of all of it I get loud.
Really loud.
And then I hear myself. In a castle, in a room, one door away from four men with dragon hearing.
My hand slaps over my mouth.
“Oh my God.” Muffled, horrified, frozen mid-motion. “They can hear. Erik. They can hear — all of them — the whole—”
He takes my wrist, gently, pulls my hand away from my mouth, and presses a kiss into the palm of it, and his eyes never leave mine.
“Don’t hide.”
“Erik—”
“They know what you are to me. They know what you are to them.” His hips rise, slow and deliberate, and my breath breaks in half. “Nothing about this is a secret, Ella. Let them hear you.”
I’m mortified. Mortified and so turned on and he wants this. Wants to hear me and —
You know what?
Fuck it.
I let go — the volume, the balance, every quiet year I spent across a hallway from this man — and I lean back and grip the rim behind me and let the new angle take him deeper, and the sound that comes out of me is one I have never made in my life and intend to make constantly from now on.
It changes everything. Every stroke drags him right across the place that makes my thighs shake, and I chase it without one ounce of shame, water surging over the sides in sheets, and Erik watches me.
I never want him to look away.
“Elara.” It comes out of him like it’s pulled up by the root. “Fuck. Elara.”
He sits up. Wraps an arm around my back and brings us chest to chest, the tattoo pressed against his arm and sparking without pause now, a live current running between our skin, and his hand splays over my sternum where the purr has built into something closer to a roar.
“I can feel you,” he says into my mouth, wondering, wrecked. “Ella. I can feel you everywhere.”
My next sound comes out and hits the stone and comes back to me, my own voice filling the room, and I don’t reach for it. His name comes out on the next stroke, louder, and the echo hands it back, and I say it again.
Something in Erik breaks underneath me.
“That’s it.” His hands flex hard on my hips. “Just like that. So good, Ella. Take everything.”
He’s meeting me harder now, exactly as hard as I’m asking, and I’m asking with my nails in his shoulders and my heels hooked behind him and half the bathwater already on the floor.
“Look at you.” It’s barely breath. “You feel so fucking good.” My rhythm starts to stutter. My thighs tremble where they grip him, every stroke landing hotter and closer than the last, and when it crests too fast I slow down and drag it out, greedy still.
He knows. Of course he knows. His hand slides down between us, right where I need it, sure and slick and perfect, and he angles up into me and puts his mouth to my ear.
“Now, Ella. Loud.”
I couldn’t hold back even if I wanted to.
I come apart with his name in my mouth and every ounce of air in my lungs behind it, clenching around him in waves that go on and on, the water going everywhere, my whole body one long pull of light — and the feel of me finishing takes him with me.
He drives up once, twice, buries himself deep and holds there, spilling into me with my name and a sound underneath it, low and enormous.
His arms locking around me like the world might try to take me back, both of us shaking while the tub sloshes the last of its water onto the stone.
He leans back and pulls me with him.
His heart under my ear, going like a hammer, and mine keeping up.
The floor is a lake. Several candles did not survive. I regret nothing.
“Stay there,” Erik murmurs into my hair, his arms not loosening at all. “Just — stay.”
“I live here now,” I tell his collarbone. “This is where I live.”
From the other room, distant, muffled, and absolutely unmistakable, comes Gunnar.
“FINALLY.”
I groan into Erik’s chest. He’s trying hard not to laugh and failing, his body shaking underneath mine.
I grin, I can’t help it.
“I’m executing him first.”