Chapter Nine #2
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew my birth control had no influence here, yet I couldn’t find it in me to care as I braced my hands on his shoulders and rode him.
Releasing a low, deep rumble of approval, he watched me from beneath half-mast lids, breathing heavily, until it seemed his ability to hold back snapped.
A blink later, I found myself on a plush fur beside the fire, and he was riding me rather than the other way around.
After that, there was nothing slow and romantic about it.
He was frantic and desperate as he drove into me and I held on tight, trembling all over as my pleasure swelled so sharply, I was crying out with need.
Demanding he take me over the edge so we could feel that untouchable peak together.
One I knew I had felt with his other half, but it had never been quite like this.
Nor had it been when I was in heat.
“I could impregnate you,” he warned telepathically, clearly unable to speak aloud as he thrust deep, his cock swelling inside me even more, he was so close. “I should not continue—”
“No.” I wrapped my legs around him and dug my heels into his backside, not wanting him anywhere but deep inside me when I knew he meant to try to pull out if he could rally the strength. Be my honorable hero if he could manage despite his own needs. “I want...”
I gasped before I could finish my sentence when an orgasm tore through me and I exploded in pleasure, giving him no choice but to follow, locking up and bursting inside me with a roar of dragonly ecstasy.
I couldn’t say what happened after that, other than I had never felt anything like it.
Never felt so cherished and ravished at the same time in the most romantic way possible until we both lost control, but even then, the fur at my back was so extraordinarily plush, I felt like he had laid me down on a cloud.
“I meant to take you to bed,” he murmured as we basked in what felt like a never-ending release, still pouring his seed into me. Keeping my face buried in the crook of his neck, I breathed him in, certain I would never get enough of his masculine scent. Of the musky aroma of our lovemaking.
When I could finally find my voice, I murmured that I liked it right where we were. I steered his face to mine and offered him a drowsy, contented smile. “I liked it right here.” I glanced from the chair to him and kept smiling. “And there.”
“As did I,” he rumbled, his voice rough with emotion before he brushed his lips across mine, and looked at me with such adoration it warmed my heart.
“More than you will ever know.” Concern flickered in his eyes that I knew would never be there in his darker, more ruthless counterpart, and he pulled away when I would have much preferred he stayed where he was.
“Yet I didn’t mean to make things more difficult than they might already be. ”
“You did what I wanted you to do, mate,” I said softly as he wrapped his fur around me again and pulled his trousers back on, giving me a welcome eyeful of all the gorgeous parts of him I had just enjoyed. “And I wouldn’t take back one minute of it.”
“Nor I if there weren’t a good chance that I impregnated you,” he said gruffly, downing his ale and chanting fresh meat onto the wooden plate before sitting on the fur beside me and urging me to eat. “’Twas foolish given there’s so much uncertainty on the horizon, including an enemy you desire.”
“An enemy I’m drawn to, not desire,” I corrected, shivering at the idea I might want Skarde that way, however blasphemously true it may be. How could I desire anyone else but Torsten after what we just experienced, never mind love another?
It seemed impossible.
“Whatever the emotion ‘tis undoubtedly tied in with Skarde’s darkness,” he said, sighing and chanting himself another ale. Rain began falling, and thunder rumbled across the nighttime sky. “As is another darkness that’s bound to complicate things even more.”
On that, we agreed, and truthfully, it had been the last thing on my mind. The only thing I cared about was soaring over that pinnacle with this side of Torsten and feeling him let go inside me, claiming me in the most primal way possible.
Yet there was another side to him, so he was right. His darker half was bound to complicate things if I ended up pregnant, and in a terrifyingly possessive way. Of that I had no doubt.
“And he would not be alone,” Torsten said softly, his troubled gaze meeting mine. “If you become pregnant, I would likely behave just like him, as our offspring is one and the same. It would be our dragon’s, and no creature is fiercer when protecting its own.”
I didn’t argue because I knew nothing about this topic other than I sensed he was right.
More than that, my inner beast knew it. We had traveled back in time to a far different era with entirely different rules, thrust into a prophecy we were supposed to navigate well on behalf of dragonkind and for the sake of the Realm.
So bringing an unborn child into the mix could most certainly complicate things.
“No more intimacy, then,” I assumed, not liking that idea at all, burying my angst in several deep sips of mead.
“’Twould be wise of us to avoid it,” he replied, downing half his ale as if struggling with the idea too. “’Tis best you eat and rest now anyway. And it seems the Keep feels the same, having trapped us in here.”
“Which makes you wonder if the Keep, within a Realm created by the gods, didn’t know I would be going into heat,” I pointed out, arching my eyebrows at him. “Now wouldn’t that be something?”
Far hungrier now than I had been before, I popped a piece of the succulent meat he’d manifested in my mouth, nearly groaning at how good it tasted.
“’Twould be something.” His gaze drifted to the Yggdrasil, almost as if he prayed we might have created a child, despite knowing better than to hope for it right now, and he spoke to that.
“Something I know I should not wish for yet but ‘tis hard.” His loving gaze returned to me.
“I can think of nothing I would want more.”
“Me too,” I said softly, knowing we had never spoken about it in dreams, but then why would we? We were young, and children were the last thing on our minds at the time, especially given we didn’t know each other in the flesh.
“And then there’s my darker side.” He shook his head. “He should never be a father.”
While tempted to agree, I couldn’t seem to find the words.
Somewhere deep inside me, I knew his darker half wanted to sire offspring with me, because I was sure he referred to our future children in a forgotten conversation.
He had wanted a life with me and was determined to get it, yet his kinder side, this version of Torsten, held him back somehow, and now I knew why.
He had more power over his darker half than he realized.
And while I should tell him that, I couldn’t quite bring myself to do so. Yet it seemed he would figure it out soon enough in a way I never could have expected.