Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
Adjar surfaced from sleep slowly, his consciousness returning in lazy waves rather than the sharp, violent awakening he’d experienced the previous times.
For a moment, he simply existed, suspended in that liminal space between dreaming and waking where the past and present blurred together like ice melting into water.
Something was different.
The pain was still there, a hot, dull ache in his side and a tightness in his chest, but it had faded to a background hum rather than the screaming agony of before. His body felt… solid. Real in a way it hadn’t since he’d first opened his eyes in this strange new world.
And there was something else. Something soft and warm pressed against his side, fitting into the curve of his body with an intimacy that sent an unfamiliar sensation rippling through him.
Jaz.
His eyes remained closed, but his other senses painted a picture even more detailed than his sight could provide.
He could hear the slow steady beat of her heart, the rhythm of deep sleep.
He could feel the gentle expansion of her ribs with each breath, the subtle shift of her weight as she unconsciously burrowed closer to his warmth.
He could smell her—that indefinable sweetness that was simply her, a scent that had already imprinted itself on his memory.
His arm was draped across her waist. He didn’t remember putting it there, but his sleeping body had apparently decided she belonged exactly where she was.
His wing had curved around them both, creating a cocoon of shared warmth, and his tail had migrated at some point in the night to coil loosely around her calf.
He felt… possessive. She was small. Fragile. Exhausted from caring for him when she should have been caring for herself. And some primal part of him had responded to that vulnerability by gathering her close and holding on.
He should be alarmed. He should be questioning why his first instinct upon waking wasn’t to push her away but to pull her closer.
Instead, he felt… content.
The strangeness of the emotion was almost as startling as the physical sensations. When was the last time he’d felt content? Not in the fragmented memories of the before times, and certainly not since he’d woken to this new world. Perhaps he never had.
He slowly opened his eyes. The space around them was dim, lit by soft lights that cast everything in muted shadows. The howl of wind outside spoke of the continuing storm. Then he looked down at his female and his breath caught.
She was curled against him like she’d been made to fit there.
Her face was relaxed in sleep, the tension he’d seen in her waking hours smoothed away, and one of her hands had come to rest on his chest, her fingers spread over the scales that covered his sternum.
Her dark hair had escaped its braid, spilling across his arm in a cascade of dark brown that looked almost black in the low light.
Beautiful, he thought, and he didn’t try to push the thought away.
She was beautiful. Not in the sharp, precise way of ice sculptures carved by wind and time or his fleeting memories of the sleek females of his species, but something softer.
Warmer. The beauty of resilience and stubborn survival, of strength that didn’t need to announce itself.
His gaze traced the curve of her cheek, and the scatter of small marks across her nose and cheekbones.
The fullness of her lips, slightly parted in sleep.
The sweep of dark lashes against her skin.
His hand moved without conscious thought, his thumb brushing a strand of hair away from her face.
The texture was nothing like the crystalline smoothness of his own kind but amazingly pleasant.
Soft in a way that made him want to touch her again.
She made a small sound and nestled closer. Something in his chest constricted, not with pain but with longing.
Focus. He forced his attention away from her face and towards an assessment of his own condition. I need to evaluate my wounds.
The gash in his side had been the worst of it.
The metal fragment from the strange structure he’d attacked had embedded itself deep in muscle and flesh.
Even though he’d been barely conscious at the time, he remembered the pain of her removing it, the steady determination in her hands as she worked despite her obvious fear.
Now…
He shifted slightly, testing the injured area. A twinge of discomfort, but nothing like the searing agony of before. The flesh felt hot and tight, the way new-healed skin always did, and when he pressed experimentally against his ribcage, he found the bones solid rather than grinding.
Too fast.
He remembered enough to know that his kind healed quickly.
They had the ability to recover from injuries that would kill lesser beings.
But this was beyond even that. He should still be struggling to breathe, still be counting the days until he could move without gasping.
Instead, his body had somehow compressed weeks of healing into… how long had it been? Two days? Three?
Because of Jaz’s medicines? The food she’d given him? His body burning through everything it had to repair the damage? Or something else entirely? Something connected to his unnatural awakening, to the violence of his emergence from a slumber that had lasted for millennia.
He filed the question away for later consideration. There were more pressing matters to attend to. Like the fact that his body was responding to the presence of the female.
The awareness crept over him gradually—a warmth that had nothing to do with fever, a tension that coiled low in his belly and spread outward with each breath.
His skin felt sensitized wherever she touched him, his scales almost tingling with the contact.
And lower, his shaft was pressing against his sheath, threatening to emerge from his body.
Oh.
He went very still.
This was… unexpected. And entirely inappropriate. And absolutely beyond his control, apparently, because his body was reacting to her proximity with an enthusiasm that bordered on embarrassing.
He hadn’t felt desire in… he couldn’t remember how long. His people weren’t driven by their base urges the way some other dragons were. Their mating was a considered thing, a choice made carefully and rarely. The preservation of memory had always taken precedence over the creation of new ones.
But here, now, with this small, impossible female pressed against him, his body seemed to have developed opinions of its own.
Stop it, he commanded himself firmly. She is caring for me. She has shown me kindness. This is not—
She shifted in her sleep, her hand sliding lower on his chest, and his thoughts scattered like ice crystals in a strong wind.
Heat flooded through him, and his breathing went shallow.
His tail tightened around her leg without his permission, and a low rumble built in his chest that he barely managed to suppress.
Control yourself.
It was more difficult than it should have been. Everything about her seemed designed to undermine his discipline—her warmth, her scent, the soft sounds she made in sleep. Some part of him that he didn’t fully understand wanted to roll her beneath him, to cover her with his body and—
No. Absolutely not. She was half his size and a different species entirely. She’d saved his life. The last thing he was going to do was repay that kindness with anything that might frighten her or make her regret her actions.
She stirred and he froze, caught between the urge to feign sleep and the knowledge that his current… state… made that option inadvisable. He settled for going absolutely motionless, hoping she would drift back into deeper slumber.
Instead, her eyes fluttered open. For a moment, she simply looked up at him—her gaze soft and unfocused, still caught in the haze of sleep. A small smile curved her lips, drowsy and unguarded, and something in his chest turned over at the sight of it.
Beautiful, he thought again. And she’s smiling at me.
Then awareness flooded back into her eyes.
The smile vanished. Her body went rigid against his, every muscle tensing as the reality of their position registered. He watched the progression of emotions across her face—confusion, realization, mortification—and felt an unexpected pang of loss as the warmth between them shattered.
“Oh God.” Her voice was rough with sleep and high with panic. “I didn’t… We’re—”
She scrambled backwards, and he made himself release her. He lifted his arm from her waist, folded his wing back, and reluctantly unwound his tail from around her leg. Everything in him protested the separation, but he forced himself to let her go.
She practically fell off the bunk in her haste to put distance between them, her feet tangling in something on the floor before she caught herself against the curved wall. Her face had flushed a deep red—fascinating, how her skin changed color with emotion—and she wouldn’t meet his eyes.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—you grabbed me, and I was going to leave, but you said—and then I fell asleep and—”
The words tumbled over each other, a rush of sound that his still-struggling mind could barely parse.
He caught fragments—sorry, sleep—but the details remained frustratingly elusive.
He understood enough to know that she was apologizing.
That much was clear from her tone and the way she held herself, the distress radiating off her in waves.
She thought she had done something wrong.
No. The denial rose fierce and immediate. You did nothing wrong. I took you. I held you. The fault is mine.
But he couldn’t say any of that. He couldn’t make her understand that he had been the one to pull her close, and that her presence in his arms had been the best thing he’d experienced since waking in this strange new world.