by Romi Hart
“Marriage isn’t even real. Mating is as real as it gets. You and I are already bound by things that no man can tear apart. Marriage is a piece of paper and some words said by a priest.” It still bothered me that she hadn’t noticed that I wasn’t like any other man she’d ever known before. Letting her know about my dragon was a thing that I wanted to do before we went any further.
Her eyes began to get heavy as exhaustion took her over. “No marriage then. Only mating. K. I can handle that. I guess. Night, night, Tieris. I still love you. I don’t understand why or how, but I do.” She cuddled up against my chest and I wrapped my arms around her to hold her as we slept.
With a final night’s kiss to the top of her head, I whispered, “I still love you too, my dear sweet female.”
I hope she means the words she’s said as much as I mean the ones I’ve said to her.
12
Linda
Waking with strong arms wrapped around my body, I couldn’t believe that it was actually true. Tieris had not only returned but had told me all sorts of crazy things about wanting to be with me forever and how he wanted me to have his babies.
And I agreed!
I had no idea why I had so readily agreed to everything the man had said, but I had. And now I was in his arms as he slept soundly, making small snoring sounds.
Looking at him, his eyes closed, his hair falling all over the place, I couldn’t hold in the sigh that escaped me. The man was so completely perfect that it made no sense.
His body seemed like something an artist might’ve drawn. Not one thing was out of place on him or looked weird in any way. He was simply perfect.
And the way he worked his body to make mine come unglued as also perfect. Not that I’d had lots of experience with sex, but what he’d done was above and beyond anything I’d even known was possible.
Having to pee, I eased out of his arms, leaving him to snuggle down in my bed. Moving slowly so I wouldn’t make stomping sounds, I got to the bathroom then closed the door so he wouldn’t hear anything.
Putting my face in my hands as I sat on the toilet, I stifled a scream of absolute joy. “He came back to me!”
As I showered, brushed my teeth and managed my hair, I couldn’t stop thinking about everything he’d said during the night. I recalled faintly something about his village having troubles, but he’d fixed things and had asked me if I was ready to come with him to his home.
Which I was on the fence about. He hadn’t called the place a village at first. He’d called it a world. And going to another world, even though that would be an impossibility, wasn’t a thing I wanted to do. Even if it was with the most wonderful man in my world.
The one thing that there was no if’s, and’s or but’s about was the way he made me feel. Hugging myself as I had the towel I’d dried off wrapped around me, I stood in front of the full-length mirror. Tieris made me feel womanly, free to do anything I wanted, and unapologetically sexy. These were all things I had never felt before.
Dropping the towel, I looked at my body in the mirror with new eyes. Where I’d seen ugly fat before, I now saw rounded curves. My breasts had always been too big and hung too low in my opinion. But now I saw them in a way that made me feel good about myself. Those big tits had proven to be something Tieris had found to his liking.
If a man like Tieris could find my body pleasurable, then everything I’d thought about myself before had been lies. I didn’t have a plain face – as he’d told me that I was beautiful. I didn’t have a huge and unsightly body as he’d touched me in ways that let me know he liked the way I was built.
In a way, it was too bad that it had to take a man to show me that I was beautiful in the skin I was in. I hadn’t needed to change a thing about myself to please him. And all this time I had thought that I would have to lose weight and learn how to put lots of makeup on as well as get hair extensions if I ever wanted to get a man.
Tieris wants me just the way I am.
Another thing sprung up in my mind as I stood there. He’d said that he wanted us to be mates but not get married. And I thought that I understood that. We’d still be a couple just not a legally married couple.
He did want me to have his baby, so there was that. But I didn’t know what he wanted past that. And I didn’t know what I wanted past that either.
I’d never given a lot of thought to what I wanted to do with my life. Working at a bookstore wasn’t a career – it was a job. Leaving it wouldn’t hurt me a bit. But I didn’t want to sit around to be something that Tieris had to play with.
It was fun and exciting what he’d done, but that was sex and sex wasn’t everything in life. I had no idea what there would be for me to do in his village. And what if he expected me to do nothing but make my job being with him and taking care of this baby he wanted me to have?
And why the hell did I agree to have this man’s baby when I don’t even know him well at all?
It was news to me that I was that kind of woman who lost her damn mind when a good-looking man showed her any attention at all. If anyone had told me that if a hot guy asked me to have his baby that I wouldn’t even take a moment to think about it before I answered yes and hurried to spread my legs wide open for him I wouldn’t have believed them. Yet, I’d done just that.
Not that I would call myself a whore, but I was a gullible fool for sure. And I wasn’t sure that I hadn’t gotten myself pregnant, but it could be a thing that I’d done. And I had no real idea if Tieris was going to stand up to what he’d said while we were in bed or not.
Picking up the towel, I wrapped it back around me to go into my bedroom to grab something to wear. I didn’t want to be naked when he woke up and I confronted him about what we’d done and what he’d said.
As I tiptoed into my room, I saw that he was still sleeping soundly. Easing open my closet door, I found a dress that would cover me from neck to toe, then got a bra and some panties and put them all on as quietly as I could. A pair of sandals sat near the bedroom door, so I could slip them on if I left the room.
For now, I wanted to look the man over. I hadn’t felt comfortable enough to really look at him. But with him sleeping so deeply, I felt that I could do just that.
He has to have at least one physical flaw.
No human was as physically perfect as Tieris. And the whole devil-man thing came rushing back to my mind.
Why does he want to get you pregnant so badly? Why does he want to be mates, instead of getting married? Why is he so damn great in the sack and easy on the eyes?
Perhaps he thought me to be a person with money or who stood to gain an inheritance. That would make him a conman and maybe a sociopath. Both bad things and both attributes that I couldn’t live with, in a mate.
Looking down at him, I moved the blanket a little to see his broad chest that had the most chiseled muscles I’d ever seen on any chest in my life and that included on film. The one thing I hadn’t had even a glimpse of were his feet.
Moving to the end of the bed, I gently lifted the blanket to look at his feet. “How in the hell does he have such beautiful feet?”
Shaking my head, I just didn’t understand it. But then something trickled into my brain. Love can make you see something as perfect that actually isn’t.
But how could I actually love this man already? I had said the words to him that I had never said to anyone other than my family. But had I truly meant them?
Pulling up the blanket once more to check out what I thought would be a flaccid penis took my breath away as what I found was equally as stunning as the rest of his body. Is that a hardon or is his dick hard all the time?
I supposed that time would tell me what the case with his penis was. If he actually gave me the time he’d led me to believe he would. With a grunt, he moved off his back to lie on his side and I smiled as I thought about his bare butt.
That had been a thing I hadn’t gotten a look at. I’d touched it a lot during the night’s activities, but I hadn’t seen it. So, I pulled
the blanket up and saw one firm, muscular butt and the way my knees went weak made me almost laugh.
Okay, so he is perfect in every way, it seems.
But his physical perfection had to mean that he had to have a personality disorder or maybe more than one. No one is all the way perfect!
Freezing in place, I heard a scary sound coming from deep inside of him - a low growl as fierce as anything I’d ever heard. It built, becoming louder and even scarier.
His feet moved fast beneath the blanket and I couldn’t help myself and pulled the blanket up to see what was happening. With the cooler air hitting them, he stopped moving them and what I saw defied imagination.
His skin had turned red and shiny scales covered both feet entirely. Devil-man!
Dropping the blanket, I sprinted out of my bedroom with my heart beating out of my chest. “I knew it was too good to be true!”
Flying through Flora’s bedroom door, I’d caught her sitting up in bed, yawning and stretching while eyeing me. “And you are here because?”
“He’s – a -,” I tried to catch my breath so I could speak. “He’s not.”
Holding up one hand, she wasn’t understanding the severity of the situation. “Let us start from a place which makes sense, Linda. Who is he?”
“Tieris. He’s still asleep.” I put my hands on my knees and leaned over to try to regain some control over myself. “He showed up last night and we had sex. Lot’s of sex. And we said some things that neither of us might mean in the light of day. But the thing is that he’s got red scaly feet and I think he’s a devil-man.” It felt good to finally have gotten that out to someone.
With a smile, she just shook her head. “He’s got a foot problem. No reason to call him a monster. It’s probably just athlete’s foot. You’re overreacting. Just go back in there before he wakes up. And don’t bring up his foot problems.”
She didn’t understand at all. “No. I saw his feet only a minute or so before and they were normal. He had gorgeous feet, just like everything else on the man is gorgeous and absolutely perfect. But then he growled, and they changed to something out of a nightmare. They grew longer and turned red and became covered in large scales.”
Cocking her head, she looked at me as if I were crazy. “Linda.”
“No. I mean it. He was perfect. Then he was a monster.” I grabbed her hand, pulling her to come with me. “We have to leave now. We’ve got to go before he wakes up and eats us both alive.”
It made so much sense about why he’d spoken about eating each other. He got me used to the idea of doing it in a sexual way, but soon he would say it and he would actually mean that he would eat me. And maybe my roommate too.
“Eat us?” Flora just laughed.
And it was a little too loud for my liking. “Hush. Do you want to wake him up?”
“I think you’ve put this guy up on a pedestal and now that you’ve found he has a flaw you’re freaking out and making things seem worse than they are. If you want, I’ll go with you to talk to this perfect man and together we can get to the bottom of this.” She got out of bed, sliding her feet into her house shoes. “You’ll see that he’s just a normal man who might have itchy feet.”
She had no idea what was going on at all, so I had to help her understand the oddities this man had. “Look, he asked me to have his baby last night. And he asked me to be his mate. Plus, he said something about being his mate for eternity. At first, I thought he might be a human sociopath. But now I’m pretty positive that he’s not human at all. And I’m also sure that he wants to eat me and if he finds out that you’re here, maybe he’ll want to eat you too.”
All the way to her closed door, she giggled, obviously thinking that I was looney. “Come on, Linda. I’ll prove to you that this guy is just a human man with normal problems like everyone has.”
I couldn’t let her go into my room alone, so I walked up behind her. “You’re going to see that you’re wrong. And when you find that out, we will have to make a plan about where we need to run so we can be safe.”
“Sure, Linda,” she said with a side of sarcasm. “Come on. Let’s get this over with.”
I held tightly to her hand as we got closer to the other end of our flat to where the monster-man slept in my bed. “Just promise me that you’ll run when we see his red feet.”
“I will do no such thing. You’re being crazy.” But she froze the same as I did when my bedroom door opened.
There stood Tieris – naked, scratching his head as he looked at us with sleepy eyes and red, scaly feet. “I wondered where you’d gotten off to, my sweet. And who is this lovely young lady?”
Flora let go of my hand, pushed me to one side, making me fall down on my butt. Then she hauled ass out of the house, wearing only her nightgown and house shoes as she screamed all the way down the street.
But I couldn’t seem to move at all as I sat on the floor, four feet away from Tieris’ now normal feet.
What in the hell is going on here?
13
Tieris
“What is going on here, Linda?” Her roommate had fled, screaming as she went. As if that wasn’t bad enough, she’d pushed my love to the floor in her haste the leave. Sweeping Linda up in my arms to pick her up, I found her shaking. “Your roommate seems to have some issues. Pushing you down is the one which bothers me the most.”
“Put – put me down,” Linda stammered.
Not one to hold a lady against her will, I placed her feet on the floor and watched as she stepped back until her back hit the wall. “You’re acting oddly. What’s the matter, my sweet?”
Her eyes went to my bare feet. “Your feet.”
I looked at my feet, finding nothing wrong with them. “What about my feet? Are they too big? Does that bother you for some reason? I think the thing you might not understand is that men with big endowments normally have big feet as well. I would think that you might be thankful for my big feet.”
Her skin had paled, her body shook, and her voice quivered as she pointed at my feet. “They were red. They were scaly. They didn’t look like human feet.” Her eyes came to mine. “You are an evil thing, aren’t you? You’ve put your demon seed into my womb, haven’t you? I’m cursed and damned, aren’t I?” Tears began to stream down her face as she slid down the wall until she was in a ball, hunkering on the floor. “Please, don’t hurt me.”
As if I would ever harm a hair on her pretty head. “Linda, stop acting this way. You know that I adore you. Why would I hurt you?”
“Why aren’t you explaining to me why you had red feet?” She pulled her legs in even tighter, making herself even more of a ball.
I had no idea what to tell her about that. She didn’t seem to be in the right state of mind to learn about me being a dragon-shifter. It was obvious that I would need to gradually let her in on that.
What she needed to understand now was that we were bonded to one another after the events of the night before. “Maybe you misinterpreted what you saw. My feet couldn’t have been red and scaly. They were itching,” I came up with on the fly. “Maybe they did get a little on the red side. But as you can see,” I held up one foot, “they’re fine now.”
“But they weren’t that way a minute ago.” She jerked her head toward the still-open front door. “That’s why Flora pushed me down and ran off. You should go close the door since you’re standing here naked or someone might walk by and see you.”
Not that I cared, but I went over to close the door anyway. “I find it hard to believe that you two would overreact to itchy feet.” When I turned back around, I found Linda scurrying to her room.
She slammed the door, leaving me out. “You need to leave! I know you’re not what you seem to be.”
She was right; I was more than I appeared to be. But what to tell her was a thing I’d yet to come up with. So, I leaned against the door. “Are any of us what we seem to be, my sweet? Look at you for instance. You seem like a rather innocent young woman. But you have hidde
n sexual gifts that no one would be any the wiser to. I have to admit that you took me by storm last night. You were full of surprises that I never saw coming.”
“That was lust and desire that brought things out in me that had never come out before,” she said through the closed door. “What brought out your crazy feet?”
I had no idea. I’d been dreaming about chasing something in our realm. Some of my dragon must’ve come out while I was dreaming. And it seemed that it had hung around a bit even after I’d woke up. But I had to come up with a plausible explanation for her. “Maybe I’m allergic to the laundry soap you use on your bed linens.” Sounded rational to me.
Soft whimpers told me she was truly frightened, which I hated. “Tieris, what are you? Please just be honest with me? What if you’ve made me pregnant? What if I give birth to a monster?”
Sighing, I hated that she was so close to the truth. “Let me in. I need to see you when I talk to you.”
Opening the door, she wiped her eyes and backed up so I could come in. “Good. Talk to me. Tell me the truth.”
Taking her hand as I walked in, I kicked the door closed then pulled her to sit on the bed with me. “The truth is that you will have a normal child.” I thought that to be true, so it made it easy to say. I had no idea when our offspring would begin to show signs of being shifters, but that didn’t matter right now. “I am not a monster.” I wasn’t evil anyway.
I knew that some humans might see a dragon as a monster, but they were wrong. Dragons never harmed humans if they didn’t deserve it.
The bothersome knights of old used sneaky tricks and unorthodox tactics to try to kill us. So, they had to be taken out. But we did the deed fast and never made the mortals suffer, the way they did to us. A quick slash of a talon or a fountain of fire with the heat of a thousand suns would make a pile of ashes where a man wearing a suit of armor once stood. It was rather humane of us dragons to end those who sought to hurt and kill us in such a quick manner.