by Aja James
She lifted one shoulder in an insouciant shrug.
“I wouldn’t know. I’ve only ever been Mated to you.”
“Do you like the way I taste?” His irises darkened into a midnight blue as he held her gaze.
“Baby,” she purred, “I could live off of your body’s Nourishment for the rest of my life. Breakfast, lunch and dinner. Maybe for dessert, I’ll spread some chocolate mousse in strategic locations and lick it off of you.”
He hid his heated face in her neck.
“You say the most confounding things,” he murmured.
But she could tell that he was pleased. Pleased that she craved him so much. Pleased to fulfill her every desire.
“That was me being tame,” she told him as she bit back a chuckle. “Wouldn’t want to debauch your innocence in one go. We have the rest of forever, after all.”
He parted her lips with his own and swooped his tongue inside, reveling in the taste of himself mixed with her sweetness in her mouth.
“I love the way you taste too,” he rasped, and began to slide down her body.
“Another time,” she said impatiently, keeping him where she wanted him. “I need you inside. Now.”
He looked down at her with a purely masculine gleam in his eyes. It was a look that told her he knew exactly how much she wanted and needed him. How desperate she was to have him.
He undulated his hips in slow, mind-numbing increments, rubbing himself from root to enormous tip through her wet, swollen pussy lips.
“You want this, Amazon?”
Her eyes rolled into the back of her head at the breath-stealing pleasure.
“Yessss.”
He canted his hips slightly so that the plump head of him dragged across her pearl with every pass, sending shockwaves of bliss like little lightning bolts throughout her body.
“Like this?”
She clawed her hands in his hair, scraping her nails across his scalp in desperation.
“Oh Goddess! Yessss!”
Abruptly he stopped, torturing her with his stillness, making her huff with frustration.
She squirmed beneath him, bucking her hips to take him inside, but he pressed her down relentlessly with his greater weight, keeping his erection nestled against her nether lips, pulsing against her clitoris.
“I’m a novice at this,” he murmured, sprinkling light kisses along her jaw, “I want to make sure I do this right.”
Aella about swallowed her tongue.
He might be a “novice,” but he was the world’s foremost expert in making her so high on ecstasy, her veins might as well have been filled with endorphins rather than blood.
He stared down at her again, all teasing gone.
“I want you to remember only my body covering yours. My cock inside of you. My seed and my blood Nourishing you. And when you need, when you want, when you hunger and thirst, you hunger for me. Only me.”
Her lips parted as his primal, possessive words cracked her wide open and filled her with feverish, desperate longing.
“Yes, Cloud,” she breathed, pulling him to her in a fervent kiss.
“Only you. Always you.”
At last, he nudged her thighs wider with his hips, positioning himself at her entrance.
She opened herself completely, and when he began to push inside of her, she felt every, luscious, steely, thick inch of him stretching her quivering flesh, branding her as his, making her body imprint around him so that it would recognize no other owner but him.
When he was fully seated within her, buried to the hilt, he stilled, simply letting his maleness pulse against her womb, triggering an explosion of mini orgasms that made her shake uncontrollably.
Aella felt like she was literally coming apart, so she held herself together by wrapping her long, strong legs tightly around his hips, squeezing him rhythmically with her inner muscles, reveling in the satiny fullness and heat of him.
Never, ever, had she been filled this way before. They were made for each other. She all but sobbed with the rightness of it.
How could she have survived so long without this feeling? And now that she knew it, the indescribable joy of having him inside her, how could she ever live without it?
Good thing he was hers forever.
And then he began to move.
Slowly, deeply, inexorably, he undulated within her. Stretching her, owning her, loving her.
“Good?” he asked in his gritty, rumbly voice.
She couldn’t speak.
Fuck, if it was any better she’d die of pleasure overload!
She clawed her nails across his shoulders in reply and tightened her body around his.
“Tell me,” he commanded, plunging deeper, reaching higher, but maintaining that maddening, unhurried pace, resisting all her attempts to speed things up.
Aella thrashed her head back and forth across the pillow.
He was torturing her. He had to know!
The pleasure was so keen she was incoherent with it. How was she to form actual words when everything was sensitized, orgasmic mush? She’d been coming nonstop even before he entered her. The climax simply kept building with every stroke of his magnificent cock.
She was delirious with euphoria at this point. And he wanted her to speak?!
“Tell me,” he repeated, slowing his thrusts even further, simply grinding the head of him against her cervix in small, rotating bursts.
In a desperate move, she grabbed his ears and pulled hard, rasping against his mouth, “You’re the best, the greatest. Incomparable. My only. My forever. Now stop fucking around and fucking fuck me!”
She felt his full-bodied silent laugh everywhere.
Glad he was having fun, at her expense, no less. But she didn’t mind. She could feel the lightness of his heart in that moment.
He knew she loved him. Craved him. He knew it down to his bones, just like she intended.
“As you wish,” he growled.
He surged within her like an undulating tidal wave, building her climax to unbearable heights.
Faster.
Deeper.
Harder.
Longer.
He pounded her so, so good.
She squeezed him with everything she had, her arms and legs, her nails clawed into the perfect globes of his ass, her pussy milking his cock, her mouth sucking on his tongue.
She was going to be one large sore turned inside out after this. But she fucking loved it!
Cloud unleashed was the hurricane to her whirlwind. He was thunder and lightning and passionate rain. He drowned her in the tidal waves of his lovemaking. And she never wanted to come back up for air.
She only wanted to breathe Cloud, hear Cloud, taste Cloud.
With the last of her strength and control, she pulled away from his mouth to bury her face against his throat.
He knew what she wanted, tilting slightly to give her better access—
She punched her fangs into his jugular and pulled on the vein with her mouth.
They groaned in unison as his blood flowed into her, the same moment he released his Nourishment against her womb.
He came apart piece by piece in her arms, inside her body. His life force drenching her core, his blood washing down her throat.
She took it all.
He took her too.
And at the end of it, when he lay heavily on top of her, his erection still hard and pulsing against her pleasure knot deep inside, she pulled out of his throat and gathered enough wits to say:
“That was good, baby. Now give me more.”
He went completely still for a moment, then barked out a surprised laugh.
In a smooth motion she was too discombobulated to fully appreciate, he lifted her up and off the bed, somehow keeping them connected as he moved. And then he slammed her back against the wall, the motion pistoning his erection into her hard, jolting another orgasm through her liquefied body.
“I’ve got more,” he ground out, and began to pound her
right through the wall.
Oh heavens! Aella celebrated internally, and held on to dear life, because externally, she was a hot, post and inter-coital mess.
She was the luckiest, most blessed female in the world.
*** *** *** ***
After forty-eight hours (forty-nine and three-quarters, but who was counting?) of fucking, loving, monkey sex and good-old fashioned fornication, the newly Mated couple decided to take a small supper break.
After all, even dragon warriors had to eat.
While Aella was full to bursting with Cloud’s Nourishment, physically replete and satisfied in ways she could never have imagined, her Mate needed fuel to keep up his strength.
And keep up other parts of him as well.
The good news was, she could continue to savor him while he ate leftover roasted chicken, cheese, fruit, and a few batches of dim sum Rain had the decency to make for the busy lovebirds. Who, as their friends expected, never bothered to leave their chambers.
“Mmm,” Aella hummed against Cloud’s taut belly, licking along the veins that led from his lower abdomen to his groin,
“Internal iliac veins. My favorite.”
She’d been saying that about every part of his body, so Cloud took the superlative in stride.
But he paid more attention when she rubbed her face against the root of him, sucked ravenously on his mushroomed, over-sensitized head and sank the tips of her fangs in right beneath the crown.
“Aella…” he warned gruffly, as she greedily lapped up his pre-cum and a thin stream of blood.
The last time she took this much from him, he’d paid her back twice over, making her pussy pulse endlessly with such acute pleasure it bordered on pain.
And even when she begged him to stop, he didn’t. He could tell where her real boundaries were by reading her body. He pushed her to them, stretched them, and then flat out obliterated them.
He’d made her come so long, so hard, over and over again, she was sobbing and gasping for breath at the end of it.
Let that be a lesson to her.
Dragon, one.
Amazon, zero.
Well, technically, Amazon one hundred.
Because that’s about the number of orgasms she’d had over the last forty-nine hours and three-quarters.
And now she was playing with fire again.
“Can’t talk,” she mumbled cheekily around his swollen member, “mouth full.”
He lay back against the headboard and let her have him. She didn’t take no for an answer anyway.
Whatever Aella wanted, Aella got.
When she’d had her fill of his essence, she licked the small puncture wounds closed and held him loosely in both hands, gently kneading him up and down, as if she couldn’t stop touching him, couldn’t stop claiming him.
This is mine, her fingers said as they skimmed across his satiny flesh.
This is mine, her lips said when she peppered soft kisses on his scrotum and sucked gently on his skin.
This is all mine, her tongue said when she ran it from root to tip before lapping meticulously around his crown.
“Come here,” he commanded, wanting to kiss her and hold her close.
She crawled sinuously up his body and laid herself fully on top of him, taking his sex inside with a voluptuous swoop, until her groin met his.
They both hissed at the delicious pain-pleasure.
They were sore and well-used, and yet they still craved more of each other.
It would never be enough.
But for now, she simply held him deeply inside her against her womb. She tucked her face into the crook of his neck and sighed with contentment.
“Do you have any regrets?” she asked softly. A little uncertainly.
“No,” he answered right away.
“Won’t you miss being a dragon?”
She glanced the tips of her fingers over the spot in the middle of his forehead where she’d seen his chimu, then threaded her fingers through his silky hair.
Goddess, how she loved his long, ebony tresses. She might even be a wee bit jealous.
“Yes. But I would miss you infinitely more,” he said simply. Honestly.
She found his hand and laced their fingers together on his chest.
“It would have been nice to have a warrior dragon on our side,” she murmured wistfully. “Medusa is getting more powerful every day. There have been rumors…”
“I know,” he said. “The form she has taken is an aberration on earth. She is distorting the Balance.”
“What can we do?” she asked, a thread of unease in her voice. “How can we stop her?”
“Fight fire with fire.”
“What? But how?”
She propped up to look into his eyes.
“You can no longer—”
“Not me,” he replied. “Another.”
“Who?”
He smiled a mysterious smile at her.
“The dragonfly will show us when it’s time.”
“Dragonfly?” she wrinkled her nose. “Why does that seem familiar?”
“You’ve ridden his other forms. Perhaps that’s why,” he hinted with a teasing smile.
She thought hard for a moment, and then—
“White Dragon! Is he…?”
Cloud nodded.
“That’s my little cousin. His soul is back in heaven. But one day, perhaps soon, he will visit us once more in his dragonfly form. He will show us who the savior will be. A warrior dragon borne of earth. It is thusly written in one of the three scrolls we found. And I will be the one to train him, for only I have the knowledge and experience to do so.”
She stared down at her Mate with awe.
The tides were finally turning in their favor. She could feel it.
It made her positively ecstatic. Which made her want to celebrate with a different kind of ecstasy.
She wiggled suggestively on top of him, drawing out a long, raspy moan from him.
“I do have a teensie weensie regret,” she confessed.
He arched a sleek black brow at her in question.
“I wish I got to ride your dragon.”
He grinned wide and undulated beneath her. This time, she was the one who moaned in abandon.
“You can, Amazon. Let me show you how.”
He connected their minds to take her into his memories, his fantasies, where he soared through the heavens in his true form.
And that’s where he took her, as she rode him higher and higher—
To Heaven and beyond.
Epilogue
Ishtar was right.
Being in the Shield, surrounded by friends and family, especially the children, is the best medicine in the world.
Being able to train with the Elite warriors has helped as well. It feels good to strengthen my body, to be reminded that I am powerful, that the horrors done to me do not define who I am.
Most of all, being able to love Ishtar with all of myself, even the parts that are twisted and broken, the Darkness and the Light—it has revived me in the most fundamental ways.
To be simply a male, Nourishing his female.
A Mate.
A lover.
To be hers.
To claim her as mine.
I can breathe again. I yearn to feel again.
Because when she touches me, kisses me, when she sinks her fangs into my veins and take my body into hers, I feel pleasure again.
The pain is still there, pulsing beneath my skin, a dormant poison in my veins. But somehow, it has become diffused.
Ever since the day of Ishtar’s nightmare, my own have lessened. The memories plague me less frequently, and when they come, the edges have dulled. As if I have distanced myself from them, or they have retracted their claws from me.
I suspect Ishtar has seen my memories, no matter how I try to keep her from them. She refuses to speak to me about it, always finding a way to change the subject when I press her.
And yet, despite my
fears, she does not treat me differently because of it.
She does not cringe away from my touch as if I am the hideous monster Medusa turned me into. A mass of ugly scars and shattered soul.
She does not ply me with pity and stifling sympathy. Bemoan my brokenness or treat me like a helpless invalid rather than a full-blooded warrior male.
No.
She treats me as she has always treated me.
Her demands on my body are ravenous and insatiable. She teases and she taunts. She takes and she gives.
And when she curls into me at night, holding me inside of her as I envelop her in my embrace, she sighs with contentment and unwavering trust.
Trust that I am the male to protect her. Nourish her. Give her everything and anything she will ever need or want.
I am that male.
I will always endeavor to be that male for her.
I am her Mate.
And now…
Binu…Ere…he is here.
Whatever his name, I know him.
I see him.
I’ve waited so long to finally meet him.
One flicker of light in the yawning, infinite void that surrounds me…a burning brightness that has reignited the blackened embers of my soul.
One spark is all it takes.
I see the light at last.
Author’s Note
The character Zhao Yun has always been one of my favorite heroes from Chinese history, highly dramatized in Luo Guanzhong's historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
I always paid extra attention at the dinner table when my father used to recount the tales from memory (my father is an exceptional storyteller). Zhao Yun, nickname Zhao Zi Long (which means “dragon’s son”), rode a horse called Bai Long Ma, or White Dragon. His steed was decked out all in white. Zhao Yun himself was said to always wear white, with a silver armor, and he wielded a long spear that was ten feet in length.
The real Zhao Yun was a military general who lived during the late Han Dynasty and early Three Kingdoms era. For most of his career, Zhao served the warlord Liu Bei, playing a vital part in the establishment of Shu Han state. In literature and folklore, he is lauded as the third member of the Five Tiger Generals, the most acclaimed warriors loyal to Liu Bei.