by Mandy Rosko
She stayed put.
Slowly, those hard eyes that she’d once thought of as yellow-green, but now looked more golden, softened. He reached his gloved hand up to touch her face. His eyes found hers when she didn’t jerk away, and as though that were permission enough, his palm cupped her cheek.
The fabric was rough and cold, and it scratched, but Dawn did not recoil. “There’s no cure?”
A more worthless question could never have been asked, as he would have cured himself if there were one. Too late now.
He was good about it, though, and lightly shook his head, the barest hint of a smile tugging his lips. “I had grown to accept the curse, for we could never find that same dragon to demand he undo it. And regardless of what I sacrificed to prove that greed was not in my heart, forfeiting my throne to my brother, friends, and the chance for family. The curse never left me, or even weakened.”
“It is part of me. I had thought that agreeing to a loveless match would hardly be a burden to compare it to. But then, as the terms of our engagement were being debated upon, I saw you.”
It took her a second to remember. “The pictures you were sent of me?”
He nodded. “The instant paintings, with lists of accomplishments, favorite books, and hobbies.”
“I was never sent anything of you.” And that more than offended her.
He shrugged, grimaced, then clutched his healing arm closer to his stomach. “Another tedious tradition. As your husband, I would be required to know certain—” He paused, searching for the right word. “—details, if you will. What little they sent proved to be not enough, and I found myself constantly requesting more. Considering you were a wife, and a vampire wife, it was deemed that you were hardly in need of the same details that were requested from your clan.”
“Of course,” she said.
Though her sarcasm was light, he still noted it. “’Twas the decision of the council, that. It had been decided that, should the vampires discover me to be a creature worthless as a husband and unable to provide a throne, the marriage would have been cancelled or annulled, and my younger brother, who is next in line to be king, would have been demanded for the sake of our final peace.”
She smirked at him. “You don’t know vampires very well. If my mother had known you could turn anything into gold, I would have been shipped off weeks earlier. Like that.” She snapped her fingers.
Aaron laughed a little, and then his face abruptly turned grim. “The council decided upon it, but I still had to agree to it.”
Dawn didn’t understand. “Why?”
His face colored, and she could smell the blood rising within him and hear his heart beating faster and faster beneath his ribs as he struggled for words. “We…are at a disadvantage, I find. I am ashamed to admit that, through photographs and stories alone, I fell in love with you. Meeting you in the flesh and discovering that everything I had been told of your bravery and loyalty was true has only served to strengthen that.” He looked at her now, and she was caught within the emotion in his eyes.
She couldn’t have moved even if she’d tried.
“For the second time in my long life, I have made a horrible mistake, driven by greed. I allowed the high council to wed us, without so much as lifting an argument against their decision, trapping ye forever to me.” His teeth clenched, and he spoke through them in a near hiss. “I have since raged against myself, for being foolish enough to allow such an idiotic thing, and for attempting to steal jewels from a dragon. Because now we are wed, and I may never have you without killing you.”
He touched her face again. The hard fabric of his gloved thumb slid over her lips. Dawn released a breath of air. It came out ragged and left her chest and throat tight, and she ached to touch him.
“Please,” he began, voice raw and begging. “Tell me ye have no one close to yer heart on the mainland, or even the one called Nox,”
“Nox?”
Aaron’s eyes were hard on her, awaiting an answer.
“No. No, Nox is just an old friend.” She wasn’t even sure how interested in women Nox was. “I don’t have anyone back home either.”
He closed his eyes and sighed. “Thank the Gods. I do not know how I would have lived with myself had I come between ye and a lover.”
Dawn was glad for it, too. Not for herself, but for the unbelievable amount of guilt he would have felt if she’d even so much have had a crush on someone else. Divorce was not an option in their case, and somehow, even thinking the word brought her a discomfort she didn’t want to analyze too much.
Aaron went back to admiring her mouth now that he knew she was emotionally unattached. “I have wanted to kiss and touch you like I have never wanted anything in so many decades, since the moment I first saw you. But I cannot. I can never bed you like a proper husband, even should you wish it, or offer you comfort or children.”
She knew the rest instantly. “It looks good for the elves to say their prince married a vampire, but as long as you’re cursed, you can never be king.”
Aaron nodded. “Yes.”
“But Georgiana didn’t know that,” Dawn said, bitter emotions for the woman rising inside of her. “She married me off. She heard the king’s offer of marriage and jumped at it, thinking that if she got rid of him, I would be queen.”
And, naturally, the woman didn’t mind putting her own son in danger to get that job done. Probably thought it’d bring more honor to the family.
“I have never met yer mother,” Aaron said. “But it sounds as though ye have a valid explanation for yer brother’s actions.”
Dawn smiled, and her lips tingled and itched to kiss his lips and open his mouth with hers.
She hadn’t moved any nearer to him, but his gloved palm gripped her shoulder and pushed her back. “What are ye doing?” he demanded. “I can see the want in yer eyes. Have ye forgotten what I have told ye? What ye have seen?”
He motioned toward the golden snake statue. She didn’t look at it.
“You said most things you touch turn to gold,” she said, her eyes never leaving his mouth.
“Aye, yes, water does not turn.”
That made sense, she supposed. After all, if he were able to just dip a toe into the ocean and turn it into a desert of solid gold, his curse would become downright dangerous for everyone on the planet and not just a punishment for him. “But how do you eat?”
“My tongue and teeth are not cursed like my skin.”
That was a start. Just thinking about his tongue made her shiver. When the hell had this happened to her? “But what about me? My heart beats, but I’m technically part of the un-dead.”
His arm was like stone with the strength that he held her back, his face turning to anger. “I will not risk it!” He shoved her with enough force to knock her on her back.
“Dawn!” Though she wasn’t hurt, not by a long shot, Aaron rushed to help her up. He grabbed her by the arms and yanked her back against the tree, checking her face for any burning.
“The canopy’s too thick,” she said.
He ignored her, eyes still searching for burns.
“I’m fine.” She touched his chest, completely by accident and without thinking. She’d only meant to push him back a little from examining her face. Her glove flashed, and when she looked down at it, it was made of gold.
Aaron cried out, “What have you done?”
His eyes were wild, and for a split second her heart beat just a little faster in panic, but the gold did not spread beyond her glove. Not into her leather jacket, and not into the skin of her hand. She flexed her fingers, just to see if she could move them.
She could. Unlike with the snake, the leather, while now definitely made of something tougher, was not solid. She could even still wear it.
“I think I’m okay.”
Aaron stepped away from her. “The next time ye may not be.”
Kehn and Bell must have heard his shout because they rushed back through the trees. Their eyes scanned t
he scene.
“Are ye well?” Kehn demanded, eying Dawn through suspicious, half squinting lids before his gaze became fixed on her hand.
“Nay, I am not well,” he snapped. Aaron righted his tunic and robes as best he could, considering half of them were torn beyond what was presentable. He wrinkled his nose at the tears, but put them over his shoulders, regardless.
“We’re moving on,” Aaron declared. “Enough time has been wasted.”
Dawn shoved her helmet on and ran to stand beside her husband as they moved forward. She sensed some of his anger cooling as she stayed next to him. As close as she could get without touching him.
Chapter Seven
There was always that little thing about rules being made to be broken.
Dawn had been the same way back in school, in the years gone by when women were expected to wear long gowns and showing even the flesh of your ankle was considered highly inappropriate. Of course, to spite her mother, she’d done that all the time with her tutor, a handsome young man who had been paid well to teach her after the lights went out. Though he was in his early twenties, and she fifteen at the time, it wasn’t their ages that made the flirtation abominable, but the fact that he had nothing, and she would have everything, immortality included.
Dawn had thought it incredibly extreme to remove her and her brother from the English countryside to go all the way to America just to get her to stop.
But there were always other ways to get into trouble, little things that made Georgiana shriek with rage and Blake laugh.
Maybe that was why she hadn’t immediately sought out her husband and tried to kill him her first night on the island. After nearly a hundred and twenty years on the planet doing the opposite of what her mother wanted, taking her time with that task was second nature.
Well, she was about to break the rules again, only this time they weren’t set in place by her mother. She was going to make Aaron touch her.
Dawn was in no mood to become a golden statue in the near future, but there was always a way to get around these things as long as the imagination was used. She knew that better than anyone.
She damn near made him jump right out of his tree branch when she shook him awake. It was kind of funny, considering the grace and poise elves were known for. He looked faaaaar from ready to laugh.
“What are ye doing here? Get back to yer branch and go to sleep, now!”
He could have been ordering around a little kid from the way that sounded. She wasn’t about to get put off track, not after what he’d told her earlier when Kehn and Bell interrupted them. She could hear their heartbeats in the tree across from her, light and even. Sleeping, but she still preferred him to be quiet.
There was no way those two were light sleepers, and Dawn wanted zero interruptions.
“Ye have a queer look about you,” said Aaron. “Are ye well?”
She had no doubt in the world he knew what she was up about, even before she began peeling off her leather.
His breath hitched and his heart sped up, but he didn’t attempt to stop her. Dawn felt anything but sexy in her tank, considering how much she’d sweated, but the night air was a welcome kiss to her skin. That and the dampness of her clothes proved to be useful. She wasn’t exactly big enough to warrant a bra, and she had no doubt he could see all there was to see beneath the flimsy cotton material.
God, how did he survive wearing all those layers in this heat?
“I—”
“You want to touch me.” She pulled the gloves from her hands so they were as bare and as cool as her chest and shoulders, then reached out for his own hands, still thickly clad in those long gauntlet-style things. The lack of fight in him as she brought his palm to her breast did not go unnoticed by her.
She meant to say more to him, but somehow that got lost the second there was pressure against her nipple. Dawn’s eyes had fallen closed without her notice because they only flew open when he unseated her and put her on her back.
The air whooshed from her in a disgraceful grunt, the leaves on their tree branch rattling with the sudden jostle of weight.
Dawn held as still as that snake statue they’d left behind all those miles back. The heartbeats of their comrades still made the lazy thumpa-thump of sleep.
“I apologize,” Aaron said, the noise apparently having pulled him from the spell that had taken him. He was leaning over her now, one arm on either side of her, keeping him from being entirely on top of her. His face was inches away, loose strands of hair tickling her face.
She was actually enjoying even that small amount of contact when he ruined it by saying, “We should not do this.”
A little late for him to be rationally thinking about what should and should not be done. She heroically refrained from making that comment. It would definitely have ruined whatever little bubble Dawn had managed to create around them.
She reached for his hand again, placed it just at her waist, and helped him to slide it under her tank, the scratch a pleasant tickle against her skin. The sweat that made the tank cling to her pretty much made it impossible for him to lift his hands from her belly to her breast without taking the thing up with his palm. He did it until she was naked from her neck to her belt.
When she got his hand over her breast again, and he took over like before, massaging and gripping, pinching her budding nipple between his wandering fingers, she actually keened at him. “Touch me more.”
His face moved, just a fraction, as though he meant to kiss her somewhere—likely her other breast—but he halted himself and continued on with his hands.
The act hadn’t scared her. She wanted to make him lose it, but after living with his curse, being as careful as he was, he would never forget himself in that respect. He could’ve been suppressing a yawn for all she knew.
Please, God, don’t let that be the case.
After about a minute of nice massage to her one breast, he removed his hand, putting it to the back of her neck while he adjusted himself until he was sitting above her, then he began playing with the other. Aaron was gentler this time, his thumb occasionally flicking over her exposed nipple until it darkened and tightened, the nerves flaring up and shooting pleasurable sparks down between her legs.
“You can be rougher if you want.”
His hand stalled. When he spoke, his voice was strained and his nostrils flared. “I do want, but cannot.”
That didn’t sound right. Not the way she’d wanted it to sound anyway. This was supposed to be as much for him as it was for her. If all Dawn was doing was teasing him, then she needed to let him know that she planned on going further than second base.
She reached down, her fingers tickling along his robes until she made it to his breeches, then the center area and…yeah, she was definitely a tease.
She made up for that by squeezing him through his pants. His eyes fell shut, a soft noise escaping him as he thrust his hips into the friction of her hands. He half collapsed from that alone, but made sure to do it off of her so that their foreheads couldn’t so much as bump.
“I’ll touch you then,” she said, starting up their earlier conversation.
His hand seemed to entirely forget what it was doing, but she didn’t mind. The look on his face was reward enough, as she watched him enjoy her touch. Had anyone ever done this—?
No, she put the brakes on that thought right there. It was too sad to even contemplate.
Within seconds, despite the loveliness of his warm, labored breathing against her cheek and neck, she found their positions to be too uncomfortable to continue. She didn’t dare attempt to push him down like he did her. With her luck, she’d push him right out the tree.
“Turn over.”
He came out from the fog she put him in. “Wha—?”
It was the most undignified thing she’d ever heard him say. Couple that with the red on his face and he was absolutely breathtaking.
She took her hands away, the classic move to get a man’s attenti
on during coitus, and began to worm her way out from under him. “Lie on your back, right here. Do it now,” she said when he hesitated a half second too long.
Like a good little trooper, he did as she told him, his eyes constantly watching her, his blood still thrumming with the scent of arousal, especially considering where most of that blood had gone.
She swung her leg out and got on top of him, straddling him until she felt the bulge of his cock, even through all his layers, press against her leather which hid her own waiting and throbbing sex. She sighed at the contact and the delicious pressure it brought on.
God, if only she could touch him, but this was still good. She liked the idea of teasing herself and him until they both came.
“Tell me what you want to do to me,” she said.
“I want to bite them.” His eyes were on her breasts, hard and hungry.
His teeth didn’t work the way his skin did. Dawn leaned forward until her nipples were directly in front of him. “Do it then.”
He was still so unsure, his eyes flicking to her, but he waited for no other permission as he gripped the dark bud between his teeth. Dawn trembled at the sensation, fighting the urge to move, to put his entire mouth around her breast. But he was careful, and his teeth gripped and his tongue tasted before her nipple was released, rosy, a little wet, and feeling really damn good.
He put the same attention to her other breast, careful to keep his lips back, using more tongue than teeth this time. Dawn keened softly at the contact, jerking back roughly. She needed more than this.
“Ye are beautiful. Gods …” He trailed off when she began moving on top of him.
She grabbed his hands and put them both at her breasts again, not just for the pleasurable feeling of it, but also for safety purposes. If his hands were holding her back, she couldn’t forget herself to lean down and kiss him.
Mustn’t touch, mustn’t touch.
She kept the pace of her hips slow, yet strong, allowing everything to build and heat up within the both of them, considering the layers that still separated them. With the satin lining of her leather, it was actually pretty easy for her to do this and still be comfortable.