“Flying with you by my side will be even more incredible.” He ran his fingers along her arm, raising a trail of gooseflesh.
Then he looked her in the eyes. “You and I have been together. You really could be carrying my dragonlings now. And you know about the issues with dragons losing their clutches.”
“Yes.” Her smile faded. “It’s scary.” Normally a female dragon shifter would be pregnant for seven months, and in the final month would shift into dragon form and deliver her eggs. She would sit on them in dragon form in a nest for another month until they hatched. However, because of the rise in air pollutants and pesticides, dragon egg shells were so thin these days that dragonlings frequently didn’t survive the hatching.
“There’s a clinic in Pine Heights, about an hour from here, that’s been doing some experiments. The doctor there is world-renowned. Dr. Kowalski; she was recruited to work there all the way from Poland. They have had success with surgically removing entire clutches from the mother, coating the eggs with a special breathable substance made partly from the mother’s blood, and keeping them in an incubator.”
“I know of the clinic. How much success?”
“They’ve only done the process with three clutches so far, but they have had a one hundred percent success rate with them.” He frowned. “The best thing for you to do would be to start giving blood now, to ensure that there’s enough by the time they would need to remove the babies, which is at about four months.”
“Bring it,” she said. “If I’m expecting, then I’m willing to try anything to save my babies.”
“That’s my mighty dragoness,” he said. “Show me your scales again.”
She giggled. “Is this like ‘you show me yours and I’ll show you mine’?”
“Cadence Bergmann, I do not know what you take me for. What kind of a dragon do you think that I am?”
“Hopefully the naked kind,” she said, and showed him a ripple of scales before they sank back into her arms again.
“You are a naughty, naughty girl,” he murmured into her ear, nuzzling her. “How shall I punish you?”
“You could make me have multiple orgasms. I would absolutely hate that.”
“Well now…” he mused. “I suppose if it would teach you a lesson…”
“Oh, it would, it would,” she agreed eagerly as he began to strip off her clothes. She set to work too, skimming his shirt over his head and moving down to unbuckle his belt.
By the time their clothes were piled in a heap beside them, they were laughing and breathless.
Then Orion pressed Cadence back in the grass and she sobered, gazing up into his eyes and savoring the closeness of his big, strong body. He gazed at her, his eyes human but with dragonfire lurking in their depths. He licked his lips, his quick pink tongue moistening the flesh, and something clenched low in her body. She wriggled against him, inviting him to explore her body, to taste her – to take her.
He bent his head and placed a gentle kiss to her collarbone, and she sighed at the feel of his mouth on her. Tingles of arousal washed over her skin, making the fine, almost invisible blonde hairs stand on end.
He skimmed his hands down over her breasts, then followed them with his mouth, chasing the tingling trails left by his fingers with his lips and tongue and teeth.
Cadence almost purred as she arched beneath his lips, her pussy aching with the need to feel his touch. He kissed the soft swell of her belly, where their dragonlings might quicken one day.
She parted her legs, knowing she was slick with desire, that Orion would be able to smell the heady fragrance of her need. He groaned and buried his face between her thighs, kissing her mound then parting her lips with trembling fingers so he could press the flat of his tongue against her quivering nub.
She gave a little yelp of surprise that turned into a long, low moan as he ran his tongue around the sensitive bud then pulled it between his lips and suckled, setting lights flashing behind her closed eyelids.
As he lapped at her clit, he pushed his fingers inside her again – first one and then two – drawing them back and forth to create a tormenting friction against the dense bundle of nerves inside her.
Cadence gasped and tried to clamp her thighs together – a reflex reaction – but he withdrew his fingers from her sopping channel and used his palms to hold her open, helpless beneath his erotic assault. She tangled her fingers in his hair, holding his head against her and pushing against his face with her hips, giving herself over to the climax swelling and climbing and coiling in her belly. As he sucked on her clit, every muscle in her body tensed and she realized she was digging her fingernails into his scalp as the tension inside her shattered and skittered in electrical shards through her limbs.
Orion laid a last sticky kiss on her still-pulsing core, then kneeled up to admire her lying there, flushed and languid and breathing hard.
Before she had a chance to recover, he pulled her up towards him, as limp and compliant as a rag doll in her blissed-out state, and arranged her limbs so she was on all fours, her hips arched up and her sex wet and open to him.
She ached to feel the thick, hot length of his cock inside her again, to feel his hips flexing as he drove into her, to feel the warm weight of his body against her spine as he covered her and possessed her. She moaned and wriggled her rump, inviting him to enter her.
Orion braced his arms to either side of her, his cock nudging her entrance, and kissed the side of her throat as he worked himself inside her inch by delicious inch. She clenched around him, the feeling of his throbbing length catching at the lingering flutters of her orgasm and teasing them into a needy pulse.
Orion gasped and cursed as he thrust in counterpoint to the rhythm of her body, his muscled arms trembling with tension. The crinkly texture of his pubic hair tickled her sticky thighs and his heart thundered against her back as he worked to drive her over the edge again.
She felt her crisis building and she pushed back against him, urging him to fuck her harder, deeper.
He obliged, pounding into her with wild, uncontrolled thrusts and withdrawing quickly before plunging back inside again. Cadence was aware of nothing but the driving strength of his body, the frantic beating of her heart, his impassioned gasps and incoherent words, the rising, singing ache between her thighs.
He fucked her harder and faster, relentless in his passion, and she came, hard, spasming around his cock, her bursting juices coating his balls and her thighs. She shouted hoarsely as her body was shaken and rocked, and Orion went with her.
He gave a wild groan that turned to a roar as he spasmed inside her, thrusting again and again until the last aftershocks died away and they were both left exhausted and humming with sexual fulfillment.
He withdrew from her reluctantly, murmuring sweet nothings in her ear, and pulled her into his arms, holding her against his chest as their heartbeats settled from frantic syncopation into a steady throb, beating in time.
Chapter Twelve
Cadence paused on her way out the castle’s enormous front door. She was going to the fairgrounds to meet with the festival planning committee. She wanted to find Orion first, though, to drink in his gorgeousness and possibly enjoy a few minutes of deep, passionate kissing. For some reason, she couldn’t find him anywhere.
“Hey, Orion!” she yelled, and her voice echoed back at her in the cavernous entryway.
Phoebe and her older brother Remus hurried up to her.
“Hey, Cadence, we’re supposed to distract you,” Phoebe said. “Want to go outside and see me do fireballs?”
“You’re not supposed to tell her you’re distracting her, dummy,” Remus said, and stuck his tongue out at her. “Now he won’t give us the chocolate, and it’s your fault.”
“Who are you calling dummy?” she demanded indignantly, and singed his eyebrows with a blast of fire.
“Hey! No fire inside the castle!” Cadence quickly stepped between them. “What are you distracting me from?” she asked Rebus st
ernly.
He shrugged. “Don’t know.”
Very suspicious. “Where is Orion?”
“Haven’t seen him.” Phoebe stared up at the ceiling and put her hands behind her back. Cadence leaned over to see what she was doing.
“Phoebe, are you crossing your fingers?”
“And my toes,” Phoebe bragged.
“Does that mean you’re lying?”
“Yep,” Phoebe said cheerfully. “But I can’t get in trouble because I’m crossing my fingers.”
“That’s not how it works,” Remus sneered, and crossed his eyes at her, then dodged back behind Cadence so Phoebe couldn’t flame him again.
“So where is he really?”
“Talking to Uncle Nikolai,” Phoebe said, jerking her head towards a doorway. “But he’s keeping something secret.”
Cadence stalked off to find Orion.
He was standing in the drawing room, talking to Nikolai in low tones.
“Should we tell her?” Nikolai asked him.
“No, she doesn’t need any additional stress, especially if she is with dragonling. There’s no need to worry her,” Orion said. “We’ll deal with it if it comes up. What are the odds, anyway?”
“Fifty-fifty?” Nikolai suggested. “Who even knows? It’s been hundreds of years since this issue has even come up.”
“Well, mum’s the word. Anybody who tells her has to deal with me.” Orion’s voice went deep and threatening.
Okay, she was getting sick of this.
She kicked the door wide open, and they both jumped, with guilty expressions on their faces. She demanded indignantly, “Tell me what?”
“I’m outta here,” Nikolai said, hurrying off.
“Coward!” Orion yelled after him. “Abandoning your post!”
“Not abandoning! It’s a strategic retreat!” Nikolai called back.
Cadence stalked up to Orion and repeated, in tones of icy rage, “Tell. Me. What?”
He let out a long, exasperated breath. “All right, I talked to the Elders today, because of a claim that Humphrey is making. Here’s the problem. If you are carrying dragonlings, we don’t know if they would be fire or ice, at this point.”
“And?”
“The last time we know of a fire and ice couple having dragonlings, it was five hundred years ago. In that case, the man was an ice dragon and the woman was a fire dragon. But she gave birth to ice dragons, so the ice dragon clan tried to take them from her, while banning her from their clan because she was a fire dragon. Told her husband he could take the babies from her and marry someone in his clan. Instead, she and her husband fled with their dragonlings and managed to escape. Both sides went to war, and burned down entire towns and forests. It turned humans against dragons for a very long time.”
“Thank you for the history lesson. Glad the husband wasn’t a dingleberry. What does this have to do with us now?”
“Well, because of the fire and ice war, the law now says that if you give birth to ice dragons, even if I am the father, any ice dragon male who is willing to take you as his mate can claim them, and if I were to try to interfere – pardon me, when I definitely did interfere – then my clan’s lands, mines, and all of my clan’s possessions would be forfeit to him. Wouldn’t matter if I challenged him and won – his clan would still have the right to your dragonlings and my clan’s possessions.”
“No. Orion, that’s crazy.” She went pale. He could lose everything because of her. “You didn’t know this before?”
“Unfortunately, no. It’s a very obscure point of dragon law. The scrolls that cover this are five hundred years old. But still enforceable. I am calling for a meeting of the Dragon Elders and formally requesting a change of the law, but it would be next year before that happens. Too late for us.” He’d said “us”. But he’d tried to exclude her from this news, and from any plans that he’d make to deal with a situation that affected her entire future.
“Anyway, you shouldn’t even have to be concerned with this. It’s on me. And it’s far too early for us to worry about that yet.”
She sucked in a deep, frustrated breath, and when she let it out, a cloud of icy air enveloped them both. Small icicles dripped from his hair and frost coated his face.
He shuddered and rubbed his hands on his arms. “Well, that news got an icy reception.”
She glared at him. “You know, normally, I’m all for dark humor, but this involves your entire clan’s future, and the babies that might be growing in my stomach. You had absolutely no right to keep that information from me. When were you planning on telling me? When I’d delivered a clutch of ice dragons and someone tried to rip them away from me? They’d die trying, by the way.”
“Cadence, I would never—”
“We’re done talking about this,” she said furiously, stalking off.
She knew what would happen if she gave birth to ice dragons. She’d take them, flee, and find a place to hide out with them until they were grown up. She’d live deep in the woods if necessary, and hunt for their food. Nobody was taking her babies from her, and she wasn’t going to cause Orion’s family to be homeless – well, castle-less – and poverty-stricken because of her.
* * * * *
Cadence wandered across the field with the planners and volunteers, enjoying the spring sunshine as they paced out the grounds, planning where the various booths would go. They were making marks with paint rollers and flags – white for ice, red for fire.
“Your arm looks like a pincushion,” Gretel, a human accountant who worked for Orion’s family, observed to Cadence.
“Worth it,” Cadence said. “I’m working with that Pine Heights clinic to bank my blood in case I do turn out to be with dragonling. It’s part of the treatment.”
“Oh, that’s exciting. When do you find out?”
“I go in next week.”
“Here’s hoping you have a boy and a girl!” Gretel said excitedly as they paced between the painted-off squares that represented possible booth locations.
Here’s hoping nobody tries to take my babies from me, and I don’t cause an all-out war.
“Yes, here’s hoping!” Cadence said brightly.
“You don’t have to worry. I’ve heard nothing but good things about that clinic,” Aurelia reassured her, mistaking the reason for Cadence’s pained, too-wide smile. “We’re all very excited about it. Just think, you’re a pioneer for dragon families everywhere!” Then she glanced over at Darlene, who had stopped and was glaring at a painted square with her hands on her hips.
“We need to switch. The ice dragons need that shady area so their ice sculptures don’t melt,” Darlene said.
“We had it first,” Laetitia said smugly.
“See, that’s the problem with fire dragons,” Darlene retorted. “Stupid, stubborn—”
“Ladies!” Cadence said with exasperation.
“Yes?” Darlene said. “I’m sure you weren’t speaking to her,” she added smugly, nodding her head at them.
“Oh my, this field is so uneven!” Laetitia pretended to stumble and then let out a blast of flame that singed the flags marking off the four corners of a proposed ice dragon booth.
“Okay, I’ve had it with you two,” Cadence grumbled. “I can take it from Orion’s niece and nephew, because they’re ten and twelve. But you two are being ridiculous.” She turned and walked off.
Maude followed at her heels. She and Aurelia had volunteered to help, since they were going to be in town for a while anyway, helping Cadence with her training.
“I swear, just when you think they’re getting along, they start up with this ridiculousness again,” Cadence grumbled.
“You know, I honestly think those two kind of enjoy all the bickering,” Maude said. “Look around you. Ice and fire dragons actually having civil conversations, for the most part. Since you’ve been volunteering, animosity has simmered way down.”
“Really?” Cadence paused to ponder that. She hadn’t been around this a
rea for a long time like Maude and her family, but now that she thought about it, she had seen a lot more friendly interaction and a lot less flaming and icing.
“Heads up,” Gretel interrupted, speaking to Cadence. “Humphrey’s on his way over here.”
Cadence felt a stab of fear. What now?
Humphrey was crossing the field in long, angry strides, with at least twenty of his men trailing behind him.
He was wearing a white silk suit with a blue silk shirt and tie, and white shoes that were already getting muddy from walking across the damp field. He’d probably throw them away when he left.
All of the dragons, both fire and ice, began hurrying towards Cadence, putting themselves between Humphrey and her.
Humphrey and his men aggressively shouldered their way through the crowd, elbowing aside men and women alike. Snarls and smoke and steam swirled in the air.
“Back off,” Laetitia snapped at Humphrey, standing right in front of Cadence. “We’re busy planning a festival here. She is aligned with the Garrison Clan.”
“This is none of your concern. She’s not one of yours.” He stepped around her and fixed Cadence with a fierce glare. “I have consulted with the Elders Council. You are not officially married to him yet, and therefore, unless you can prove that you are carrying his dragonlings, I have the right to claim you,” Humphrey said haughtily. “Your claim alone is not sufficient proof. I can keep you in my castle until tests have been run on you.”
“It’s too soon!” Cadence clenched her fists and tried to quiet her quaking stomach. “The tests won’t be accurate until next week!”
Then he bared his teeth in a frightening smile and stepped in very close, towering over her. The scent of his sickly-sweet cologne clogged her nostrils, and she struggled not to gag. She’d woken up that morning very sensitive to smells.
Part of her new dragon metamorphosis? she wondered. She had never heard of dragons having a good sense of smell. Or was she getting a bit of her wolf back? She’d never heard of that happening before either. Once the more dominant shifter genes took over, the other genes were dormant forever.
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