Breath of Desire

by Ophelia Bell

  ***

  Aurin lay quietly, her limbs entwined with Dimitri’s, enjoying the steady, even gusts of his breath against her skin as he slept. Her brother’s slow breathing from the other side of their lover signaled his slumber but she found she couldn’t sleep, in spite of her own weariness. It was a mental exhaustion more than physical, however. The worry over Aurik’s issue had them all on edge lately. Even the flight the night before hadn’t calmed him the way it normally did.

  Her brother had been less forthcoming about his feelings lately, less communicative than usual. His distance worried her and she had hoped that he and Dimitri would find him a female mate so he could stay. It seemed he had all but given up hope, and the understanding broke her heart.

  Dimitri’s breathing changed and she looked up to see his eyes open and filled with sadness.

  “He’s going to leave, isn’t he?” she whispered.

  Dimitri nodded and wrapped his arms tightly around her, burying his face in her hair. He sniffled and let out a soft, mournful sound against her skin. The wet warmth of tears became evident, along with the salty scent.

  “It’s my fault,” she said. “I marked you first. If only I’d let him mark you first—the Council would let him stay, and I’d be the one forced to find a second mate. Maybe I’d have better luck.”

  “We’d still be in the same bind, though,” he whispered. “He said they expect all Court dragons to produce offspring. He needs to mate a human woman one way or the other. If only he would just choose.”

  “He loves you so much,” she said. “As do I. It’s no wonder that he wants only you.”

  “But I need you both. If only he could see how much I need him as much as you. Losing him would be like losing Alex all over again. Aurin, I don’t know if I can survive that. It destroyed me and Thea. I’m terrified that I’ll lose you both if he goes.”

  She held him tighter and pressed her lips to his. “I’ll never leave you.”

  Dimitri responded with raw hunger, his kiss a desperate invasion that she accepted. The air around him pulsed with the nearly visible surge of magic seeping into him, and his arousal pressed insistently at her hip.

  Aurin responded, the warm, tingling between her thighs an automatic reaction to that rising accumulation of energy Dimitri always seemed to attract when they made love. She needed more than just the energy, however. Feeling him buried deep inside her would provide more comfort than a fresh taste of his Nirvana. Seeing his twin marks alight as they did and knowing he desired to fill her womb with his seed made her ache with joy, but at what cost if her brother couldn’t share it with her?

  He pushed her onto her back and mounted her with an urgent thrust that startled her. The slick friction of his cock sliding in and stretching her made her gasp and cling tighter to him. Roused by their movements, Aurik shifted closer. Dimitri’s mouth left Aurin’s breast long enough to kiss her brother deeply. Dimitri and Aurik clung to each other, hands clutching each other’s napes and foreheads touching while Dimitri shuddered and cried out in climax. The sweet Nirvana rushed through her, its shimmering reflection coursing over Aurik’s skin. She felt his larger hand cling to hers where she clutched at Dimitri’s shoulder.

  “Please don’t leave, brother.” She sent the thought hoping for a response but he only clenched his eyes shut and wrapped his arms around them both, burying his face against Dimitri’s shoulder the way Dimitri had to her only moments ago.

  She fell asleep with fingers linked to the hands of both her brother and her lover, but dreamed of both of them slipping away in the darkness.

  ***

  The obnoxious, insistent buzz of Dimitri’s cell phone drilled into his dreams. He sat up with a start, blinking and trying to catch his bearings. Aurin’s beautiful, otherworldly image filled his field of vision from the other end of the sofa, an amused smile on her face framed by tousled golden hair. In one hand she held a mug of steaming coffee. In another, his phone with its screen flashing Erika along with a photo he’d captured of Erika’s red dragon mark from a still of their adventures in the Temple months earlier.

  “You can choose,” Aurin said, waggling the phone at him next to the coffee mug. “It’s the third time she’s called. I told her to call back because I didn’t want to wake you, but she might be pissed by now.”

  Dimitri snatched his phone and swiped his thumb to answer.

  “Good day, Mistress Erika,” he said in a deep, scratchy voice while groping for the mug that Aurin kept pulling slightly farther from his reach.

  “None of that today, smartass,” Erika replied through his earpiece. “I need your expertise.”

  Her businesslike tone made him sit up a little straighter. His glower at Aurin caused her to give in and she handed his coffee to him with a sheepish grin.

  “What is it?” he asked, taking a tentative sip of the hot liquid and groaning softly as the life-giving substance swept down his throat.

  “Camille’s tracked the missing fragment to seventeenth-century Europe. France, to be exact. We need you to pick up the trail. You have historian friends, don’t you? If there’s someone you trust implicitly, you have my permission to bring them in.”

  Dimitri raised an eyebrow at how she’d tactfully avoided mentioning Hallie, their friend who had touted her skills as an historian to Erika in order to be included on their expedition. Hallie had other skills that had been invaluable on their trek, but history hadn’t been on the list. He only knew one person who fit the criteria, but cringed at the idea of making that particular call.

  “Just send me the research you have so far. I’ll see what I can do.”

  “I mean it, Dimitri. You might be thinking you can follow up on this yourself, but we can’t spend a year hunting for this thing. It isn’t about our careers. It’s about our lives.”

  Dimitri glanced at Aurin whose eyes had widened at overhearing that dire statement.

  “Um, aren’t you overreacting just a little, Erika? Having kids is an accomplishment, but there’s no need to rush it, especially now that…you know.” Now that we will probably live for centuries.

  The other end of the line was silent for a long moment. Dimitri pulled the phone away from his ear to look at the screen, worried that the call might have dropped, but the call timer still ticked steadily away over the image of Erika’s dragon mark.

  “Erika?”

  A heavy sigh sounded through the earpiece. “There’s more to the Verdanith than the fertility thing. It’s a kind of focus for their magic. When it’s assembled and placed in its sacred location, it can be used for other purposes. I can’t tell you more than that right now. There’s more information in the data I’m sending you, but we can’t waste time. I need you to lead this part of the search, but we need an expert to get this done. As good as you are with what you do, this is not your field of expertise.”

  Dimitri repressed the urge to say, “Yes, ma’am.” Erika was right. He was decent enough when it came to historical research, but he preferred the hands-on work of studying bones and artifacts. He had to feel them in his hands to find a connection with the past. Women like Camille were better with the words on the page, or the characters carved into the stone slabs, but even Camille was limited to her own area of study.

  He knew one person who could intuit deeper meanings and somehow read between the lines of those translations and historical accounts to finding the truth and sort it into a logical chronology. But she was across an ocean right now and he hadn’t spoken to her in more than a year.

  The thought of Thea made the coffee he’d just swallowed seem to turn instantly to ice in his belly. His memories of her were what he’d managed to subdue in his relationship with the Twins. He hadn’t just lost his brother the year before. He’d lost her, too. The Twins were his redemption in so many ways.

  His brother was gone, at least. But Thea was still there. To have to confront that old loss might just destroy him again. It scared the shit out of him.

  He glanced
at Aurin, her wide golden eyes beseeching. They’d had the talk about what her purpose was. What she wanted. She’d been subtle about it, as was her way. She wanted kids. With him. Half of her urging of Aurik was to get him to want the same thing and find a mate he’d want to accomplish that with. Ideally one they could share, of course.

  Finishing this damn quest would be the biggest step to at least fulfilling her desire, which he wanted more than anything.

  “Fine, I know who to call. It might take some convincing for me to get her here, but I’ll give it my best shot. We didn’t exactly part on the best terms.”“Do what you have to. Money is no object.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.”

  When he ended the call he stared beseechingly at Aurin. “What the fuck am I gonna do? She’ll never come.”

  Aurik had appeared again and now sat on the coffee table resting his elbows on his knees. The twins glanced at each other, then at Dimitri.

  In unison, they said, “Make the call.”

  Chapter 2

  The worst thing about loneliness were the dreams of not being alone. Thea had gotten to the point where she’d prefer not to sleep because she would inevitably have to wake up. To go from the happy escape of dreams of Alex and Dimitri, both alive and warm beside her, to the dark solitude of an empty bed, was the worst kind of hell. Except she was running out of excuses to stay awake. Her latest research project was long done, but she’d given the Foundation a three-month timeframe and they had already paid her paltry stipend for those three months. The fact that she had managed to complete three months-worth of research in half that amount of time wouldn’t matter to them. They would only think she’d miscalculated the difficulty of the project, not that she’d been working double-time on it just so she could avoid having to sleep.

  She re-read her research paper for the third time, scouring it for some detail she might have missed, a date she might have gotten wrong, a name, a lineal connection out of place—anything that would mean more work. She glanced at the clock that was nearly buried under her stacks of books and notes. Three AM was too early to sleep. If she exhausted herself enough, she could fall into dreamless slumber for an hour, then wake up and start again.

  The pile of papers in front of her began to vibrate and for a second she worried she’d gone off the deep end and succumbed to hallucinations. She blinked at the rhythmic rattling buzz for a couple seconds before it finally registered. Quickly, she dug through the pile to find her phone somewhere buried under a cataloging of the lineages of twelfth-century French monarchs. Incestuous bastards, royalty.

  The number was marked “Private” which she would generally ignore, but tonight she was grateful for the distraction. Any excuse to avoid sleep.

  The sound of his voice caused that surreal sense of vertigo to return with a vengeance. The room spun around her and she grabbed the edge of her desk to steady herself, even though she was still sitting.

  “Thea, are you there? Oh, shit, I just did the math. I’m sorry. I probably woke you up, but I need your help. And… well… it really can’t wait.”

  Alex? No, that wasn’t right. Alex was dead. Her knowledge of that fact didn’t stop her mind from taking the leap and almost believing it was Alex and he was somehow contacting her from beyond the grave. No, there was a logical alternative, but not much less disconcerting.

  “D-Dimitri?”

  The voice on the other end hesitated, the tension in it mirroring the tightness in her throat at hearing that voice again after so long dreaming about him. “Yeah. Listen, I’m sorry for calling out of the blue like this…It’s just that I have… Ah, fuck, it can wait. It’s good to hear your voice, Thea.”

  “How are you?” Her voice sounded a little too high-pitched due to the emotions surging inside her. The roiling morass of grief she had buried for so long bubbled up, but when he spoke again his words made those feelings evaporate. She only felt pure relief at hearing his voice again after merely dreaming about it and waking up to a world without either him or his brother in it.

  “Good. I’m living in Paris now.”

  “Oh? Lucky bastard.” She smiled and tears trickled off her upper lip leaving a salty tang against her tongue.

  “I regret how we left things.”

  “Me too.” Regret was an understatement. It had been all her doing, though. Alex dead and Dimitri reeling from both guilt and shock. He’d been driving the car that night, but he couldn’t have known how drunk the other driver was. Thea had been safe at home in their bed, but in the end she’d been the one who deserted him, pushed him away in her own grief. Understandably, he had left.

  He let out a heavy sigh, filling the silence. “I need your help with a research project. Remember Erika?”

  Thea wiped her eyes and sniffled, hoping her voice didn’t sound too emotional. “How could I forget. She was a force of nature among the faculty until she left on that crazy expedition. And took you with her.”

  “It was something Alex and I had been planning to do for a while, actually. We were going to bring you with us, too. It would have been an adventure we’d never forget.”

  “So you didn’t go?”

  “Oh, no, I absolutely went. Alex would have wanted me to. I wish I’d made you come with us. It was the best thing I could’ve done to get past his death and move on.”

  “I’m getting by.”

  She was grateful that he didn’t call her on the lie, though she thought he might for a second.

  He only paused for a second, but it was long enough for her to read into the gap the scrutiny of her entire life since they’d parted. True to Dimitri, he never judged. He just gave.

  “Come to Paris. I have a research project for you that I think you’ll love. It’s related to the expedition we just finished. Erika’s expedition.””

  Not “Come to Paris because I miss you and want you back.” She supposed that might be too much to hope for. “Come to Paris and work for me.” He just said he’d moved on.

  “I don’t know, Dimitri. I have a lot of work to do in Boston. The Massachusetts Antiquities Foundation just hired me a few weeks ago for a project. I can’t just drop it.”

  “I know you can do that stuff in your sleep, Thea. I’ll pay you ten times what they are, too. And you’ll get to visit all the old archives you always wished you would have time to dig into. I’m talking 17th century French history. The pieces you’ll be working from go back even farther.

  Thea laughed weakly. “You don’t have that kind of money. How the hell can you promise me that?”

  “There are interested parties who have very, very deep pockets. Erika is just one – she’s the one providing the research. We’d like you here starting on this within the next 48 hours if you’ll agree. First class airfare paid. You’re welcome to stay with us—with me.”

  Welcome to stay with us. She wanted so much to say no, for so many reasons, but to what end? To go back to sleepless nights trying to fake her way through a life that had ceased to have any meaning for her? At least he was offering her something worthwhile. Once she was there and focusing on the new project, it was very likely she’d become so engrossed in it she would even manage to forget about him.

  “Alright, but I have two conditions. I’m staying in a hotel and once you give me the details you have, you let me run with it. I work better without distractions.”

  “Anything you want.”

  ***

  Dimitri was struck by how withdrawn Thea looked when he met her at the airport the next evening. She’d insisted that she would come right away, surprising him with her decisiveness after her initial objections. He pasted on a bright smile to cover up his concern. She had an almost hunted look about her, like she hadn’t slept in a week. He was familiar with the look, having seen it in the mirror for the first few months after Alex’s death, until he’d joined Erika’s expedition and trekked off to a part of the globe where mirrors didn’t exist. The visual reminders may have faded, but the memories had
always remained—of Thea and of Alex.

  Before the false front could falter, he pulled Thea into a tight embrace. Her petite frame shuddered against him, so solid yet so delicate. Everything he remembered of her came crashing back. Her sweet, subtle jasmine scent, how unbelievably small she was in spite of her overwhelming presence in his life.

  He held her quietly, letting her clutch at him until the tremors subsided. It had been more than a year, and Dimitri had finally found a way to heal. He had taken for granted that Thea would have managed to find her own way to a similar peace since his brother’s death. How wrong he had been. After a moment, she relaxed and pulled away. Her eyes were bright with emotion and moisture when she looked up at him.

  “You look good,” she said, forcing a smile. Her pixieish haircut was a little mussed, the short glossy black of her hair curling around her cheeks and framing her pale, wide-eyed face. Her lips were still the same delicate shade of peach he remembered finding himself so fascinated with the first day he’d met her, when Alex had introduced them. He’d fallen for her then and spent the next couple months simultaneously hating himself for wanting his brother’s girlfriend and craving her presence regardless of her accessibility. Her acceptance of him into the bed she shared with Alex had surprised him, but the subsequent months of pure bliss had surprised him even more. Until it all fell apart.

  Dimitri resisted the urge to pull her back into his arms and kiss her, but the look in her eyes told him she wasn’t seeing only him. The pain and longing apparent in her expression made it evident she was seeing past him to the image of Alex alive.

  A loud bell rang suddenly, redirecting their focus toward the baggage carousel that had just lurched into motion.

  They stayed silent during the half-hour drive to the hotel. He’d made a point of choosing one of the nicest hotels near the luxury apartment he shared with the Twins, and insisted that the room he reserved for her had a view of the Eiffel Tower. Before his brother had died, the pair had been making plans to surprise her, first with the expedition, then following it up with trips to all the cities Thea had expressed the desire to visit, either for historical research or just to enjoy the sights. This was one of her dreams, and one he had once hoped to share with her and his brother.