In a low, steady burn, the heat returned. A soft, comforting glow spread through her body, warming the room and banishing any vines of doubt still clinging to her soul. Sparrow kept her eyes screwed tight and focused all her will on the warrior beneath her. The words of the spell poured effortlessly from her lips in a droning chant barely above a whisper.
Then, as quickly as it had come, the warmth fled. The light within her died, replaced by stabbing cold, shooting daggers first through her palms and then in her gut. Unbearable agony unfurled in a nauseating ribbon down her spine, coiling around it like a serpent bent on constricting the very life out of her. Rolling waves of blackness crashed and ebbed over her vision until the ground beneath her began to fall away.
Loss.
Pain.
Misery.
Fear.
Of all the emotions bombarding her, it was the fear that restricted her. Fear that tightened around her core, knotting her stomach. Fear for the warrior. Fear for herself. Fear of failure permeated the air around her until it was all she drew in.
She didn’t realize until too late that it wasn’t her fear she was feeling.
It was his.
Chapter Three
Sparrow gasped, her eyes flying open. He was waking up. It was the only explanation for being inundated by his emotions like this. By the Gods, she had to get away from him.
Now.
Hurdling through his emotions, Sparrow dug to find her own. Lowering her hands, she took a step back from the gurney.
Fingers curled around her wrist, hard and strong. Shocked, she shot her gaze to the table, gasping at the sight of two silver eyes fixed on hers. They were crazed with pain, echoing the storm he’d sent raging inside her.
A deafening roar shook her, crumbling her inner defenses until the walls fell away, letting in one word.
“Mine.”
A glove of panic fisted her throat. Sparrow tried to pull away, tried to sever all contact with the warrior, both physical and mental. But he was strong. His calloused hand tightened with each move she made to extract her hand from his.
“Please,” she begged in a hushed whisper. She couldn’t take much more feeling. The room lurched and spun. Sparrow tipped back on her heels and then forward again. Her knees buckled.
But before she could slip from consciousness and slide to the floor, another hand grasped her, this time firmly around her biceps. His fingers tightened. The flesh beneath her lab coat burned. Without warning, he hauled her off her feet as if she weighed no more than a feather. She thought briefly that to him she probably did.
Then all thoughts faded as he settled her atop him. His face inches from her own, his glittering gaze focused on her lips. An entirely new wave of his emotions slammed into her.
They all involved her naked.
Squirming, she tried to move off him. But a hand cupped the back of her head, the other curved around her bottom, his large hand flattening, pressing her into him. She heard his thoughts, his desires. They screamed into her.
Take.
Claim.
At the salacious visions his words induced, she gasped in shock. And like any trained warrior, he took the advantage she’d so foolishly offered. The hand on her head urged her down and he lifted his body, pressing his lips to hers. At the contact, she stiffened. Her heart stuttered in her chest as a peaceful silence spilled through her usually tempest-filled mind.
She couldn’t hear anything. No voices. No emotions. Not even his.
Only the urgent softness of his lips, the heat of his kiss penetrated her mind, her body. A contented sigh hummed in her throat. In a dizzying glide, his warm lips moved over hers. Had this been any other patient, anyone else, she would have fought harder, would have slapped him. Wouldn’t she? But this was the captain. Instead her core muscles contracted, tight, hard. Warmth pooled in her abdomen, flooding her limbs, making them heavy and complacent.
The firm body beneath her shifted. His legs opened, allowing her body to sink between them. She blinked, surprised to feel him, hard and insistent beneath the thin sheet. A tremble raced up her spine and anticipation thundered in her belly. He tilted his chin, swallowing her surprised gasp.
She’d heard some dragon males reacted to the narcotic of healing like this, with unabashed lust and desire. But she’d yet to experience it herself. She’d always made sure she was never around when they woke. However, as his mouth slid, warm and moist and powerful, over hers, a little voice inside her played naysayer. Telling her she wanted this. Wanted him. Whispered she’d somehow allowed him to wake, or had wanted him to.
Although everything in her screamed to deny that little voice’s claim, she found herself tentatively moving her lips against his. Realized hands that once pushed him away now tangled in his soft hair. His gorgeous dragon-lord mane, of a silver hue unlike any other she’d seen. Hair she’d yearned to thread her fingers through since she’d first laid eyes on him as a youngling when he would come to sick bay and visit her father.
The secret truth she’d held inside for so long ran unchecked and free. The inner voice was right. She’d craved this, craved a taste of him for much too long. Although she knew it was only the narcotic inducing his ardor, she didn’t care. Feeling his strength, his passion and having it all focused on her was too intoxicating not to drink in. Large and sure, his hands cradled her face, holding her to him. The scent of musk and man wrapped around, permeated her.
“Sparrow!”
At the sister’s shocked gasp, Sparrow pulled back. The moment their lips parted, a sonic boom of emotions erupted in her mind. She folded her body back off the bed, curling in on herself.
Too many. Too fast.
Cradling her head, she tried to shut them all out.
And failed.
When the soft female in his arms left, the pain her presence silenced returned. White-hot slivers of indescribable pain tore through Kestrel’s body, jerking him back to consciousness. Gasping, he fought for breath, his back arching off the cold metal table. Slowly he became aware of something frail and yet undeniably soft beneath his calloused hand. Something he was squeezing the life out of.
Footsteps shuffled from somewhere in another room. A door opened and the muffled voices and steps grew louder.
Kestrel blinked, the haze of pain that had been blanketing him lifting as elder women dressed in long white robes descended on him. The soft, comforting skin he’d been clinging to was wrenched from his hand. It was then he realized the women focused all their efforts on someone else. Someone on the floor.
“Sparrow! Sparrow,” one of them repeated in a frantic litany.
The name reverberated in Kestrel’s mind. Yet try as he might, he couldn’t recall any flock member with that name. Again he fought to move, fought to open his eyes. He rolled to one side and for an instant he had the impression of falling off the table. However, he realized it was just vertigo, his center of balance off-kilter.
“What have you done to her?” one of the women asked. He couldn’t recall doing anything. In fact, he couldn’t even recall how he got here. Or where here was. The night’s battle played back in his head—the king nearly slaughtered, the silver ax crashing on his legs, his failure. He realized he should be dead. And he briefly wondered why he wasn’t.
“What happened?” a female voice asked.
“Don’t…know,” he groaned. All he could remember was that he’d been dreaming. More accurately, it had been a nightmare. Everything good and pure in his world was being ripped from him—his brother, the king and queen, his flock, his career, his body being torn and ripped away limb by limb. In a desperate panic, he’d reached out, taking the one pure, good thing he sensed in his dark life. A woman. A female. Light and warm as the sun’s summer rays and as pure as the days were long. Her lips tasted of sunshine.
Sparrow.
Chapter Four
The soft tinkling of metal instruments being sorted and cabinets closing woke him. But Kestrel remained still, his eyes close
d, his breathing slow and even. The sensations permeating the space, from the droning murmur of sickbay to the feel of the crisply pressed sheets against his skin, soothed him now where days ago they had been unsettling. Days that had passed surprisingly easily for him, considering he was bedridden and treated like a hatchling.
Although he wanted to remain asleep, Kestrel propped his eyes open, blinking at the fluorescent light filtering in from the next room. At once his eyes focused and settled on the female he’d heard working. Not the doctor. One of the elder women, covered from head to toe in white, scooted about the room, dutifully tidying up.
Instead of being disappointed, he felt a smile tug the corners of his lips. He could sense the doctor now, feel her. He knew she was close by.
As if on cue, she walked through the door, her eyes downcast as she penned something in the chart in her hands. The light filtering in from a window behind her surrounded her in an ethereal glow. Even when he squinted, he couldn’t make out every feature of her face. Only her eyes stood out, a dark indigo against the pale complexion of her face and hair.
Then she looked up at him and smiled and his chest tightened. “Good morning, Captain.”
“Hello, sunshine.”
He’d spoken the pet name before he could stop himself. And by the look on her sweet face, she was as surprised to hear him utter it as he was to have said it. Yet compared to his days when she did not check in on him, did not visit him, it was what her presence was like. A refreshing, warm blast of sunshine. The meekly decorated cave walls and gaggle of old hens milling about did nothing for the scenery like she did. It seemed everything in sick bay was sterile, including their personalities.
“Uh.” She smiled and tucked a strand of loose blond hair behind her ear before pulling a stool from the corner. “Can you sit up, please?”
Kestrel straightened obediently in bed, which annoyed him to no end. He gave the orders, didn’t follow them. Yet the mere thought of making her already demanding job more thankless than it already was made him cross. Not to mention he still felt like a heel after what had happened the night she healed him. Granted, he’d had no way of knowing the doc was an empath. Or the sedative she’d administered would be the equivalent of jacking him full of enough pheromones to send the entire mountain into a breeding frenzy. Even so, he couldn’t quite bring himself to regret the kiss.
Even if he told her he didn’t remember it.
As if in some practiced routine, she snapped on a pair of gloves and pulled the metal tray closer. The scent of antiseptic filled his nostrils, pungent and sharp. The bed shifted, sinking slightly to one end as she settled herself atop it. He watched her small hands clasp the sheet, pulling it back and down, collapsing the edge into meticulous and even folds as she went. When she neared his waist and then lower, he shifted awkwardly. He wore no robe, just a modest wrapper around his hips. And his nerves jumped everywhere she touched, his senses heightened and unduly sensitive around her. Even something as mundane as her sleeve brushing against his skin fired a tickle around his waist, settling lower in his groin.
“I’m sorry if this hurts you.” With care the doc peeled back the wrapper surrounding his injury, undoubtedly taking some hair with it.
He cringed. “Who said it hurts?”
The doc’s full lips curled in a knowing smile. “You can’t really put anything past an empath,” she said, dabbing some sort of concoction onto the wound.
“Ah,” he said, trying to filter the dozens of questions her admission garnered down to one. “I thought you only tapped that well when you healed someone.”
Blue and piercing, her eyes rose to his. Much too briefly, he lamented, before they focused on the tray behind her. “Yeah, well, I can’t always shut it off.” Her metal stool creaked as she shifted, holding a needlelike device over his leg. “Again, sorry.”
Kestrel sizzled in a breath at the smarting sting. Ignoring it, he took in the sight of her. Her head bent low, her cobalt eyes set on his leg. Her long blond hair was pulled back into a severe ponytail at her nape. The dirty-blond color made him wonder if it would glisten if she paid half enough attention to give it a good washing. His gaze swept lower, noting her entire frame was thin and bony, as if she constantly forgot to eat. Both of her collarbones jutted away from her skin, and it floated in his mind more times than he liked how easily a horde soldier could crush them to dust with only one hand.
The large framed glasses she sometimes wore would have made a supermodel look homely. But they couldn’t hide the beauty of her eyes. They were bright blue, deep and open like the sea and just as wild, raw and untamable. Yet the more he stared into them, the more he noticed a streak of gold twisted through them. Its hue split through the iris like a lightning bolt of color, rebelling at her dull and tedious existence in this place. After just a few days of living in sick bay, he understood that streak. Already felt it, too.
Finished with his leg, the doctor shifted her intense focus to his abdomen. Kestrel glanced down at his ribs, at her fingers, carefully and precisely smoothing some sort of herbed unguent over his flesh. A shiver skated down his spine, leaving a calming heat in its wake. Her curative effect amazed him. No marks, no scar showed on his abdomen. His skin held a yellowish tint that he knew from experience would turn a symphony of blues and purples before fading. Yet he felt no discomfort, no twinge in his ribs, no ache.
“I still don’t know how you do it,” he said in awe.
She smiled. “It’s said that in the auld days, females were expert magicians.”
“Really?”
She nodded. “The scrolls speak of how they used their magic to change into humans of great beauty and enter the human world. Some fell in love with human men, gifting them with part of our dragon powers to create the race we are today.”
Kestrel balked. “Our species mere human offspring? Only half dragon? I don’t think so,” he said on a snort. “Not me.”
“No. Of course not you,” she said, tightening the bandage so firmly he winced. For a second he could swear he heard her laugh.
“Where did you read such nonsense again?” he asked.
“Nonsense? Hmm,” she hummed, her lips curving in a grin. “I wonder if the council members would like to know their legion captain went around calling the sacred histories of the ancients nonsense?”
He chuckled. “No, I suppose not.”
The sound of their low laughter gave way to silence. Funny, he used to relish the quiet. It enabled him to focus without distractions. Yet with her, the silence seemed strained, awkward and he couldn’t pinpoint why. Only that he didn’t like it.
“Well, however you do it. Thank you.”
Her hand stilled, her big eyes blinking up at him with a look of shock and humble appreciation. Her lips opened and then closed before they parted in a self-conscious smile he found utterly charming and couldn’t help but mimic.
“You’re welcome,” she whispered, lowering her eyes submissively.
A burst of color warmed her cheeks. The sight made his heart speed up. Before he could question or acknowledge why, a deliciously sweet perfume curled around him, teasing his senses. Kestrel closed his eyes and took a deep pull into his lungs. The smell harkened him back to the night he’d kissed her. The memory of her lips against his—wet, hot and silky smooth—poured through him, setting his insides aflame. A low groan rumbled in his throat and his fingers clutched the edge of the mattress in a white-knuckle grip.
Gods, the primal need for her slammed into him with blinding force. He didn’t see it coming, so couldn’t arm against it. There was something about her, this fragile doctor. She intrigued him. The way her eyes never fully met his, and when they did, she would blush the most enticing shade of pink he’d ever seen.
Kestrel wondered what would happen if he touched her, just there on her shoulder. Or lower, dragging a finger along her collarbone, or lower still, curling his fingers around her breast—what color would she turn then? Which in turn led his mind to wan
der to what sound she might make if he dared it. If he kissed her lips, would she mewl and squirm and make those soft little sounds again?
“Why are you here?” he asked in a strained voice, praying she wouldn’t presume the reason. Or worse, read his mind.
“Pardon?”
“Why are you down here with these old women?” He nodded toward the other rooms, expanding on the thought when she didn’t answer him. “Instead of the inner city with the rest of the flock.”
Instead of with a mate.
Damned if a new shade of pink didn’t flush across her face at his query. Kestrel clamped his jaw, realizing she probably had read his mind. At the thought, he turned his focus on the various metal instruments on the rack beside him, the paint peeling off the cave walls, anything other than the enticing female sending a riot of need through him.
The doctor laughed and returned her attention to his prosthetic. “It’s more like what are you doing here.”
A frown tugged at his brow. “What do you mean?”
“You’re in the magus dome.”
His mouth opened, agape. “The caverns of magic,” he said, barely able to conceal the awe in his voice as he looked about the drab room with new eyes. “I thought this was merely an infirmary.”
“It is both. One cannot heal without magic.”
“Really? Well, the humans seem to manage,” he said dryly.
“The humans don’t live when they’ve lost over eighty percent of their blood supply and one limb.”
A surprised chuckle bubbled out of him. “Touché,” he said, quite liking the glimpse at her feisty side.
“Besides,” she said, setting down one bloody tool and opting for another, “I’ve spent my whole life here.”
The smile left Kestrel’s face. “You’ve never left the mountain?”
“I’ve never had to.”
“Except to shift, of course,” he said matter-of-factly.
Dragon Warrior Page 2