by Lizzy Bequin
“Right there, Skal,” she moaned. “Oh God, don’t stop.”
As the dragon grew more aroused, his breath grew hotter. It ghosted over Katrine’s naked body in gusts. Her skin was totally dry now. Tiny orange sparks danced in the dragon’s breath and stung her skin deliciously.
“Don’t stop!” Her voice was desperate, pleading.
The dragon had made her come a dozen times or more with his fingers, but this was different. The climax that was growing in her belly was almost terrifying.
Katrine added her own self stimulation to the mix. With one hand, she squeezed and pinched her breast, pulling and stretching it almost to the point of pain. Her other hand delved between her thighs and fingered her clitoris in time to the rhythm of the dragon’s tongue inside.
He was not so much licking her as he was rubbing her tenderest place with his tongue. It was wet and raspy, and it abraded her special spot in a way no finger ever could.
Katrine humped the dragon’s leathery muzzle. More hot sparks scalded her inner thighs and lower belly. She fingered her clit so hard the muscles of her forearm ached.
“Don’t stop…”
The dragon’s hungry growls vibrated through her pussy into every bone and ligament of her ravaged body.
“Don’t fucking stop…”
The tension inside of her swelled to seemingly impossible proportions. The feeling was accompanied by a wincing anticipation, like watching an over-inflated balloon that would pop at any moment.
But it wasn’t only the size of the oncoming orgasm. Katrine felt herself on the verge of some epiphany. Some secret form of pleasure she’d never even known existed until now.
“Don’t stop… It’s there…”
Katrine arched her back and sobbed with pleasure as her climax exploded. Her muscles quaked, tensing and relaxing rhythmically as she came again and again.
A stray spark from the dragon’s breath touched her already dried patch of pubic hair. It ignited. White smoke, lots of it, curled from the singed curls. An odor of burnt hair. A flicker of orange flame.
The dragon had literally set her crotch on fire.
“Oh shit!”
Katrine reached aside, cupped a handful of water, and splashed it onto her burning lady garden, extinguishing with a hiss the tiny flames that had erupted there.
She sighed with relief.
The dragon’s tongue slid from her hole, followed by a river of arousal that spilled down Katrine’s crack. The dragon looked at her, yellow eyes tinted with concern, and sniffed at her singed tuft.
“Are you okay, little one?” he purred.
Katrine nodded. She flopped her head back onto the stone and laughed openly.
“Okay” was the understatement of the eon.
She had just come harder and longer than she had ever done in her life, and she had done it around a dragon’s tongue. A real, living, fire-breathing dragon.
Even though the climax had passed, her body was still singing with pleasure. Even the ends of her hair seemed to be sensitive.
The dragon nudged her belly with his muzzle. He licked her affectionately, like a giant scaly dog. He stared down at her with those amazing, yellow eyes that were so intense, so focused on her.
Katrine gazed up at him, naked and panting.
What the fuck had he just done to her?
She wanted to leap from the rock and fling herself at him. She wanted to smother him in kisses from his snout to his tail. But her body was still weak from coming.
Her stomach rumbled, hungry from exercise.
“How selfish of me,” the dragon rumbled. “I’ve been down here feasting away while my little atma is starving for real food.”
“Yeah, right,” Katrine breathed. “Super selfish…”
The dragon lowered his body into the water. There was a splashing sound as his bulk displaced the water over the stone rim at the edge of the pool. He encircled the rocky plinth where Katrine was lying and shifted his wings.
“Come, little one,” he offered. “Climb onto my back. I will carry you upstairs so you can eat.”
Katrine was so exhausted, so sexually sated, she felt like she would be perfectly content to just drift off to sleep right there to the sound of the rushing water. But the suggestion of food was tempting. It had been a long time since she had eaten. She had been back on Earth then.
She rolled from the stone onto the dragon’s back and clung between his folded wings.
Neither one of them spoke a word as he carried her through the dark tunnels back to the main chamber above. The whole way up, Katrine kept her ear pressed to his back, listening to the drumming of the tremendous heart inside.
CHAPTER 19
Katrine sat on the warm stone floor munching on a sweet, juicy darkplum and watching the dragon as he worked. The light from the fireplace glittered his scales and sent long dark shadows sprawling over the domed ceiling. The burning logs smelled good, oddly spicy, like a Christmas potpourri.
Katrine made a mental note: if she ever figured out a way back to Earth, which seemed super unlikely at this point, she would take some of that alien firewood back with her. So far, she had not seen Skal add a single log to that fire, yet it was burning just as brightly and warmly as when she had first woken up in this chamber.
She took a big bite of the fruit, and the sweet, sticky juice bled down her chin and her wrist.
Some of these darkplums would be coming back with her as well. They were the most delicious things she had ever tasted, like a plum on steroids. Plus, for fruit, they were surprisingly filling as well. She had only eaten one piece, about the size of an apple, but she felt as though she had scarfed a full breakfast of bacon, eggs, and pancakes. She didn’t even need this second piece, but it was so good that she was stuffing it in anyway.
And Skal had brought her a whole dang tree of these things. The fruits now lay stacked in a pyramidal pile by the wall.
Meanwhile, the dragon—for Skal was still in his full dragon form—was stripping the thin branches from the tree and weaving them together into something like a giant, flat basket. The spaces between the intertwined limbs were filled in with liberal amounts of dried rushes, and he even embedded many of those silken pillows and soft blankets into the construction.
The dragon was building a nest.
His face was intent while he worked, checking every detail and making sure everything was perfect. His scaly red brows came together in a serious expression of concentration that made Katrine smile.
For a fearsome dragon, he could be pretty damn cute.
And disturbingly sexy too. Katrine studied his graceful, fluid movements as he circled his construction, tucking more cushions into the network of branches and reeds.
“Where did you get all of those pillows and stuff, anyway?” Katrine asked, wiping her juice-stained chin.
Surely the dragon had not made the pillows himself, and they were far too finely crafted to have come from the villagers who had captured her and offered her up as a sacrifice to this dragon. The patterns on them were bizarre too. Vaguely arabesque but at the same time quite alien—unlike any patterns Katrine had ever seen.
“Oh I have collected them over many years,” Skal said. “Most of them came from an old human castle that had been abandoned.”
“A castle? But the other humans I met here seemed so…primitive.”
Skal nodded, and he continued going about his work as he spoke.
“Yes, this planet as fallen onto hard times. But the tide of culture ebbs and flows like the sea. Things were not always as they are now. There was once a great golden age of humanity—an age of technology and magic.”
Katrine’s mind went back to the things she had seen in the treasure room—gizmos and gadgets of various stages of technological advancement.
“When was that?” she asked. “The golden age, I mean.”
“Many millenia ago,” Skal answered. “Long before my kind came to this planet.”
Katrine re
membered that he had mentioned something about that before—about how the dragons had come here from some other place. She decided to ask him about that now.
“So if you aren’t from this planet, then where do you come from?”
“From someplace very far away. A great red star called Arcturus. Each dragon clan comes from a different planet circling that star.”
“But how did you get here? In a space ship or something?”
Skal chuckled.
“Oh no. We dragons don’t use ships. Why use ships when we have wings?”
“Yeah, but…in space?”
“Our wings are not just for flight within a planet’s atmosphere, Kat.” Skal proudly stretched one wing, which nearly extended across the entire chamber. The light of the fire glowed through the leathery webbing. “These wings contain ancient magic which we dragonkind use to traverse the stars, moving more swiftly than a beam of light.”
Faster than light? Katrine knew it was a physical law of the universe that the speed of light marked the upper boundary of movement. Traveling faster than light was supposed to be impossible.
Then again, dragons were supposed to be impossible too, and here she was talking with one.
The tips of her ears practically sizzled as she thought of the other things she had done with a dragon only a little while before.
“Is everything alright, little atma?” Skal asked, sensing her sudden embarrassment.
Katrine wished she had her hair back. Back when she was in school, she would use her curls like a blond curtain to hide her blushing face whenever she was mortified. But now she had mangled her hair with that dagger. All she could do was take another bite of her darkplum.
“Mm-hm,” she mumbled through her mouthful of sweet, sticky fruit.
Perhaps it was just a trick of the firelight and the shadows, but she could have sworn she caught a glimpse of a smirk passing over the dragon’s lips as he put the finishing touches on the nest.
Katrine watched him in silence, studying the shift of his taut, cabled muscles beneath the tight layer of skin and scales.
She desperately wished he would turn back into his humanoid form right now. It’s not that she found his dragon form frightening. She had already grown accustomed to it. What unnerved her was the fact that she found it so arousing. He was an animal for crying out loud. A mythical creature, yes, but that only made it slightly less dirty.
At least when he was in his man-form, her desire didn’t feel so forbidden.
Soon her wish was granted.
The looming shadows cast by his wings shrank along the rocky ceiling. His tail shortened. His posture transitioned to upright. He was a man again.
Well…a man with scaly arms, horns, and wings.
And those terrifyingly beautiful eyes.
Skal came for her in that form. He scooped her off the floor like she was a weightless thing and carried her like a bride or a child to the nest he had made. When he gently placed her inside, Katrine was surprised to find the structure to be surprisingly comfortable.
The alien dragon man climbed inside with her.
“Nobody has ever made me a nest before,” she whispered with a smile.
Of course, Skal didn’t pick up on the joke.
“Then you have never carried another’s brood,” he replied seriously. “This pleases me greatly, Katrine. I will not share you. If any man had mated with my Fatebound mate, I would seek him out and kill him.”
Wow. Jealous much?
Katrine was no virgin, but she chose not to get into that whole discussion with Skal right now. There was enough room for misunderstanding as it was. Besides, her ex, Tom, was on another planet.
Still, Katrine allowed herself to indulge in a brief fantasy of Skal kicking down Tom’s front door. The expression of shock and terror on that jerk’s face when he saw the fire-breathing dragon man coming for him. The fantasy made Katrine snicker.
“What is so funny?” Skal snorted. “Do you doubt that I would kill any man that touched you?”
Katrine shook her head.
“No, I don’t doubt that.”
And she really didn’t.
As messed up as it was, Skal’s jealous and possessive attitude toward her was somewhat endearing. She got that same feeling she’d had down in the crystalline water chamber. Skal wasn’t just looking for a quick lay. He only wanted Katrine, and he wanted her with a depth and intensity that brought back that warm, ticklish feeling in her insides.
“Good,” Skal murmured, drawing her close against his reclining body. “You are my atma. You will be the mother of my spawn.”
Katrine placed her hand on that broad, smooth chest of his. She knew she needed to set this guy straight on a couple of points, but she needed to choose her words carefully.
“Skal, look,” she whispered. “I like you, but don’t you think this is moving a little fast?”
“No,” he rumbled.
No. Of course he didn’t. He was a dragon.
“Okay…” Katrine went on. “Well, I do, all right? I like you, but I don’t think I’m ready for you to, you know…knock me up.”
Skal quirked a dark brow.
“I mean I’m not ready for you to make me pregnant.”
The wings of Skal’s nostrils spread as he tested the air in the nest.
“You are ready,” he said simply. “Your body is very ripe. I can smell it, taste it.”
The logs in the fireplace shifted and popped. Heat rushed up the arteries of Katrine’s neck and flushed into her cheeks. Her nipples hardened against her will.
“There’s more to it than that, Skal.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean emotions!” Katrine almost shouted. “Personalities. All of that stuff. We barely even know each other, Skal. What if we’re not compatible?”
As she said the words, Katrine could hardly believe what she was saying. She was hedging, allowing for the possibility that maybe they were compatible, which was patently absurd.
Skal was an alien dragon.
She was an Earth girl.
End of story.
So why did she let Skal pull her closer? Why did her stupid leg hook around his? Why was she getting so freaking wet for him again?
“Trust me,” Skal purred. “We are compatible. Fate would not have brought us together otherwise.”
Fate. There was that word again.
It sounded ridiculous. Like something out of a fairy tale. But how could Katrine explain those dreams she’d had in the weeks before coming here?
But what if Fate had been wrong?
What about her problem?
Katrine felt self-conscious about it. She had ever since she’d received the test results from that first doctor, and the following two opinions from other physicians had just driven the knife deeper.
And then there had been the way that Tom had treated her. For the longest time, he’d never said it outright, but it was written all over the way that he chilled toward her. Then, in that last fight, the really bad one, it had all spilled out into the light of day.
Defective.
That’s what Tom had called her. Defective.
Later, when she was alone, Kat had agreed with that assessment.
Now, however, that defect might be the only thing that could save her. It didn’t matter that she was growing fond of Skal. That wasn’t a real emotional attachment. That was just her sex starved skin reacting to a man’s touch after such a long time going without. It was her fragile ego enjoying the good feeling of being the object of a man’s attention, and a dominant man at that.
But he was also a dragon, first and foremost. An alien dragon. It was unnatural and wrong on so many levels.
“I can’t,” Katrine blurted.
She tried to pull away slightly, but Skal’s statue-hard arms held her in place.
“Can’t what?” he grunted. “What do you mean?”
“I can’t…I can’t make babies. My body doesn’t work right.”
“Doesn’t work right?”
Katrine nodded. She felt a dull wet ache behind her eyeballs, but she wasn’t going to let herself cry in front of him. She had promised herself that she would never let herself cry in front of a man again.
“I’m defective,” she choked.
Skal’s brow creased. At first Katrine read that furrowing as anger. A sign of his impending rejection. But perhaps it was something else.
“I do not understand.”
“My body doesn’t make eggs properly, Skal. It makes them, but they don’t work. They won’t turn into a baby.”
Skal looked at her quizzically.
“You are very strange, little atma.” Skal gently thumbed her chin, her lips. “I will supply the eggs.”
“What?”
Skal’s hand smoothed over her belly, leaving a trail of goosepimples in its wake. His fingertips brushed the top of her pubic hair, which had been partially scorched away during their little accident.
“I will implant my eggs in your incubation chamber.”
For an instant something like hope flickered behind Katrine’s breastbone. Was that really how it worked with a dragon? He would put his eggs inside her?
Hope sparked in her heart.
But this was followed by other questions. Like, what kind of eggs? And would the child even be hers? Or would Katrine just be some kind of holding tank for the alien dragon’s spawn?
Each thought led to another until her mind was a welter of confusion.
Then one thought rose to the top of the mix.
“Skal, what about my friends?”
“Your friends?”
Katrine frowned at him. “Remember, I told you. Nora and Blair and the others.”
“Oh yes. The other sorceresses.”
Katrine started to correct him, then thought better of it. Now was no time to be arguing semantics with a dragon. All that mattered was that she persuade Skal to help her find the other women.
“Please, Skal. They are out there somewhere, and they are in danger.”
Guilt was settling in Katrine’s belly like a heap of cold, heavy iron chains again. She was the one who had gotten them into this terrible mess. Okay, maybe it wasn’t completely her fault. But maybe if she had just spoken up…