He kissed the top of her head, his hand on her shoulder pulling her closer, as if he wanted to meld them together. At that moment, she wondered if yes, it was worth it. But then the thought of the wolf returned, how close they had come to being killed, and how dangerous it would be if the rest of the pack turned up to exact revenge for their fallen pack member.
At this thought, she gained some perspective on their joining. They may have consummated their relationship, but it would be worthless if they didn’t make it out of here. They belonged in the other world. For all they knew, the bond might be meaningless here. But it wasn’t; she could feel how deep her need for him went.
“You know, our magic hasn’t gone. It’s like someone put it to sleep,” she said as he absently stroked her skin.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Think about it. You still want me. I still want you. I think if the bond is still there, then your dragon is still inside you. Maybe we just have to try to fathom how we get him to come back out.”
He sat up, and looked down at her. “While I was out picking the hazelnuts, I tried, several times. But nothing. I can’t summon him. He might be asleep, but it’s more than that. I think my dragon is dormant inside me.” He paused, and then his voice shook as he finished. “But I can’t keep trying to summon him. It kills me. Little by little, the loss of who I was is taking a part of me away.”
“Dòmhnall. I’m sorry.” She sat up and kissed his shoulder, then rested her head on his chest as she said, “I will find a way to wake him up. I promise.”
He rose from the bed and went to the door, the magic between them broken. “We should go out and get what food we can. I suggest we stay together, one on lookout at all times. Then we come back here, light the fire and keep the door bolted securely. Hopefully that will keep anything out.”
She dragged her clothes back on, sensing a chill in the air. Night would soon be upon them; they needed to be safe. But she was scared she had lost the closeness they had experienced. His need for the dragon to come back to him was taking him away from her, away from this world. Is that what would happen? He would slowly fade away if she couldn’t make him complete again?
Straightening up, she promised herself, and him, that she would do whatever it took, whatever sacrifice was needed, to make this right for him.
Chapter Twelve – Dòmhnall
“I still don’t see why you won’t let me carve up the carcass of that wolf,” Dòmhnall said, after eating an unsatisfying meal of green leaves and nuts. “Dragons are not built to be vegetarians.”
“You might be content to eat anything, but I am not. It’s a wolf, you don’t even know where it came from.” Tara was stoking the fire; he struggled to keep his eyes off her luscious body. All he wanted to do was take her to bed and claim her once more. It seemed as though he needed to make up for all the time they had lost circling each other, neither daring to let their defences down. Now that they had, well, he could hardly keep his mind on anything other than how sweet her skin tasted and how he wanted to massage her voluptuous breasts with his large hands. They fit together perfectly, just like other parts of their anatomy.
He should have kept his mind away from those kinds of thoughts, because now he was so hard he would struggle to think of anything other than being inside her.
“I suppose we had better get some sleep,” he said, his gaze drifting to the bed, his mind filled with images of her lying on it, naked.
“I’m so tired, but I don’t know if I could sleep. What if we are attacked in the night?”
“I am a light sleeper; nothing will come through the door without waking me.” Dòmhnall rose to his feet and held out his hand for her. She placed hers into his palm and he pulled her to her feet, feeling the heat from her body as she stood facing him.
“If you don’t feel like sleeping…” he said, shyly, feeling like such a corny geek.
“You have another suggestion?” she teased.
“It’s more than a suggestion,” he said, his hand losing hers and stroking her cheek. His fingertip traced the contour of her lips, and then he leaned forward and pressed his mouth to hers. She sighed, soft, gentle, so unlike the brash witch he had learned to spar with.
Slowly, he undressed her, his mouth tracing the curves of her body, along her cheek, then her jaw line, making her squirm so much he could smell her desire. Inside him, his dragon awoke from its deep slumber, but Dòmhnall still wasn’t able to call him, he was out of reach, so he ignored the loss and concentrated on Tara’s luscious curves instead.
She moved, her hand curling around his cock, squeezing it, driving him to distraction. He clung to his resolve, stroking her breasts, kissing the tips of her nipples, and then licking them. She whimpered against his ear, and that did it. Stripping her pants off, he used his body weight to manoeuvre her onto the bed. Then he ripped his clothes from his body.
Tara’s eagerness was obvious, she opened her thighs for him, and he contemplated kneeling before her and licking her sex until she came; he wanted to taste her, to make her cry out his name as he nibbled her clit. But he was a selfish soul, and the need to be inside her was too much.
Hovering over her body, he guided himself into her, nearing the point of climax when her tight inner walls gripped him, but he managed to put his mind elsewhere for a short time, and regain his control. Lying still, he allowed his desire to dwindle just enough to prevent him doing anything premature. A dragon lord should know how to control himself for long enough to please his mate, after all.
However, Tara did not help. She stroked his back, her touch soft, making the hairs on his arms stand on end. His cock responded, twitching deep inside her, but he kept himself together and began to move. In and out, completely impaling her, before pulling back so that her outer lips held just the tip of his cock. Then he would thrust home, and it felt like home. She made him complete; wherever she was, he would survive, even if it meant no dragon.
With long, hard lunges, he claimed his mate. She rose to the challenge, although he knew he would make her sore; she was tight, inexperienced. But above all she was his, and he wanted to make sure she never forgot it. Not now. He would never be parted from her again, and she would never escape him. But he aimed to make sure the notion of running away never crossed her mind.
And when she came around him, her sex gripping him, her voice calling out his name, he was certain that she never would. Because he was the greatest Dragon Lord of all time. As he filled her with his seed, his dragon roared, and Dòmhnall was surer than ever before that they could beat this. Whatever had happened to them was temporary; they just had to figure out how to escape it.
Chapter Thirteen – Tara
“Did you hear the thunder in the night?” Tara asked Dòmhnall, still not quite believing she was here in his arms. Even if she didn’t know exactly where here was.
“No,” he said stretching. Damn, he looked so good, even first thing in the morning, whereas Tara knew she probably looked hideous.
“So much for being a light sleeper,” Tara said, dragging her self away from him. But he reached out and pulled her back, kissing her fiercely. She could feel his hard length against her thigh, but knew they couldn’t spend the day in bed. They needed food.
“It’s your fault for tiring me out.” He stroked her cheek and then kissed her again. “So what do we do now?”
She sighed. “I can only think of two choices. Neither of them good. We either stay here, but we won’t survive unless we hunt for food. Or we walk on.”
“Or we walk back.”
“What do you mean? Go back to where we first arrived?” she asked, thinking this over. “Do you think we should have looked for a touchstone there or something?”
“I don’t know. But something tells me whatever, or whoever put us here, is not going to let us just walk out of here.” Dòmhnall swung his legs over the side of the bed and then got up. She watched him, her eyes feasting on his golden skin, as he got dressed. Th
ose breeches hugged him in all the right places.
Shrugging these thoughts off, because otherwise she might be content to spend the rest of her life here in this cabin simply making love to her dragon, she got dressed. Together they headed back out to the small spring. Both of them drank their fill, and then they opened some of the tin cans.
As they thought, the food was off. “It smells as though it’s as old as you are,” Tara said, putting her hand over her nose.
“Charming. I think I’m a lot better preserved though, wouldn’t you agree?” he said tartly.
“Much better,” she said, emptying the contents of the cans onto the ground a safe distance away from their water source. Then she set to washing the cans out. It took a while before she was happy they were clean enough, and then she scooped fresh water into them. “It’s not going to be easy to carry them like this without spilling them, but it’s better than nothing.”
“It’s a shame there were no bottles in the cabin. It would be a lot better to have a lid on these things.” Dòmhnall said, taking two of the cans off her and sniffing them warily.
“They will have to do. I can’t bear the thought of not drinking for the whole day. And night. I mean, we might not find another source of water.”
“True. Look, that’s something we should consider. Since this is the only water and shelter we have found, I suggest we leave some kind of trail as we go. That way if we have to come back, we will end up right here.”
“Like Hansel and Gretel?”
“Yes.” Dòmhnall rummaged around in the undergrowth by the spring; he collected some small stones and then stood up. “Shall we go?”
“Yes,” she said, looking longingly at the small cabin. “I only hope we are as lucky tonight and find shelter if we don’t make it out of here.”
“We won’t know the answer to that unless we start walking.” With that, he led her in the same direction as yesterday, heading west while the sun rose in the sky. But it soon became clear that they would be spending another day in a featureless landscape. Trees, followed by more trees.
“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” Tara said, sitting on a fallen log and rubbing her feet. “I seriously don’t think we are meant to leave this forest.”
“Then what are we supposed to do? Stay here?” Dòmhnall asked, his temper frayed around the edges.
“Maybe.” She sighed, sipping the now-warm water from a can. “Can you think of any reason why the dryads would send us here? What did they say? A gift from Artemis. What does that mean? You didn’t upset her at some point in your long past?”
“No. I never met her. At least if I have, I didn’t know.” He shook his head. “No, there is nothing I have done to bring this upon us.”
“She’s the hunter, right? I can imagine her leaving you able to turn into a dragon and then hunting you. I mean a dragon slayer is a title she might be interested in. Especially since you are the mighty Dragon Lord. But the rest of it makes little sense.”
“I have no idea. Maybe when we find our way out, it will all become clear.” He reached out and offered her his hand. “So we had better keep walking, and dropping these stones.”
She groaned. Her stomach had shrunk and she felt lightheaded. “We need food, Dòmhnall.”
“I know,” he said, looking from side to side, into the trees. “But there is nothing. Barely even any birdsong. I don’t want to spend hours trying to hunt for food, when this forest seems deserted. And huge. We have walked for miles and no sign of human civilisation.”
Tara stopped, looking down at her feet. “Did you throw one of those stones?”
“No,” he said, casting his eyes down to where she was looking. “Coincidence?”
Tara turned her head and looked to her right. There, nestled in the trees was the small cabin they had spent the night in. “Really? We’ve walked around in a circle?”
“No,” he said firmly. “We have walked west the whole time.”
Tara flopped down on the floor. “I don’t understand. Why can’t we walk out of here?”
“There is magic keeping us here, Tara. And until we find out why, there will be no escape.”
She placed her hand on her stomach and said, “My stomach is not very happy about that.”
“We had better go and collect some more nuts and leaves. If we plan to stay here for the night, I might go out further and see if there is a sign of rabbits, or even a stream in which I could fish.”
“OK,” she said, getting up. “Just please don’t offer me wolf meat again, because I would rather starve than eat that.”
“Very well,” he said and headed towards the cabin. She noticed the droop in his shoulders. Whether because of hunger or in some way he felt defeated, the fight seemed to be going out of Dòmhnall. She could understand why. He had never gone up against a foe he could not beat. This time he couldn’t even see his enemy; there was nothing to fight. And no way to find them.
A dragon liked to meet his attacker straight on, but there was no straight on. Tara was convinced that no matter what direction they walked in, they would end up back here at this cabin in the woods.
“Son-of-a-bitch,” she said, throwing the can on the floor. “What the hell is going on?”
“Come on, Tara, get up,” Dòmhnall called.
Still cursing, she got to her feet and followed him towards the cabin. She did not relish another meal of nuts and leaves, but right now, it was better than the gnawing hunger in her stomach.
“We’ll fetch the nuts first, and then pick the leaves. I still think we had better stay together in case another wolf attacks.” Dòmhnall led the way back into the trees. She tried to keep her eyes averted to where the wolf lay dead and decomposing, but her eyes strayed there.
“Dòmhnall,” she said quietly. “It’s not there.”
“What’s not there?” he asked, irritably. The strain of no food and no clue what they were supposed to do was almost too much for him.
“The wolf. It’s gone.”
He turned to where the body should have been, and then walked over to the spot he had broken its neck. Nothing. “What the hell?” He looked around, and then bent down to examine the ground. “There is no sign of it been dragged away and no footprints. If something carried the wolf away, it would have to be a massive animal, and there should be indents on the forest floor.”
“So what happened to it?” Tara asked, more scared from the lack of a carcass than by the attack itself. Like the wolf, would they simply disappear one day?
“I don’t know.” He stood up, hands on hips, and even the sight of him in his breeches wasn’t enough to calm her fears. She could sense his confusion, and if a dragon as old as Dòmhnall had no idea what was happening, then it had to be bad.
Chapter Fourteen – Dòmhnall
His mind was in turmoil: what the hell was going on here? The wolf carcass had gone, vanished; there was no other way it could have been moved, except by magic.
He got to his feet, and said, “We need to gather some food and return to the cabin.”
“Do you sense something?” Tara asked, as she joined him.
“No. My senses aren’t the same as they were … before.” He ducked his head and strode off, wanting to be alone, but needing Tara there by his side. He had to keep her safe. Glancing over at her, he thought how young she looked, vulnerable. A word he never thought he would use when describing Tara. She always appeared to have solid armour covering every part of her, a barrier to anyone or anything that might try to hurt her.
However, without her magic, that hard exterior was gone. Did he look different to her? Younger, or older? He touched his face. What if all of the years caught up with him, just as they had with the witch who had stolen his heart stone. Once more, he pressed his hand to his heart, realising this had become a habit since it had been returned to him. He held onto it too tightly. It stifled him.
When in reality, it belonged to Tara, so that she could be by his side forever. Slowing dow
n, he walked by her side. She looked up at him and smiled, despite her worries and hunger. His heart stone contracted in his chest. It wanted to go to her; it was where it belonged.
Reaching out for her hand, he took hold of it, feeling her warmth, her strength. She would make him a good, strong mate. An intelligent woman, who would bear his child, an heir to the Stronghold in Spellholm. If they ever returned.
Dòmhnall made a promise to himself, and to Tara. Somehow, whatever it took, he would get them out of here. Then he would finally make things right. He would claim her on the stone altar, as he should have done the first time they mated. Then he would give her his heart stone.
One thing this adventure had taught him was he had been stupid, arrogant and disrespectful to Tara. She was his mate. The fates had chosen them to be together for a reason. And he had tried to deny that fate.
Somewhere in the distance, thunder rumbled. Louder than before, it sounded as though a hammer was being struck upon the heavens.
“What the hell was that?” Tara asked, ducking as though the force of it would beat her to the floor.
“A storm. If it’s heading this way, we need to get inside quickly.” They had reached the trees where they could gather nuts. Dòmhnall stripped off his shirt, and they both picked the nuts from the tree and placed them in this makeshift bag.
They had to spread out to find enough for them both. If this were all they were going to eat, they would need plenty. And plenty of water to wash them down. As another crack of thunder speared the atmosphere, Tara moved back to be closer to him.
“It scares you?” he asked.
She looked up at the sky, which had not changed from its azure blue. “Thunder doesn’t, normally. But there is something not right about this. Where is the lightning? And the sky is just the same, cloudless, blue … it’s wrong,” she finished, her voice a whisper.
Dòmhnall had to agree. This whole place was wrong. Surreal. Unreal. “Come on, let’s get back.” But he knew that they couldn’t stay in the cabin forever, and whatever had put them here was beginning to play out its end game. Deep inside him, his dragon raised its head and puffed smoke out through its nostrils. He felt comforted by its presence, the closest he had been to it since they had come here.
Mate of the Dragon: BBW Paranormal Shifter Romance (Her Dragon's Bane Series Book 6) Page 5