With her nose scrunched in confusion, Adri twisted until she faced him, her hand turning until they were joined palm-to-palm. “Why isn’t it possible, Eron?”
Fuck! She’d heard him?
Oh Christ! This was un-fucking-believable, because if she could hear him, Ti’eron, as well as his dragon then that meant she was…oh shit!
Our mate! Ver’gren’s loving croon filled not only his mind but the goddamn room as well.
She shook her head, as if in denial of his dragon’s verdict before she brought her green eyes to his own blues, ones he sensed were whirling in shock. “I’m not asking about love and especially not mating which I’m guessing goes beyond just fooling around. I’m wondering why you feel there’s not even a possibility of it, of an ‘us’. Is it because I’m human?”
The openness and honesty he saw in her face made him drop his gaze to their hands. “No. God no, Adri.”
She sighed. “Is it because I work in a bar, then? That I’m not tall, big-boobed and blonde, worthy of being with a WarDrag? Or because you regret the promise you gave me when we were kids? ”
He shut his mouth so hard, the click of his teeth was audible. She thought she wasn’t beautiful enough for him, didn’t have the right kind of fucking job, for Christ’s sake?
“We hate that word, Adri,” was all that broke from his mouth as he fought against the comfort he ached to give her, exposing his own vulnerability instead. “That WarDrag tag everyone uses is an insult to both warriors and dragons alike.”
She took in a sharp breath, making his eyes shoot to hers, only to see the tears she no longer held in check. “You should’ve maybe mentioned that in your YouTube.”
Since it was not the response he expected, he could be forgiven his bark of rueful laughter. “Yeah, probably.” But of all things currently on the table, it wasn’t what he wanted to say, what needed to be discussed.
He looked away, dreading what was in his heart, at the words crowding closely together and clogging his throat. “It’s not that you’re not good enough for me, baby.”
Her hand squeezed and held his in a death grip.
“There’s just no future for us.” God! There, he’d said it. Finally got it out, admitting he couldn’t provide for her and had no clue when he might have the means to do so.
When she didn’t respond and didn’t snatch her hand away, he sneaked a peek upward.
*.*.*.*.*
He was so full of shit. I couldn’t believe my Eron, the beautiful boy who’d I’d mourned over for more than ten years had grown up to be such a clueless man.
“Did I ask for your freaking future, big guy?” To say I wasn’t pleased by his look of shock at my carefully articulated words would be a lie.
Without thinking about it, I leaned forward as soon as his chin tilted my way and pressed my mouth quickly to his. He went to statue mode allowing my lips to trail in and over his mouth until, frustrated by his lack of response, I used one of his moves against him.
I bit his full lower lip.
Hard.
As he gasped and attempted to pull back, I grabbed the back of his neck while inveigling my tongue into the hot, wet space of his oral cavity, lightly touching his tongue with mine. I swallowed his groan even as he grabbed me around my waist, pulling me to him. But I clutched him right the hell back, yanking at the leather of his shoulder, winding my fingers through his hair and jerking his head closer.
As he reacted, I confess I took full advantage, pushing him down to the mattress. His hands reached for the flannel I wore as my fingers flew to disengage laces. A palm cupped the fullness of one of my naked breasts as I skimmed the furrows of his abs, reaching lower to release the heat of his desire, trapped at an angle I knew couldn’t be comfortable.
When I felt the coolness of the morning air against my uncovered skin, I threw a leg over him, racing to expose the silk covered steel my body yearned to encase. I wasn’t going to be happy with him half-dressed, with his leathers simply shoved down. Shifting off the bed, I tugged each trouser-concealed leg down.
I wanted him fully stripped. Totally exposed to my eyes and defenseless to the urges we’d ignited so many years before. Shifting until I straddled him, I slid back, feeling his crown as it incitingly bumped against my nub of pleasure.
“What’re you…” he ground out even as he lifted his hips, colliding with my clit so firmly, I threw back my head in delight, whimpering at the feel of him against my sopping folds.
I needed him inside me almost more than I needed my next breath.
Reaching between us, I grabbed him, bolstered him until he was centered against the core that wept for him and him alone.
“Christ! Annie…” he shouted as his legs locked, thrusting upward as he slid inside, parting me with his thickness.
Inch by inch, my body accepted both his length and his girth as I sank slowly down with a low, heartfelt moan. His invasion was so damn wanted, so gratefully needed.
“Give it to me, Eron.”
“Take it all, baby. That’s it. Christ, yeah!”
After a few moments, ones of my butt churning, knees gripping the mattress as I filled myself with all the gloriousness I’d somehow been able to resist in my yearning years, I heard it.
“Damn, Adri,” he breathed, eyes zeroed in on my chest as I bounced above him. “So damn good, girl.”
I dropped my chest to his as everything within me edged over the chasm of pleasure, flinging my cells, my very being into the abyss that both destroyed and regenerated my insides in showers of delight.
His hands gripped my hips, pressing me harder, the hardest, as my nether walls pulsed around him. “Fucking, sweet baby Jesus!”
As words a girl wanted to hear as her man hit his orgasm, it wasn’t a lot.
But it was what he yelled.
Although I couldn’t tell if it was a prayer, a plea or just something he unconsciously bellowed when he found his bliss.
Chapter Fourteen
Ti’eron came back to earth slowly, an inch at a time fully knowing he held the woman of his dreams in his arms. After admitting he had nothing to offer her, that he couldn’t see a future for them, she’d gone all out to seduce him. Had ridden him fast and hard, so goddamn good, he was uncertain in that moment where he began and she ended. As his thoughts leveled out, he remembered her question right before she kissed him. ‘Did I ask for your future, big guy?’
He didn’t like it, didn’t fucking like that question at all. Because in some way he thought she meant they could play together, but when it came to a happily-ever-after she wasn’t asking for one. Not with him. And that was the rub, the crux of the issue.
He couldn’t think of mating with her, but he’d be damned if she thought to be with anyone else! Without volition, Ti’eron gathered her even tighter against him, his thoughts a jumble of what a life without Adri might hold as his eyes idly roamed around her bedroom.
Only to stop on a three foot high, stuffed animal in the shape of a dragon adorned with sequins sitting in a place of pride on a corner of her dresser.
“What the hell is that?”
She followed the trajectory of his gaze before turning back to him. “It’s my first dragon.”
“But its blue!” He narrowed his eyes unable to understand why she was smiling, her eyes dancing. “Your beast is a beautiful bronze, baby. Unless you have something you need to tell me.”
Her giggle did nothing to calm the jealousy flaring inside him. “My first day at Toxic, that little guy was swinging over the front door by a noose. I cut him down, saved him and brought him home.”
He looked back over at the toy and immediately thought of Lor’gen’s ideas for merchandizing the Warrior Dragons. He still hated the idea of a calendar, but plush toys?
He rolled her onto her back, holding her beautiful eyes as he began to lengthen within the walls he’d never withdrawn from, had remained embedded in. “Wanna adopt another dragon only a Bronze this time?”
She
smiled before she lifted her chin, pressing a soft, sweet kiss to his lips. “Getting that noose off was a pain. Almost as much as making you stop with the grabby-hands.”
His own lips stretched into a grin. If only she knew the effort it took him to rethink that move every time he was around her!
“I never stopped, you know,” she whispered, her face going serious. “Never stopped missing you.”
Goddamn! She completed him in ways he didn’t know were possible. “Absolutely the same here, babe.”
Ver’gren added his two-cents, both growling and purring as Ti’eron again pushed into her moist, velvety softness, before his dragon also succumb to the sweet deliciousness of all that was their Adri/Annie.
Both the girl and the woman she’d become.
*.*.*.*.*
It was a little later, after a rousing and amazing round two, when I was shoveling the mound of scrambled eggs and toast onto his plate, I saw his eyes again go to the window. He’d done it several times and I couldn’t figure out what he was looking for or hoping to see. “Is something going on?”
“It’s getting late,” he mumbled before taking another bite.
I glanced at the clock and turned back to him only to see him looking out the window again. With my crazy hours at Toxic, eight-thirty was still the middle of the night—definitely nothing ‘late’ about it. “Is that your way of saying you gotta go?”
“Ver’gren says we’re okay here but I don’t know…something feels off about lounging around when the next Berstat swarm is on its way.”
I don’t know that I’d label what we’d been doing as ‘lounging’, but there was no mistaking his unease. “Are you still supposed to work the ground? Because after the tongue lashing those reporters gave that general guy, I’m surprised you haven’t been ordered back into the air.”
His next forkful halted halfway between his plate and his mouth as his stunned gaze met mine. “What?”
“Didn’t you see the press conference? The one where the media lambasted the Global Militia when they tried to talk of the glorious effort our fighters were making? Man, they ripped that military clown a new one, demanding to know why dragons were on the ground doing cleanup. Cleanup that wasn’t needed when dragons flew.”
Ti’eron’s hand slowly dropped the fork to his plate, his bite untouched. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope.” I went to the remote on the coffee table and turned on my modest flat screen TV. It was Sunday morning and I was sure some of the political shows did a week in review which would contain some of the more disastrous sound bites from the news conference. Two clicks in and I found it.
We watched in silence and I caught more at the second viewing than I had the first time I’d seen it. Picked up on the anger in the reporter’s postures and tones, the haughty arrogance of the general until he realized his practiced speech wasn’t going to influence or gain favor with the media. As soon as it was over, Ti’eron looked up in shocked surprise.
“The public is on our side?”
I stepped to the table and leaned a hip against his shoulder, running a hand over Ti’eron’s still tousled hair. “How could they not be, honey? Before general-whoever got his way, none of us knew what those creatures would do if they landed. But we got to see it, watched as the bugs tried to burrow into the soil, attempted to take out whatever forest they landed in, as well as endeavored to drain our lakes and rivers dry. Until the WarDr…erm, Warrior Dragons stayed on the ground, flaming them super-fast before the Berstats could do much damage.”
Did he understand what I was trying to tell him, of how proud and grateful the citizens of the world were in having the dragons’ help when our leaders succumbed to their own hubris, attempting to crush the tide of public opinion concerning dragonkind?
For some reason, I didn’t think my man got the full picture and maybe he couldn’t, being so close to the situation and everything.
“It wasn’t only that his precious troops couldn’t handle what you and the dragons do so effortlessly. It’s also the fact the men comprising those troops, the ones trained to follow orders without question, didn’t have to die. Those families didn’t have to lose their husbands, fathers, brothers or sons to the Berstats. Not when dragons were created, came out of hibernation just for this purpose.”
Ti’eron threw his head back and the roar exploding from his mouth rattled the windows, knocking a couple of pictures off the walls in his dragon’s fury. But it was the flames surrounding his mouth that found me taking a couple of steps back and holding a hand over my heart.
We would never, ever hurt you, our Annie.
Yeah, well. I mentally shot back; embarrassed because I didn’t have words enough to tell the dragon how much his flames terrified me. I’d seen what that fire could do, for heaven’s sake!
My guy though didn’t seem to be aware of my interaction with the other part of him as he pushed back his chair. “I need to go back to the compound.”
Though my stomach dropped at the thought of him leaving, I put on a brave face. Sunday was my day off and I’d kind of, sort of, maybe hoped we’d spend the day together.
“Dress warm, Adri.” He advised, picking up our plates before taking them to the sink. “Heavy jeans and coat. Layer on thermals if you’ve got ‘em.”
It was my turn for my body to stop in its tracks as my mind tried to make sense of his words. Did he mean to take me with him?
His dragon purred in satisfaction as I simply blinked at the vision of manliness captured in the sunshine streaming through my kitchen window, the golden light caressing Ti’eron’s chiseled face, his broad shoulders and muscled arms. “It’s not a long ride, baby, but I hear it can get cold.”
Oh. My. God.
I was finally gonna get to fly! Dragon-back style.
*.*.*.*.*
Ver’gren dipped a wing to begin another circle so Adri could view yet another vista before they began the last leg of the journey to the compound. Ti’eron, though not in physical form, delighted in the second-hand feel of his woman straddling Ver’gren’s ridges, caressing the scales of his beast.
At first it was a test in patience since Ver’gren had never carried a human before. But after instructing her, his dragon advising her to wiggle her body underneath his vest and to hold on with both hands and feet as she climbed up onto the paw that gripped the side of her patio, all went smoothly.
Her delight at the experience more than made up for those awkward few moments as she slipped beneath his vest, sliding her hands up and out of the armholes to grip on as instructed. The fact she could communicate to him through Ver’gren was amazing and she’d kept up a steady commentary, letting both Ti’eron and beast share in what she was both seeing and feeling.
Oh, look at that! It’s only late-fall but those mountains area already packed with snow. How’s that possible…
Ver’gren patiently took the time to explain how it was in the high reaches of the Rocky Mountains as Ti’eron took pleasure in the echoed feel of her spread legs shifting on one of the hard ridges on his beast’s neck. God, the warmth from her core was too hot to ignore!
Can you do one of those stop and twist moves? You know, how you can halt and then turn as you…oh, hell!
While Ti’eron and his dragon had practiced for thousands of hours in order to perfect their skill in the sky, training so Ti’eron could follow Ver’gren without human dizziness flogging his dragon’s every move, Adri hadn’t. And the human side of the pair laughed as he caught the jumble of her twirling thoughts. Although if it gained him another echoed press of her breasts against his beast’s scales as she clutched and pushed herself into the dragon, he was willing to allow it again and again.
This is so beautiful. Her mental voice was even sweeter in his mind than when he actually heard it with his human ears. How can you stand to just walk when you can—?
Christ! A Berstat fell toward them from directly overhead, a Global Militia fighter jet on its tail, strafing as it fired. Th
e beetle was dripping green indicating its mortal wounds where its appendages used to be. It seemed determined to make it to the surface despite its wounds and Ver’gren reported it was a female, filled with egg-sacks. If it hit the soil, in the verdant green just beneath them, they’d have a helluva time killing the tiny, budding larvae which would tunnel into the dirt to await adulthood.
Ver’gren, Ti’eron’s mind shrieked. Hard left!
The dragon reacted without question before he pulled up, back-drafting his wings as his long neck stretched out towards the black creature. Ti’eron saw through his beast’s eyes, watched as the aircraft zoomed over the bug’s back, the military weaponry striking the invulnerable outer shell. He’d been in enough battles with the Berstat’s and knew the defense mechanisms the fucking mindless monsters employed.
Within a half-second, an electrified bolt shot out from behind the head, just above the thorax of the huge alien insect, coating the metal skin of the fighter jet before it exploded with a boom. A quarter of a second before another beam skewed toward Ver’gren and the precious property he carried on his back.
Turn away! Everything went to slow motion, including his shout as he belatedly tried to twist Ver’gren away, to protect Adri from the creature’s lightning bolt zinging the air, the scent of ozone searing his nostrils. As his dragon complied, curling his huge body away from the threat, it was obvious his beast had forgotten his ridges carried a plumper target, only coiling his neck at the last second.
Her scream seemed to go on forever and Ti’eron felt the living vest he wore as a dragon-pair split as the jolt of electricity scored across it and her back.
Christ! She was hurt! First time out and she was injured!
She bleeds! Ver’gren’s heart-wrenching bawl matched the panic inside Ti’eron as he felt the warmth of her blood dripping off his dragon’s sides.
Hospital! It was all Ti’eron could think to do but luckily Ver’gren had the strength of will to overcome that bellowed mental command and flame the pregnant Berstat until it was ash. Ducking his huge head, the beast zeroed towards Earth as Adri passed out. Steady on, old friend. She is incoherent with pain and can’t hold on to us. Be gentle.
Bound By Heat - Dragon Shifter Page 26