“It scared her,” he muttered.
That thought set my teeth on edge. I didn’t like the idea of some woman – some foolish woman with a truly awful screen name – making this beautiful man so shy about what he could do. I set my mug down and stepped forward. We were so close that, if I wanted to, I could reach out and run a hand over his naked chest. He hesitated before raising his hand between us and creating a ball of flame in his palm. It was shaped like a tennis ball and bathed me in a pleasant glow of warmth.
I glanced up to see him staring at me. The moment stretched between us. I looked back down at his hand and, slowly, I placed my hand under his. His skin was pleasantly hot. I felt the jolt of electricity run through my arm again. We both gasped.
“What is that?”
“It’s an empathetic reaction,” he said. “Some humans will feel it when they touch a shifter.”
“It didn’t happen when I shook Ichiru’s hand,” I said. Daiki didn’t answer me. “Can I paint you?” I asked.
He closed his hand and the ball of flame disappeared. I felt strangely bereft. “Why would you want to do that?” he asked.
My throat felt dry. I ran my tongue over my bottom lip and felt a twinge of pride when his eyes followed it. “Because you’re beautiful,” I said. “I like painting beautiful people,”
“I’m not a person,” he said hoarsely.
“Beautiful shifters, then,” I said. I wanted to track down everyone who had ever made him feel bad about what he was and smack them in the face.
He blinked slowly, running his eyes over my face and down my arms to our joined hands. “Okay,” he said finally. “You can paint me if you want – just not my face.”
I took his hand and led him through the apartment and into my bedroom. The canvas was still set up where I’d left it. I got him to stand by my bed where the street lights poured through the window, casting him in a dirty yellow glow.
“Can I see your wings?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. He just paused for a moment, and then the leathery black shapes curled out from his back. They unfurled enough to take up most of the room. I stared for a moment as the sheer magnitude of what I was seeing finally sunk in. Daiki wasn’t human. He had wings and he could make fire with his hands. He was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen.
I gestured for him to turn around. “I’ll paint your back first,” I said when I saw the way the black leather blended seamlessly into tanned skin. He nodded without speaking. I stepped behind the canvas and picked up my charcoal. I traced the arch of his back with my eyes before I began drawing.
I felt a hot, burning ache in my lower belly as I stared at him, wondering what an ‘empathetic reaction’ really meant and why he was affecting me like this. No man had ever affected me like this. I wanted to run my hands all over him and learn every dip and curve of his skin. I wanted to memorize the way he looked in the morning, in the afternoon, in the throes of passion. I wanted him. Badly.
I’d finished the outline by the time my resolve broke. I set the charcoal down firmly and stepped around the canvas. Daiki cocked his head when he heard me coming, but he didn’t move or turn around. I wondered if that counted as consent.
I reached out hesitantly and ran my hand over the space between his wings. His skin burned and shuddered beneath my touch.
“Sorry –”
“It’s okay,” he said quickly.
How long had it been since he’d let someone touch him like this? I ran my hand over his back again, more firmly this time. He didn’t react, but I felt the tense muscles; he felt like a coiled spring on the brink of snapping. I considered what it would take to make him snap.
My hands trailed the top of his trousers. Daiki didn’t react. I stepped forward until my chest was pressed against his back and my arms could snake around to stroke his stomach muscles. The jolt of electricity that I felt whenever our skin touched had turned into a gentle hum. His breath hitched; he turned in my arms until we were chest to chest. His eyes lingered over my face.
“Can I kiss you?” he asked.
My heart was thudding so loudly that I was sure that he could hear it. I nodded and he raised a hand to gently tuck a lock of hair behind my ear, stroking it lightly, and then cupped my cheek. I could feel the heat coming off his skin in waves. I leant into it, my eyes falling closed, as our lips brushed together.
His breathing was as ragged as mine and there was an unbearable sweetness in his mouth beneath the lingering taste of coffee. It was both relaxing and intoxicating. I changed the slant of my lips and Daiki shuddered against me, a pleased, breathy moan escaping him.
Daiki pulled me closer, angling his chin for a deeper kiss. I felt the heat building in my lower belly as I melted against him. I was surprised when a gasp escaped my lips. My knees buckled. He scooped me up and laid me down on the bed. I’d had experience with high-school boyfriends, but nothing could compare to how safe I felt with Daiki leaning over me. I wanted to press myself against him, faster and harder, and at the same time I never wanted this to end. Groaning happily, I wrapped my arms around him, my hands sliding into his soft, sweet-smelling hair, keeping him close.
I matched him kiss for kiss. They went from slow, to deep, to devouring. Daiki bit my lip softly and my back arched in response. My chest, hips and belly pressed against him. I felt a hard bulge in his pants and felt a surge of pleasure at the thought that he was just as affected by the kiss as I was.
Daiki’s wings arched and curled in on themselves as he ran his hands over my shirt. His touch was just this side of burning. I thought that it should have been frightening – I didn’t know how much control he had over his powers when he was like this – but really, all I felt was excited. The electricity running between us tasted of anticipation. I ran my hands down his chest and he growled his approval. He ran his hands over my legs to cup my hips, then lifted the edge of my shirt. Our kiss slowed and intensified. My body was reacting so powerfully that I would have pulled away and taken moment to breathe, to think about how fast this was going, if I hadn’t been so intent on feeling.
The heat building in my belly travelled lower. As Daiki ran his fingers gently over the skin of my lower belly, I began trembling even more, and when he pushed my shirt up to expose my ribs and brush just under the curve of my breasts, a longing gasp tore out of my throat. Daiki grabbed my hip with his free hand and held on tight, pressing down on me with the bulging hardness between his own legs.
I arched again. I let my head fall back, the kiss finally breaking, and looked up to see Daiki holding himself above me. One hand on my breast, one on my hip. His eyes glowed with golden light as he ground down into me. The angle of his thrusts, the pressure and the weight of him, his wings beating gently above us, and the way he looked on the verge of losing control, sent a final bolt of electricity through my groin.
My hips bucked against his restraining hands. I shook in his arms, crying out sharply against his mouth, and I leant up to bury my face in his neck as my body shook with the force of my orgasm. He gasped and shivered against me, reaching around to crush me to his chest as I quivered and curled around him. He pressed heated kisses against my neck.
“Did you just…?” he asked.
“Sorry,” I said, my face going red. “That’s, uh, never happened to me before.” I kept my face pressed into his neck so that he wouldn’t see me.
He groaned and pulled me closer. “Don’t ever apologize,” he said. “Not for that,” His hoarse voice was tinged with awe.
I wrapped my legs tightly around his hips and rolled us both so that I was above him. His wings bent awkwardly and for a moment I thought he might be in pain, but he shifted and leant forward so that they were laid out on the blanket. Daiki let out a moan as I pulled my shirt off, running his eyes over my body as if he wanted to memorize me. I could sympathize with the desire. I slid down to kneel next to the bed, taking a moment to make eye contact with Daiki. I ran my hand over the bulge in his pants to make my intentions clear. His e
yes flashed gold again, and he inhaled sharply.
Opening his fly with trembling fingers, I cast my mind back to all the times Annabeth Casey had regaled me with stories about the blowjobs she’d given to her boyfriends. I’d never really liked doing it before. But now, with Daiki laying shirtless and half undone on my bed, I couldn’t think of anything I would like better. My hand dipped inside in pants and glided over the hard flesh. Daiki’s head was tipped back and his throat worked quickly, his red lips slightly parted. His hips shifted slightly, pressing his penis into my hand.
I matched my movements to the speed of Daiki’s gasps, thinking that nothing had ever felt quite so good as seeing him like that – of knowing that I was responsible for his pleasure. I pulled his pants down his hips, exposing the pink head of his penis to the chilly night air; proud and strong and so much bigger than I had imagined it. I moved down to take the head into my mouth. Daiki cried out and came. I pulled away in time to avoid catching any semen in my mouth. Instead, it splashed onto his stomach.
“Sorry,” he said after a pause, but he didn’t look it. His head rolled backwards as his entire body relaxed. “It’s been a while.”
I wanted to ask how long, but instead I crawled up to kiss him sweetly on the lips. “Don’t ever apologize,” I said. “Not for that,”
He snorted at me. “Bathroom?” he asked, gesturing at the quickly cooling liquid on his stomach. I pointed at the ensuite and watched as he sat up and drew his wings back into his body.
Watching him walk to the bathroom, I rolled over and put my shirt back on. When I heard the faucet running, the weight of what I had just done hit me. That was further than I’d ever gone with a man so soon after meeting him. I couldn’t regret it, but I also couldn’t help the ripple of worry rolling through my body. Did Daiki think that I did this all the time? Did he think I was easy? Would he think that I didn’t want a relationship? Did I want a relationship?
I wasn’t sure about that last question, but I did want to get to know Daiki better. I wanted to understand his world and his past, and I wanted to see where this crazy, amazing thing between us would lead.
The water stopped running. Daiki appeared in the doorway to the ensuite. His cheeks were pink and his eyes darted around nervously.
“That was… unexpected,” he said. I felt my heart sink, but then he added quickly: “Amazing, I mean. It was amazing. I just wasn’t expecting it.”
“Do you – would you like to stay?” I asked.
He smiled crookedly and looked at me from under his eyelashes. “I would, actually,” Daiki said. “I can’t stay the whole night. Oji-san will worry – but I can stay a few hours?” I smiled at the hopeful look on his face.
I slid over so that there was room for him on the bed next to me. He grinned widely and darted across the room to slide under the blanket with me. I found myself returning his grin with one of my own, before moving over to rest my head against his naked chest. His heart beat steadily beneath my ear. His skin was still so much warmer than a regular human’s. He wrapped his arms around me and pulled me close, and I let the soft, steady rhythm of his breathing lull me to sleep.
Epilogue
I woke up to soft sunlight streaming through my window. I was alone, but the side of the bed where Daiki had slept was still warm. I pressed my face into the pillow and breathed in his scent.
On the bedside table beside me, there was a piece of paper lying on top of my phone. I reached over, feeling a pleasant ache in my muscles from last night, and grabbed the note. A phone number was written in spiky handwriting, right underneath the words: Don’t walk down any dark alleys.
“Oh, that would be so creepy coming from anyone else,” I said to myself, typing the number immediately into my phone and smiling in a way that Mama would describe as ‘twitterpated’. I was twitterpated, alright, and I didn’t regret it for a second. I glanced over at the canvas still set up next to the bed. I would call Daiki later that day, I decided, and ask him out on a real date. One that didn’t involve muggers or home invaders.
I still had some time before classes that day, so I rolled out of bed and wrapped myself in a fluffy dressing gown. I ran my fingers through my messy hair and stepped up to the canvas with its half-finished outline of Daiki’s back and wings. A soft blush rose on my cheeks when I remembered the way they had beat lazily while he’d ground into me.
Taking up my charcoal, I sat on the edge of my bed and set to work finishing the outline.
THE END
Dragon Romance
Heat Wave
Book Two
Lucile Wild
Dragon Romance: Heat Wave
Chapter One
When Terry led me into the abandoned warehouse I was skeptical. She’d promised me a gallery opening, not a horror movie. But she’d just led me through the narrow doorway and into the darkened basement.
“You’ve gotta embrace the unexpected, Dorothy,” she said. My name isn’t Dorothy. It’s Skye.
I’d only known Terry a week – for all I knew, her idea of ‘unexpected’ involved murdering country girls and stashing their bodies in abandoned warehouses. I was thinking that maybe I should quickly text Daiki and see if he would come and pick me up. But then we stepped into the basement and I felt my jaw drop.
“Nice, right?” Terry said, watching my reaction.
I nodded dumbly. The basement of the abandoned warehouse was crowded with people speaking in hushed whispers and clutching glasses of bubbling champagne. Blue light cast their faces into an eerie, dull shadow. But what it did to the paintings was another matter entirely.
There were three paintings on each of the four walls, uniform in size. The images on the canvas seemed to burst with vibrant fluorescent color. While the crowd looked washed out, the paintings seemed to blossom under the blue light.
“Black light,” Terry said.
I wondered if she could read my thoughts. “Pardon?”
“She paints with blacklight-reactive ink. That’s what’s making the paintings glow like that,” Terry pointed at the nearest one. It was a picture of a little girl in a white dress, dancing alone. “When it’s just regular light, or daylight, the pictures look kind of grim. Put ‘em under a blacklight, and suddenly it’s a party.”
I wanted to reach out and run my fingers over the paint, but I knew that it was a terribly inappropriate thing to do to another person’s work.
“It’s amazing,” I said. The image of the little girl would have looked grim. She had her back turned to the artist, with her head tipped so that she could see the viewer out of the corner of her eye, and her hands fanned down as if she meant to fall to the ground. But with the blacklight paint, she looked as though she was getting ready to take flight.
“I know, right?” Terry said. “This is art, whatever Professor D-Bag says.”
I laughed. Terry and I went to the Art Institute in Manhattan, but neither of us had been impressed by our professor. He’d made a bad impression when he’d told the class that painting shouldn’t be considered art and was a waste of time. I’d watched that lecture unfold with my lips pursed like I’d swallowed a whole lemon. Terry had sought me out not long afterwards.
We couldn’t be more different, Terry and I, but we’d bonded over our mutual dislike of pretentious art teachers. Terry had been raised in New York and had more piercings and tattoos than I had fingers and toes. Today, she’d dyed her hair saffron, and she wore a long vintage dress which made her look like she’d just walked off the set of Grease. I’d been raised in small town Texas by two very protective parents. I tossed my brown hair out of my face and ran my hands over my long skirt, glancing around at the room and all of the sophisticated gallery attendees.
“Relax, Dorothy, you look fine,” Terry said, snagging two champagne glasses from a passing waiter and handing me one. She had promised to take me shopping in a week or two when she got some time off work.
I’d tried champagne once at my cousin’s wedding and hated it, bu
t I took a sip anyway. I already stood out because of my boring hair and childish clothes. I needed to fit in somehow.
Terry gazed around the room before offering me her arm. “Shall we?” she asked.
I took her elbow and allowed myself to be pulled around the room, staring in awe at the way the artist had rendered her subjects. They looked so bright and alive.
“So how’s it going with that guy?” Terry asked as we walked. “Daiki, right?”
I felt a blush creeping up my cheeks. “Really well,” I said. “We’re having lunch tomorrow.”
I first saw Daiki outside of my apartment window rescuing a girl from a mugger. He’d lit his arm on fire and had used it to burn the man’s face. Later, we had met at his grandfather Ichiru’s Japanese restaurant. Then he’d saved me from a mugger without his fire powers. Daiki was a masked vigilante, which was something I’d thought could only exist in comic books, but he might as well have been a superhero. After some investigation, I realized that he couldn’t possibly be human. He was a shapeshifter; a dragon, from a long lineage.
It made me giddy to think about Daiki. We’d enjoyed an evening in each other’s company about a week ago, but hadn’t had the chance to see each other since then. But we’d texted. And flirted. Sometimes when I heard my text-alert tone my heart would flutter like I was in high school again. Terry had noticed my little smiles whenever I’d get a text. She figured out pretty quickly that it was about a boy.
Man, I thought. Daiki was twenty-three.
I still hadn’t entirely wrapped my head around the concept of magical creatures being real, but I’d decided that I wanted to get to know Daiki better. I wanted to understand why I felt so drawn to him, why I felt that jolt of electricity every time we touched.
“That’s great,” Terry said. “Let me know if you need someone to give him the shovel talk.”
“The shovel talk?” I asked.
BILLIONAIRE ROMANCE: The Unforgettable Billionaires: The Complete Collection Boxed Set 1-12 (Young Adult Rich Alpha Male Billionaire Romance) (Alpha Bad Boy Billionaire Romance) Page 68