by Chant, Zoe
I know what to do! She reached for her hem and flung her soggy dress over her head and away, shrugged out of her bra and kicked out of her panties. His hands closed hard on her shoulders. She pulled his face into her hands and kissed him.
In that single heartbeat between the flash of lightning and the crash of thunder heat ignited her entire body. They tumbled to kneel in the moss, kissing desperately, mouths hungry.
He smelled like smoke and fire and sex, and her hands roamed all over him, touching, pulling him to her as yearning blazed, igniting a deep ache in her core. But she must not give in yet. His body had homed to her, but she must call down his mind, his identity.
“See me,” she whispered into his face as she fisted her hands into his silky hair.
He blinked, swaying, and she pushed him flat onto the moss, and pressed his shoulders down with her hands as she traced kisses from his lips over his jaw, down his throat to his heaving chest and rock hard stomach.
“See me,” she said again, and closed in on his cock. “Feel me. Trust me.” He stiffened, fingers wide as she nipped her way up the ridge and licked and sucked. “Love me, as I love you.” His back arched, his hands open at his sides.
And he gasped, “Jan!”
She gave a triumphant crow. She bent to take him into her mouth again, but he sat up and reached for her, and there he was again, at home in his face as this time he pressed her into the moss. It was her turn for the thousand kisses, each kindling a tiny fire in her flesh. She burned with languorous heat, opening her legs wide as his knees thudded down between them, and his seeking mouth found her breasts.
His hands caressed her hips, her folds, then inserted two fingers deep within her, his thumb stroking her clit. Long, hard sucks to her nipples, already tender, shot lightning through her. The fingers withdrew and there was his cock.
And at last, at last he thrust home.
Her body twined about him, rocking in primal rhythm. Her fingers threaded through his hair and gripped as she gloried in the exquisitely perfect fit of his cock inside her.
But she wanted him deeper yet. She raked her nails down his back to his rock-hard buns and gripped as she tipped her hips to pull him harder, deeper, deeper . . .
He pounded into her, rough and hard the way she wanted it. Urgency soared, building, pressure mounting. He spiraled upward with her, and they flew together to the peak, his thrusts faster than their rib-banging heartbeats, until the sun burst around them in a shower of stars.
Down they fell, through rings of slowly widening throbs of sweetness, until they lay side by side, limbs still tangled. He lifted his head to look at her, and there were his own eyes, and his mouth was tender as he whispered, “I love you so much.”
She dissolved into laughter that hovered very near tears, then whispered as she traced his eye sockets and over his cheekbones to his jaw, and then to his lips, “I love you, too. I loved you the day I saw you, and I even loved you falling out of the sky, because I was there to catch you.”
“I will always come back,” he murmured against her fingers, “when you call.”
* * *
They fell asleep with their limbs tangled.
The faint blue light of dawn sifted through the leaves overhead when JP wakened to the wonder of Jan lying warm and soft and fragrant in his arms. She smelled like crushed herbs and sex and her own delicious scent.
He moved his fingers gently to cup the curve of her cheek, not wanting to wake her, but she stirred, and gave a small sigh, then lifted her head to smile at him.
Her hand cupped over the jut of his hip, caressed his ribs and drifted over his shoulder to his chin. She rubbed her fingers over his stubble, and hummed that low note that never failed to send shivers through his nerves. “What would that feel like?” she asked.
“Want to find out?” he answered, and shifted his weight to kiss her throat, brushed his chin gently down her throat to her breasts, the humming note rose higher as he teased and rubbed the tightened peaks of her nipples.
By then he was hard and ready, and so they made love slowly, languorously, each so sensitive to the other that the slightest flicker brought an answering, echoing response.
When at last they slid into the water to sink onto the bench with warmth flowing around them, the light had turned pearly. The sun was cresting the horizon.
“It’s Shelley’s wedding day,” she whispered. “We had better go.”
“We’re only twenty minutes from town,” he murmured. “But we shall go whenever you like. Um, that is, if we have a car?”
“I stole it. From that scumbag Niklos.”
At the mention of Niklos’s name, JP’s mood darkened, and he shook his head, refusing to let the cockatrice ruin the moment. Niklos was gone. He would harm no one now.
Jan looked earnestly up into his face. “I think I get why you didn’t tell me. About the dragon.”
Regret suffused him. “I’m sorry, Jan. I meant to. After the wedding. When I’d figured out how to talk about it. Part of that is how little experience I have. I was afraid I would lose you. And lose myself, if I ever let the dragon rise.” He pulled her tight against him. “Nothing. In all my life.” His voice was unsteady, but he made no attempt to hide or control it—if he even could. “Nothing. Matches the moment I heard your call.”
“Where were you?”
“I don’t know. Above the Rockies, maybe? Jan, I realize it hasn’t even been a week, but will you marry me? Or at least consider—”
Her smile was sweet, tender, with a lilt of laughter at the corners. “I’ve already planned my wedding dress.”
Heat surged through him. “Make sure it’s the kind that comes off fast.”
She uttered another of her delicious laughs, and said against his chest, “It’ll never be fast enough for me.”
* * *
And so they got out of the water, and she rooted around for her dress, dirty and moss-streaked as it was. He had nothing, so they searched Niklos’s car together. JP was not surprised to find clothes in the trunk. They were loose on him, but nothing, she thought as she watched him dress, would ever mar his elegance—even wearing somebody else’s clothes, with his unshaven chin. That elegance was innate, a part of him.
And it was all hers.
As they got into the car, the conversation turned to all the little things in daily life that one can’t escape. Where to go first, a meal. What to do with Niklos’s car.
How many kids to have.
“I want lots,” she said dreamily. “Lots and lots. Mine or someone else’s, doesn’t matter. I was so lonely as a child. And that empty museum of a house of yours is even lonelier. It needs noise and laughter.”
“Yes,” he said.
Weddings.
“Tomorrow,” he muttered huskily, his right hand tightening on hers as his left handled the wheel. “I want everything settled.”
“All that matters is already settled,” she promised, bending to kiss the knuckles of his hand. “The rest is frosting.”
Careers.
“I still want to sing.” She loved looking at him. That shirt was so loose he hadn’t bothered buttoning it. As far as she was concerned, he need never button a shirt again. “Or at least try,” she amended, wrenching her mind back to opera.
His fleeting smile curved his lips. “Oh, I’ll see to that.”
“No undue influence,” she said, quickly. “It hurts too much at the other end.” She glanced at him, and relaxed. “But you wouldn’t do that.”
“No. What I can do is what so many others get done for them, which is to drop a word in a good agent’s ear to give you a listen themselves, and not one of their flunkies who’ve already sat through fifty auditions that day. But I won’t if that makes you uncomfortable.”
She struggled with it, then said, “Just once. And if I make it, I make it, and if I don’t, I’ll be perfectly happy with non-paying venues and community theater. I just want to sing.”
Where to live.
&n
bsp; “How fast can you get out of that crappy apartment I’ve heard so much about?”
“Try light-speed. Plus five minutes to write a note to my can’t-be-soon-enough ex-roommates that they have the rest of the lease to find another place. As for where, I don’t care. My home is wherever you are.”
He had to pull the car over for another kiss.
As they neared the town, the questions came faster, and even if they didn’t have answers right away, it didn’t matter. She delighted in the thought that they had plenty of time to decide.
And when at last they reached the LaFleur mansion, he insisted on taking her all through it, ending up in his suite, which featured a king-sized marble bathroom with a sunken tub big enough for two.
Her secret places still pulsed faintly later that day, as she stood in the performance shell in her beautiful blue dress, waiting for the violin to begin the music for her solo.
The rain had broken the heat, and droplets still sparkled on the masses of white roses on the bowers arching overhead. As the familiar bars of introductory music drifted through the air, Jan took a moment to look at all the faces—Shelley and Mick nervous yet happy. Mrs. LaFleur cool and poised. Mick’s shifter friends, sitting in rows behind the Willis clan, who were silent for once, with only a few fidgets here and there. Dennis grinning at Mick’s left.
And last, but oh, the sweetest, JP at Mick’s right. He sent her a secret smile then returned to his duty as co-best man, elegant in his expensive suit. But Jan knew what he looked like utterly undone, and it was to that memory that she sang.
“Rest gently, my dearest love,
sleep until your happiness awakes . . .”
The beautiful aria spun its magic through the air, and even Mrs. LaFleur smiled, eyes half shut. The restless Willis kids so brimming with life paused, and stilled, one with head half tilted. What emotions did they hear, what images did they catch?
Jan did not know how others heard her singing. She was only aware that this performance far better than the previous day’s, and there, sitting ten feet away—so close but too far—was the cause.
Jan brought the aria to a close, the sweet sadness of the song softened by the tenderness in her voice. Then she took her place by Shelley’s side, and it was time for the ceremony.
That took mere minutes, simple as it was. Then suddenly the quiet was broken, the Willis clan hollering as Mick twirled Shelley and bent her backward in a magnificent kiss. The newlyweds were promptly surrounded by shrieking nieces and nephews and congratulatory friends.
JP held out his hand. Jan twined her fingers in his, leaning up to kiss him. They kissed again, and she began mentally moving past the rest of the wedding to an actual bedroom—at last!—and a clean, shared bed, when a little movement beyond one of the bowers caught Jan’s eye.
She turned her head, and shock hit her when she recognized skinny little Toby, muddy and bedraggled. The poor thing looked ready to run if someone sneezed at her too loud.
Jan turned, and beckoned to the girl as the wedding party, too wrapped up in their happiness to be aware, began moving slowly up out of the dell.
“Toby?” Jan said gently.
“I came. Like you said,” Toby said, and then glanced behind her, to where a couple of scrawny teens who looked even younger had pressed themselves against the rose trellises as if they wanted to be invisible. They were all muddy and filthy and ragged. “Niklos didn’t come back. Iggy and the others, they were fighting each other . . . we didn’t know where to go.”
Jan stepped toward her, hands out. “You did the right thing. We have a house right here. Let’s go inside and get you cleaned up, and some food.” Then she stopped herself, and glanced back at JP: did ‘we’ have a house or did ‘he’ have a house?
He answered the real question, his arm encircling her. “Lead on, my darling,” he said. “Lead on.”
A note from Zoe Chant
Thank you for buying my book! I hope you enjoyed it. If you’d like to be emailed when I release my next book, please click here to be added to my mailing list.
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Page down to read a special sneak preview of Hollywood Bear.
The cover of Hollywood Dragon was designed by Mona Midnight.
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