by Karin Shah
He caught himself. What was he thinking? Damn, he’d come a whiskers-length from relinquishing domination to his dragon. It’s voice and potential were seductive.
Sofia said she loved me. He reasoned with the creature. She only has a human form.
Right now, countered his dragon.
Ever, if you don’t allow us to woo her as we should.
Woo, scoffed his dragon. We must mate.
Roan rolled his eyes. His dragon was intelligent, but it saw the world in dragon terms: hunt, eat, mate, sleep.
It knew almost nothing of positive human emotions. He loved Sofia and she loved him. He ignored the tiny niggle that said he couldn’t trust a deathbed confession. They loved each other. He let the warmth of that knowledge swell inside him.
He felt his dragon curl up under the onslaught and marshaled his will, further forcing aside his dragon. He imagined the way her hand would feel on his human skin, visualized threading his fingers through her glossy curls.
In a blink, he was back on two legs. He glared at his scaled arms, Still, not completely human, damn it.
The hot sun on his shoulders reminded him he was naked. He scooped up the bloodied sheet from the ground and wound it around his waist.
Sofia didn’t bat an eyelash. “I’ll get my car. You get dressed.”
~ ~ ~
“Where should we go?” Roan slouched into the seat of Sofia’s cramped fiat as it rattled down the road and winced as his knees hit the dash—again.
Reality intruded along with the pain. When he’d gotten his clothes, Guy had still been unconscious on his floor. Roan heard the man’s heartbeat and respiration.
Guy would no doubt be on the warpath when he awakened. Maybe if Roan disappeared, Guy would fix his wrath on Roan alone?
He should tell Sofia to let him out and take off on his own.
His dragon flexed at the thought and snorted. It wouldn’t allow any such noble gestures, and if he were honest with himself, the idea of abandoning Sofia was repugnant, even if it would make her safer.
She bit her lip and looked out the window as if searching for direction. “I don’t know. No one, except Guy and Thalia, knows I’m back, so as long as Guy stays unconscious they shouldn’t be looking for me. If they notice my car is gone, chances are they’ll think I took it last night.”
A sign advertised a generic chain hotel at the next exit. He pointed at it. “That looks like a safe place to hole up long enough to talk.”
She sent him a glance out of the corner of her eye, but simply answered, “Okay.”
Chapter 28
Roan opened the hotel room door with the key Sofia had handed him, the slightly musty scent typical of most low-budget Florida hotels tickling his nose.
Two double beds with floral bedspreads, a table and chairs, one upholstered chair in the corner beside a sliding door, a long dresser with a TV above it, and a small refrigerator with a coffeemaker and assorted coffees on top, filled the space.
Roan entered, carefully measuring the inches between the door lintel and his head. Wrung out, he went directly to a chair at the table and dropped into it, putting his head in his hands. The seat gave an ominous crack. He froze, waiting, but it held and he turned to glance at Sofia.
She took a seat on the end of the bed nearest him, plucking at the bedspread. She didn’t quite meet his gaze. “You wanted to talk?”
He didn’t reply for a moment, at war with himself. The right thing to do was to push her away, to free her from his troubles. It didn’t even matter if he went feral without her. She deserved better. If I love her, I should let her go.
His dragon was crafty, however. If we love her, we should tell her everything and give her a choice.
He couldn’t argue with that. Sofia wasn’t a child and assuming he knew what was best for her was an asshole move.
Silence spun out between them. Finally, he scrubbed his hands over his face. What to say first? “You said you love me. I never got a chance to tell you how I felt.”
Her brows pinched together and her mouth compressed. He heard her heartbeat speed up and smelled the bitter aroma of anxiety. “Yeah.”
He groaned. She was worried. He took her hand, savoring the weight of her soft fingers against his palm, and met her gaze. “I love you too.”
She was clearly as privy to his tells as he was to hers because she released a leaden sigh. Her shoulders dropped. “But?”
He almost laughed, but it would have held an acidic tone. “I come with a shitload of baggage.”
“You’re telling me?” Sofia’s forehead puckered. She waved her free hand, then began ticking off a list with her fingers. “Abandonment issues, low-self-esteem, a short temper, trust issues—”
Roan flinched with each label. A gaping chasm opened up in his chest. He grabbed her other hand when she got to her index finger, stopping her. He didn’t want to hear anymore. “See?”
She grinned, shaking her head, a dimple forming in her cheek, brought their combined hands up to her mouth, and brushed a kiss on his knuckles. “And that’s just me.”
His chin dipped as he absorbed her point. He glanced away and opened his mouth to counter.
The silky pads of her fingers barred his lips. “So I’m no prize. Still, love me?”
~ ~ ~
The question should have been rhetorical. All she needed him to realize was thinking she couldn’t love him because of his obstacles was a fallacy, and yet, her hands shook as she waited for his answer.
He hung his head. “Of course. But issues are just about all I’ve got. I don’t even own the title to my trailer setup.” He reached into his shorts’ pocket and balanced the items he’d pulled out on the flat of his palm, a crumpled piece of paper that looked like an old receipt and a small misshapen brown disk. “Here are the only things I have in my possession besides the clothes on my back, a lottery ticket I bought when there was all that hype a few weeks ago and some piece of crap I picked up in the weeds by the side of the parking lot just now, don’t ask me why, to go in my collection, because, oh, yeah, by the way, I seem to have some compulsion to horde garbage.” He stuffed the junk back in his pocket. “And let’s not forget I could be arrested at any minute.”
His features were rife with gravity. She sighed, then tried to lighten the mood. “Okay, collecting junk is weird, but this is Florida, people doing weird stuff is a Tuesday.”
He shook his head in exasperation, but didn’t speak.
Her hand squeezed his. “That was a joke. Roan, you can’t talk me out of loving you.” She poked him in the side with her elbow. “If love worked like that, I wouldn’t have had my heart broken, so many times.” That was a joke too. In hindsight, none of those rejections had broken her heart. Only injured her pride.
“There’s more.” His gaze swept around the room, landing everywhere but on her. His features were creased with apprehension.
A chill iced her veins. He’s awfully full of excuses for someone who claims to love me, the voice of her self-doubt prodded. Maybe he just felt obligated to say he loved me because I did? She ignored it, but doubt burrowed under her skin. “Go on.”
“Once we . . . have sex, you’ll become a chimera too.”
She closed her eyes in relief. He was anxious about how she would react to becoming a shifter, not because he’d only been letting her down gently.
For a second, happiness kept the information he’d presented from being fully absorbed, then it hit her. Her eyes widened. “You mean, I could become a dragon?” A delighted laugh bubbled up. “Roan, that’s not a bug, it’s a feature.”
~ ~ ~
He’d told her and she hadn’t run screaming out the door. Roan felt the rock in his gut dissolve. Sofia rose from the corner of the bed, keeping her hand around his and walked toward h
im. His knees were slightly apart, and she nudged into the gap, her lush thighs brushing his. An envelope of warmth surrounded her. Air became a sneaky thing that hid when he needed it.
The maneuver put their faces level. She cupped his cheeks with warm palms and pressed a gentle kiss to his lips.
The caress, light as it was, exploded in him. He resisted the impulse to crush her to him. Insecurity warred with desire. He drew back to look into her questioning eyes. “You’re not disgusted with this face?”
She pulled a frown so fierce he could almost see the thunderclouds on her face, and tapped his lips with her pointer finger. Tap. “First, of all. Don’t insult my boyfriend.”
Her boyfriend. The label initiated a wiggly puppy of delight in his chest.
Tap. “Second. I’ve already kissed ‘this face’ as you call it.” Tap. “Third, I fell in love with the whole you. Inside and outside. Okay?” She cradled his cheek again.
Her defense of him to himself detonated around the stony fortifications he’d built around his heart. She lifted her inky, arched eyebrows.
Oh, she was waiting for a response.
He inhaled sharply as if about to dive. “Okay.”
She kissed him so long after that, it turned out, he needed that breath. The hot pressure of her mouth on his consumed him like a drug. Apprehension ebbed away in a rushing tide, leaving him flying high in a world where the places they touched were his only anchors.
His head swam. The ache in his cock begged to be abraded against her softness, but he eased back a fraction, panting. Oxygen flooded his urgent lungs. Cognizance returned.
There was still some fine print. He couldn’t make love to her, if she didn’t know everything. “I need to tell you one last thing about chimeras.”
Her pupils were blown, turning her eyes into black abysses, her breasts rose and fell rapidly, and her lips were swollen, rosy, and glazed from their kisses. She licked them, her pink tongue peeking out, and it was all he could do not to scoop her up and dump her on the bed.
She cleared her throat. “I’m listening.”
He glanced over her shoulder. His face heated. “Full chimeras have one true mate.”
She nodded. “You mentioned that.”
He swallowed. “Until you showed up, except for some pretty explicit dreams I realize now starred you, I didn’t feel sexual desire.”
Her eyes seemed to take over her face. “Never?”
He shook his head, holding her wide gaze. “Never.”
Her dimple appeared. “So I get to train my very own dragon?”
Roan smothered a laugh. “Well, those dreams were pretty explicit, as I said, but . . . pretty much.”
She slid her hands down to his and grabbed them, towing him out of the chair and toward the bed behind her. “Then we better get started.”
~ ~ ~
Shit. Shit. Shit! How had this thing gone so wrong? Hank stared down at the shoe mired in cold, sucking, Florida mud.
“Having trouble?” a rich woman’s voice asked from behind him.
He spun toward the intruder and almost yanked his loafer clear off. Only his toe still shod, he grasped a sapling for balance and stomped his foot back inside the shoe, his hasty move sending more golden-red mud up around his foot.
The woman, a brunette, would have been pretty except for the large raspberry birth mark marring her smooth cheek. The sun was no longer high and for some reason the shadows strafing her face seemed ominous.
Ominous. How nonsensical could he get? Besides an audience, the last thing he needed right now was to indulge in flights of fancy.
He hid his irritation. “Nothing I can’t handle.” He extricated his shoe from the mud with his foot safely tucked inside. Despite his attempt at a dignified gait, the mud caked in the treads forced him to limp. He gritted his teeth and hobbled in the direction he’d been told his quarry had been seen. God, he missed the days of having lackeys to do this kind of stuff.
“Hmm.” She folded her arms and fell into step with him. “So you’re Deputy . . .”
“Brown,” he lied smoothly. The several minutes it had taken to research a common, but not suspiciously common surname had been worth it. The owner of the carnival outfit hadn’t batted an eye.
But his pat answer didn’t seem to satisfy the brunette. She almost stopped walking and when she caught back up with him, narrowed her eyes, tilting her delicate chin. She really was lovely, her skin pearl-like, her eyes held an almost crystal sheen. The birthmark was a real shame.
“From . . .”
He shook his head. Had he been staring? There was something almost mesmerizing about her. He blinked, forcing himself to digest her meaning. “Oh, the Leon County Sheriff’s department.”
She halted completely at that. For some reason, his feet planted in the pine needles and refused to move. He found himself unable to continue. She circled him, standing before him.
Her eyes glowed red. “I don’t think so.” She advanced into his personal space. Those eyes pinned him in place. He couldn’t tear his gaze away from hers or even close his eyes. A whimper escaped his lips.
“Why don’t you tell me who you are and why you’re really here?”
Chapter 29
Roan blessed his chimera senses as he settled over Sofia on the bed. The perfume of her excitement suffused the air around them, washing away any remaining insecurities. She wanted him as much as he wanted her.
He painted a trail along her downy cheek with the back of a knuckle. And was rewarded with a tiny hitch in her breathing and the expansion of her pupils.
How many times had he stroked her in his dreams? As mind blowing as those dreams had been, this was ten to the fifth power times better. God, don’t let me wake up. If she disappeared the way she always did when he woke, he would go mad.
She moistened her full lips with her tongue and the worry was driven from him as if dispelled by a concussive blast. He zeroed in on the glazed path left behind, then met her eyes.
Her gaze skimmed over his face as if she were as incredulous as he at this turn of events. She glided her elegant fingers up and stroked a hand through his hair. “It’s so soft.”
The tiny compliment upended him. Heat warmed the skin on his cheeks. A lump in his throat made it difficult to swallow.
Words of denial sprang to his lips. Self-denigration was a hard habit to break, but he bit them back. “Thank you.”
Her gaze swept his mouth and her longing invaded him, striking at the place where he and his dragon were one.
He hesitated. He wanted her to experience the electric rapture he felt when she touched him, but more than anything, he wanted her to feel in every kiss, every nibble, and caress, how much he loved her. How devoted he was to her, not just now, but for the rest of their lives. This wasn’t a sexual encounter, it was a dedication.
As slow and easy as a dark day morning, he slid down to taste her lips. The other kisses they’d shared had breached some barrier between them, but this one demolished the remnants.
The petal-like delicacy of her lips called for restraint, but the hunger of her response, her lips parting under his, her nails biting through his shirt to meet his scales, countered any notions of holding back.
He eased his tongue inside her mouth and she met him with her own. The slick friction of the touch was like a flame to a wick. He groaned as her flavor burst on his tongue, curling against the cradle of her thighs to assuage the sweet pulsing ache it ignited.
She retreated, breaking the heavenly contact, but tugged at his clothes with urgent hands. “I need you naked.”
How could mere syllables be more arousing than caresses? The electric buzz she set off with the demand coiled in his veins and pooled in his cock. He couldn’t be any harder.
He grasped the hem
of his T-shirt and flung it off over his head, not bothering to track its landing. His shorts and boxer briefs joined it on the floor.
Her clothing was more complicated. She’d somehow lost her blouse. She’d kicked off her shoes, but her black jeans were still fastened and a lacy, black bra both hid and revealed the ripe mounds of her breasts.
She reached for the button at her waistband, but he stilled her hand. “Wait.”
She issued an airy. “Oh.” As he kissed the back of her hand before setting it aside and tackling the button himself.
He hadn’t thought he could be more enflamed without exploding, but the reveal of her silky tan belly as he inched down the zipper was so tantalizingly erotic he had to shut his eyes for a second.
Her hands fluttered over the rise of her stomach, as if she wanted to cover it, and he shoved them aside, planting a searing kiss on her bellybutton and then nudging her jeans further down with his cheeks and chin, kissing and nuzzling and savoring every new area he uncovered. When he got to the waistband of her sheer, filigreed boy shorts, he stopped, just breathing in her scent.
~ ~ ~
Her heart slamming against her breastbone, Sofia let her hands knot the bedspread as he’d moved them away. The cushion of flesh under her bellybutton was probably the place she hated the most on her whole body, but he was loving the despised region as if it were precious. The tender skin burned under the assault of his mouth, cheeks, and chin.
He didn’t have a beard, not even scruff. Maybe because of his scales.
The scales themselves were soft as if covered with invisible fuzz, but each one possessed a thin raised rim on the bottom like the edge of a pared fingernail. When he rubbed against the grain of his scales, the delicious scrape raised goosebumps on her neck and arms.