“He was a hat of many asses,” Archer said, relieved she wasn’t having an attack. He breathed fire on the door just in case it hadn’t been fireproofed.
It had.
A strangled noise came from Thaisa. “You knew him?”
“Yes. He was stubborn. Not an easy man to be with, although he knew a great number of ribald anecdotes.”
“God’s gonads, the man sailed with Cook, and all he can say is that he was stubborn and liked a dirty joke.” Thaisa looked like she might swoon. “What about…uh…da Vinci? Did you know him?”
“No.”
She slumped in relief. “Thank God. I might have had a small brain spasm if you had known him. Wait—what about Galileo?”
He squinted out of the corner of his eyes at the door. “No. I bedded his daughter, though, before she became a nun. She had several moles that she was quite proud of. Does this door look warded to you?”
“Moles like the hairy growths?” She looked both horrified and awed.
“The rodents. She used to dress them up and make them dance. She had odd tastes.” He thought for a moment. “Inventive in bed for a woman who ended up in a convent, though. She particularly liked a position where I stood in front of her, and she put her hands on the floor while I held up her legs by the ankle, and—”
“Right,” Thaisa snapped, jumping to her feet, her eyes all but shooting sparks at him. “I think that’s about enough of historical memories time.”
“Even you can’t be jealous of a woman who has been dead for more than four hundred years,” he told her, amused by the looks of mingled ire and desire she was throwing his way.
“Oh, I can. It might not be easy, and certainly doesn’t make sense, but I can. Her hands on the floor, Archer? Really? Did you enjoy that position?” she said, her little chin rising.
Gods, he loved that chin.
“If I say yes, will you put your hands on my chest and demand I show it to you?” he asked.
“Certainly not. I’m too top-heavy for that sort of a move.” She thought about it for a minute, her eyes on his chest and thighs and groin. He reacted, as he always did, as if she were stroking him, and he made a mental note to hurry his tailor along with trousers that were Thaisa-proof. “Maybe. Well, all right, but only if I see a picture drawn first, because I get a headache easily if I stand on my head. It’s why I failed the yoga class my friend Laura dragged me to.”
“I would like to oblige, little flower, but this is hardly the place to make love to you.”
“I’m not asking you to—” she started to say, but he, despite his words, cast an eye around the room and considered the blue Regency sofa.
She looked at it as well, giving it a good long look before turning a speculative gaze to him. “Was it a sort of scissors position or more of a wheelbarrow?”
“Scissors,” he said, dragging the chairs over to block the door. Not that he expected anyone would let them out any time soon, but it was better to be safe than sorry.
“Reeeally,” she drawled, giving the sofa another look.
He had his clothes off by the time she turned back to him, her eyes widening at the sight of his arousal. He had gone from pleasantly aware of his cock, as he always was when Thaisa was near, to full-fledged marble effigy. “We will start with an easier managed position, one that is a little less reliant upon balance, flower, and work up to the more complicated ones.”
“Oh no,” she said, backing up when he reached for her.
He froze for a moment, unsure of why she wasn’t throwing herself on him. She loved him naked. Her breath caught in her throat when he so much as took his shirt off, but when he disrobed in entirety, her eyes went round, and her fingers twitched a little, as if she wanted to be touching him.
He wanted her touching him.
“You do not wish me to love you now?” he asked, watching as she picked up his clothing, shook them out, and spread them onto the surface of the sofa.
“No. That is, yes, I do want you to, quite badly as a matter of fact, but no to you picking the position. It’s my turn to pick.”
“We are taking turns?” he asked, not sure how he felt about this strange new dominance in his little flower.
“We are. Partners, remember?”
“Very well,” he said, deciding to be magnanimous. It intrigued him, the way her petals unfurled, revealing new elements to her personality. He didn’t for the world want to undermine her newfound confidence. “But I will warn you that I do not have a submissive nature. Just as you say you do not respond to commands, I do not respond to being dominated.”
She smiled and gestured to the sofa. “I promise I won’t dominate you. Well, I will, but just a very little, and if it makes you uncomfortable, I’ll stop, all right?”
“Hrmph,” he said, but lay down on his back and watched her with some doubt. “Do you think to perform a striptease for me? You do not need to perform in order to stir my passions.” He grasped his rod and shook it at her. “I am hard enough to take down a few redwoods.”
“Oooh,” she said, pausing for a moment in the act of unbuttoning the front of her dress. “A striptease! I haven’t ever done one, but I did take a few belly dancing classes online. Let’s see if I can remember some of that.”
He watched her shimmy out of her dress, her hips moving to a tune that only she could hear, the sight of which made him want to claim her, to cover her body with his and make her understand just how strong the mating bond was between them, but he had given her permission to torment him, and by the gods, he would lie there and let her torture him if it killed him.
Which it may well do if she kept doing that roll of her belly, her body undulating in a way that made him a flaming brand of sexual frustration.
“Do you like this?” she asked as she pushed her dress down over her hips, the material falling to the floor with a soft whoosh.
“No,” he said, his voice filled with gravel.
She paused, blinked, then smiled a slow, wicked smile. One he was shocked she knew. She wiggled her way out of her underwear and bra, revealing herself to his gaze at last. He damn near licked his lips as his gaze ran over her body even as she pushed one of his feet off the sofa, making room between his thighs so she could kneel.
If she did what he thought she was going to do, then he might very well die of sheer, unadulterated pleasure.
“Archer?” she asked, bending down over his thighs, her hair sweeping across it like little whips of fire. Her breath was soft, her mouth warm, but it wasn’t comfort she provided as she nipped the flesh of his inner thigh, the top of her head brushing against his bollocks. “You’re not talking.” She glanced over his groin to where he was frozen in anticipation. “Or breathing. My love, take a breath. This will go much better if you don’t pass out again.”
He took a long, shuddering breath, his hands clenching and releasing convulsively. He wanted badly to grab her, to impale her on him, to feel her sweet heat join with the inferno that raged within him, but at that moment, he was incapable of words, let alone actual movement. “Nrng,” he said.
“I know just how you feel,” she said, her voice brushing across his flesh like the softest velvet. “You make me nrng every time you touch me. Let’s see if we can’t get a whoa, Nelly out of you with this.” She kissed a steamy path up his thighs to his bollocks, one hand gently pulling and rolling them around in her hand. “I love your balls. I know that’s an odd thing to say, because they normally are anything but attractive. They always look angry to me, darker than the rest of you, and just…well, annoyed with life. Maybe it’s because they’re always stuffed into your pants. Maybe it’s because they don’t get the attention that your dick does. Either way, I like yours.”
“Thaisa,” a voice said. He was amazed to realize it was his, since he hadn’t thought it possible to think of actual words, let alone speak them. “If you do not stop toying with my stones and mount yourself upon me in the next two seconds, I will die. And then you will have to
get yourself out of here, which I have no doubt you will do, but you will have no one to protect you from the evil that lurks without. I will be forced to haunt you. Do you understand?”
She giggled and gave his stones another little squeeze. “And I thought you couldn’t even manage a whoa, Nelly. All right. You ready for this? I’m going in.”
For one startling moment he thought she was speaking the literal truth and was about to inform her that although he knew his cousin enjoyed those sorts of things with his lovers—both male and female—he was not of the same mind, but to his immense relief—and enjoyment, rapture, ecstasy, and a number of other words that he couldn’t at that moment pull to mind—she took him into her mouth.
“Whoa, Nelly,” he said, his hips arching up as she swirled her tongue along the underside, making him see stars.
She giggled, the sensation of that while she tormented him with her mouth one that almost made him lose control. “You taste…it’s hard to describe…you taste like the sea when a storm is rolling onto the shore. You make me feel wild, Archer. Wild and untamed, like I can do anything, but at the same time, connected to you so tightly that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to separate myself.”
“You won’t,” he said, knowing he had to stop her. He pulled her up despite the frown she gave him, shifting his hips so that she had room to straddle him. “You are part of me just as I am part of you, and if you don’t cowgirl me right now, I will spill my seed and you won’t make that hum you make when you climax.”
“Cowgirl?” she asked, leaning down to press a fleeting kiss to his lips. He took his rod and tapped her pointedly. “What do you, a man who has lived for seven hundred years, know about cowgirl position?”
“We had cowgirl then. We just called it St. George.” He gave up trying to be subtle and tried to place himself at her woman’s parts, but she leaned down, taking one of his nipples into her mouth.
“St. George riding the dragon,” she said when he gasped in a good half of the available air in the room, his rod twitching of its own accord, desperate to bury itself in her heat. “Archer?”
“You’re going to kill me,” he groaned, his hips bucking in an attempt to join with her.
“I know. But it’s going to be such a good death,” she said, reaching between them and positioning him, slowly sinking down in a way that was certain to drive him insane. “I love you. I don’t know how it happened so fast, but you fill my heart, and I will love you from this moment until the time when I draw my last breath.”
He froze for a moment in time so exquisitely sweet, he thought he might just cry. And then he gave in to the need that had been riding him since she had started the torment, his body twisting until she was underneath him, and he was bucking wildly, touching her, tasting her, doing everything he could to make her as close to exploding as he was. She tensed, her legs tight around his waist, her head thrown back as a sexual flush washed upward, her eyes huge when the climax took her. The tightening of her inner muscles pushed him past all bearing, and he gave in to it knowing without a single shred of doubt that she truly did love him.
He’d just have to make sure that she stayed that way.
Chapter Fifteen
IT TOOK A LONG, LONG TIME FOR ME TO RECOVER FROM the lovemaking in the room where we’d been dumped.
Since there wasn’t enough space for both of us to lie together, Archer insisted that he lie on the couch and I lie on him. As I was at that moment a boneless, incoherent puddle of goo that had been pleasured almost to the bounds of human bearing, I made no objection and lay quivering with little orgasmic aftershocks on him, his chest damp, his body solid beneath me.
“You’re sweaty,” I said, apropos to nothing. I trailed a finger around a pert little nipple that poked out of a curl of chest hair made dark with his sweat.
“It is honest sweat. You rode me hard.”
I propped my chin on my hands and looked at his face. His eyes were closed, the thick black lashes making little crescents against his skin. He looked so beautiful it almost hurt, and I saw, with clarity that almost scared me, the long years of our life in which women would be attracted to him. Some would no doubt just admire from afar, as I had initially done, but others would not hesitate to try to take him away from me.
They could try, I thought to myself, my gaze caressing his face. I had been misled by Archer’s beauty just like all those women would be—they’d think he was as shallow as I had first thought him to be, so secure in his appearance that he thought of no one else. But I knew better. Beneath that gorgeous surface, a warm, loving man resided, one who put the welfare of others before himself.
No, not man, dragon.
And he was mine.
I smiled. He was such an interesting mix of modern intelligence and medieval morals. “I like when you get aroused. You lose some of your modern words. I don’t think any modern man calls his balls stones and his dick a rod.”
He cracked one eye open to look at me. “Are you calling me old?”
“No, although we are so going to sit down and go over each and every year of your life, so you can tell me everything you’ve seen and heard and experienced. Then I’ll write it all down, and we’ll astound the world with our new insights into history.”
He closed the eye. “I am master of the storm dragons. I have no time for such trivialities.”
“Mmm-hmm.” I pinched his side. “You’re still going to make time for it because it will make me happy.”
His hands, which had been drawing little patterns on my back, slid around and under me, causing me to arch my back so the strumpets that were my breasts could have access to his hands. “Possibly.”
I pushed myself off him and reluctantly gathered up my things, shaking the dust from them before I put them on. “I think I know where the pieces of the medallion are.”
Archer watched me silently for the count of eight. “It was written on the leaf?”
“No. Yes. Kind of.” I finished dressing and sat down when Archer began to pull on his clothing. I watched him, but for once, my gaze was directed inward as I tried to make the puzzle pieces that had slid together earlier make sense. Somehow, there were more pieces now.
I looked at him and decided to tackle the most recent of things that confused me. “You’re not mad at Miles.”
He pulled out his phone, shaking it as if it might have been damaged by the fall before tucking it away. “You heard me name him betrayer and cast him from the tribe. I do not do so lightly.”
“No, you don’t. But…” I shook my head as one of the pieces of the puzzle twisted and turned but would not fit. “But your fire wasn’t filling you. Or me. It was there, simmering away, but you weren’t truly angry. Nor, for that matter, were you with your brother. And that makes me wonder why. That makes me really wonder why, Archer.”
He didn’t look at me, just considered the door again.
“And then there’s this,” I said, waving my hand around the room.
“Being here was not my choice, in case you were going to accuse me of that.”
“No, I don’t think it was your choice,” I said slowly, eyeing the couch. “But neither were you raging with desperation to get out of your brother’s grip. I can’t think of any other place where you’d let yourself make love if there was any danger. Except we did that in the forest…” Two pieces of the puzzle clicked into place. “But it was your brother who was supposed to be looking for me then. Which means that for some reason I can’t figure out, you are not afraid of your brother.”
“I am not afraid of anyone,” he said, still not looking at me.
And that fact told me a lot.
“Right, but all this business about the shadow dragons attacking the storm dragons and vice versa…a show, Bree said.” I stared at him with dawning awareness. “It’s all a show! But why?”
“What did you learn from the leaf?” he asked, ignoring my question.
I had my own idea of what was going on with Hunter but
decided to circle back to that. First, I needed to tell him what I’d found on the manuscript. “The cipher on the leaf wasn’t that sophisticated. It looked like a variation of a Marseilles cipher used by alchemists in the fifteenth century, and that ties in with the Latin note at the top.”
He was silent, sitting down next to me, obviously giving me time to tell him what I had found in my own way. His hand was warm on my back, his leg pressed against mine while I picked out the words. “The ciphered part of the leaf told a short tale about the birth of constellations. There’s nothing familiar about that at all?”
He shook his head, looking thoughtful. “What I know is what was passed down orally, and in that, I have never heard a mention of the night sky or stars.”
“The cipher said that the mother had broken the medallion and they became two constellations.”
“That makes no sense,” he said, frowning.
“I would have expected that one of the constellations was Gemini, because you are a twin, but it wasn’t that. I double-checked. The two mentioned were Sagittarius and Orion. Do you know anything about the history of the constellations?”
“Other than most of them have origins in Greek myth, no.”
“Sagittarius is Latin.” My gaze met his. His eyes were beautiful pale blue, like a rain-washed spring sky. “It means archer.”
He raised his brows. “And Orion?”
“Orion fought the scorpion that Scorpio is named for.” I gave him a long look, wondering how he’d take the news. “He was a hunter, Archer.”
He chewed that over. “I admit the coincidence, if it is one, is colossal, but I can assure you that I do not have either piece of the Raisa Medallion. If one was placed with me when I was a babe, newly abandoned and taken in temporarily by a mortal whose barren wife enjoyed babies, it has long since been lost.”
“Let’s put a bookmark in your foster mom, because I want to come back to that sometime, but the leaf was pretty clear: the mother was divided, and from her were created the two constellations. I didn’t pull it together until it struck me that Bree is always calling you Archer Dragon. Not Archer, or Archer the dragon, but the archer dragon. She knew, dammit. She knew and she didn’t say anything to me.”
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