“What was her name?”
“M’re. It means, my fyre.”
He hugged her, and she buried her face against his throat, no longer a demigod but a woman who’d suffered a terrible loss. He would carry her pain if he could, soothe her hurts, protect her from all things bad and evil.
Slender arms gripped his waist. Pillowy breasts melded against his chest. Rounded hips cradled his still-hard cock.
She lifted her face. “Kiss me.”
He brushed a kiss of comfort across her lips.
“No—like you mean it.”
“Oh, babe, I mean it.” She was a fever in his blood, an ache in his groin, his weakness, his obsession. He claimed her lips in a raw surge of need and carried her, her feet dangling at his shins, to the pool deck. Her braid had come unwrapped from around her waist and half floated in the water.
He groaned, and his lips fused to hers in a heated surrender to a force beyond his control. Desire and desperation thrummed a heavy beat. He boosted her up to capture a beaded nipple in his mouth. He sucked, drawing it tighter and harder, before treating the other, and setting her on her feet again. She threaded her fingers through his hair, scratching his scalp, lighting a fire in his soul.
When her soft hand wrapped around his hard-on, the blood in his veins turned molten. Her touch was tentative, unpracticed, and all the more erotic for it. Every awkward, passionate caress stoked the flames.
How had he lived without her? How would he continue when they had to part? Don’t think about that.
Retreat was not an option. For the first time, he felt connected to his dragon essence. Something inside, some small but essential force, needed her, craved her, would always seek her. The tie could not be severed. It would always be there. To be with her was the purest joy; to live without her an agony.
He cupped her face and kissed every feature: her closed eyes, her temples where wayward strands of wet hair curled, the tender lobes and whorls of her ear, the smooth line of her jaw, and those sweet lips. One last kiss, and then he scooped her up and settled her on the pool deck.
“What are you doing?”
“You’ll see.” He grinned, parted her thighs, and lifted her feet to his shoulders.
She was bare, which he assumed was natural. He lowered his head and brushed his mouth over her sex, eliciting a gasp of shocked pleasure. Her anatomy wasn’t entirely like a human woman’s, he did not detect a clitoris, but when he slipped a digit into her channel, he discovered raised ridges ringing her passage. He pumped his finger in gentle exploration, and she arched her neck and moaned. Ah… He grinned in understanding.
He alternated between fingers and tongue to stimulate the sensitive rings. When her frenzied movements and heightened cries of pleasure drove him to the near-breaking point, he pulled her off the ledge into the water.
She grabbed his hair with both hands, tugged his head down, and pressed her lips to his in an open-mouthed kiss.
He lost himself in her exotic, bewitching scent and taste. Senses heightened, and his fyre twisted and curled, snapped and crackled like an exploding sun, shooting out tendrils of rapture. How he longed for this coupling to be the beginning of a life together instead of the beginning of another end, this one final.
He turned a blind mind’s eye to his bleak future and poured all his emotion into his kiss. His cock throbbed and ached, and her teasing hands, bolder and surer, ratcheted up the desire.
Take. Claim. Bite. My mate, mine. “I need you now.” He pressed his lips to her neck and nipped.
“Yes!” she gasped, canting her head to the side. “Again.”
He nipped, a little harder.
“More.”
He bit her on the other side of her neck as he positioned her over his cock. “Wrap your legs around me,” he growled, but she was already locking her heels against his ass. Planting his feet wide apart, and holding her buttocks, he thrust into her welcoming, tight heat.
Buffeted on waves of fiery sensation, he moved with a desperation he couldn’t define. Water smacked against the pool’s edge, splashed over the sides. Urgency that was more than sexual burgeoned inside, driving him toward…what? What?
She dragged her nails down his back as she pressed her face into the crook of his neck. “I need…I…need.”
“What, babe. Tell me.”
“You. More. Faster.” She moved against him.
He was lost then, unable to deny her anything. His body took control, thrusting harder, faster, discovering it was exactly what he needed, too. Flames shot higher, extending more tendrils. Searching, searching…
And he discovered what the ridges in her channel could do. They tightened and released in rhythmic contractions around his erection.
“Oh god, oh god. Jesus.” His balls drew up tight.
“I need…I…need…to…to”—she shuddered—“to…bite…”
His fyre swelled.
“Can’t…shouldn’t…” She turned her face away.
Suddenly he needed to be bitten, as if it was a matter of life or death. From his scalp to his toes, he craved the sting of her teeth “Do it. Do it.” He dragged his mouth across hers in a fleeting but hard kiss and then encouraged her with a hard nip to her throat.
She turned her face into his neck. He felt the graze of suddenly razor-sharp teeth, and then, with a moan, she sank her fangs into his flesh.
A surge of heat and light and power blazed through him. Skyrockets ignited in a shower of ecstasy…and insight. He felt O’ne. He saw her for everything she was: a reluctant but powerful priestess, a dragon yearning to fly free, woman with strong needs and desires. He experienced her arrogance and humility, confidence and self-effacement, certainty and confusion, hope and despair. Residual wariness dissipated like wisps
