Desperation and heartbreak fueled every needy, beautiful, possessive kiss that drugged his mind and sent his dragon soaring, even as his heart plummeted.
He should end this. Gods, he had to end this.
Smoothing his hands up her thighs, he tucked his fingers into the creases of her ass and lifted. In one smooth movement, she responded by wrapping her long legs around his waist, and he pressed his rock-hard cock against the heated core of her.
He broke the kiss to groan against her neck.
Meira shuddered against him. “Please, Sam.”
The whispered words were hoarse and as desperate as the sensations buffeting him. His dragon whined in his head, a sound his creature side had never made before. Those two words also dropped him into reality with all the subtlety of a nose-breaking punch to the face.
He was hers. Always. Her Sam. And the most important thing he would ever do with his life was protect this woman.
Even from himself.
Slowly, he pulled his head back, resisting her even as her hands grasped at him, trying to keep him against her. Carefully, he lowered her feet to the ground, then stepped away. Only she stepped with him, arms still around his neck.
“Sam?” The question wobbled, and he thought he might throw up.
Gently, he grasped her wrists and forced her hands down, then stepped back, cutting all physical contact. “I can’t do this.”
“Captain?” The question preceded Amun into the hallway by only half a second.
Holy hell.
A half second longer touching Meira, kissing her, marking her as his when he couldn’t, and they would’ve had witnesses. He hadn’t even heard the door to the chamber open, let alone the approach of his men either down the hall or on the perch from the atrium.
Sucking in a silent breath, Samael hid every terrible emotion behind a blank expression, shutting himself down and ignoring the woman beside him. The only way he’d get through this. “The king is in his room, resting.”
Amun nodded, which should’ve been it. Instead, he stepped closer, gaze serious. “We have a…situation.”
Chapter Nineteen
It seemed her life was turning into a coiled mess of bad ideas, thanks to a never-ending stream of worse situations.
“Take my arm, my lord,” she said to Gorgon.
She tried not to grunt when the king leaned heavily against her. He was barely keeping his feet already. Meira had to brace her own feet to keep them both from swaying while at the same time trying to appear as though they waited patiently.
They stood inside the massive cavern, not unlike the one at Ben Nevis, that connected to the landing platform outside. A space used not only for training, but apparently for meeting with large numbers of dragon shifters.
Again.
The meeting with the clan previously had been trial enough. She’d had to secretly hold fire in her fist to turn off the emotions screaming at her. Mostly distrust and resentment.
They needed to tell Gorgon. Now. Before Samael had a chance to do something worse than push her away. But now wasn’t the best time. Because now they were meeting with the part of the clan that had abandoned their people.
Rather than wait for night, a storm had allowed the deserters to return during the day. Ominous dark-gray thunderheads built like towering cathedrals over the rolling brown lands around the mountain and swirled up and around Ararat’s peaks, obscuring the dragons from view of any humans nearby. Outside, a swarm of black almost obliterated the cloudy sky as a torrent of swirling dragons in varying shades of black, gray, and silver swirled down from the high altitudes at which they’d been hovering. In groups of roughly ten, they would land, shift to human, and step out of the way for the next group.
She’d directed Maul, who’d refused to leave her and return to Kasia, to stay in Gorgon’s chambers. No need to add to the tension in the room with a hellhound. At the king’s orders, Samael, along with the rest of the viceroys of the Curia Regis and soldiers of the King’s Guard, stood in a line at her back. Behind them, the rest of the clan had gathered to welcome their brethren home.
In theory.
The twisting of her insides told Meira that maybe this wasn’t going to go the way Gorgon hoped. Or it could have something to do with her chosen mate. The man who was abandoning her because he thought it the right thing to do—his emotions a black swirl of pain and determination behind her.
The pain was the only thing keeping her remotely calm. He didn’t want to leave her. As if she’d let him. As if she didn’t have a voice in what happened to them.
Except every second they stayed, without revealing what they’d done, only dragged them further into an abyss of deceit. Samael was beta now and back to leading the guard…and she, in the eyes of the clan, was queen. She’d have to claw her way out of the grave she’d dug with her silence eventually. Now was not that time.
Finally, the dragons flying home assembled outside on the landing pad and walked toward where she and the king waited inside the massive training chamber.
One man walked ahead of the others.
Their elected speaker, most likely. The one who’d contacted Amun to tell the clan that many of those who’d left when they’d thought Gorgon dead wanted to return to the fold. That they wished to beg mercy from the king himself.
Gorgon remained where he was, and Meira continued to prop him up, her muscles starting to shake.
As the leader of the group neared, she studied him. But he was just a man. As tall as the other black dragon shifters with the same midnight-colored hair and eyes the color of mercury.
At an unseen signal, he stopped at least fifty feet from where
