“Oh.” She searched his face. He wasn’t afraid or angry. Just overwhelmed. Perhaps there was a chance that the night wouldn’t end in total disaster. “You can touch them now if you want. Gently.”
Chapter Fifteen
Nick’s head buzzed like he was in a dream. Maybe he was. He had been sleeping, after all. He moved closer, that smoky citrus scent of hers everywhere in this room. Her room. He was definitely dreaming.
He swallowed hard.
“My wings are intimate to me. I don’t usually let others see them or touch them.” She licked her lips. “I’m letting you see them because… I like you.”
His gaze met hers, and the vulnerability in her eyes melted his heart. “I like you too.” He reached for her and slowly stroked his thumb along her jaw, trailing his nail gently beneath her lip before cupping her cheek. “Your wings look like they’re made of rose petals,” he said. “They’re beautiful.”
A blush warmed her cheeks. “Thank you.”
Sweet. Alluring. If this was a dream, he didn’t want to wake up.
She nodded, never looking away from him. He moved his hand from her face and toward the outer bone of her right wing. The tips of his fingers inspected the edge, the texture of scales bumping in smooth regularity beneath his touch.
She giggled, and the sound sent a pleasant shiver along his skin. “It tickles.”
“You can feel that?”
“Of course I can feel it. It’s my wing.”
“Were they… surgically implanted? I didn’t think it was possible, but…”
She snatched his wrist, holding his hand between them, and stared him in the eye. “You’re not listening. This isn’t technology, Nick. It isn’t surgery. It’s me. My wings are part of me. Of who I am. I’m a dragon from a realm known as Paragon. That’s in a different dimension. A different world.”
He narrowed his eyes on her, trying to wrap his mind around it.
She groaned. “You said you were a human lie detector. You tell me—am I lying?”
Nick shook his head. “No.”
She released his hand. After an awkward moment, he couldn’t resist stroking her wing again. She arched and stretched the wing beneath his touch as if it tickled again, and he increased the pressure to long, even strokes that seemed more soothing to her. Damn. He used to think he was a leg man. Who would have thought wings would be his ultimate turn-on?
“How did you come here to this place, from uh, Paragon?” His instincts told him she wasn’t lying, but that didn’t mean what she said was real, only that she believed it was.
Her brow knitted and she folded her hands between them. “There was a coup. The government of Paragon was overthrown. My mother, an extremely powerful dragon, knowing that I and my siblings were in danger, used her magic to send us all here to Earth, to hide us.”
“How many of you are there?”
“Eight. I’m the only girl.”
He watched her carefully. Could this be real?
Her lips bent into a nervous smile. “Do you believe me now?”
Nick was a homicide detective in New York. He’d known monsters. Real-life Hannibal Lecters existed in the world. He’d faced them. Seen what they could do. The vampires he’d seen that night were monsters, monsters as evil as the human ones he’d faced. But Rowan… she might be a dragon, whatever that meant, but she wasn’t a monster. She was an angel, a goddess, a woman.
He trailed his fingers along her wing, over her shoulder, to the place where the red scales melded into the muscles of her back. Her eyelids drooped and her head tilted to one side. That must feel good. He messaged the muscles there gently, his arms wrapped around her, her citrus scent filling his lungs.
As a detective, he’d thought he’d seen everything. He’d been wrong.
“Nick, tell me you accept that I’m a dragon?” she implored softly. “I need to know.”
“I hardly think you need anything from me. After tonight, I think it’s clear you can take care of yourself.”
She frowned. “Telling you this makes me vulnerable. Can I trust you to keep my secret, even if you can’t…?”
