“It’s fruit, Medea. Nothing more.” A talon sprang from the first knuckle of his right hand, and he sliced through the peel. The inside was strange, segmented like no fruit she’d had before, not like an apple at all. He pulled it apart and popped a segment into his mouth.
Medea gasped. “What are you doing?”
“I’ve had it before. It’s very good.” He took another step closer. “I’ve told you, Medea, the rules don’t apply to me. I can eat the sheep. I can eat the fruit. I can even leave the garden. The only question is, do you trust me enough to try it for yourself?”
He gave her a wicked smile that Medea thought must hold all the secrets of the universe. Her heart thudded in her throat. His gaze locked onto hers, and he held out a wedge, juice dripping from his fingers. Her throat turned dry as a stone. If she could just taste it, taste him… Was she really going to do this?
“But you are a dragon. An immortal! It may not hurt you, but what will it do to me?”
His eyes narrowed. “I don’t understand exactly what you are Medea, but I know this fruit won’t hurt you. Do you trust me?”
She searched her heart and found she did. Tentatively, she sat up and opened her mouth like a baby bird. He placed the fruit on her tongue. Sweetness burst across her taste buds, and she sucked the juice from his fingers, rolling the slice against her cheek. The taste wasn’t metallic despite the gold outer appearance. It tasted like liquid sunshine. She closed her eyes and moaned as she chewed.
She opened them again when his lips met hers. The sweet fruit held no glory compared to the kiss. Swallowing, she gave herself over to the honeyed taste of his mouth melding with hers. If the fruit had any ill effects on her, she didn’t feel them. All she knew was the heat of his touch and a strange mounting pleasure. A heaviness formed between her legs, a throbbing ache that she instinctually knew only he could soothe.
Her hands smoothed over his short hair, down his neck, and over his shoulders. He pulled her into his lap, his fingers stroking the thin fabric over her breast and toying with her nipple. He broke away from the kiss and bowed his head to suckle the tip. When he lifted his head again, the sensation was exquisite, the warmth of his tongue replaced by a delicious cool nip from the wet material.
She stared at him, breathless. “Tavyss, I…” She ran a hand down her body. “I ache for you.”
He wrapped an arm around her and tangled his fingers in her hair, the long lashes of his eyelids lowering. The purr she’d heard him make before grew louder, and she placed her palm against his chest, feeling the vibration.
“Mine.”
“Your voice sounds strange.”
His hand found the bare skin of her ankle and stroked up her calf to her knee. “Say you are mine, Medea. Be my mate.”
His fingers explored higher, stroking along her inner thigh. She panted at the heat, the way the spot between her legs grew wet and ultrasensitive. She had the strongest urge to shift her hips against those fingers.
He squeezed her thigh and gripped the back of her hair. Medea’s lips parted at the feeling. She wanted him. Everything she’d read in the strange forbidden book she’d conjured about sex, she wanted to try with him.
“Say you are mine,” he demanded. “Be my mate.”
“Mate…” She glanced away, confused at the term, but then she realized it was exactly as she’d hoped. He was asking her to wed him, to become a family as her mother and father were a family. “You wish me to become your wife? Be with you always?”
“I love you, Medea. Every part of me. The dragon and the man.”
She took his face in her hands. “Yes, Tavyss. I will be your mate.”
Mercifully, his hand crept to the tangle of nerves that throbbed between her legs and painted delectable circles there.
“Oh,” she said, surprised by the sheer pleasure of it. It was far better than anything she’d imagined based on the book.
Clinging to him, she worked her hips, doing what instinctively made the pleasure more intense. The most marvelous magic unraveled from her lower belly, seizing her in a cascade of golden stars that arched her back and left her gasping for air. He held her as her body spasmed with the intensity of it.
Only when she’d come down from a great height did she remember the other things she’d read about. She reached for his breeches and untied them at the waist. Her hand brushed the long hard length of him. Would it truly fit inside her? She had her doubts.
“You’re sure?” he asked. “My mate, once we do this, you will always be mine and I yours, until the moon crumbles into dust.”
She thought of her sisters, of her family, for she knew to the core of her soul that this was no small promise she made to Tavyss. She was binding herself to him, the same way she was bound to them. No, in a much stronger way. She felt the magic, thick in the air around them, licking her skin.
But she was a woman, and she was ready for this. She wanted a full life like her parents had had, with a partner, maybe children of her own.
“Yes, Tavyss. I am yours.”
Gently he leaned her back against the moss, her dress bunched around her hips, and settled between her legs. His breeches were gone, and he tugged his tunic over his head. Seeing him above her, a mass of dark golden power, almost flooded her body with pleasure again. She tugged her own dress over her head and cast it aside.
Allowing her knees to fall to the sides, she bared herself to him, reached for him. His wings unfurled, reflecting the moon gloriously in the twilight. With one flex, he was over her, blunt head parting her most sensitive flesh. Slowly, ever so slowly, he pushed inside. There was the slightest pressure, then pain, but she lost sight of it in the ever-building pleasure as he gently began to move.
