Charlotte cried out, her body arching off the mattress as her skin lit up like a rising sun. “Fuuuuck!”
That was unexpected. Light and heat washed over him until it almost burned. Her pleasure shone through her skin, her body becoming an exploding star. The light was almost blinding. A small part of him wondered if he should be afraid, but he cast the thought aside. His life wasn’t that precious to him. He was more than willing to be consumed by her, by this.
But as she sank back down on the mattress, he wasn’t harmed in any way by the energy he’d drawn out of her. She came together again and stared up at him in blatant wonder, her lids low, her lips parted.
“Mountain, Liam. I’ve never felt anything like that.”
It took him a second to realize what she was saying. But that couldn’t be right. “Wait, do you mean you’ve never had an orgasm?”
She shook her head.
“Princess Charlie?” A distant voice came through the door.
Her eyes widened and she leaped out from under him, a look of panic on her face.
“It’s my lady’s maid!” She swiped her pants off the end of the bed and pulled them on. “Stay here.”
He nodded. Where else would he go?
Smoothing her hair, she slipped from the room, leaving him feeling cold and empty in her absence. Fuck, he was in trouble, and not just because he had a major case of blue balls.
An hour later Liam found himself in the palace kitchen, running his fingers through a substance Charlotte called flour. It was white. It was powdery. But the texture reminded him more of almond flour than wheat flour, and the scientist in him was attempting to divine its chemical composition from touch and smell alone.
“What is this made from?” he asked her.
“Barrel root, from the volcanic side of the mountain.”
He nodded. “Only one way to find out if it’s the same as flour from Earth.”
He grabbed a large bowl from the rack and measured in a couple of cups. He’d decided to make chocolate chip cookies. They weren’t exactly Christmas related, but it was the only recipe he had memorized. Thankfully, Paragon’s salt and sugar were identical to what he was used to. Baking soda and vanilla extract he’d have to improvise.
“Is there anything I can do to help?” she asked as he perused the contents of the pantry.
He glanced back at her, that damned warm feeling blooming in his chest again. “Talk to me. Tell me about yourself.” It occurred to him that he should be asking about the composition of the soil or where Paragon was in the universe—scientific questions—but all his dumbass brain wanted to know was more about her. What made her tick? What was it like for her growing up in this place? Maybe her favorite flower and how she liked her coffee.
She seemed surprised at the request, her wings rising. “What do you want to know?”
“Start with this legend you were telling me about yesterday. Why would anyone think you’d be a monster?”
Charlotte leaned against one of the steel counters and started to talk, and the story she told rivaled any novel he’d ever read. Thousands of years ago an empress named Eleanor had murdered her own brother and his witch mate, who was one of three powerful sisters. Their unborn child, who would have been like Charlotte, was killed with his mother. Publicly, Eleanor spun it as self-defense and they outlawed all mating between dragons and witches because it fit their narrative. For hundreds of years, the people of Ouros had told stories and sung songs about the monster child of a witch and a dragon. So when Charlotte’s witch mother mated her dragon father, there was naturally trepidation.
Only, over time, her father was able to reveal Eleanor’s true colors and take back the kingdom from his wicked, murderous mother. Charlotte’s birth fulfilled the prophecy of the three sisters, but not in the way everyone assumed. By overthrowing Eleanor, her family brought peace to the kingdom.
She told him about her journey into the underworld with her uncle Marius—another uncle!—and how she’d spent her childhood learning to control her celestial powers while expanding her practice of witch magic, a skill she learned from her mother, along with traditional dragon magic she learned in school.
“So you went to school.” He stopped stirring the concoction in front of him to concentrate on her. “No private tutors for the princess?”
She smiled. “I think my father would have preferred private tutors, but my mother wanted me to have as normal a childhood as possible. I attended Rawkfist Academy. It’s a private school here in Paragon. My parents were worried at first because I’m different, but I wasn’t bullied much, surprisingly. I think they were too afraid of me to bully me. My biggest obstacle was getting people to see beyond my royal title and the disparaging folklore to interact with me at all. A few did. My best girlfriends are people I met there.”
“Did you go to university?” he asked, pulling a pan from the rack and heaping balls of dough onto it. It smelled like chocolate chip cookie dough, but the texture wasn’t quite right.
She glanced at him. “Yes. As far as I could go. My specialty is metaphysics and sorcery.”
He chuckled.
“What’s so funny?”
“That wouldn’t even be a real major in my world.”
