“Let me go.” I set her down immediately. She whirls on me. Shoves me with both hands. “Why do you have to be such a brute?”
I narrow my eyes, the fire rising in my blood. “You’re not pushing me away this time. Not over something like this.”
“Something like this?” she hisses.
“A misunderstanding. When I said you were desperate, I wasn’t suggesting you were a gold digger. I only meant that your financial problems made you vulnerable. I know you’d never marry someone for their money.”
She shakes her head. “Damn you. Damn you for suggesting it.”
I reach for her again, but she dodges my grip. My eyes narrow on hers, my finger pointing at the floor between us. “I don’t think you understand what it does to me to think about you with him,” I grit out. “It makes me jealous as hell. It makes me burn to claim you. It makes me wonder what he has that I don’t.”
Her breath comes in pants, and her brows knit together. “You’re jealous… of Roman?” She scoffs.
I nod twice, slowly. “The idea of him touching you enrages me. The idea that he had you and I… don’t… is intolerable.” I turn my back to her, unable to watch her walk away one more time. For what seems like two full minutes, I stare into the cold fireplace.
“You never intended to trade me for information from the Order, did you?” Her voice startles me, as does the hand that lands on my back. “If Roman had agreed to meet with you about Lucy’s murder, you would have never let him take me, would you?”
I catch her eyes over my shoulder. “Never.”
Her expression softens and I turn, drawing her to me once more, and this time she doesn’t fight me. “If you accept me as your mate, I will be loyal to you and defend you to my dying day. I’ll always put you first. My soul will be yours. My dragon will be yours to command. You’ll never have to question it. A mated dragon is biologically programmed to serve his mate. Our union has been blessed by the creator, fated, destined in the stars.” I swallow. “You can reject it. I won’t force it on you. But if you say yes, I’ll make it my mission to love you the way you need to be loved. And I’ll tell you one thing, no fucking scar or story about how you got it is going to convince me you are any less of a goddess.”
Her heart flutters and her eyes go wide as dinner plates. “Oh,” she says breathlessly. “Is that all you have to offer? Just a lifetime of love written in the stars?”
Another wave of sickness comes over me, and I close my eyes as my stomach pitches.
“You’ve been patient to wait for me. That’s not what Aries are known for.”
“No.” I take a deep breath, fighting against my instincts to grab her. To claim her.
“And if I left you right now, you’d let me go?”
I open my eyes again, pain like I’ve never experiencedbefore slicing through me. A lump forms in my throat like a fist. “Yes.”
Her hand presses into her chest and she draws a shaky breath. She feels it too, down the bond, the deep sense of dread, the awful black hole at the thought of being apart. “I’ve never truly been your prisoner, have I?”
I shake my head and my voice is trashed as I admit, “Never. If you ask to leave, I’ll allow it. If you ask me to take you, I will fly you home myself. I can’t deny you anything. Maybe I never could, not anything I thought you truly wanted. You do understand that when I took you, I believed it was what you wanted.”
She licks her lips and moves a baby step closer to me. “When I was standing there in that ridiculous wedding dress, I never dreamed a love like yours was possible for a woman like me. A woman could get used to being loved like that.” She reaches behind her back, and I hear her zipper.
My breath halts its flow in my lungs. I’m afraid to breathe. Afraid to say a word. Afraid my reality will shift and she’ll pull away again.
But she keeps going, unzips her dress, then lets it fall off her body. I keep my hands by my sides as she draws near and brushes her lips against mine. “You don’t have to wait anymore, Connor,” she whispers. “Claim me. I accept you as my mate.”
With a growl that rattles the paintings on the walls, I sweep into her, lifting her feet from the floor as my mouth crashes down on hers. Fire meets fire. She’s already open. Already welcoming me in, hertongue stroking against mine in a breathless tangle of repositioned heads, nipping teeth, and bruising kisses.
“I can’t be gentle. Not this time,” I warn her, the words sinking into her mouth, swallowed by our need.
She draws back a fraction of an inch to unfasten her bra and tosses it onto the chair, then goes to work on the buttons of my flannel.
My dragon surges, sending scales flipping along one arm and disappearing beneath skin a breath later. “Faster. I’m not kidding.”
She eyes the place on my arm where we both saw the partial shift, fists both sides of my shirt, and rips. Buttons fly and I shrug the scraps off me, my heart pounding in my ears. My wings unfurl.
“Jesus Christ, you’re beautiful,” she says, reaching up and stroking along the edge of one.
My answering purr makes her heart pound faster, and the scent of her arousal blooms between us. I hook my fingers in the sides of her panties and drop to my knees, taking them down with me. She kicks them aside.
Entirely naked now, she meets my gaze as I eye the scar she kept from me so vehemently, such an important part of her, a badge of honor for surviving her past. I lay the flat of my tongue on the place it starts at her hip and lick the length of it. Slowly, ever so slowly, I worship this thing she’s been so afraid of, this piece of her she’s guarded, still guards, from me. I end with a swirl around the nipple of her right breast.
