I weaved through cold, thick clouds before riding the thermals with outstretched wings, wild and free, and wished I could be this way forever.
OLLIE
Archer had been right. This place felt safe.No lights from houses for miles, and car headlights only occasionally swept around the edge of the woods. I took myself up high, hoping to spot Archer in the intermittent moonlight, and before long, I saw him beneath me, a great, dark shape, wings extended as he rode the air. I wished I could be so graceful. I loved flying, but Jack had always said I wasn’t exactly gainly. My wings were slightly out of proportion to the rest of my body, he’d said, examining me critically.
Driving those thoughts away, I pretended I was an owl and stooped out of the sky, plummeting down fast, almost touching the tops of the trees and pulling away at the last minute.
I repeated the trick a few times before looking for Archer again. I wasn’t bored—no one could grow bored of flying—but it felt sad to fly alone. Dragons always trod a fine line between liking personal space and needing other dragons around.
He was moving at a steady pace around the perimeter of the woodland. I flew over to him, ensuring he could see me coming, and made wide, loose, lazy-looking circles around him. At a respectful distance—I wasn’t going to risk a repeat of Avebury.
To my amazement, he turned his head to watch me, and after I’d looped around him a few times, he sped up. He wasstill watching me, and I realised this was an invitation to play. I swooped around him in decreasing circles, ever faster, trying to keep up with him, and he began to circle me back. We were going around one another as if a piece of invisible rope held us together.
The pattern felt oddly familiar, though I didn’t know why until all the natural history documentaries I watched came into focus and I realised—this felt like a mating dance. The push and pull, coming closer but never allowing one another to touch before dancing away in the night sky. And all in silence, because thinking to one another would have broken the spell of whatever this was.
This wasamazing—me and Archer, dancing in the sky, havingfun,but with a charged edge to everything that left me hoping this might be more than playing.
Eventually, hedidpull away, heading for the clearing we’d taken off from. I followed hot on his tail, not wanting to lose this flirtatious closeness that had developed. When I dropped to the grass, wild anticipation blotted out the discomfort of shifting. I’d scarcely changed shape when he strode across the clearing to me, pulled me to him, and his lips descended on mine.
His tongue pushed into my mouth, and arousal shot through me. He tasted of metal and power andArcher.His hands moved from my biceps, one to cup my head against the sheer force of his kiss and the other on my arse, the rough patches on his warm fingers sending sparks through me.
I kissed him back with everything I had, my body like water, flowing and moulding against his solid strength with no structure of my own. Except for my cock, which was getting so hard as I pressed against him that I was breathless.
It was everything I wanted, even better than I’d dreamed, but suddenly he pulled away. I was left cold and panting in the moonlight, wondering what the hell was happening.
“Fuck,” he said.
Sadly, it didn’t sound like an invitation. I was standing there like an idiot, hard dick on display, and he was turning away from me. “I’m sorry.” His voice was low and strained, as if he didn’t often apologise. “I shouldn’t have—”
“You bloody shouldn’t have stopped is what you shouldn’t have done.” It wasn’t often I lost my temper—like about three times in my life so far—but the disappointment was unbelievable. “What’s going on, Archer?”
He swung back to me, and with relief I saw I wasn’t the only one with issues around the groin area. “You can’t say no to me.”
I stared at him, trying to process the words. The moon filtered through a wispy cloud to light his face, but I couldn’t read his expression.
“You really think so?”
His lips twisted, and he bent to pick up his clothes. “Get dressed.”
At the command in his voice, I turned automatically to my own pile of clothes, and then I realised what he’d done. “Oh, very clever.” A tiny part of me worried that this was a head of family I was being so disrespectful to, but the rest of me knew this wasArcher.“Look, can we at least talk about what just happened?”
“Nothing to talk about.” He roughly pulled his jumper on and headed out of the clearing while I was still fumbling with my jeans. Out of time, I stuck my socks in my pocket and stamped into my new boots to follow the faint, bobbing light of his phone through the trees.
Chapter Seventeen
OLLIE
I caught up with Archer at the car, where he was leaning with his arms folded on the roof, staring along the beam of his phone into the night.
“Any head of family demands respect, but they’re not a god.” My voice shook slightly with how important this was to me. Also because I’d run the last bit of the way to catch him.
He withdrew his attention from the horizon to look at me, his brows drawing together.
“Sorry, but you’re not. I mean, I disagreed with my own head of family at the moot.”
He was still miles away from me somehow, and I had to put this in words of one syllable to get through to him. “I wouldn’t sleep with you because you told me to. Not if I didn’t want to. And the thing is, you haven’t told me to, yet I really,reallywant to.”
Something about his mouth changed at my sincere declaration, but I couldn’t tell what.
