His hips began to move. He couldn’t help it. “Pinch them tighter.”
She did, her breathing growing hard and uneven.
“Now roll them.”
She obeyed, and rode him faster, rougher.
When she spent her pleasure, squeezing him, milking him, Draknart lost his control. He grabbed her, rolled her onto her stomach, lifted her hips, with her face resting on her folded arms on the cave floor, and plunged into her tight opening from behind.
She cried out. But as he pounded his need into her, she began pushing back, meeting him thrust for thrust, arching her back, her soft moans begging him to bring her to completion once again.
He reached around her with one hand and found her throbbing nub, pinched it and rolled it, the same as she’d done with her nipples. The gods be damned, he couldn’t stop, he didn’t want to stop, he wanted everything she had.
When she flew apart in his arms, he at last shot his seed inside her pulsing, tight channel.
Later, as they lay next to each other, Draknart cursed the gods again. He’d wanted Einin, but not like this, not without control. Not when neither of them could make the choice for themselves.
He understood then that the goddess had not forgiven him. The years she’d given to Einin were no years at all. The goddess expected Einin to run from the dragon in the morning. How could she not, after Draknart had spent the night ravaging her body?
She wouldn’t ever want to see him again.
Chapter Ten
When Einin madeher way to the cave’s mouth in the morning, Draknart was still sleeping the sleep of the dead in the back of the cave. She peeked through the opening before she stepped outside. The sun shone brightly down on the clearing. No sign of the gods. Safe.
Trees had fallen, bushes had been ripped up by their roots, leaves, torn from their branches, lay scattered everywhere. Einin picked her way through the debris and headed to the lake. She needed to clean herself, and she needed the cool water to soothe the soreness between her legs. Even her nipples ached, and she blushed furiously at the knowledge that she’d been the one to torture them—at least some of the time.
She’d considered herself a woman before last night. She’d lived alone in the village. She’d cut her own wood. She’d snared her own pheasants in the woods to cook. She’d gone to the dragon. And she’d come back. She was no twittering maiden, even if she’d still been in possession of her maidenhead.
Yet, this morning, she somehow felt more of a woman than she had been before. What Draknart had done to her… What she had done to Draknart… Their fierce mating awakened a part of her that she hadn’t met before. She liked that part. She liked being a woman who could pin a man like Draknart to the rocks by his shoulders and take from him what she needed. She liked knowing that she was the kind of woman who had survived being tossed to a dragon and could survive being witness to the clash of the gods.
She walked into the water and smiled at the thought.
She walked in until the water was chest-high and washed herself. Then she dropped to her knees and dunked her head under for a few seconds, holding her breath, trying to make sense of the new world she’d woken to this morning.
She was just coming up for air when she spotted Draknart tearing down the narrow beach with as much haste as if he was rushing to battle.
“Einin!” he roared when he spotted her, and he faltered for a moment before he resumed his mad dash.
He ran into the water, and when he reached her, he roughly dragged her up, flattened her against his wide chest, and held her there, his strong arms like iron bars around her body. A very dragonly groan escaped him. “Einin.”
She lay her cheek against his warm skin and inhaled his scent of faint smoke and sex and more—her own scent still lingered on him. Red nail marks crisscrossed his chest. Hers. As were the teeth marks on his shoulders. She was pretty sure she also had his teeth marks on her neck and breasts.
She regretted nothing.
From the way he was holding her, it didn’t seem as if he was regretting the night either.
His voice rumbled above her. “I woke alone.”
“I needed a quick bath.”
His great chest expanded, moving under her cheek as he drew a deep breath, then let it out again. “I thought you’d left.”
She could feel his manhood between them, hot and hard, but he made no move to seduce her. She, too, held still, resting against his heat that had the power to warm her even in the cold lake.
He eased back, opening his mouth to say something, but his lips snapped shut as his gaze darkened, dipping from mark to mark that he’d left on her skin. Then he abruptly turned from her and strode into deeper water, then dove to swim.
She waited for him for a few moments, but when it became apparent that he wasn’t going to return to her anytime soon, she waded out of the water and went back to her clothes to see if any of them were salvageable.
