When Caz had come roaring into the terrarium, I hadn’t had time to focus on his nudity.
Now it was partially in my face. And not just his abs and his powerful quads but his cock. The same cock he had been stroking to the thought of me not half an hour ago.
Fuck.
Knowing he had gotten that hard, that desperate for me, was a powerful aphrodisiac. Now we were alone. On the top of his castle, with a beautiful view, he was naked.
Things started stirring in me that I did not want to stir. Heated desire curled its claws around my core, stoking the embers of the fireswithin and bringing them to life in seconds. Anxious need poured through me, livening every nerve ending as I stared at Caz.
“Caz,” I whispered.
“Yes?” he growled, looking up, his eyes glowing. His dragon was still near the surface, but there was no danger this time. Not to me.
All I saw was desire. My body was doing all the things, trying to find the weak chink in my armor, the flaw that would shatter my flailing resistance and send me to him.
“Why did you run away from me?” I asked, trying to maintain cohesive thought.
“I had to keep you safe,” he said. “My dragon was losing its mind. It wanted to kill everyone who had ever looked at you wrong, or with anything at all resembling appreciation of your body. Anyone. I would have torn the citadel down block by block. I had to leave. For everyone’s sake. My dragon is a monster.”
A monster. There was that word.
“I don’t think it is,” I said gently, stepping toward him.
“How can you say that? You saw it. It was ready to hurt you. To hurtyouof all people.”
“I think you’re wrong.” I bit back a smile at his surprise. People probably didn’t tell him that often. “Your dragon could have easily hurt me. Killed me. Power wise, I’m a nobody compared to you, Caz. But it didn’t. Even the ice was justtrying to scare me off. It stopped well short of me.”
“I don’t want to hurt you again.”
“Who says you hurt me?”
“Well, I …”
I shook my head, stopping him. “I’m not the one who has been hurt,” I said softly, locking eyes with him.
He didn’t flinch. Not precisely. But the very corners of his eyes and mouth did tighten. Just enough to reveal he knew what I meant.
“Turn around,” I ordered in that same gentle, quiet tone. “I want to see you.”
I was asking a big thing of him—not just to show me the scars but also to put his back to me. Dragons were predators. They hunted. Turning their back on a fellow predator was not lightly done.
But I was no predator. I was his mate. I wouldn’t hurt him. Couldn’t hurt him.
“Anna …”
I took another step forward, surprised at my brazenness. Where had this come from? Why was I the one making advances when, until now, I’d been so adamant about keeping my distance?
But in that moment, none of it mattered. Ella, Milly, the fact that I was standing across from the ice tyrant. It all vanished. There was only me, Caz, and his pain. I could do nothingmore for my friends right then.
Caz, though? I could help him. I could ease his pain.
“Let me see,” I whispered, ignoring the growing thickness of his cock between his legs and the matching drive in my body. “Please.”
He shuddered as I said that and pushed gently on his shoulder at the same time. After a brief resistance, he folded, turning to show me what I had glimpsed before.
“By the orb,” I whispered, stunned.
It was so much worse up close. Lines of different sizes were visible everywhere, some thick and deep, others thin and curved, each one piled on top of the next in an endless mass of scars.
