“What happened to you?”
Caz was silent for some time. “Life,” he said at last.
I reached up, tracing one of the largest, ugliest ones from his right shoulder down toward his left hip. Caz hissed in surprise but didn’t pull away.
Without thinking, I leaned in and pressed my lips to the center of his back, where so many of the lines met and passed one another, leaving only a broken, rippling mess.
He growled deeply enough that the vibrations reached my lips and spread out through my body.My nipples hardened under my shirt, but that was nothing compared to the eruption from my core, culminating in a deep throbbing need. That need pushed me toward Caz and our eventual, inevitable, mate bond.
Leaning forward, I kissed another line.
Again, Caz rumbled from the depths of his chest.
He had more scars than I could count, and my lips sought them out, one by one. I wanted to take some of the pain of them, to ease his burden.
“Anna.”
My name poured from his lips like molten lava, searing its way across my body. It sounded like it had in the shower. When he’d moaned my name as he stroked his cock to me. For me.
Just like he’d come to the terrarium for me. To my rescue. Somehow he had known I was in danger. That I needed him. And he had been there.
Never in my life had that happened. I was always the one in danger, always running. Nobody ever came. No protector appeared at the last second to thwart the bad guys. That wasn’t the life for a clippy. We didn’t have that.
But now I had Caz, and everything was different. He had given me so much and promised me a future full of much more. I just wanted to give him something back. To show my gratitude, however I could in the here and now.
“What do you need?” I whispered, running my hands down his back and feeling the muscles underneath the scars. Strength underneath the pain. “Tell me.”
He turned, towering over me, his hair falling over his ears and shoulders to frame his face as he stared down at me. His eyes were aglow with his dragon, the green the same as the mark on my chest.
His mark.
“You.”
He whispered that word, but the three letters meant something much, much bigger than they seemed.
I hadn’t expected that. We had barely kissed. So much had happened, but we had barely even hugged apart from that one time. I wanted to help him, but jumping that far, that fast?
“I …” I bit my lip. “I don’t know if I can give you that yet.”
I waited for him to get angry. To ask me why I had told him to speak up, only to shut him down. To make it my fault.
The frustration never came. It never entered his eyes.
“Not that,” he growled, leaning in closer to me.
“T-then what?” I whispered, the nearness of his presence weighing on my lungs and making it harder to talk.
“I need to taste you. To feel your lips on mine,” he said, lifting one hand to my jaw. “Here.”
I shuddered as he ran a thumb softly along my lower lip, gently pulling it down ever so slightly. His touch was warm and sensual, unusual for someone so large and raw and fierce as my Caz.
“And here.”
His other hand caressed my stomach and dipped lower, below my belt line. My lungs froze in nervous anticipation, but he stopped short of the heated button at the center of everything, dipping low but not so low as to take what had yet to be offered.
“That is what I want,” he growled, leaning in closer, his eyes locked on mine, boring deep into my soul with his stare. “I know you can’t give me all of you. Yet. But I crave your taste. My dragon wants more. Pleasuring you is the only thing either of us wants, and it’s killing us to stay away. I need to know you feel it too.”
Fuck. It was so intense, being wanted that thoroughly by someone. Let alone Caz. He wasn’t shy at all about telling me what he desired. And every time, the answer was the same.
