“Yes, but I want to see what you’re doing.”
His eyes darkened with lust. “Yes,” he murmured, “yes, I want to see you too. Actually, there’s no need to have any clothes on at all.”
“You’re right,” Cela breathed.
Sitting up, she pulled her nightgown over her head. Tyrswallowed, taking her in with his eyes. Then he lifted his hips and pulled down his boxers.
He was hard and erect, his member surrounded by red-gold curls. She found that it took all the self-control she had not to reach out and wrap her hand around him.
Instead she lay on her back, propped up on a mound of Tyr’s pillows, and slid her hand between her legs. Tyr was watching her intently, his hungry gaze roving from her moving fingers, up her chest, to her face. He began to stroke himself.
It was over faster than she was expecting. At the end, she closed her eyes and imagined the fingers touching her were Tyr’s, his capable hands drawing her orgasm from her. She opened her eyes just in time to see the look on Tyr’s face as he came. His eyes were closed as well; she guessed that he was imagining the same thing.
Tyr got up and brought back two warm, damp washcloths from the adjoining bathroom. He passed one to her, and she wiped her fingers, while he cleaned himself up. Then he lay down again and rolled onto his side to look at her.
“You’re gorgeous when you come,” he murmured, and she shivered a little. “How was it?”
“Good.”But not as satisfying as I’d hoped.
She rolled on her side, too, and gazed at Tyr. For a little while they lay with the space of half a queen-sized bed between them. It might as well have been the distance between Earth and the moon. Both of them yearned desperately to touch, their sexual desire slaked for once, only to be replaced by an aching skin hunger.
Abruptly there was a thump from downstairs, followed by a yowl. Cela grinned to mask the ache in her heart.
“Sounds like the twins are awake. At least one of them.”
The twins were getting better at escaping from their crib.Cela had been thinking about seeing if it was possible to cover the top of the crib with some kind of child-safe mesh.
“I’ll handle it,” Tyr said, smiling back at her. “You stay here and nap.”
He put on boxers and a bathrobe, and vanished out the door. Cela stirred herself enough to put on her nightgown, then lay and drowsed, waking again when Tyr came back with the children awake and squirming in his arms.
“I don’t think I’m quite ready to start the day yet, no matter what Wiggly and Wigglier here have in mind.” He lay down again, depositing the children on the bed between them. Both of them squealed with delight at the sight of Mom. Aven immediately shifted to a lion cub and toddled over to climb on her. Ayra pulled herself up on her arms and experimented with scooting around on the bed.
“I feel like a human speed bump,” Cela remarked. She lifted Aven off her and set him down between them. “No, stay there with Daddy.”
She halted in shock at the words that had left her mouth. She hadn’t spoken it aloud before, although she thought of him that way: the children’s father in every way that counted.
Lifting her eyes from the twins to Tyr, she saw that he was looking back at her with infinite softness and love in his gaze.
“Daddy,” she repeated, grinning at him helplessly.
“I like the sound of that,” Tyr murmured. “And I love looking at you.”
“I love to hear—oh no, catch him!”
Aven had just about dived off the end of the bed while they were distracted. Luckily he was a lion cub, so it wasn’t as if it was going to hurt him to land headfirst on the floor. Tyr sat up and scooped him back into the middle of the bed with his sister.
“Another exciting day in the Raines-Skye household,” Tyr remarked, folding his arms under his head.
Cela didn’t answer; she just tried to hold on to this warm feeling, saving it as if to bank it against the potential of future unhappiness ahead.
She couldn’t see how they could possibly be together with this desperate divide between them. But right now, she had never been more determined to fight for their chance.
TYR
“Nothing at all?”
Ben shook his head in answer to Tyr’s question. Cela was at work, and Ben had dropped by to deliver the news from his dragon relatives. They were sitting on the porch with cups of coffee.
