I whimpered.
The flame came to my left thigh, and it was a long stroke over my quadricep.
This was different from the arms.
Different from the chest.
My thighs were closer to my cock. The nerves there ran on the same highways, traveled the same roads, reported to the same desperate, aching center between my legs.
When the heat sank into the tissue, it didn't stay in my thigh. It traveled. Crawled upward through the muscle, tendon, and the blood until it reached the base of my cock and fed the ache already living there.
I trembled so hard my teeth chattered.
“Hmmm.” She went back to my chest.
Over the dragon again.
But this time she didn't just trace the tattoo. She followed the dragon's body the way you'd run your hands over a lover in bed—learning the dips and rises, the soft places and the hard ones.
She traced the curve of the dragon's neck across my collarbone. Drew the flame down through the coils on my left pec, around the swell of the muscle, and underneath where the skin was thinner and more tender.
I gasped.
She heard that.
Noted it.
Came back to the same spot. The underside of my pec. The soft crescent of skin where muscle met rib. She dragged the flame across it again.
A sound left me that I would deny for the rest of my life.
High.
Thin.
The sound of a man who had discovered a nerve ending he didn't know he had and a woman who was already exploiting it.
And then I stopped tracking time.
Minutes.
Hours.
The candles might have burned down by inches.
The room existed outside of clocks.
The only measurement was her—where she stood, where the flame went, how long the pauses lasted.
And the pauses.
God, the pauses.
She stood beside the slab with the wand burning at her side and she didn't bring the flame back.
She just watched me.
“T-tora. . .” I writhed on the stone, rolled my hips against nothing, and strained my arms against the restraints until the leather bit into my wrists.
