“There you are,” I whisper.
Something in him gives, and his hands come up and hold mine there, pressing my palm harder against his chest as if the contact is the only thing keeping him tethered. Then his mouth finds mine again, and this kiss is different, deeper, hungrier. It’s the kind that peels back every pretense and leaves nothing between us except the truth of how badly we both want this.
His hands slide down my arms, fingers trailing heat that makes my skin prickle, and when they find the hem of my shirt, they pause, a question posed through touch. I pull it over my head myself without breaking eye contact, because if he is going to see me, all of me, then he does it without flinching.
The sound that leaves his throat when his gaze drops is low, rough, and saturated with want built over longer than either of us has been willing to admit. His hands spread across my waist with a reverence that contradicts the brutality waiting behind it, and the contrast between tenderness and the hunger in his eyes makes my pulse hammer hard enough to hear.
He lifts me, hands gripping my thighs hard enough to leave marks blooming purple by morning, and I wrap my legs around his waist without hesitation, nails raking down his back through fabric and muscle until he hisses against my mouth and his hips press forward with enough pressure to arch my spine involuntarily. His lips drag along my throat, teeth scraping the pulse point with enough force to make my entire body shudder.
“You want to know what happens when a dragon stops holding back?” His breath ghosts across my collarbone, hot enough to burn.
“Show me.” The words come out steady despite the trembling in my thighs, and I dig my nails in harder, dragging them down his spine until he snarls.
The sound is answer enough.
He carries me to the bed and follows me down in one fluid motion that covers my body with his weight, grounding and overwhelming at once. His mouth turns bruising against my throat, one hand fisting in my hair to tilt my head back and bare my neck completely, and the claiming starts at the junction where my neck meets my shoulder, his teeth sinking in with enough force to make pain and pleasure detonate simultaneously. Ice traces the edges of the wound as it forms, not enough to freeze but enough to sting, a cold seal pressed into skin that is already burning, and the sensation spreads outward in shivering waves until my entire body is trembling beneath him with something that has nothing to do with fear.
He pulls back from the bite slowly, mouth dragging a wet, deliberate trail down from the wound toward my collarbone, tongue pressing flat against my pulse before teeth scrape across it hard enough to make my hips jerk upward without permission. His free hand works the clasp of my bra with an impatience that borders on violent, the fabric parting and sliding away before I have finished processing the loss of it, and then his mouth moves lower, open and warm against the curve of my breast. The sound that escapes me is sharp enough to make him pause for a fraction of a second before he continues, taking his time in a way that contradicts every other urgency pouring off him in waves.
His tongue traces the underside of one breast in a slow, deliberate stroke, and when his teeth close around the peak, the bite is hard enough to send a jolt straight down through my center, white-hot and instantaneous. My fingers rake into his hair and pull hard to make him growl against my skin, the vibration of it traveling through my ribcage and settling somewhere low and molten, and his response is to bite down again, harder, until my back bows off the mattress. My thighs press closed around his hip in an involuntary clench that makes the friction between us sharp and immediate.
He shifts, his hands sliding beneath my hips to strip the rest of my clothes away with a roughness that leaves no room for gentleness or hesitation, fabric peeling off skin that is already damp and flushed. Then his shirt is gone, and his jeans following with less care, and when the full length of his bare chest presses against mine, the contact hits like a live current. Warmth bleeds through every point where skin meets skin, radiating outward from him in a way it never has before, and the contrast between that heat and the cold still clinging to his hands where they grip my hips makes my breath stutter in my chest.
I reach up and drag my nails down his sternum, hard enough to leave red lines that well and darken beneath my fingertips, and the way his jaw locks, the way the muscle in his cheek twitches with the effort of keeping his breathing even, tells me exactly how thin the thread he is holding himself by has become.
“Easy… or I won’t be, Firecracker,” he warns.
Ice threads along the scratches I leave, frost tracing the paths my nails carve through his skin, and instead of pulling my hands away, I lean up and press my mouth against the marks, feeling the frost dissolve beneath my lips as the warmth between us chases it back.
“I’m not scared of you,” I fire back.
His hand moves between my thighs, and the gasp that tears from my chest is loud enough to ring against stone walls, my hips pressing forward into his palm before conscious thought has a chance to moderate the movement. “Keep testing me like that, and I’llmakeyou scared of me.” He doesn’t tease. His fingers find me slick and burning, and the first stroke is precise enough to make my vision blur at the edges, pressure applied exactly where it needs to be with a certainty that suggests he has been paying attention to every involuntary response my body has given him since the moment he touched me.
When he slides two fingers inside me, the cold follows them in, a lance of sensation that shoots straight up through my core and steals the next breath clean from my lungs. “Oh fuck!” I whimper, ice and heat together, his dragon bleeding through the contact in ways that should not be possible but are, devastatingly so. My body responds by clenching around him hard enough that a rough sound escapes his throat, something between a growl and a breath dragged out by force. He chuckles as his fingers curl, finding the place inside me that makes my vision go white, and he presses with enough precision to make my back arch off the mattress entirely, spine bowing as my handsscramble for something to hold onto and find his shoulders instead, nails digging in until blood wells dark beneath my fingertips.
“That’s it, take what I give you.” He works me with a rhythm that doesn’t rush but doesn’t relent, reading every sharp inhale and every shift of my hips and adjusting pressure and angle until my thighs are shaking badly enough to rattle the frame beneath us. The ice traces the edges of the bruises already blooming where his other hand grips my hip, cold fire that burns in its own particular way, and the contrast between the chill spreading across my skin and the heat coiling tighter at my center twists the tension inside me until it vibrates like a drawn wire.
“Oh God, don’t stop!” I grip his wrist and grind down against his hand hard enough that there is nothing left to misinterpret, my hips moving with a need that has stopped caring about dignity or restraint, his fingers respond by curling harder, pressing deeper, and the sound that leaves my mouth is raw, broken, and too honest to swallow back. The pressure inside me has been climbing for longer than I can track, coiling with every stroke, shift, and place where cold meets heat against my skin until it sits directly on the edge of shattering.
His eyes find mine across the narrow space between our bodies, and what stares back at me is not entirely human. The ice in his gaze has cracked open into something hotter, hungrier, pupils blown so wide there is barely any blue left, and the last wall behind his expression gives way all at once, something surrendering that he has been holding with everything he has.
And suddenly, he withdraws his hand, and the rapid, devastating absence of him drags a sound from my chest that borders on a snarl. My hips chase the contact for a split second before the rest of the world sharpens back into focus, and I see what replaces it. His cock presses between my legs, and I glance down to sneak a peek. He is huge, his body faintly glowing withblue scales, his hands braced on the bed, either side of my head, his chest heaving, every line of his body locked in the particular tension that exists only in the space between wanting something and deciding to take it.
He’s not moving.
He’s waiting.
The look on his face while he does it, hunger sharpened into something that borders on reverence despite the violence barely contained beneath it, makes my breath catch harder than anything his hands have done to me tonight.
I curl my fingers around the nape of his neck and pull him down until his forehead presses against mine, breath to breath, and the heat between us is so dense at this point it has actual substance.
“Don’t stop,” I say, and his restraint breaks.
A low growl reverberates from his chest, loud enough that the bed vibrates. It sends goose bumps pebbling across my skin as he thrusts inside me with enough force to drive every molecule of air from my lungs in a single, searing rush. The sound that tears from my chest is something beyond language, raw, shattered, and stripped of everything except pure sensation. My body opens around him, the stretch of him bordering on too much, sitting right on the edge where pain and pleasure stop being separate things and become something singular and all encompassing. My hands slam flat against his back, nails embedding because holding on is the only thing keeping me grounded to anything that exists outside of this.
He holds perfectly still, and the effort of that stillness shudders through every muscle in his body in waves I can feel against my skin. His pulse slams against the inside of my thigh where his hip is pressed flush against mine, heat radiating outward from him in pulses that chase away the last traces of cold clinging to my skin. His forehead drops to the curve of myneck, his breathing comes in rough, measured intervals, each one controlled and deliberate, the breathing of someone holding himself together by threads that might snap at any moment.
Then I decide to move.
