Until both of us lost our words, falling over the brink together, my body shattering around his in the most perfect orgasm I’d ever had.
Afterward, he gathered me into his body, his cock already hard again against the curve of my ass, offering soothing words as he held me close. My body rippled with the aftershocks of my orgasm as he gently caressed my skin.
I felt treasured beneath his hands, wanted in a way that had nothing to do with plots or rebellion or Lightbringer herself.
As if all that mattered to him was me. For tonight.
Nineteen
Cara
In the morning, I woke up to Fieran pulling a tunic over his head. His back was to me, and I admired the ripple of his muscles, the play of the sunlight on his dark hair.
When he turned around, I became intrigued by the ceiling. He was arrogant enough without realizing how drawn I was to him. “Where are you going?”
“Out to fly,” he told me with a mischievous grin. He loped toward me with a confident swagger that suggested to me he was entirely aware of how I watched him, then tossed me one of his tunics. “Are you coming?”
Sudden anger pierced my heart.
My heart was suddenly racing, but I wasn’t sure the fury was mine. I was always a little bit angry—as a mortal in our world, as a woman—but now my anger felt changed and redoubled. I took a moment to compose myself, pulling his tunic over my head. What was happening?
I tried to hide the sudden pulse of rage. “My dragon and I are not ready to fly together.”
“Maybe if you just leap out, your dragon will catch you,” he suggested.
I resisted the temptation to tell him he was channeling Dair’s optimism. “And maybe I will die on impact.”
“I wouldn’t let that happen.”
“Then there’s no reason for my dragon to catch me to make sure I don’t die.”
“You’re not still afraid of heights?” He seemed offended that his attempts to orgasm me out of my fears hadn’t been successful.
“She felt the pull to shift last night when everyone else went up. She felt it and turned away from it. That’s not a dragon who can’t shift. That’s a dragon who won’t.”
“Fine,” he said, recovering his grin with the ease of long practice. “Watch me fly and fantasize about seeing my wings fail.”
He gave me that cocky grin and stepped onto the window ledge. He smiled at me as if gravity were nothing to him. Then he let himself fall backward.
Despite myself, a sudden burst of fear pierced my chest. I was on my feet and running toward the window, even though I knew what I’d see.
For one heartbeat, he was a dark figure falling. Then wings unfurled from him, vast and radiant. His dragon caught the updraft from the ocean as if it had been waiting for him, and they rose together.
Something raw and aching stirred inside me. A throb of want, different, sharper than the usual wanting I felt for Fieran. Part of me always wanted him, unfortunately. That had not changed and showed no signs of changing, and I had made my peace with it in the way you made peace with conditions that were simply permanent.
But right now, I wanted to fly.
“Is that your emotion too?” I muttered to my dragon. “Then why don’t we just fly? Why don’t we shift?”
Rees pressed against my legs, watching the sky with me. Below us, the sea beat the cliffs with its old, patient hunger. Above, Fieran wheeled once, twice, sunlight breaking over the curve of his wings.
“Is he showing off or inviting us?” I asked Rees, though I wasn’t really talking to the dog. I was talking to my dragon.
I could feel desire and resistance, both coiling inside me, and perhaps not all of it was mine.
Then my vision snapped into too-sharp focus. I could see every seam of mortar between the stones, the salt crusting on the black rocks below, every flicker of color in Fieran’s radiant scales. I was drinking him in, helpless, watching him hungrily no matter how I tried to resist.
We knew so little about our dragons.
