He dried his hands on his trousers and crossed the two steps of the kitchen floor between them. He raised his handand brushed the fallen shirt back up onto Fergal’s shoulder, his fingers trailing across the collarbone, lingering on the warm skin. Fergal’s breath caught.
“I want you,” Gregor said.
Fergal’s lips parted. His pupils dilated, the brown swallowed by black. “You’ve had me.”
“Not like this.” Gregor’s thumb traced the line of Fergal’s collarbone, feeling the pulse jumping in the hollow of his throat. “Not because you’re falling apart and need me to put you back together. Not because we’re desperate or scared or running on adrenaline.” He held Fergal’s gaze. “Because I want you. Because we’re here, in our home, and there’s nothing in the way.”
Fergal’s hand came up to cover Gregor’s, pressing it flat against his chest where his heart was hammering. “There’s never been anything in the way except you. You’ve been the brakes on this thing the whole time, and we only ever moved when you took your foot off.”
“I know.”
“So what changed?”
Gregor considered the question with the seriousness it deserved. Fergal deserved a real answer, not a deflection. “This place. Seeing what’s possible. Watching you hold my hand this morning and realizing that the sky didn’t fall.” He paused. “And the fact that I’m tired. I’m tired of being afraid of this, Fergal. I’ve been afraid of it for years, and the fear has never once protected either of us from anything. It’s only kept us from having what we should’ve had all along.”
The honesty cost him—it always did, if only because even now, he wasn’t fully honest, wasn’t sharing what he had buried so deep inside him—but the expression on Fergal’s face was worth every syllable. Wonder and tenderness and a fierce, blazing joy that made him look like the twenty-six-year-old hewas, young and beautiful and burning with a fire that had nothing to do with his dragon.
Fergal pulled him in by the shirt and kissed him with complete commitment, holding nothing back, pouring himself into the act with a generosity that was staggering. Gregor kissed him back. His hands found Fergal’s waist, slid beneath the borrowed shirt, and the skin underneath was warm and smooth and alive. Fergal arched into his touch, a soft sound escaping into the kiss, and Gregor’s body responded with a surge of heat that was no longer filtered through guilt or caution or any of the hundred mechanisms he’d constructed to keep himself in check.
He wanted this man. He was going to have him. And for the first time, he wasn’t going to apologize for it.
They made their way to their bedroom in stages—kissing against the kitchen counter, then the hallway wall, then the bedroom doorframe. Gregor’s shirt was gone by the hallway, pulled over his head by Fergal’s impatient hands. Fergal’s shirt disappeared somewhere near the door. By the time they reached the bed, they were both barefoot and bare-chested, and the skin-on-skin contact was sending jolts of electricity through Gregor’s nervous system that made coherent thought increasingly difficult.
He eased Fergal onto the bed and stood over him for a moment, just looking. Fergal lay on his back, dark hair fanned across the white pillow, chest rising and falling with quickened breath, his body lean and taut. The lamplight painted him in gold, catching the definition of his abdomen, the line of dark hair below his navel, the visible bulge straining against his soft pants. He was lean for an alpha, but oh, how stunning he was. Beautiful.
“Stop thinking and get down here,” Fergal said, propping himself on his elbows.
Gregor lowered himself over Fergal, bracing on one forearm, and the full-body contact—chest to chest, hip to hip—pulled a groan from both of them. He kissed Fergal’s mouth, then his jaw, then the spot below his ear that always made Fergal gasp. He worked his way down the column of his throat, tasting salt and clean skin and the faint, smoky undertone that was uniquely dragon, uniquely Fergal.
“I want you inside me,” Fergal said, and the directness of it—Fergal telling him exactly what he needed with fierce certainty—made Gregor’s cock throb painfully against the confines of his remaining clothing.
“Are you sure?”
Fergal lifted his head and fixed Gregor with a look that could’ve leveled mountains. “I’ve been sure since I was eighteen years old, Gregor. If you ask me that again, I will fire you.”
Gregor laughed. A real laugh, the kind that came from somewhere deeper than amusement, the kind that only Fergal had ever been able to pull from him. “Understood, Your Majesty.”
He kissed his way down Fergal’s chest. Slow, thorough, every response cataloged and noted—the sharp intake of breath when his mouth found a nipple, the way Fergal’s stomach muscles clenched when Gregor’s lips traced the line of his ribs, the low moan when Gregor’s tongue dipped into his navel.
He hooked his fingers into Fergal’s waistband and pulled the pants down, pressing kisses to each inch of revealed skin—hip bone, upper thigh, the sensitive crease where thigh met groin. Fergal lifted his hips to help, and Gregor drew the pants free and dropped them to the floor.
Fergal was fully hard, his cock flushed and curving toward his stomach, and the sight of him—exposed, wanting, trusting Gregor with this vulnerability—sent a wave of tenderness through Gregor so intense it bordered on reverence.
He stripped his own pants off with considerably less ceremony, and Fergal’s eyes tracked down his body with an expression of such naked hunger that Gregor’s cock twitched under the scrutiny.
“You’re unfairly attractive for someone your age,” Fergal informed him.
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“It’s meant as an observation. A frustrated one. You have no business looking like that after three hundred and fifty years. It’s offensive.”
Gregor settled between Fergal’s legs, and the contact of their bare bodies—nothing between them now, no fabric, no barriers, just skin and heat and the electric friction of two dragons whose internal fires were responding to each other—drew a sharp gasp from Fergal.
Gregor reached over and found the small bottle of lubricant he’d noticed three days ago during his standard security sweep of the cabin. Fergal planned ahead. It was one of his many remarkable qualities.
He slicked his fingers, then paused, resting his clean hand on Fergal’s thigh. “Tell me if anything?—”
“Gregor.” Fergal’s voice was soft now, the bravado gentled into something tender. “I trust you. Completely. You’re not going to hurt me.”
