Shaking her head dismissively, she went into the living area of the suite. She wasn’t particularly hungry, but she hadn’t eaten much the night before. She couldn’t allow her nerves to put her into such a state that she would grow weak and listless with the lack of food. She knew from personal experience that she would, and more nervous besides.
“How long will we stay here?” she asked when she’d settled in her chair.
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“You.”
Color climbed her cheeks, but she wasn’t about to try to reason with him. Apparently the females in his world did come in season. She was naturally curious about it, but she rather thought she preferred the idea of consulting another woman for the information.
She considered it as she ate, wondering what might bring about such a development. A long gestation? It was hard to believe they might gestate longer than a human pregnancy when that took most of a year.
Their life span? He’d said that Princess Cassiamia had aged tremendously in her world. That was curious enough in itself, but she was more interested at the moment in figuring out the reproductive habits of these dragon folk.
Perhaps their life span was longer than the human life span and the female reproductive cycles were different because of it?
It made sense. Khalia was almost envious to think of not having to worry about her menses every month. Almost.
There was the little matter of having males fighting over who was going to mate with them when they were in season. That was downright scary.
She cleared her throat on that thought. “I suppose that means I must stay here … in the suite?”
Damien looked away uncomfortably. “I ordered the guard to secure a perimeter beyond the fortress. Under the circumstances, I thought it … best. The main danger at the moment is the possibility that their urges might overcome their training.”
Khalia turned red. She did wish he’d stop referring to her in terms of breeding! From what she’d been able to tell, he seemed to having nearly as much difficulty thinking of something else as the men he’d accused. “Then it would be all right for me to look around the fortress?”
He seemed almost to shrug. “I will escort you.”
She hadn’t really expected him to allow her to go alone, but she wasn’t particularly happy about it. On the other hand, the place had seemed huge. Maybe it would turn out to be for the best if she became familiar with it first? Perhaps, in a day or two, he would become less suspicious of her, or at least bored, and allow her to wander around alone?
Apparently, Damien decided to use the opportunity to improve her education. While they walked, he told her what he knew of her ‘family’ history, explained the workings of court, and Atar’s class system. Khalia found it interesting, although she didn’t consider it particularly useful information. She wasn’t planning on staying.
On the other hand, the conversation was far more stimulating than the tour. The entire floor consisted of suites for the royal family and their entourage, and, for the first time, she discovered that Damien had placed her in her own mother’s suite.
Apparently, the King, the Queen and each of the royal princesses had had their own separate apartments. On the floor below were more of the same, only for slightly less important people. On the level below that were ‘business’ rooms, the various offices and meeting rooms where governing of the realm took place when the royal family was in residence. The ground floor consisted of salons and bedchambers--no suites for those low born enough to lay their heads here.
There was also no entrance or exit that Khalia could see. She would’ve liked to have asked Damien about it, but she saw little sense in drawing his attention to her eagerness to be gone.
As they started back up, Khalia reluctantly set her agenda aside and cast about in her mind for a question that would make it seem as if she’d been giving her full attention to the lesson, which she hadn’t. She’d been a little too preoccupied with trying to formulate plans of escape to listen except when he used a word that caught her attention. “That thingy you were wearing when I first met you … the head dress … what does it mean? Is it … it isn’t like the head of your enemy or something like that?”
Damien gave her a look that left her in no doubt that she’d gravely insulted him. “We are not barbarians,” he responded stiffly.
Khalia blushed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be insulting.”
He said nothing for several moments and she was beginning to think she’d so insulted him that he wouldn’t speak at all. Finally, he smiled wryly. “It is a symbol of great honor, but in truth, an archaic one. In ancient times, very likely it was the head of an enemy.”
“Honor? Because you are the King’s champion? His highest general?”
He shook his head. “No. It means I am of pure blood, pure dragon, untainted with the blood of other tribes that inhabit our world. It is a rarity now.”
Khalia felt insulted, although she wasn’t entirely certain why. Part of it, she knew, was the remark he’d made about her being a half breed, but she couldn’t figure out why she should care. The truth was, she didn’t really believe she had any dragon blood, whatever he thought.
She supposed it might be because she didn’t have the sense of connection people like him did with their forefathers because she wasn’t even certain of who her parents were, much less theirs. There was also the barely acknowledged fear that her antecedents might be worse than merely poor. For all she knew her mother might have been a common whore, her father a thief, murderer, or rapist.
She told herself it was probably just as well she didn’t know, might even be for the best if her fears were true, but she would’ve liked to know she had no reason to be ashamed of her roots.
“Only those of purest blood retain all the abilities of the old ones. The others are like those who tried to claim you--they cannot fully shift.”
They had arrived, finally, at the door of her suite. As they entered, she turned to him, blocking his entrance into the suite. “Like me, you mean?” she said, trying to keep her voice carefully neutral.
His brows rose. “You are a female.”
“I figured that out a long time ago. I had the distinct feeling you’d figured it out a while back, too.”
His lips tightened at her sarcasm. “Females lost the ability to fully shift long ago, before memory.”
Khalia gaped at him. “So … you’re saying they’re absolutely defenseless against these great brutes?”
His eyes narrowed. “They have their tongues … and yours seems sharp enough.”
Khalia narrowed her eyes, as well. If she’d been tall enough, she would’ve been nose to nose with him. “I didn’t get the impression that those … those beasts out there wanted to talk. Precisely what do you think I could’ve done with my sharp tongue to stop them?”
Something flickered in his eyes. At just about the same moment Damien grasped her upper arms and hauled her toward him it occurred to Khalia that her last remark hadn’t come out exactly as she’d intended.
It also occurred to her that he’d been behaving like such a perfect gentleman that she’d forgotten a) that he’d previously shown every indication of a man on the edge, and b) he was by far the worst beast of all, the blue blood of dragons.
Chapter Six
“Were it not for my honor and my dedication to duty, I would sup from your lips and taste at last the essence that is driving me mad with need and there is only one word you might utter that could stop me,” Damien growled in a low, husky whisper, his lips so near her own his heated breath caressed the sensitive surfaces, sending tingles of sensation through her that created its own heady wine.
Weak with the rush of chemical intoxicant, her anger completely forgotten, Khalia lifted her gaze with an effort to look up at him. For many long moments, their gazes locked. Her thoughts scattered, her instincts and desires warred for dominance, the tiny voices of caution and reason distant
and failing to generate any sense of need for self preservation. She could stop him. She knew he still retained enough control that her denial would not fall on deaf ears.
She couldn’t find the want inside herself to speak it and break the spell. The desire to fall more deeply into the unexplored chasm he tempted her with held sway over her mind and body.
Slowly, his face twisted with pain. He closed his eyes, resting his forehead against hers as he struggled with a ragged breath. “Say it, sheashona,” he growled hoarsely. “On my honor, one taste would not be enough for me. I fear … I know I could not stop. I would heed nothing … not your pleas … not those of the gods themselves.
“Say it before we are both lost. Before Olgin no torture any fertile mind could devise as my just reward for dishonoring my queen could be worse than what I have endured these past days.”
Nothing short of a deluge of icy water could have more surely or swiftly ripped her from the verge of total capitulation. A tide of fear washed all before it. Khalia shivered.
Before she could gather her scattered wits, however, he drew slightly away from her, sliding his hands down her arms until they encircled her wrists. Pushing her arms behind her back, he manacled both wrists with one hand. Very deliberately, he caught the edge of her top and snapped the tie on one side, thrusting the cloth aside to expose one heaving breast. Just as deliberately, he lowered his head and caught her nipple in his mouth, sucking.
Khalia lost her breath as a jolt of knee weakening pleasure went through her. She gasped, struggling against his hold, arching her back in an effort to gain her release. He clamped his lips more tightly over her breast, suckling harder. The pleasure that shot through her was so intense a wave of blackness followed behind it. “No,” she said faintly and not very convincingly even to her own ears. Struggling to close her mind to the debilitating sensations erupting through her, she moistened her lips and tried again. “Damien, please stop.”
For several horrifying moments, she thought he wouldn’t listen. He released her nipple at last, lifted his head slowly and stared at her, breathing harshly. Finally, as if he had to focus on his hands and mentally will them to release her, his grip slowly relaxed. Drawing a deep, shuddering breath, he stepped away from her, turned abruptly on his heels and left.
The door closed behind him.
Khalia stared at the panels, shaking with reaction. Finally, she moved to the nearest couch and sat, drawing her knees up and hugging them to her.
She wasn’t certain what had happened. One moment they had been snipping at each other, the next…. Heat washed through her at the memory. The muscles low in her belly clenched painfully. Her femininity ached. It didn’t take prior experience or a great mind to understand why.
Her body yearned for his with a will of its own, without conscience, without any anxiety about consequences or morality. She had never been subject to the whim of instinct. She had believed, wrongly it seemed, that logic and intelligence always prevailed over primitive instinct.
She couldn’t have been further from the truth, even as it applied to herself. From the moment he had pulled her tightly against him, morality had never entered her mind. Fear of the consequences to herself hadn’t either. Nothing but her fear of the consequences to him had held any weight with her whatsoever … and she shuddered to think what her ignorance of the customs of this world might have cost him if he hadn’t had enough sense to warn her.
In truth, ignorance wasn’t just shameful. It could be deadly.
She had only been interested in the things he told her in a distant, clinical sort of way, as something she might want to catalogue for later study … when she was home again and beyond reach of the real meaning of any of it. She should have been more cautious. This world was far advanced from the one she’d left behind in many ways, and in others far more savage.
Remembering how she’d come to be here in the first place, she amended that to ‘at least as savage’.
She wasn’t entirely at fault, but ignorance wasn’t an excuse. It would certainly give her no comfort if he was executed on her account, because she’d allowed her instincts and primitive urges to outweigh her common sense.
Despite those thoughts, she found it hard to accept, especially in light of his behavior toward her since she’d arrived. Perhaps, as her guard and mentor, he was allowed far more than one might expect ordinarily? Or, perhaps, he hadn’t meant it literally?
She found it hard to believe that any civilization as advanced as this one seemed to be would behave in such a barbaric manner as to use torture on prisoners, for any reason, certainly not on someone who’d done no more than engage in consensual sex ... because it most certainly would have been consensual, not rape by any stretch of the imagination.
Of course, that might have been what he’d meant. He’d said he didn’t think he could stop. Another wave of heat washed through her at the thought. It took an effort to ignore it, but she was as unnerved by what he’d said as she was by her reaction to him. She was no more certain, if it happened again, that she would have the strength to tell him no than he, apparently, was that he’d be able to stop.
It occurred to her after a moment that she was probably hampered by her knowledge of the customs considered acceptable in medieval Europe. Despite some notable similarities, there were probably far more differences than she could imagine.
He had plainly said this was a matriarchal society. The female line was followed, the queen ruled unless she had only a male heir. But what of the tendency to form alliances through marriage? Was that the same? Was that what he’d meant? The royals could only wed other royals from the ruling houses of this world?
The female held the right to decline, regardless of how savagely the males fought for her favor … and the penalty was death by torture for any male that ignored it?
She was suddenly certain that that was what he’d meant. He’d said he didn’t think he could stop, even if she demanded it. But it seemed to her that he had been trying to warn her that she could not accept him. Why? He was a noble, but not a royal? Or was it even more complicated than that?
If the males were mindless, rutting beasts when the females were in season, perhaps the females were little better off? Perhaps it was forbidden to choose a mate at a time when neither party was capable of thinking rationally?
It seemed probable, at least in the case of royalty and the upper classes. Perhaps those of the lower classes weren’t subject to more than their instincts, but the upper classes would almost certainly have to consider issues beyond those that were personal.
She was in serious trouble, far worse than she’d realized to begin with.
If it was true that the females of this world came in season, then it would follow that that was not a common occurrence. Very likely longevity was a factor and it was a natural sort of birth control and selective breeding.
She might or might not have dragon blood, but there was no doubt at all that she was completely human when it came to her reproductive cycles. She was as regular as the moon--Earth’s moon. Unless the passage had somehow changed her, or these people were scientifically advanced enough to manipulate nature, there was going to be hell to pay.
Flight no longer seemed merely a matter of her own survival, but quite possibly the survival of this realm. It didn’t take a great deal of imagination to envision the place descending into a constant, savage battle over the one female who was almost constantly ‘in season’.
Or they would have to imprison her in some deep, dark dungeon where she could do no harm.
Rising abruptly, she went into the bath and retrieved the sad remains of what had once been her best suit. It was still damp since she’d had to lay it across the lip of the pool to dry, but it was dry enough for repairs. When she’d returned to the living area, she dropped the suit on the couch cushion and began a search for a sewing basket.
She didn’t expect to find mending supplies. It boggled the mind only to imagine a princess performing s
uch a menial task and in any case the clothing the people of Atar wore could not require a great deal of mending--probably couldn’t hold up to much mending. The apartment was filled with elaborate needlework creations, however. It seemed likely that the queen must have entertained herself with her needle a good deal of the time.
Despite her expectations, she was still surprised when she discovered one. Settling on the couch once more, she spent the rest of the evening carefully repairing the suit. There were pieces missing and she had to sacrifice a good bit of length in the skirt to replace them, but she realized that it was very fortunate she was no flapper. There was plenty of fabric to cut and still maintain some decency.
She was fairly certain Damien would not want to return to the suite again so soon after what had transpired between them, but she suspected duty would win out when it came time to feed her. Since she didn’t want to alert him to her plans, she placed a half finished tapestry in her lap with the suit under it.
There was no black thread to match the suit. She hardly thought it mattered. The suit was ruined anyway, but she chose the nearest color she could find to black.
She was so engrossed in her task that she didn’t actually register the fact that Damien had entered the room until the clatter of the tray hitting the table jerked her out of her abstraction. She looked up guiltily then, but discovered she needn’t have worried. Damien left once more without once glancing in her direction.
She watched him until the door closed behind him, feeling a mixture of emotions she found hard to identify. She found she didn’t really want to examine them. Setting her work aside, she flexed her cramped fingers and finally rose, stretching to relieve her stiff muscles.
Tears of the Dragon Page 5
