by Jadyn Chase
I yelled and growled and bared my teeth and spit at her, but I couldn’t feel that hostility toward Paige. She was the one person who tried to help me. She even visited this agony on my body as a way to help me.
I launched the chair off the floor, but the straps held. The weight pulled me back and I slammed down. If anything would have woken the dragon, that jolt would have done it, but it didn’t.
She hit me one more time and I railed with all my might against the horror. I roared and fought and struggled to break out, to unleash the dragon on an unsuspecting world. Nothing worked.
The last prod sizzled out and the weapon clattered to the floor. The next thing I knew, Paige knelt in front of me and threw her arms around my neck. She kissed my ragged skin and sobbed in my ear. “I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry!”
I couldn’t stop howling through my bared teeth. I stared around the room searching for any enemy to rip asunder. I could hardly feel her tender ministrations. She unlocked the straps, but I couldn’t get up. My body ached all over. My joints screamed in pain and sweat poured down my cheeks. I blinked it away, but I couldn’t lift my arm to wipe it off.
She clasped my cheeks kissing me. Her mouth touched my neck and skittered to my mouth. She kissed me again and again in between telling me how sorry she was, but I couldn’t respond. I could only stare everywhere in mad rage. If anyone came near me right now, I would tear them limb from limb.
She hooked her elbows under my armpits and made me stand up, but I couldn’t think about her. I kept seeing phantasms lurking to attack me. The mindless fury of the dragon occupied my whole being, but the dragon itself didn’t appear.
Moment by moment, my rage died away but not my seething energy. If I had had wings, I would have flown off then and there. I didn’t fly. I couldn’t. I wasn’t a dragon no matter how mad I got.
She pulled me aside. I couldn’t see where I was going. I could see nothing but my own senseless rage against everything and everyone, against the whole world. I hated this world for doing this to me. I hated everything outside this room.
Her hand came to rest against my cheek. That touch alerted me to her presence. My head snapped around and I heard her crying. Tears streamed down her face and her shoulders heaved. I blinked at her trying to understand what was wrong.
Her face contorted in agony. She glanced up at me and immediately cast her eyes to the floor. The truth hit me. She blamed herself for this. She hated herself for hurting me.
All at once, I couldn’t keep away from her. I spun her around and kissed her too hard, but I couldn’t stop. Furious energy compelled me to take her, to impose myself on her now or never.
She stiffened, but only for a second. When she realized I was making contact with her mouth, she burst to life. She strapped both arms around my neck and smashed her mouth into mine. The taste of her electrified me. It fired through my body on a torrent of wild energy.
I charged her and hit her against the wall. I couldn’t crush her hard enough. She started out moaning in my mouth. Her noises escalated the harder I kissed her. I ground my pelvis between her legs and she mewed in ragged ecstasy.
Christ, she felt good! She fueled my rage and my desire and my will to conquer. I wasn’t a dragon anymore, but I could conquer her the way I needed to conquer the whole world.
Her flesh sagged before me. Her head tilted sideways and her mouth parted to let my tongue inside. All the old proprieties fell away. I needed her body now. Nothing else mattered more than that.
My manhood stiffened to get inside her. I ached to feel her quivering around me. My blood burst into flame. My whole being exploded in monstrous raving passion. I was the dragon still, even if I couldn’t take that form on the outside. Becoming a dragon changed me. It made me wicked and devastating and furious.
Her drunken eyes floated before my sight. She caved to my demands and her body responded. Her pupils dilated beyond my nose. Her lips softened and her effervescent saliva took on a sweet, rapturous tingle. I couldn’t taste her enough. Her breath catching in her throat made my shaft throb to penetrate her.
I shoved into her and lifted her feet off the floor. One thigh draped over my hip and I wormed my way into her cleft. She sobbed every time I thrust to spread her open. I seized her from behind and picked her up.
Her gelatinous thighs spread and left only her trousers blocking my path. Her chest heaved and her breasts flattened under my weight. Her being seethed with broken desire for me and only me.
The realization ignited my volcanic fury as never before. I could destroy her. I could invade her. I could occupy her and she would submit to anything I wanted. I owned her. I dominated her. I fulfilled her.
I hungered after her. I lusted after her. My body compelled me to take her, to grip her in my fist, to possess her beyond all reason.
I locked her against the wall under my frame, but the harder I drove into her, the more she responded. She sighed and moaned at my spike stabbing between her legs. She arched her spine to meet me and she bucked to return the pressure. She clawed her fingertips into my shoulders pulling me toward her. God, that was so good!
She gasped when my lips broke away. She darted in and tried to recapture my mouth. Her tongue drifted glistening behind her pouting lips.
I needed her. I needed all of her right this very minute. I grabbed the back of her neck and squashed her mouth in ravenous kisses. She devoured me in return.
I couldn’t keep off her a second longer. I dropped her feet to the ground and attacked her trousers. I tore them open and stripped them to her ankles. She tried to help, but in the end, I did it myself.
I didn’t bother to get her permission to pick her up again. I swung her aloft and pinned her in place. I have no notion how she got her trousers off one foot, but they didn’t get in my way. I peeled my own clothes aside and dove in.
In a fraction of a second, I struck home. Her hot flesh sealed around me in the tightest grip imaginable. Her sublime wetness enfolded me in matchless delight. That unbelievable tightness obliterated everything else. It sparked a compulsion to stroke inside her, to feel that spongy velvet sucking me to my doom.
I snatched a bit of a kiss off her mouth, but her midsection undulating with my rhythm attracted me instead. I burrowed under her shirt and found the dainty morsel of her nipple. I consumed it in greedy bites that made her squeak with… well, I have no idea what she squeaked with. Whether I hurt her or delighted her, I couldn’t exactly say. I did it, though. I had to bite her and draw that agonized mewling sound out of her. It drove me out of my mind with rapture.
I buried my shaft in her goodness. She rode down hard on it with each shattering thrust. Her squelching wetness answered my stiffness in matched glory. Her wide, staring eyes questioned me every time I looked at her, but I could never stop. I had to reach some destination beyond her, beyond this brilliant exhilaration of being inside her.
I supported her hips with both hands to guide myself in. She clung to me with her legs. She contorted her body so she rode on my movements with no apparent effort. She held onto my shoulders and shrieked every time I blasted against her.
Her rising cries echoed around the room. They stabbed my brain and made me plough in harder. I needed to be deeper. I needed to push harder. I needed to feel that pounding knock of my bones into her innermost core.
Her eyelids drifted half-closed. Her lips drooped. She flinched at every penetration, but her voice told me a different story. Her cheeks flushed and her tongue darted into my mouth every time I kissed her. She shoved her breasts into my mouth to taste.
Her honey bathed my member in heavenly beauty. Her kisses and her skin tasted of the finest wine. She gave herself to me as a priceless gift. I let myself believe I took her, I owned her, I occupied her, I consumed her, but that was a lie. I was her slave, her servant, her dedicated supplicant for all time. I was all that and happy to be.
15
Paige
I floated in James’s arms. The bedside clock
whispered its numbers in the dark so I could see them. 8:45 PM. We would leave for the airport in an hour. Until then, we had nothing to do but wait.
I still couldn’t really get my head around the fact that I was leaving England. When I thought about it, I was leaving everything—every country in the world. I would never have another home. James and I would go on the run, probably for the rest of our lives. He would become my home.
I could live with that, but the whole prospect startled me into a stunned reverie from which I couldn’t extricate myself. This was really real. I was walking away from my house, my job, everything I knew and cared about.
Just then, someone knocked on my front door. I lifted my head and listened. The sound came again. I checked James. He was lying awake and listening, too. “Who do you reckon it is at this hour?”
“I don’t know, but I better go check.” I sat up and ran my fingers through my hair. “You stay here. I’ll try to get rid of them. Maybe it’s one of the neighborhood kids selling raffle tickets. I don’t know.”
I shut the bedroom door. The last thing I wanted was some Health and Safety Officer accidentally walking in on James at this time of night.
I padded to the entry in my socks, but I froze when I peeked through the peephole. It was fucking Tristan Dempsey from work. What the hell was he doing here? He shouldn’t have known my address and he sure as fuck didn’t have my permission to come stopping by my house at nine o’clock at night.
I hesitated to open the door. Should I call through the letter slot and tell him to beat it? I wanted to, but that would only rouse his suspicions. I had to act as though I didn’t have a wanted fugitive hiding in my freakin’ bedroom.
I took a deep breath and cracked the door just wide enough to show my face. I leaned against it so he couldn’t see through the gap. “What are you doing here, Tristan?”
He made a half-hearted attempt at a grin. “It’s good to see you, too, Paige. I missed you at work today. I was just checking in to see if everything’s all right with you.”
“Of course, it is. Why shouldn’t it be? I should be asking you the same thing. None of the employees in the department are supposed to know each other’s personal details. Don’t you think Sweeney would be irritated if he knew you hacked my address so you could harass me at home?”
“Come on, Paige,” he chided. “I didn’t hack anything and you can hardly call this harassment. I’m just checking on a friend.”
I stiffened. “We aren’t friends, Tristan. We’re colleagues at work. That’s all. Even if I was lying on my deathbed in the hospital, you coming around uninvited is harassment and could get you canned, but you must already know that. That begs the question. What are you really doing here?”
He glanced over my shoulder. “Do you mind if I come inside?”
“Why on Earth would I let you do that?”
“Some equipment went missing from the lab yesterday.” His eyes kept shifting left and right and his lips quivered like he knew something. “A serum concentration monitor and a bunch of IV-related tubing and cannulas disappeared from the infirmary. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”
I couldn’t lie to him. He already knew I had them or he wouldn’t be here asking about them. I only hoped Sweeney didn’t put him up to this. Either way, I had to tell Tristan at least part of the truth. I looked over my shoulder at nothing. “Yeah, I’ve got the monitor here. I brought it home to calibrate the settings. It was malfunctioning yesterday.”
“You should have given it to Tech Support to fix. That’s procedures.”
I squared my shoulders at him. “Procedures say you shouldn’t be coming to my house at nine o’clock at night to check up on your senior research manager, either, but here you are. Is there something you want, because if there isn’t, I have better things to do.”
I started to shut the door, but he charged forward and pushed it back. “Like what? What better things do you have to do besides talking to me? You wouldn’t be on your way to meet someone, would you—someone like…maybe…. James Shelton?”
I fixed him with my most disdainful glare. I only hoped I convinced him. “What on Earth makes you think I know where James Shelton is?”
He kept a steady pressure on the door so I couldn’t shut it. “Let me come inside and take a look around. Let me make sure he’s not sneaking up to attack you. I wouldn’t want anything to compromise your reputation now that you’re under investigation with the department.”
I stared at him. Now I really did worry Sweeney put him up to this, but that was never Sweeney’s way. If he suspected for half a second I was harboring James Shelton, Sweeney would have broken down the door and stormed the house with a couple hundred Special Operations Unit personnel. He would have ripped the whole house apart to satisfy himself that James wasn’t here.
No, this was all Tristan. This sneaking around, these subtle threats disguised as hints—only he could be conniving enough to come up with a plan like this. Only he could be so slimy as to wheedle and cajole to induce me to let him inside. This was Tristan all over.
Still, I couldn’t turn him away. If I didn’t satisfy his curiosity now, he would go to Sweeney. Tristan was just dumb enough to believe that Sweeney would ignore his misconduct in exchange for information on James’s whereabouts. Tristan might just be right about that, too.
I pried back to the door. “Fine. Come on in and take a good look around. I don’t care. You won’t find anything.”
He broke into a self-satisfied smirk and strutted past me. Fuck, I would have liked to smack that smile off his ugly face, but that might give the game away.
He strolled into the living room and looked around. Of course, he didn’t look very carefully. That would have been the intelligent thing to do. He could see plain as day that James wasn’t there. Maybe he thought that if the dragon didn’t pounce and bite him in half that James wasn’t here.
I waved toward the monitor. “See? There’s the equipment.”
“What about the IV tubing? If you were just calibrating the settings, what did you need the tubing for?”
“I don’t know anything about the tubing.” I sent up a silent prayer of gratitude that I disposed of the tubing after I finished the test.
Tristan’s face fell. The living room contained not one shred of evidence that I brought the monitor home for any other purpose than to calibrate it. The tablet on which I recorded the test sat dead and quiet on the table nearby. It gave away none of its secrets to the untrained eye. Tristan surveyed the room again and shuffled his feet. Maybe now he would leave.
No such luck. He shot me another crooked grin. “Aren’t you going to offer me a cup of tea, Paige?”
I snorted. “I wasn’t planning on it. You’re forgetting that I don’t want you here, Tristan. I wish you’d leave and I certainly won’t be helping you make yourself at home by offering you food and drink.”
He chuckled to himself. That sound made me hate him even more. The longer this charade went on, the more convinced I became that he invented this pretext to get himself promoted on my disgrace.
He didn’t know I was already planning to leave. He didn’t know that, in a few short minutes, he would walk out that door and James and I would drive to Heathrow Airport. We would get on a plane and Tristan could get himself promoted to senior researcher for all I cared.
In all likelihood, that wouldn’t happen. If Tristan was stupid enough to cook up a scheme like this, he was just moronic enough not to realize he wasn’t cut out for the senior position. Sweeney was smart enough to realize it, though. He would keep Tristan in his place and hire in a new, more qualified senior researcher to replace me.
None of that mattered now. Nothing that happened at the department concerned me in any way. If Sweeney wanted to make Elmer Fudd senior researcher, more power to him. In a way, I half-hoped he would. Then maybe, just maybe the department wouldn’t do so much damage to its subjects’ lives.
Tristan kept scan
ning the living room as though James would magically appear if he only looked hard enough. I stayed put and waited. I made up my mind I wouldn’t help him at all. He might be able to threaten me, but I didn’t have to like it. Whatever he did, I could keep asserting that he had no right here and that he violated my privacy, not to mention department policy, by coming to my home.
When I didn’t respond, he sauntered to the kitchen himself. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he made himself a cup of tea, but he only inspected the place searching for fire-breathing dragons. He meandered on down to the laundry, turned a 360º circle and came ambling back in no particular hurry.
He cracked another crooked grin swaggering past me like he owned the place. Christ, I hated him! I never realized before just how smarmy and revolting he could be.
He made another tour around the living room and headed down the hall. I lunged after him. “Hey! What the fuck do you think you’re doing? That’s my bedroom, Tristan!”
Before I could stop him, he seized the door handle and flung back the door. I cringed expecting to see James lying right there on top of the bedspread. I blurted out, “You son of a bitch! How dare you?”
Then I stopped dead in my tracks. The bedroom was empty. James was nowhere in sight. The bed lay smooth and made and undisturbed. No one would ever have known some man was just lying there a few minutes before.
Tristan strolled in and looked around with the utmost interest. He cast a condescending gaze over my dressing table. He was too fucking dim to realize that half my usual supply of makeup and skincare products weren’t there. They were already packed in my suitcase in the boot of my car.
“This is a very nice room, Paige,” he mused. “I always wondered what your bedroom looked like. I can’t tell you how many times I imagined what you did and where you went after work each day.”
I cringed at the thought of him fantasizing about me, but I kept quiet. I had one job here. I had to let him see that James wasn’t here when he really was. Then I had to get Tristan out of the house in time to take James to the airport. If I could accomplish that, I didn’t care if Tristan played with himself thinking about me until he died of a heart attack one of these lonely old nights.
