“They appear to be healing cleanly. I do not know that I could make anything that would aid in the process.”
He used his wing, as much an arm as his other appendages, to wrap around her, pull her where he wanted her to be.
She would not meet his gaze when he stopped her before him.
“Why did you not swim, pretty human?”
Oh, he very much enjoyed the way her skin pinkened and heat rose in a wave up her chest. The gold of her flesh darkened for a moment, glowed.
She was silent when embarrassed, tried to hide the truth in changing the subject.
He used his talon to tip her chin up to his, careful of her softness. “You do not know how, do you?”
“We have had no rains. What water we had was too precious to waste learning useless talents.”
“There was water when I met you. When first I saw you.”
The blue of her gaze darkened.
If she were of his species, the skies would have clouded over in response, thunder roll across the land. “Not all of us are as prone to waste as the khan and his kin.”
“The priest still rules your world then? Your grandmother chose her allies well.”
Clouds parted, and confusion took their place in her gaze. “Priest? No, the priests lead the temple services to Selish. The khan Roaca, our king, he is not an acolyte, though he obeys their counsel when it is given.”
King.
So much had changed in this world.
Questions he didn’t know he should ask awaited with answers he didn’t want to know.
A king who obeyed the will of a god; whose line bore the poisoned blood of the same.
Dangerous changes.
He shifted on his rock, not as comfortable as he had been when he laid upon its blessed heat in the light of the new morning.
His wings folded in gracefully.
When he twisted his neck to work out the kinks building in it, she flinched at the crack and pop of his bones realigning.
There was something missing, unsettled in his stomach, and Ouros didn’t know what to do to calm the feeling.
Nothing to do.
He pushed from his slumbering position, rose to stand on his rock.
His gaze met hers, always needing to meet her gaze, the clear purity of her stare, no malice, no hidden intent, everything there to see.
The day she learned deception…
“You should know how to swim, djinn, if the rains are returned and the waters with them.”
“I don’t—”
He ignored her response, focused his attention inwards.
The burn started low in his belly, a fire that swept up from his navel and through his chest, igniting the pit in his heart to an inferno, the blaze that usually laid dormant raging through his body.
He was a creature of fire.
He knew what it meant to step into the flames.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Ven stepped back, stumbled, in her haste to get away from her dragon.
She fell to the green earth. Her hands rose to cover her mouth, the gasp and fear, the cry that came from her lips.
Where he’d been, was nothing but a blaze, the fire reaching high above the tree line, a beacon of destruction that remained on his rock, engulfed the great body that had stood there, wings and tail and snout.
Water would put out the conflagration.
She could not carry enough water to put it out, to save him from the flame.
It was getting brighter, hotter.
The rock looked to be melting, molten pieces of the stone dripping over the edges of the granite, slinking its slow, burning way towards where she laid.
Wood would ignite the moment the fire touched it. The grass turned brown and caught fire, smoked black in the still air of the grotto, the wet leaves not burning cleanly, dying unwillingly beneath the flame.
Nowhere to run that she would not be trapped.
The water at her back, the falls that fed it, perhaps the only thing that would withstand the flame.
She scrambled for the shoreline.
Even the water absorbed the heat from his inferno.
She looked back, and his body flared brighter, exploded.
A heat wave knocked her from her feet, knocked her into the waves, so strong that she was carried deep beneath the water, not deep enough that she could not see the red and yellow arcs of fire dancing on the surface of blue for a moment before fading away.
Chapter Thirty-Six
The water sizzled against his skin when he stepped into the surf, but it cooled the fire of his rebirth quickly.
A lucky thing, as she had yet to emerge from the pool, and, as she said, she could not swim.
It was a different thing, to brave the tide in a human’s form than the dragon’s body that had been trapped beneath the surface.
His arms rose above his head, allowed for a more streamlined stroke in the depths.
No wings that would have given him push through the waves.
No tail to maneuver him one way or the other like the rudder of a ship.
The pool was not big enough to worry over the same.
She had not slipped so deep into the tarn that it was a problem.
His fingers wrapped around her wrist, and she jerked to pull away from him, thrashing in the water, not seeing his face, not knowing what to expect in the deep, who or what could have followed her into the waves.
Ouros pulled her close, kicked his feet, to bring them to the surface so that when she screamed—
And she did scream, and then sputtered, coughed and clung to his neck when her head hit the air and she choked up the drink she’d swallowed in her panic at his hold.
Her legs wrapped around his waist, arms doing their best to push him back beneath the waves as she tried to climb his body and use him as a step onto dry land.
A lucky thing he could breathe beneath the surf.
She calmed.
He dipped beneath the water line to dunk his head back, brush aside the strands of his hair that covered his eyes from her mad attack to escape.
Her limbs tightened around him.
He pushed back to the surface. “Just hold on for a moment. Hold on to me.”
She panicked, when he released one arm from her waist and tipped them to their sides in the pool.
It would have been easier for her to climb atop his back and swim with her that way.
But the pool was barely large enough to require three good strokes.
He could bring them to the shore, or at least to the place where her feet could touch the sands at the bottom of the drink, with or without the ability to swim easily.
Her frantic thrashing only forced him beneath the water three times before he was close enough to the sands to stand, walk them up to the beach, wrap his arms around her again to give her the feeling of security he’d stolen in trying to swim with her from the deepest parts of the lake.
“Ven. Ven, stop. You’re all right. The water is shallow here. You’re all right.”
She gasped when he reached to cup her cheeks, unsure whether to pull away or draw closer, not hearing his words over her own terror.
Terror at the fire that had forced her into the depths, or terror at the water that had tried again to steal her from the world?
She’d been closer to drowning in the sea.
Then, she had been unconscious when her lungs began to fill.
Not so here.
He cupped her cheeks, forced her gaze to his, soothed her with nonsense words he barely understood, spoke only so that the sound of his voice might call her back to herself.
“Ouros?”
He smiled at her recognition, the question. “You’re all right now, Ven. The water is shallow enough here to stand upon the sands. You’re all right.”
“But you were in flames?”
His smiled turned into a grin, a hint of laughter in his voice when he responded. “I’m a dragon, little witch. I am made of fire.”
“But you were in flames!”
He brushed back the wet strands of hair covering her forehead, rubbed his thumb along the ridge of her cheek bone, reveling in his ability to touch her, to feel her, feeling that he had missed in his true form, unable to draw so close to her without fear of tearing at her flesh, hurting her accidentally, no matter how close she came to him.
She didn’t stop him, closed her eyes, went so far as to lean into his caress.
“It is the way of things. My kind were born from the clay of the earth, given breath by the air, fanned to life in the flame. It is not an easy thing, to be remade, but the fire is the simplest of transformations to endure.”
“Endure?” Her blue eyes snapped to his, the calm that had slowly been filling them replaced with concern, a hint of displeasure that he didn’t understand. “You chose it. You chose to be engulfed.” She shook her head, “Why? Why would you do that? You shouldn’t have done that!”
Did she not understand that if he had not…
She balled her hand into a fist, pounded at his chest.
Her strikes were weak enough to cause him no injury.
He caught her hands all the same, drew them behind her back so that they stood, half-submerged in the pool, her legs around his hips, her hands trapped by his, chest to chest, only the thin sarong she wore separating their flesh from each other.
Her breath was his.
He held her stare.
Who moved first, he couldn’t say, but move they did, and not apart.
The press of her lips to his was not like it had been with Amece. There was no kind consideration to the act, no caution or concern, no learning the other with the touch. She kissed him, and she claimed him, and, Squalls Above, he’d be damned if he did not claim her in turn.
He released her hands only to tangle his fingers in her hair.
She didn’t struggle when he tilted her head to better align their lips, met the dueling thrust of his tongue against her with her own, a taste and a savoring and a dance that he had begun before but never finished.
Her fingers clenched at his shoulders, moved to cup his ears, pulled away enough that their lips parted, and her racing pulse matched the unsteady rhythm of his own heart.
She rested her forehead against his. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.”
He didn’t want her apology for the kiss. “I do not regret it.”
This time, when she tried to pull away, he held her still, did not let her escape. He moved slowly, cautiously, watched as her eyes closed, her lips parted in a breath shared between them, not touching, a moment held in suspense of time. “Tell me now if you do not want this.”
It was a kiss, only a kiss.
There were more two bodies could share than this.
He knew that, knew that she knew the same, and yet, if she accepted, he would not ask again, he didn’t think he would pause again.
What he’d never shared with the grandmother, he would with her heir.
The thought should have given him pause.
“I want you.”
So much a better answer than what he’d asked for in his question.
He lifted her from the water, carried her from the pool and over the smoldering ground, ashes rising around them as he walked, a curtain that kept the world at bay for a moment more.
He brought her to the bed they’d shared.
No mattress, no wooden bench like in her home.
A pile of cloths sewn together in another time. The padding was lumpy and uneven. There was an indentation of where his body had laid in his dragon form, his weight and size having molded to the cushion, but she didn’t care, he didn’t care, when he lowered to his knees and placed her against the cloth.
He stared down at her face, her hair curling in ringlets around her pink tinted cheeks. Her lashes fluttered, breath uneven, matching the pattering of her fingers against his chest, uncertain as he was uncertain.
It would have been easier, he presumed, if there was levity between them.
This was not that moment.
Ouros held himself above her by the strength of his arms, his body bare where she wore sodden cloth over her breasts.
He waited.
Her choice.
His skin steamed and the water from the pool dried on his flesh. She touched the line of scales over his pectoral, dropped her hand to the pin holding the drape of linen to her shoulder.
Ven took a breath. He held his.
It was one thing to undress another, care for their needs, view their body not in the name of, or with the notion towards, sharing it.
He’d undressed her when she fell into the sea.
She’d stood in his arms naked in the rain.
This was different.
She undid the pin. A roll of her shoulders had the damp cloth sliding from her breasts. She pushed up towards him, and he reached to pull the garment from beneath her body, bare skin all that remained between them.
Their gazes held. Her fingertips moved to his cheek, his throat, across the small slits of gills that would fade into his skin once his body was dried completely from the pool. She touched his chest, fit her palm over his heart, felt the heat of him caged within his flesh. He lowered his body onto hers, and she molded to him until he could not separate the feeling of her skin or his.
He remembered the sensation from the past, the hardening of his flesh against that of another’s.
Her legs rose around his hips, and his body fit into the welcoming embrace of hers, a core of heat as explosive as that which lived in his own chest waiting to consume him.
No claiming kiss, this.
No learning the other.
They moved in silence, her stare intent on his; her hand the fulcrum moving between them, running across his body, his stomach, her thumb brushing his belly button which had him thrusting and her head dropping back for a gasped breath before looking up at him.
She closed her fingers around his length, and when she led him into her body, it was his neck that arched and his breath that escaped in a rush to the feel of her closing around him.
He pressed into her slowly.
She gasped small cries between them, ankles rising to cross at the small of his back, pull him deeper into her flesh.
He bent forward, pressed his lips to the side of her throat, hips moving in tandem with hers, thrust and withdrawal, slow stroke in that rasped his every nerve ending with building pleasure.
His tongue tasted the beading sweat against her skin. He mouthed kisses down her neck, over her collarbone, paused at the mark burned into her flesh over her breast, the body of a dragon a fiery brand she would never be rid of. Not his marking, but it called to him all the same.
He made love to her breast. The sweet cadence of her moans egged him on as she begged him for more, and he increased his thrusts in time to her own.
A different type of fire built in his body.
This one burned without pain, promising only ecstasy.
Ven tangled her fingers in his hair, the arcing of her body lifted them from the bedding, blood-scent tinging the air in the moment of her release, his orgasm following hers, the dark of his cavern winking out of existence in a swirl of color that he couldn’t escape, a womb of pulsing flashes of light that sparked notes inside him, had her body tightening against his again, his cock rising in reaction.
How long they remained suspended in time, lost to the ever-widening expanse of pleasure between them, he couldn’t say.
Nothing mattered except the feel of her wrapped around him.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
His hand made soft circles across her back, smoothing over her skin in absentminded touch. It was comforting, his presence next to her, the feel of his body against hers, coiled together.
She’d never thought of what it would be like to spend a night in someone else’s arms.
The men of her acquaintance, if she could even call them that, were few and far between. None looked at her with anyth
ing but scorn or fear.
Who would want to sleep with the daughter of the blood djinn, a witch herself?
What poisons would she share in her touch?
Ven moved to press her ear against his heart, listen to the steady beat pounding against her.
Strong and sturdy.
That he was her anchor, her salvation, she couldn’t deny. That he should deny the same…
A chill crept down her spine, and Ouros pulled her closer in response, his body flaring with heat. “I will build a fire. The sun is nearly set. Night upon us.”
They would need food too. Not that she’d seen Ouros eat, but, surely, he would need food, same as her, and she didn’t know what there was to feed them here. She’d seen nothing that would serve to make bread from, and she was not a hunter for meat.
Her stomach growled, and he pulled back to look down at her, the pink flush upon her cheeks at the unavoidable reaction to the thought of food.
“You should have told me you were hungry.”
The frown on his lips made her grin. “I had other things on my mind at the time.”
His hand moved from her back to her throat, fingers trailing over her skin, down her breast, over the protrusions of her ribs beneath, too thin, but he said nothing of the same. He paused with his palm over her stomach, no doubt able to feel its gurgling when he pressed, and she gasped in response. “You need to eat more. You should have told me you were hungry.”
She didn’t mention that he was repeating himself. Ven didn’t argue that she saw no food stores to have eaten from either.
He stood smoothly, a rippling of muscle in perfect harmony, his body a study in perfection, at least to her eye. The wound on his thigh seemed to be healing, no longer pink around the edges, though the scar would likely be with him the rest of his life. If it hurt him, he made no mention of it, was not hampered by it.
She let her gaze trail over him as he stood before her, the definition of his muscles, the thickness of his…
She blushed and looked away.
Ven well knew the thickness of his cock now, something she’d never thought to know and couldn’t regret.
His body pressed to hers, joining with hers…
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