How could this be? the dark-haired woman thought. First, to be thrown away, discarded, tossed from his life as if she no longer mattered; and now to see him with this creature—and planning the thing he was planning with her. The dark-haired woman looked at her wall and raised a hand before her. The hand and wrist turned reptilian. She presented a dragon’s talon with claws with which she would so dearly love to rend the human flesh from this female. How dare she? How dare he?
She was meant to be in that aerie with him, not this human. This human was now going to take what had been hers. He was going to give her everything. Everything. She looked at the woman and she looked at him, and hatred boiled inside her.
Liona Vess glared at the media report of what was happening at Nest Moran. She seethed at the coverage of the impromptu press conference with Tynan and this woman, this Sierra Smith. Smith, yet; even the creature’s name was common. And yet, this common creature in all likelihood was even now lying with—and under—the Prince. Liona’s Prince.
Listen to this little hypocrite. Liona could practically feel her human teeth turning to dragon fangs. Judging the Lotteries as a “competition.” Passing judgement on our world’s way of life. Is she one of us? Does she have a dragon heart, a dragon soul? She only lives in a single body. She can’t begin to grasp what it is to be who we are.
And she judges us! Listen to her, going on about how she doesn’t need the Nest Moran’s money and she doesn’t need to “lease” her body. She may not “need” their money, but she doesn’t put herself above taking it, does she? Hypocrite! Stupid, worthless human hypocrite! Tynan wants to have a child and make a difference for our future, and this creature—this creature!—is the one that the Morans see fit to bear it?
The bile and anger made Liona’s face turn reptilian. Her features turned to the brow and pointed snout of a dragoness. Her horns broke out on her forehead. She leaned forward, staring malevolently at the wall. Your precious fertility drug wouldn’t have worked with me, Tynan, because I’m not human—not like this pathetic creature. But I could have given you so much more than a child.
I could have given you—I did give you—such passion. We could have had a lifetime of that passion. But you didn’t stand by me, did you? I tried to explain to you. I tried to tell you that I was giving up that life for you, giving it all up to be your Princess. All I wanted was to be your Princess. But you held everything against me, didn’t you?
She hissed loudly. Both of her arms now turned to dragon arms, and her talons sank into the linens of the bed as if to rend it into tatters. She only wished she could do with this wretched human female what she could do so easily to the cloth on which she crouched. After everything we had… Now it’s this creature. If she bears your child, you’ll want her for your consort, won’t you? The noble Prince of Nest Moran—and his human whore. You’ll probably even marry her. I can see it. Damn you! DAMN BOTH OF YOU!
Shrieking furiously, Liona lashed out with one arm, grabbed her drink from the nightstand, and flung it cruelly, viciously, at the wall. The glass shattered, its fragments raining down onto the floor, the drink inside it splattering on the image display, making a streaking, running wet spot on Sierra Smith’s face. Hissing again, she slammed her dragon hand on the nightstand, shutting off the wall.
Liona sat trembling furiously on the bed, lowering herself back onto her bottom, bending her legs, and wrapping her arms around them. She hissed and fumed and shook, slowly boiling off at least some of the anger that had welled up inside her, enough to release her arms and face back to human form.
But enough of the anger remained to make the features beneath her dark hair a livid red. A storm brewed in her dark eyes. Dismissed, cast out, abandoned, left in the clutches of the law—and now replaced. With a human. A mere, common, single-bodied human, who would never live a moment in scales and horns with wings and a tail. A human bitch.
She would never be a Princess, not Tynan’s nor anyone else’s. But to live with this humiliation? To live knowing that this common human Sierra Smith would be the female in Tynan’s bed, giving him her sex every night and day, and enjoying his? And ultimately bearing his child?
No—not this. Liona Vess would not countenance this. She would do something about it.
Forcing her trembling body to be still, she unclenched herself from the ball into which she had pulled her limbs. She steadied herself and found a voice more civil than the shrieks and shrills of her dragon outrage. And she tapped on her halter top, engaging her comm system. When it sounded a tone of readiness, she spoke.
“Kharno?” she began. “This is Liona. I have a proposition for you. Something that I hope will intrigue you very much. I think it will…” And she smiled, a dark and sinister smile.
_______________
Dinner at the Moran aerie was served promptly at eighteen hours. Two servers, a male and a female, were putting out the entrees on the elegantly set table in the regal-looking dining room when Tynan and Sierra, fully dressed, entered hand-in-hand. The parents and Tynan’s brothers were just about to be seated when they arrived. They paused to acknowledge the youngest and their guest.
“You two look properly pleased,” said Leland.
“We have good reason to be,” said Tynan, giving a squeeze to Sierra’s hand. He looked over at her like the dragon who’d just eaten the sunbird. Which, come to think of it, he had done, in a manner of speaking. And she’d loved it.
Preston and Evan eyed Tynan with expressions that said, We know how you must have spent your day.
“We’re rather pleased ourselves,” Moira remarked, “after certain things we’ve been seeing in the media today.”
“Yes,” said Tynan. “About that…”
“What about that?” Leland asked.
“Sierra and I have talked it over and we’ve decided something. We know it’s not even been a whole day, but…”
It was all his brothers could do to stop themselves snickering. The moment was turning all three Moran siblings into adolescents again. Preston and Evan both flashed back on nights when they’d sat up with Tynan telling him what sex was and how it worked and watching their little brother’s eyes light up at what they were describing.
Dismissing for the moment the positively pubescent looks of his brothers, Tynan finished, “…we’ve decided we’re going to go ahead with it. We want to do the Proliferon test. We want to get Sierra pregnant.”
Whoops of approval burst out from the two older brothers. The parents both marched down the side of the table to embrace and congratulate their son and the woman who was now adding to their nest. Leland gallantly kissed Sierra’s hands. Moira warmly kissed Tynan’s cheeks. Sierra basked in Tynan’s family’s acceptance of their decision.
“This is everything I was hoping to hear,” Moira said to Sierra. “We saw the media about what happened at the front of the aerie today.”
“I have to admit I was wondering what you’d think about that,” Sierra replied. “I didn’t quite know how you’d react to the little show I put on. If I’ve embarrassed you, I’m sorry. I’m going to be interviewed by Joanna Way; I can try to put some kind of spin on it. I really don’t want to put you in a bad light.”
Moira waved her off. “Don’t even trouble yourself about that. This family has seen more vexing uproars than that. I expect this is not the last we’ll hear of this, and I expect you will continue to comport yourself like a dragon. And I expect you will be the mother of a fine dragon before very long.”
Sierra blushed. “I hope so.”
“We know so,” said Evan. “We know our brother.”
Tynan shot his brothers a look that said, You two lizards know where you can stick your tails. They only grinned at him with suppressed chortles.
And so, Sierra sat down to her first dinner with what she now felt was becoming her new family. The parents had the servers bring from the wine room a bottle of the finest Lacertan vintage and the best vintage they’d had imported from Earth in anticipation
of this very moment.
They drank, and Tynan’s brothers teased him, and Tynan taunted them back. And Sierra, despite having only one mammalian body to inhabit and no reptilian side, felt warmed by the closeness of these dragons in human skin. Moira had told her she expected her to “comport herself like a dragon,” and by all the stars that was exactly what Sierra would do.
After dessert, Sierra asked Moira for a few moments alone and the two women withdrew to the hallway outside the dining room to talk. Tynan, Leland, and the older brothers watched the matriarch and the new addition step away and disappear, and once they were gone, Tynan piped up, “What do you think those two are putting their heads together about, then?”
Leland guessed, “I’d say at a time like this, a young woman bonding with the future grandmother of her future child wants a moment for a little advice. And I expect your mother will have plenty to give. Sierra has never had a baby before, and now she’s not simply having just any baby—not just any human child. There will be things she’ll have to learn about being the human mother of a child of Lacerta.”
“She can handle it, Father,” said Tynan proudly. “I don’t think there’s anything Sierra can’t handle.”
Leland watched his son keeping his eye on the threshold to the dining room, his every thought fixed on the young woman with his mother on the other side of the wall. It had only been a day. It had all happened so fast. He recalled the way it felt to be a young dragon first meeting his mate. And he was sure that this was what was happening now. Tynan had found not just an exciting new sex partner, but a mate. And he felt a swelling of pride at what was now happening to his son.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Tynan and Sierra retired immediately after Sierra’s private talk with Moira, about which she said nothing. Tynan didn’t mind. After dinner they took themselves back to his bedchamber, to a bath and another bottle of wine, and then returned to Tynan’s bed for a sweet and joyous renewal of sex.
And that was how Sierra came to be sitting in the window of his bedchamber, watching him sleep, before climbing back into bed with him and pulling away the covers, exposing what she knew she would find hardened and ready, no doubt from some sexy dream. She awakened him in the way that a gorgeous man most liked to be stirred from slumber, with long licks on his sac and his shaft, making his erection leap and throb at the wet touch of her tongue.
Sure enough, he awoke with a sudden tremble and peered down at her licking at his privates. He smiled groggily and lustily, and in a sexily hoarse voice he said, “Get your beautiful ass back up here, you.”
They sat up together, kissing, at the center of the bed, with Tynan’s legs around hers and hers around him. He thumbed and squeezed her hardened nipples while she stroked and petted the throbbing serpent between his legs, and they turned their minds to what they would now continue to do with their bodies.
Kissing her lips and nibbling at her chin, Tynan whispered, “You are so perfect. Perfect tits, perfect muff…perfect little wet squeezer…”
Sierra said with a tiny giggle, “And you have the most perfect thing to squeeze,” and kissed him steamily.
Nuzzling her cheek with his nose, he asked, “Do you think maybe this could be turning into something more than just fucking?”
“It will be,” she said. “We’ll have a purpose for it besides just how incredible it is when you’re inside me.” And she repeated that steamy kiss.
“Yes,” he said, now nuzzling her neck. “A purpose. But…”
She lifted his face to meet hers, wondering. “‘But’…?”
“But,” he continued, and then he hesitated.
“What is it?” she asked, just a bit insistently.
“Sierra, the way you were today… You stood up for my family. You defended my nest. Today was the first time I felt…proud of being with someone. Not just enjoying what happened in bed—and in the zero-G room—but proud of the one it was happening with. Proud to have you. After everyone else I’ve done it to…this was the first time I’ve felt that way.”
She looked almost as if she could cry. Sierra never cried, but this moment felt to her as if it could happen. “Oh, Tynan…,” she said, her voice ever so slightly cracking.
“Do you think,” he asked, “you could see yourself being more, someday, than just the woman I’m making a baby with?”
Sierra stroked that handsome face into which she could have gazed forever and been happy. “I think I could,” she said, her voice a half-whisper.
“I want you so much,” he said, kissing her hard.
She tugged at his massive root. “I want you, Tynan. Your body. All of you. Just…you. Just you.”
“Damn. It’s only been a day, and I can already see myself never doing it to anyone else as long as I live. That’s how perfect you are for me. I just want to fuck you forever.”
She sighed at him, feeling her fingers getting slippery with his appreciation. “We will have to pause a little bit to have a baby.”
“Which will make me want to do it even more,” he said. And he gave her another hard kiss. “Just think, sometime soon I’ll move into you, and I’ll come…” He touched her abdomen. “And something wonderful will happen right here.”
They melted into a long kiss, and Tynan eased her down onto her back on the bed.
“Let me taste that little squeezer of yours,” said Tynan. And Sierra sighed again, keeping her legs open and letting him climb down between them.
And once again Sierra was flying, this time while stretched out on sleek and luxurious sheets; flying not with a harness on her back but with the most perfect man between her thighs. His every flick and lick and peck with lips and tongue on her most intimate places was like the beating of a wing, propelling her through a sky of delight.
He’d said he wanted to have her this way forever, and she had not an instant of doubt that she wanted him just as much. Since she first came into her womanhood Sierra had enjoyed the generous bounty that the galaxy had to offer her in beautiful men. She had lain with them and under them; she had sucked them and ridden them and let them eat and penetrate her in so many ways. And she had thought of them as the greatest excitement and the greatest pleasure that she could ever receive. Why was it, then, that this man of all men gave her an elation greater than any other?
Was it only that she had come to him with, as they had said, a purpose to fulfill? Or was it something about him—about him specifically—that made him the one man in all the galaxy with whom she was meant to lie? Whatever it was, she had never felt as right as she did right now, serving up her body and her sex to him and awaiting the surpassing joy of him moving his piece inside her yet again. And again and again and again…
Sierra pushed her sex into his face, feeding herself to him, and he took his fill of her flesh petals and her nectar, drinking deeply from her woman-flower.
Tynan put his tongue inside her and held it there, making Sierra quiver and whine with sustained ecstasy. She rubbed against his sides with the soles of her feet, massaging and caressing him that way in response to his oral attentions. Tynan kept her sex engorged with his tongue until the almost plaintive sounds of her whimpers convinced him that she was ready for him to take her all the way to the stars.
He slipped his tongue free and enveloped her pulpy buzzer with his lips, bringing the tip of his tongue fully to bear upon it. Sierra, in the throes of increasing pleasure, slapped the bedsheets with one hand and squeezed her own nipple with the other, spurring herself to respond ever more to what he was doing to her.
She moaned like a woman possessed, as indeed she was, not by a demon but by a man who was a dragon, until she couldn’t stand it anymore. She cried out at a feeling of transcendent joy coming to a boil and melting her inside, an orgasm that left her with a humming, shimmering sensation from her core to her brain. Her every muscle relaxed, and she lay there, supremely satisfied, with Tynan’s face still between her thighs, still licking and sucking away.
When at last he
was finished, Tynan nuzzled and licked her pubes and kissed his way up to her belly button, into which he playfully inserted his tongue, before saying, “Get ready. Here comes my cock again.”
Grinning drunkenly, Sierra lifted her head to see him climbing the rest of the way up her body. He reached her face and gave her a kiss that tasted of where his mouth had been. She recovered her muscle tone and took him in her arms and put her legs up around him, letting him do the rest of the work of entering her glistening abode. Tynan grunted ecstatically and lay down fully on top of her, and she sighed blissfully, at the feeling of his eager shaft sliding home, stretching and filling her again.
Sheathing himself all the way in her, he growled, “Squeeze it. Squeeze that prick…” Sierra’s reflexes, learned from so many times with so many men, took over and obliged the man she now wanted most of all. He made insane noises of rapture at the feeling of her wetly constricting his wooden pipe, sounding as if he would utterly lose his mind. And then, between contractions, he slipped back enough to begin to pump.
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