Lucas reared back and roared, and a luminous ball of glowing white magic shot forth from his mouth. It hit the flesh blob with a blinding flash.
Suddenly, it went dark.
I dropped to the ground.
The blob was gone.
And ash fell around us.
What had just happened?
Lucas, still in dragon form, turned toward me. Golden eyes the size of basketballs blinked at me.
He was magical, magnificent, more so than my memories and dreams had made him out to be.
Impossibly, my heart still ached, as if I were still the teenager mourning the future I could never have.
He came toward me, and as he did, there was a quivering in the air, then Lucas stood there, naked, perfect, beautiful. Definitely not the teenager I had kissed, but a man fully grown.
Nothing, no good could ever come of these impossible feelings for him. I had to remember that, hold on to that realization as if it were a shield, because if I forgot it for a single moment, it would destroy me.
He walked toward me with a slowly measured stride.
“What just happened? How did you—”
“Something that Hunter and Sophie have been working on.”
Hunter and Sophie were the first dragon and fairy couple, and apparently, it was their rare combination of magic that had defeated the main piece of the Devourer a few months ago.
He reached for my face, his thumb caressing my cheek. “If this is truly you, let me try something, Lana.”
I knew what I was to him: a human convenience for him to exercise his urges. For the most part, the knowledge kept me safe, save for the occasional dreams that tinted memories with a passion and sweetness too artificial to be true.
But his heated fingertips on my bare skin scrambled my brain. “Umm, okay.”
He kissed me.
Time stopped.
There was only him, only me, and he was tasting me. A delirious lightness filled my being, tingling all the way down to my toes. I tasted fire that was the core of his unmistakably dragon self. He was my ambrosia, my drug, and if I didn’t have more, I would be lost. In his touch, I could feel the magic that was him emanating from his kiss, his skin, searingly hot.
My scales fell away, exposing my skin to his heated touch, and I let out a startled sound of excitement as his fingers grazed my bare back, leaving trails of hot, tingling sensation on my skin. I kissed him back with every atom of my body.
He kept kissing me as his fingers wove magical patterns on my skin, assaulting all my common sense.
It was magical.
A magical assault.
That I was the target of.
I shoved him, hard. It was like pushing a brick wall, and I bounced backward.
“Did you just fucking magic me, dragon?”
4
Lucas’s surprised expression instantly shuttered, becoming something harder, colder. “Yes.”
I stepped toward him, my bare feet squishing into ice cold mud and god knew what else, and realized my scales were gone.
Horror and anger filled me. Had he just killed my armor?
To my relief and revulsion, they reappeared, covering my skin. Blades felt ready to explode from my forearms. “Why?”
Luca looked at me, defiant. “I had to know if you were free of the Devourer’s magic.”
It was all magic. All a lie. My voice rose as I spoke. “By kissing me? Who the hell do you think you are, some prince in a fairytale with a magic kiss?”
“No,” he said, looking at me. “I’m the dragon.”
There was a reason that fairytales didn’t have the girl living happily ever after with the dragon.
I had known what he was, and I had still fallen for him with eyes open wide.
I stepped forward, drawing myself up with bravado. “Were you going to ‘magic’ me into having sex with you too?”
“I wouldn’t do that,” he said in a low voice of disbelief that I would even consider such a thing. “You know me better than that.”
Something in me couldn’t believe it either. I mean, he had even asked me before kissing me.
But I had to keep pressing this attack because the best defense was an offense. I couldn’t keep letting my guard down around him. “I don’t know you at all, Lucas. I knew you when I was thirteen, but a lot changes in fifteen years.”
I had to be smarter.
I turned away and touched my lips, which still tingled with the magic of his kiss, like a strong mint. “What did you do?” I said, staring at the black layers covering my skin. They were opaque in the light, save for the edges, which were almost crystalline.
Screw him. I wasn’t going to care if he was disgusted. Actually, it would be better that way.
I tested the arm blades. They emerged, long and sharp, without hesitation.
He stepped closer, distractingly naked. I looked up at his face to keep myself from staring at the hugely unmistakable…maleness of him. My cheeks heated. Damn it.
And I was captivated again by his eyes. They were usually blue but now outlined with a flare of fiery gold that spoke of his true nature.
I sucked in a deep breath, trying to save myself from falling into this gaze. Because if I did, there would be hell to pay, and I’d be the mortal stuck with the bill.
“You know how to use what you wear. But do you know what it is?”
I stepped backward. A twig cracked underneath my foot. “Some kind of living armor.”
He followed, completely unfazed by the twigs, rocks, and other crap that was underneath his bare feet. “Sym-armor. It was once worn only by the most elite Dragon warriors. I’d heard none existed anymore.”
Sharp points emerged from my scaled forearms. I crossed the blades in front of me, between us, as if I could hold back his presence.
Those mesmerizing dragon eyes narrowed. “Lana.” He said my name in a tone that was meant to be a warning, but instead sent warm shivers up my spine.
I dropped my arms, the blades re-sheathing themselves into my armor. I pinched the bridge of my nose where I’d once had to wear glasses, in my pre-armor days. “Listen, that’s great and all, but my friend Val is missing, and I have to find her. And the only way I’m going to be able to find her is with this suit.”
He looked at me with dark concern, as if he were actually worried. “It’s not just a suit. And I should think you would be a little more concerned about an alien lifeform that talks in your head and feeds on blood.”
I stopped. “How did you know that it talks in my head?”
His brow furrowed. “I didn’t. It was an educated guess.”
Headlights flashed in the trees. A massive black SUV pulled up, disturbingly quietly for all its bulk. It was the kind of vehicle that looked like it ate small cars for breakfast.
I glanced at Lucas. As a teenager, he had been a bit of an eco-warrior, meticulous in making sure we recycled everything. This was not the kind of car I pictured him driving. “You trying to destroy this planet too, gas guzzler?”
The front passenger’s side door opened, revealing that the driver’s side was unoccupied. Self-driving. Lucas gestured to the door. “You want a ride or not?”
I sighed. Getting into a small, enclosed private space with a naked Lucas was the last thing in the world I needed. But I was in the middle of who-the-fuck-knew-where Long Island, and this would be the fastest way to get back to civilization and what I needed to do—find Val.
I settled into the seat. The vehicle smelled new with a hint of something else.
Lucas.
My skin still tingled from where he’d touched me. Like I needed to be surrounded by more of his scent.
Lucas got into the driver’s seat, set his hands on the steering wheel, and took over.
A floating luminescent dashboard popped in front of me, prompting me to let out a stupid little shriek in surprise.
I poked at a floating box and it moved, like the other Dragon tech on their fancy private plane.
<
br /> “Just because something looks like one thing on the outside doesn’t mean it’s actually what it is. It’s solar-powered, the electricity stored in a battery.”
The heat came on, and my scales retracted, leaving me again with my tattered gold dress. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him glance over. I focused forward. Lucas Randall was far too naked and close. There should have been plenty of space in the SUV, but somehow, he seemed to occupy more space than he should.
“Do you control when the scales appear?”
I tried unsuccessfully to pull the neckline of my dress up a little higher.
“Most of the time.”
He turned toward the southern part of the Brooklyn-Queens expressway where the tall green towers of the Verrazano Bridge surged upward.
Wait. Confusion bloomed within me. “Where are you taking me?”
“Jersey. Via Staten Island.”
Needles of anger scraped the insides of my skin, as though my new scales had turned against me. He was acting as if I was still his employee.
“I don’t have time for this.”
“Yes, you do. You’re making time.”
I could stop him now. I could open the car door, leap out, and live thanks to the armor.
And then where would I be?
Staten Island. That would be almost as bad as Long Island in terms of finding a car service to fight through the traffic to get back to my apartment.
Fuck, I’d have to talk to him.
“Again, here you are trying to control my life.” I crossed my legs, trying to pull the skirt down to cover more of them, but I only succeeded in lowering my neckline to a degree I didn’t need around him. “Look, Val has been missing for months. But her mother didn’t reach out to me on social media until a week ago.”
“You’re the first human to have bonded with sym-armor and almost certainly not via the proscribed rituals or under any sort of supervision. There are stories about warriors who improperly bonded with their sym-armor who later went mad and had to be put down. Let the authorities handle your friend, and take care of yourself.”
That was precisely the choice I had made before. And it had been the wrong one.
“Val’s mother isn’t in the country. She got deported several years ago for being here without papers. She can’t ask anyone else to help find her daughter. If I don’t help Val, no one will, and I don’t have much time left.”
“How long has your friend been missing?”
“Almost a month.” I glanced out the window. “It was chance that my profile popped up on her mother’s Friendbook feed. She was getting worried because Val hadn’t been responding to her phone calls, texts, or emails. So she asked me to check up on Val, gave me an address.”
I swallowed hard at the memory.
“There was a man living at that address. A man who had the bodies of several women stored in the basement freezer.”
Lucas’s voice was low. “What happened?”
I clenched my fists. “I killed him. I let the armor feed off its blood. And when it wanted more, I said he didn’t have any more. The armor told me how I could get more.”
"And since then you’ve been going out.” He looked over at me, his gaze taking in my tattered, clingy gold dress. “Hunting. Like that?” He said it with such disbelief I wasn’t sure if it was disgust or something else.
“I need to keep my skin exposed.”
“Congratulations. You’ve achieved that goal.” If his sarcasm were any more pungent, I’d have to roll down the windows.
I gritted my teeth, wanting to smack him. “The armor in my skin can sense the most minute traces of human blood. Arterial blood. Brain spatter. Blood that shouldn’t be exposed to air. The men I go after? They prey on the victims that no one will report. People without papers, the poor, the desperate. I have to find her, and I don’t have time to go on a catching-up road-trip to Jersey with you.”
Lucas didn’t take his eyes from the road. “There’s a tablet with Wi-Fi in the glove compartment. I’m assuming your stuff is in the cloud. You can still work while I drive. I’m taking you to someone who can help you.”
“I didn’t ask for your help,” I said, even as I took the tablet and booted it up. I still had no intention of going with him, but I would be foolish to turn down an opportunity to get my bots going on the new information I had copied to my cloud drive. Similarly duplicated drives from previous serial killers my armor had eaten had helped me develop a program to triangulate areas where people had disappeared. Even if things weren’t reported, nearly everything was on social media if you knew how to look for it.
There was a rumbling deep in his chest, a dragon sound both scary and disturbingly sexy at the same time. He growled with gritted teeth. “You should have asked.”
I couldn’t stop myself. The anger, the hurt I had so carefully dammed inside me, poured over the barrier as if it were a mere speed bump rather than the mile-high wall I’d thought it was. “Why? Why the hell would I ask for help from someone who broke a promise, and not just any promise, but one made at my mother’s funeral?”
I regretted it immediately. Because that was opening a door to a whole new world of hurt, one I had vowed that I would never unlock again.
He was silent. Fuck, I hoped he’d stay that way. It would be better for us both.
The car hummed, speeding down the elevated highway toward the glittering lights of the bridge as shadows slid over his face. Then another.
His voice was all gravel. “I’m sorry about that.”
I undid my seatbelt and put my hands on the door handle. “You know what? Forget it. Because I have.”
“We’re moving at eighty miles per hour. The door’s not going to unlock, Lana.”
I didn’t want to fight with him, didn’t want to hurt him, but I would not be forced to go anywhere I didn’t want to go. I made my voice project power and confidence with a calmness I didn’t feel. “You think you can take me somewhere against my will?”
“Auto drive engaged,” said the car in a calm feminine voice.
His seatbelt released, and he let go of the steering wheel.
In nanoseconds, he had me hauled out of my seat, across the gearshift, and into his naked lap, my back against the door.
I struggled, willing my scales to emerge, but they didn’t. Where was the supernatural strength I was so used to filling my limbs?
Gone.
The fuck?
I struggled against his grasp. There were no secrets between my gold mini-dress and his nakedness. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Keeping you from making a mistake.”
I kept struggling and elbowed him in the abdomen as hard as I could.
His only response was to grit his teeth. “Stop. Wiggling.”
He was growing hard. And my traitorous body was responding in a way that was all wrong. If I kept moving, there was a chance he might know.
Anxiety accelerated my breathing. The feeling was oddly soothing because at least that was a rational response. “You did something to me. What did you do to me?”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“The armor, it’s not working.” I paused, my heart racing. At that moment, I realized three things simultaneously: how helpless I was, imprisoned against him by his monstrous arms; why he had wanted me to stop struggling; and most awkward of all, how slickly my body answered the feel of his hardening cock nestled against my ass.
“Doesn’t it trouble you that your armor isn’t responding to your commands?”
And as I looked into his eyes, I realized I was wrong. The problem wasn’t that I liked the feeling of him, even though I knew I shouldn’t.
His nostrils flared, his draconic senses inhaling the scent of my arousal.
The problem was that he knew just how much my body liked being in his lap.
“Fuck.”
“Yeah,” he said, his voice husky, his thumb stroking a slit in the upper thigh of my dress. “I miss
ed you too.”
I folded my arms, one hand trying to block his hand from my skin. “It doesn’t matter.”
“I had every intention of coming back to you.”
The night of my mother’s funeral, we had stayed up late reminiscing and drinking when one thing led to another.
I wished I could’ve said I was drunk, that I didn’t know what was happening as I’d given into the feel of his hands on my skin and reveled in the press of his hard, naked flesh against mine.
But I’d needed comfort, and he had given it to me.
And more.
I want to know you again. Because there’s always been something between us. When you wake in the morning, I’ll be here, and we’re going to start over.
I knew that night his words were lies the moment he’d said them.
Because the next morning he was gone and I wasn’t surprised.
I had been right.
My throat closed up. I swallowed hard.
“Lucas, stop,” I said slowly, hyper aware of the physical position I was in. With his sheer size, and a strength intense enough to demolish a brick wall with nothing more than his fists, I knew I should feel threatened.
But it was Lucas.
And something inside me refused to believe that he would ever hurt me physically even with the memory of Lucas wearing the Devourer’s mind-control band as he swung an axe at me flashed in my head.
I wasn’t defenseless, I reminded myself. And we weren’t prisoners anymore.
“I need to finish saying what I should have said to you, before we were taken by the Devourer. When I’m done, you can choose to go.” His arms tightened around me as if he were fighting himself. “I won’t stop you.”
The vehicle looped down an exit ramp, the centrifugal force pressing me against him.
My fingers twitched, wanting to thread themselves into his hair. Blond hair that back in high school reminded me of a particular Viking god superhero. But even now, the severe haircut only emphasized his perfect, masculine jawline.
“Talk fast, dragon.” Before I forgot myself.
“Hunter called me. They traced a piece of the Devourer to the compound where my betrothed had lived with her family.”
I went still. I would have been jealous at the news that he had gone from my bed to hers, save for the almost emotionless inflection of his voice.
Belonging to the Dragon: Lick of Fire (Dragon Lovers Book 2) Page 3
