Anya nodded and wrinkled her nose. “Yeah, you’re right. Besides, I wouldn’t mind rinsing off. I haven’t had anything close to a bath in at least a week. Even for a wilderness lover like myself that’s a bit much.”
Izzy laughed. “I know what you mean,” she said. “That’s the biggest reason I wanted to find a branch of the river that came close to camp.”
“Is it safe to go by myself?” Anya asked uncertainly, looking toward the sky as though some of Saul’s evil soldiers might suddenly appear out of thin air.
“Perfectly safe,” Izzy said. “Saul doesn’t know we’re here, and, even if he did, the portion of the river I found is close enough that it’s still covered by our protective shield. Even with all their dark magic, it still takes Saul’s soldiers a bit of time to break through our shields. I would know there was an attack going on long before anyone could get to you.”
“Alright,” Anya said, feeling somewhat reassured. “I’ll go, then. How do I get there?”
Izzy gave her quick directions to the spot she’d found, and even found her a fresh set of clothes from one of the backpacks.
“It’s a Falcon Cross military uniform,” Izzy said. “I hope you don’t mind wearing it, but we don’t have many extra clothes so it’s all I can offer. You can wash your own clothes in the river and put them back on once they dry.”
“I’d be honored to wear a Falcon Cross uniform,” Anya said. And she meant it. Despite her misgivings about the wizards and their outdated laws, she was happy to be part of this group. Izzy and Raven had stood up for her and been nothing but kind to her, and Anya was finding herself growing excited at the prospect of actually making a difference in the search for the dragon amethyst. She still wasn’t sure how she was going to do that, but she was determined that she would.
“Do you want anything else to eat,” Izzy asked as she handed over the uniform. “We have more meal bars, and some trail mix and stuff like that.”
Anya shook her head no. She was a bit hungry still, but not overwhelmingly so. And, right now, she wanted some time to soak in the water and think. She had a feeling that whoever Harlow was, she was right. There was something about the dragon claw and forest claw riddle that held the key to finding the dragon amethyst. Anya was determined to figure out the secret, and water had always helped her think more clearly.
With resolve in her step, Anya waved to Izzy and started walking toward the stream. She was going to prove that she had something to offer, even though she was only human. Perhaps she might even impress Finn a bit.
Anya smiled at the thought and quickened her pace. She hoped that Finn would be back at camp by the time she was done with her swim. She was intending to have some riddles solved by then.
Chapter Twelve
The water swirled around Anya, the warm ripples soothing both her body and mind. She was naked and on her back, with only her face, breasts, and small bit of her torso poking above the surface of the small pool. She closed her eyes and imagined that she was floating on a cloud, far away from the worries and troubles of her present life. For a moment, her imagination did carry her away. But her mind would not be silent for long. The chaos in her head insisted on pushing its way through, no matter how hard she tried to act like it wasn’t there.
Izzy had been right about this section of the river. The river had carved out a bit of an inlet into the forest here, and the water inside of it was still, peaceful, and warm. It felt heavenly, and getting rid of the dirt and grime that a week in the wilderness had caused felt positively luxurious. Anya had taken her time, using her bare hands to scrub water across her skin until there was not a speck of dirt left on her shimmering wet body. Once she was clean, Anya had pushed onto her back to float, and she had been like that for nearly half an hour now. The skin on her fingers and toes had crinkled into a raisin-like texture, but Anya paid it no mind. She was at peace to think about the riddles of the amethyst records here, and that’s what she was doing. Thinking, thinking, thinking. She rolled the words ‘dragon claw’ and ‘forest claw’ over and over in her mind. But still, no answer came to her. She was growing slowly frustrated. She knew that those words meant something to her, but she could not remember why.
She was close to giving up and heading back to the campsite, when the sound of a twig snapping startled her out of her aquatic reverie. Another snap came, and another, and Anya sat up as quickly as a lightning bolt, keeping her body below the surface of the water even though the river was so clear here that one could easily see anything below its glassy top. Her cheeks started to turn red as she looked around to see who was coming. For a moment, she had a flashback to what it had felt like to be caught lying naked with Finn in the middle of the woods. Who was about to come upon her naked now? Surely Izzy would have warned the men in the group that Anya was taking a bath out here.
But as Anya’s gaze darted wildly around, it finally settled on the person responsible for the snapping twigs, and she relaxed. Finn. Her physical nakedness in front of him did not cause her embarrassment, although, perhaps, her emotional nakedness did. The insecurities she’d felt on his account came rushing back in an instant, and she felt exposed. She dipped her eyes slightly as he approached the edge of the river, his boots crunching the ground with exaggerated noise.
“Was I loud enough this time?” he asked, a grin on his face as he came closer. “I know you don’t like it when I sneak up on you.”
If he was aware of the discomfort she was feeling right now, then he did a damn good job of hiding it. He sat on the edge of the river and began to take his boots and socks off. He rubbed his feet as he did, his eyes wincing a bit in apparent pain as he tried to get the circulation going.
“I thought there was an elephant coming,” Anya said, trying to grin as well. She didn’t want him to see the pain and confusion in her eyes, so she tried her best to hide it completely. He wasn’t so easily fooled, though. He gave her a searching look as he rolled up his pant legs and then dipped his feet in the water.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there when you woke up today,” he said, his voice cautious. “You were dead to the world this morning, and Peter and Knox wanted to head out on a scouting mission at the crack of dawn. I thought it was better to just let you sleep.”
“It’s fine,” Anya said, her voice sounding unnaturally high despite her efforts to sound normal. She smiled warmly, but Finn was still watching her carefully, as if trying to see into her very soul.
“No, it’s not fine,” he said. “We made love in the forest the night before, and I told you we’d talk about it when we woke up. But then I up and disappeared on you. I’m sorry. I hope it didn’t cause you too much anguish.”
Anya was surprised by the tenderness in his voice. He might be a tough dragon, but he still had a soft heart. At least, when it came to her he seemed to have a soft heart. She looked away from him to try to hide the emotion in her eyes. She focused on the treetops above her and shrugged.
“You told me before we slept together that you couldn’t fall in love. What we did wasn’t about feelings or a relationship. It was about the fact that we both had an itch to scratch and we scratched it. There’s no need to apologize for being gone when I woke up in the morning.”
Finn let out a long sigh, then stood and started to take off his clothes. Anya watched him from the corner of her eye, avoiding his gaze but not able to keep from stealing glances at his muscular body as he stripped. Within a minute, he had removed all of his clothing and dumped it in a pile on the ground next to Anya’s pile of clothes. The next thing she knew, he had slipped into the small pool and swum over to her. When he reached her, he tilted her head upward toward his.
“Look at me,” he ordered her, his voice deep and gravelly. Anya tried to look away, but he held her chin firmly.
“No, look at me,” he said. “I want you to see my eyes when I say this. I thought I couldn’t love a human. I thought there could never be anything more between us than just a couple of friends having f
un. But I was dead wrong. I think I only said those things because I was scared to admit the truth to myself. And the truth, Anya, is that I’ve known since the moment I met you that you were someone special. I was attracted to you instantly, and, at first, I thought it was just because you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. I thought it was just a case of insane lust due to your incredible beauty.”
“Sweet talker,” Anya joked, her voice light as she tried to pass of Finn’s words as flirtatious flattery. But he wasn’t having any of that.
“No, I’m serious, and you know it,” he said. “You’re perfection, Anya. I’ve seen a lot of beautiful woman before, but never someone as beautiful as you. And I thought that if you were willing to have a bit of fun, well, then why not? We’re two grown adults after all. But you know as well as I do that after we slept together everything changed.”
“Did it?” Anya asked, her voice small and trembling as she looked up into his eyes. His hair was glistening with water droplets from the short swim over to her, and little trails of water ran down his tanned face. He blinked as one of the water trails hit his right eye, but he never moved his hands away from Anya’s body to try to brush at his face. He kept one hand firmly on her chin, and the other firmly on her hip. She could feel his dick, standing erect and poking at her stomach as they both stood there, naked in the water. Her eyes pleaded with him, although she wasn’t quite sure what she was pleading for. He smiled at her, then, and the warmth of his smile felt like it melted her very soul.
“You know it changed,” he said, bending his head down to nuzzle her nose with his nose. “There was a connection between us that went beyond just the physical. The moment I locked eyes with you while inside of you, I knew that there was no turning back for me. I had fallen in love, just like that. Do you hear me, Anya? I love you. I wanted to tell you last night, but I was trying to come up with some sort of romantic speech and felt woefully inadequate. Then, when the crew found us and dragged us back to camp, I didn’t want to try and explain my feelings for you with a bunch of nosy ears listening in. I thought I would steal away with you this morning and just tell you how I feel, even if my attempt at a romantic speech turned out to be far from perfect. You can imagine my frustration when I was forced to go scouting instead. But here I am now, finally alone with you and finally telling you how I feel. I love you.”
Anya could hardly breathe as she looked up at him. “But…you’re a dragon. And I’m a human. And…”
Anya trailed off, afraid to say the words she wanted so desperately to say. Finn waited, never taking his eyes from hers as he waited for her to complete her sentence.
“And I love you, too,” she finally said.
The broadest smile she had ever seen spread across his face. He pulled her in close for a kiss, his tongue quickly slipping past her lips as he wrapped his arms tightly around her. The water swirling around them felt cool now. It was no match for the heat of Anya’s body as she filled with desire for the man who held her. Finn, too, was burning up. She could feel his skin, hot to the touch even below the surface of the water.
Something in the back of her mind tried to tell her that this was crazy. Her rational side tried to insist that they were going to be caught and teased again, that they didn’t know each other well enough to throw around the word “love,” and that a dragon and a human could never make it together in this world. Anya pushed away each objection as it came. Perhaps dragons and humans were worlds apart, but that didn’t change the fact that their worlds had just collided.
Finn raised his hands to her breasts, enveloping their round fullness with his large, strong palms. He massaged them as he continued to kiss her, continued to drink her in. She felt a trembling between her thighs as her body responded to his attention, yearning to have him inside of her. Heat filled her, radiating out from his palms and his tongue and setting her whole body on fire. It’s hot business, loving a dragon, Anya thought. Then she giggled, amused by her own thoughts.
Finn pulled back from their kiss for a moment and raised an eyebrow. “What’s so funny?” he asked.
Anya looked into his emerald green eyes and gave a small shrug, trying to look coy. He growled in return, a mischievous glint in his own eyes as he pulled her back into his kiss. This time, he dropped one hand from her breasts and let it slip below the water, searching until it found the soft warmth between her legs. She moaned slightly as his finger explored inside of her, rubbing against the most sensitive part of her body and sending streaks of hot fire radiating out from between her legs.
She closed her eyes as he drew circles on her inner walls. Her mind was beginning to quiet now. It was impossible to think of other worries when Finn was driving her crazy like this. Her thoughts became mercifully consumed with him and only him. Sweet, pressure-filled heat flooded her, and every nerve ending in her body began to tingle with electricity. The electricity grew, until she felt that surely anything she touched would be shocked by the powerful passion that filled her. Finn thrust another finger inside of her, and the wide span of the two fingers pushing against her was too much to take. She felt herself going over the edge, and in the next instant she let out a yelp of surprised pleasure as spasms began to rock her body. She trembled, falling against Finn’s body as she shook, his heat and electricity taking her to heights she had never been before. He kissed the top of her head, then gently nuzzled her ear. He kept his fingers inside of her as her insides clenched around them, and wrapped his other arm firmly around her bare back.
She had never felt so safe. She had the strange sensation that she was falling apart, but in a good way. She let the feeling wash over her, and, when it had subsided, she rested her head on Finn’s shoulder. He held her there, stroking her mess of tangled wet hair and seeming to enjoy just being together. Anya could still feel his erection pressing against her lower stomach, but he was not in a hurry. He was drinking in this wonderful moment, just as she was.
To her surprise, after a minute or two of this, he spoke.
“Humans don’t really know of the concept of lifemates, do they?” he asked.
Anya tilted her head back so she could see his face. “No, I guess not. I’ve never heard that term before.”
Finn nodded slowly. “I think it’s just a shifter thing,” he said. “The wizards don’t really know of it, either.”
“Lifemates,” Anya said, repeating the word. She liked the sound of it. She could somewhat guess what was meant by the term, but she asked anyway. “What are lifemates?”
Finn’s smile deepened, causing his eyes to crinkle up merrily as he looked down at her. “It’s sort of like the idea of a soulmate, but more intense. In the shifter world, we believe that each person has someone they are destined to be with. From the moment of your birth, fate and destiny are working together to bring you across that person’s path. When you do meet them, you’re almost always instantly attracted to them—although I have heard of instances where two lifemates initially did not like each other. But, in any case, things usually start out feeling like your run-of-the-mill, normal infatuation with someone you’re attracted to.”
“And then?” Anya asked, feeling slightly breathless as Finn looked happily down at her.
“And then,” he said, “You end up sleeping with that person. You might think it’s just having a bit of fun together, which is what I thought we were doing last night. Or maybe I knew it was more, but I was afraid to admit it to myself. Whatever the case, as soon as you make love to your destined lifemate, you form a bond with that person.”
“What does that mean?” Anya asked, her breathlessness increasing. She had a feeling she knew where this was going, but she forced herself to wait and let Finn talk.
“Well, once you’re bonded to your lifemate, you can never truly be separate from them again. Oh, sure, you might be apart physically, but your very souls are intertwined. Your destinies are one. You feel it when they feel pain, even if they are far away from you.”
“But
how do you know that you’re bonded?” Anya asked. Her heart felt like it was going to pound out of her chest now.
“You just know,” Finn said with a shrug. “I mean, you can feel the physical effect of the bond when it’s happening. It feels like a hot warmth at the very core of you. But the bond itself is so much more than that physical sensation. It’s a deep knowing, an understanding, that you and this person are meant to be together. It’s a connection of your souls, if you will.”
“I...I felt a warmth when we made love last night,” Anya said. “I’d never felt anything like that before and I wasn’t sure what to make of it. But I’ve felt different ever since. I’ve had this strange sensation that almost makes me feel like I’ve found a new home, and I haven’t been able to think of anything but you.”
Finn brushed a wet strand of hair back from her eyes. “That’s the lifemate bond,” he said softly. “I felt it, too. And it’s why I can tell you that I love you, even though we’ve only known each other a few days. I don’t need more time to know the truth. We’re bonded. We’re lifemates. I swear to you, Anya, I will spend the rest of my life protecting you, and fighting to make you happy. I don’t know how all the details will work out. I know I’m a dragon and you’re a human and we have different lives that we have to figure out how to entwine into one. But I promise you, we will figure out how to do that. Because I know now that I cannot live a day without you, and that there is nothing in the world that I want more than to be with you. I hope that you feel the same, because whether or not you do, I’m a lost cause. There will never be anyone else for me but you, Anya. I love you, with every fiber of my being.”
Anya bit her lip, but could not keep the silly grin from spreading across her face. “I love you, too,” she said. “I told myself that there was nothing serious between us, but there’s no use trying to deny it. I don’t know how this will all work either, but I know deep down that it will work. We’re meant to be together.”
Destiny and the Dragon (Redwood Dragons Book 5) Page 13
