Declan, the ever helpful dragon, shot the information to my mind as if it was a picture, and I suddenly knew I needed to take the last hall on the right, which led straight to the infirmary.
“You’re going the wrong way,” he growled when he saw me take the turn.
I snorted. “You’re not my mother. I don’t have to listen to you.”
He narrowed his eyes. “You’re my mate, which means what I think should play a significant part in what you decide to do. Which, if you knew what was good for you, would be to go back to the safe room and stay there until I come get you.”
Once I was in the doorway, I turned and started walking forward, only to come up short two feet in with a large arm around my waist.
“Don’t turn your back on me,” he growled against my neck.
I shivered, leaning my head into his shoulder as his beard rasped against the back of my neck.
“I just wanted you to be checked out,” I whispered hesitantly.
Everything along my back felt hard.
His abs. His chest. His arms. His cock.
Everything.
He sighed and breathed against my neck, the hot, minty breath washing over me, making my nipples pebble.
“Okay,” he finally agreed, letting me go reluctantly before he went to the exam table his sister was standing next to and hopped on. “Nikolai, you know what to do.”
I heard steps behind me start to retreat and knew Nikolai followed his orders without questioning them.
Skylar got to work, removing the bandages with a pair of wicked looking scissors, and I walked up to her, helping remove the tape and bandage as well.
“Jesus,” I whispered as the tape started to peel off. “Did you need so much tape?”
He snorted. “Wait till you see it, then tell me if you think I used enough tape.”
I understood what he meant when all the tape finally came off, and the only things that was left was the layers of gauze.
They were saturated with blood, and the moment the wound was revealed, I nearly lost it.
Although managing to stay on my feet, my head did get woozy, and my face was suddenly cool.
“Holy shit,” I breathed, utterly flabbergasted at what he was able to do with the way his arm was torn to shreds.
I could see muscle, bone, fat, and debris in the wound.
“Holy shit,” I repeated.
“It’s bad, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t see you not healing this. Especially with Declan’s abilities. You’ve probably got about two and a half to three days until it’s fully healed,” Skylar inspected the wound.
Keifer grunted. “Been worse.”
I couldn’t even imagine.
“Worse?” I whispered. “Days? What?”
Keifer looked at me and grabbed my hand, his eyes clear of any anger as he said, “I nearly had my entire leg bitten off four years ago. Declan has the ability to heal himself, as well as others. Something that’s extended down to me. I don’t heal anywhere near as fast as him, but it’s definitely significantly faster than most humans.”
I nodded, understanding what he meant completely.
“Kind of like this?” I asked, lifting my shirt sleeve and showing him my arm where the new scar was located.
He sucked in his breath, and it literally felt like all the air in the room was sucked out with it.
“Holy fuckin’ shit,” he breathed. “Oh, holy shit.”
His uninjured hand lifted, and he gently trailed his finger over the large scar on my arm.
“Does it hurt?” His voice cracked.
I shook my head. “No.”
I didn’t think it was a good idea to tell him that, initially, it’d hurt like a motherfucker.
He didn’t seem to like me having this mark and I was fairly sure it’d be bad for him to know he’d inadvertently caused me pain.
“God,” he shook his head, leaning forward and pressing his lips to the scar. “I hoped that part in the book wasn’t true. I can only imagine how many scars you’ll have by the end of our relationship.”
I winced. “Yeah, that might suck a little bit.”
He smiled, and then winced when Skylar poured alcohol over his arm straight out of the bottle.
“Goddammit, Skylar. You could’ve warned me,” he gritted through clenched teeth.
Skylar, with her long blonde hair and warm green eyes, flashed her straight white teeth at Keifer. “Oops.”
I smothered a laugh, and dropped the hand that was holding my sleeve up, concealing it from Keifer’s still searching eyes.
“What happened?” I asked quietly.
His eyes moved up from my shoulder to me, and he winced.
“A search party of Purists, stumbled through the veil. Normally all they do is bumble around looking, never to find a thing. Except today one of them found us. It was pure luck, and we dispatched them within seconds, but one of the younger dragons fell from a cross bow to the eye, and did this on the way down,” he indicated his wound.
I frowned. “Well, they have to have some clue where you are, otherwise they would’ve never gotten so close to you in the first place.”
He nodded. “Yes and no. Really, all they do is follow the Meridian. That’s what feeds the dragons. Keeps them alive and healthy. They can follow the Meridian much the same way as any human can, which is by following the rich vegetation.”
I blinked.
“What?”
He closed his eyes and his face blanked as Skylar started to pick debris out of the wound.
“The flowers. Rolling meadows. Beautiful rich grass. It’s easy to find, especially here in Texas where the land is so dry that the vegetation not located along the meridian does not thrive. All you have to do is open your eyes. Flowers bloom all year long, deer eat copiously. I’ll have Declan take us down the line of the Meridian, and you’ll see,” he rumbled gruffly.
I thought back to our trip here, and tried to remember if I saw a difference in the vegetation, but couldn’t recall much. Mostly because every time I tried to recall what I’d seen, I could only remember studying the dragon I was riding on, as well as the one that had flown beside us.
“So other than the small group of Purists accidentally finding where you live, what’s the verdict? Will you tighten up security? What?” I asked, moving forward so my butt leaned on the padded bench Keifer was leaning against.
His shoulders touched mine as he shrugged.
“We control burn. The shield we have conceals us pretty well for the most part, but the Meridian makes the grass and flowers grow past our shields. Those are the parts that we burn and make look like the surrounding area. Although we end up burning quite a bit of the land beyond ours so it all blends in,” he admitted.
“How do you control burn?” I asked. “That’s a lot of land to be burning.”
He opened his eyes, and they were swimming with mirth as he answered. “The dragons.”
I blinked.
“The dragons…ohhh! They breathe fire?” I gasped.
He snorted. “Of course. What kind of dragons would they be if they didn’t breathe fire? But that’s just the fire dragons. There are many kinds of dragons. The ones you saw yesterday afternoon, the small ones, those are ice dragons. They can breathe cold air and turn the surrounding area into ice. Then there are the lightnings. They cause thunderstorms. Big ones.”
I was fairly sure my eyebrows were somewhere in the vicinity of my hairline.
I had no idea there were different kinds!
“What’s your favorite kind?” I asked.
Now I was just trying to distract him, and it was working if the smile on his face was anything to go by.
He was enjoying telling me about his life and the dragons.
“They’re all special in their own way. I control all of the elements, because Declan can. He’s what you would call a Primordial Dragon—or a dragon that controls all elements. He can c
ombine some of his abilities and make many things that you wouldn’t otherwise see with any specific dragon. My favorite thing he can do is make smoke. It’s less subtle than the other special powers, but we use it the most. Situations where we need a quick escape, we dispense smoke, and it’s like we disappear. We can do that to some extent, but mostly it’s just the smoke that he blends into that also aids in our disappearance,” he explained.
“Out in the alley that night,” understanding dawning. “There was smoke. That’s what you did?”
He nodded and smiled. “Yeah. Exactly what we did.”
A smile that went straight to my vagina, causing it to become wetter than it already was. Which also caused me to squirm.
“That’s pretty nifty, Mr. Vassago,” I confessed, hiding my emotions. “I’d thought that you’d disappeared. Whatever it is you do, it’s pretty amazing.”
“Alright, it’s stitched up,” Skylar sighed. “Don’t use it unless you absolutely have to. That means you’ll have to eat with your other hand and try to do without a shirt for the next two days. Or, at least, one that doesn’t touch it.”
I had to admit that seeing him without a shirt for the next two days was kind of heartbreaking. I mean my poor eyes, right?
Ha!
Chapter 9
I believe in love and peace, but I say fuck a lot.
-Coffee Cup
Blythe
“I have four more weeks of school left. I don’t give one flying fuck if you don’t want me to go. I’ve worked my ass off for this, and I will finish!” I practically bellowed in Keifer’s face.
His eyes narrowed on me.
“Have you heard nothing I’ve said over the last hour?” He asked in disbelief.
I narrowed my eyes.
“You’re going to work!” I yelled.
He growled. “Yeah, I’m going to work. But my place of business also has protections and wards all the fuck over it! Your school doesn’t!”
I shook my head.
“Keifer,” I said softly. “This is a deal-breaker for me. I’ll quit my job. I’ll move out of my apartment. I will not, however, quit school. I’ve busted my ass for two and a half years to become a nurse, and I’m not quitting. I’ve already missed one clinical when you got hurt yesterday. I’m not missing one more.”
He sighed. “You’re not going to give me this, are you?”
I shook my head. “No.”
The closer his body got to mine, the more aware I became.
It’d been a day since he was hurt, and of course, he was already back to full strength. His arm had healed miraculously well, and he didn’t show a single sign that he’d been hurt only twenty-four hours before.
And I hadn’t seen him since last night.
I knew he’d slipped out of the bed we’d slept in sometime around midnight, and here it was six in the morning, and I had to go find him to tell him I’d be leaving to go to my clinicals whether he liked it or not.
Last night I’d been too scared of his injury to initiate anything physical between us, and he’d been too hurt.
Now here we stood, him healed, both of us angry, and he still had no shirt on.
That pull between us that started out as just a little tingle the first time he touched me was now a full blown, raging inferno inside of me that clawed at my stomach.
He felt it too.
I could tell, not only because his eyes were telling me all that I needed to know, but his erection was tenting the front of his drawstring pants.
“I’ll take you. I’ll pick you up. You’ll not leave, and you’ll call me with hourly updates,” he reminded sternly.
I shook my head, my mind moving from the inspection of his beautiful abs, and that mouthwatering V of his lower stomach that led to the promise land.
“I can’t have my phone on me,” I told him. “Not that I have my phone. Oh, my God! My sister’s probably going nuts!”
That’s when I set my hair on fire.
I screamed.
Keifer sighed.
“Cool stuff, Blythe,” Keifer replied impatiently.
I glared at him, smelling the rubber band in my hair starting to burn.
Literally. Fucking on fire.
I didn’t feel the heat, amazingly.
I could see the fire swirling around my face, but when I touched it, I didn’t feel it at all.
“Why don’t I feel it?” I questioned.
He sighed, his anger evaporating the longer he watched me.
“It’s a part of you. It’ll burn anything that’s not a part of you, but anything that is a part of you won’t be hurt.”
I closed my eyes, concentrating on the hot coffee on the table next to my hand, feeling the heat leave me and replacing it with the soothing cool that Keifer had taught me only a few hours before.
Channel it into something. Don’t make yourself become it. Make the area around you become it. If you are to be off on your own, you have to be able to control it, or those around you could suffer.
So that’s what I did.
I turned my iced coffee into a hot one.
“Good,” Keifer muttered. “Very good.”
I smiled, opening my eyes to see him watching me rapturously.
“Do you want to drive…or fly?” He asked.
I gave him a look.
One that said clearly, are you crazy.
Yes, yes he is.
I smiled at Declan’s telepathic intrusion into our conversation, and Keifer’s eyes narrowed.
“That really disturbs me,” Keifer muttered.
I grinned. “Car, please.”
He just shook his head. “Alright. You’ve got ten minutes before I’m ready to go. If you’re not there, then I’ll assume you came to your senses.”
I snorted, and went to my bedroom to quickly change into the scrubs that Skylar had been kind enough to loan me. Though they didn’t have the patch that the college uniform required, I knew that it’d have to be good enough for now. Otherwise I’d have to stop by my apartment for them, and that would take more time than I had.
Luckily, Brooklyn, my very good friend that I’d met on my first day of nursing school, promised to stop by my apartment for my name badge, stethoscope and paperwork. Fortunately, I was able to send her a message on the Internet.
Not to mention I needed my charger, laptop and the books that I’d need for class tomorrow afternoon—which she’d also informed me she’d pick up.
Oddly enough, in Keifer’s haste to get me to his house three days ago, he’d not been able to bring anything of mine with him since I kept setting it all on fire.
I, on the other hand, had been passed out so I couldn’t bring anything even if I had wanted to.
Hurrying through brushing my teeth, I rushed out the front door, waving to Bella as I left.
She waved back and smiled happily as I moved out the door.
My heart light, I ran down the length of the walk, and let my fingers trail over the sleeping dragons that were curled up on the patio furniture outside the door, before coming to a sudden halt at what I saw before me.
Keifer was on a bike.
He had on a leather vest that declared him a member of the ‘Dragon’s Warriors MC.’
And he looked freakin’ hot.
All of that sexual energy I’d done my damnedest to ignore over the past twenty minutes came bubbling right back to the surface, burning right through me and nearly bringing me to my knees.
I’d always had a thing for bad boys.
And the fact that Keifer was the ultimate bad boy had my knees shaking, and my panties melting.
Luckily not in the bad way.
Keifer, at seeing me watching him, stiffened, and he looked down as the muscles in his chest swelled as he hung on to the handle bars with a harsh, unforgiving grip.
The muscles in his arms bulged causing the veins to stand out in stark relief.
And I
couldn’t help but pant over the perfect nurse porn he was offering to me.
I loved veins.
I had a fascination with veins.
I’d had it since I was a kid, and now it was only intensified.
“You getting on or not?” Keifer rasped, still not looking up.
I walked forward slowly, eyes on him as I went.
Once I reached his side, I placed both of my hands on his solid shoulders, and swung my leg over the back of the bike.
When I would’ve place my hands gently around his middle, he laughed, and hauled me in tight.
“We’re gonna go hard and fast, baby girl. You’re gonna need to hold on tighter than that,” Keifer growled, then threw his body into starting the bike.
It rumbled to life, and the vibrations the bike sent through my body had me humming in anticipation almost immediately.
The only thing that kept me from succumbing to my building orgasm was Keifer’s yelled command.
He must’ve felt the same desire burning through him as I did, because he knew exactly what to say to get me to calm down.
He definitely knew how to control my desires
“Don’t you dare come without me. The next time you come will be with me inside you, buried so deep you’ll feel me in your throat,” Keifer growled over the powerful engine.
I closed my eyes and attempted to reel in my wayward thoughts about seeing just what this bike could do…while sitting still…with him inside me.
Pounding deep.
I didn’t hear his hiss, but I felt it.
It vibrated through him, and I felt it in my chest that was pressed up against his back.
“Twelve more hours, and you’re fucking mine,” he promised.
Then he roared out of the driveway.
I gasped in surprise, burying my face into the back of his leather vest, and held on for all I was worth.
My body became one with his.
We moved fluidly on the back of his bike. We leaned into the turns together, and when he’d lean forward, my body would automatically follow.
When he’d stop and place his feet down onto the ground to look both ways, my legs would become pliable, allowing him the movement he needed without thought.
I Like Big Dragons and I Cannot Lie (The I Like Big Dragons Series) Page 7
