Men And Beasts (Fate - Fire - Shifter - Dragon Book 6)

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  The Shifter tugged at Pavlovich’s hand. “This numbness you feel is new?”

  Aiden bellowed. “What did you do?” Why was he flitting between these people? He swung first at Pavlovich, then the doctor. Nothing. “I will slice both of you into Shifter strips!”

  He’d been close—so, so close—to his Daisy.

  Pavlovich nodded. “It began in the hotel bar.” He shook his entire arm. The glass piercing his flesh shook with it and the velocity of the universe—the winds blowing around the two Shifters—swirled up into a tight funnel between them. “A phantom dances on my palm, Dr. Torres.”

  The healer pulled off Pavlovich’s glove. The skin underneath appeared swollen, and bruised, but cleared once the healer’s power focused down onto Pavlovich’s flesh. “Why have you waited this long to ask me about this, Dmitri?”

  Pavlovich’s eyes narrowed. “I was busy.”

  Aiden peered at the glass piercing Pavlovich’s hand. Maybe he could pull it out. Then he would no longer pop back to Pavlovich-space. He pinched at the top of the needle-splinter, where it poked out of the man’s palm.

  Nothing. No slippery surface between his fingers. No cool feel. “What did you do?” Aiden punched at Pavlovich again, and again, nothing.

  Torres did not respond to Pavlovich. The doctor prodded Pavlovich’s palm, his own finger dancing around the splinter of glass. “Fascinating,” he said.

  That hand glowed in new-space. It throbbed and threw off energy and behaved like Pavlovich’s very own, personal pulsar.

  “I hate Shifters,” Aiden hissed.

  “Please stop the numbness, doctor.” Pavlovich glowered toward the kitchen. “It distracts.”

  Aiden turned away. The doctor knew nothing of the glass, and thus would not interfere.

  The boy toy was a much better mark. Aiden watched the kid snuggle up to his true love. Watched him touch her. If he’d stayed in that body, he would be doing the touching. He’d be in control.

  “Please also double check Mr. Bower.” Pavlovich nodded toward the laughing young people.

  Torres poked at Pavlovich’s palm again. “I did. He’s fine. That rib will never have the mobility it once had, and he seems attached to his branding.”

  Pavlovich grinned. “My daughter marked him.”

  Yes, Aiden thought. And now he’d mark the boy as well.

  Chapter Forty

  Rysa pulled Ladon’s black turtleneck out of his jeans and thrust her cold hands under its ribbed yet silky fabric. “Where did you get this shirt?” Turtlenecks shouldn’t be so damned sexy.

  He shivered and groaned under the shock of her frozen fingers, but he did not waver from his kisses. “Thrift store in Rock Springs.” He sucked on her neck just below her earlobe and groaned again when she ran her chilly fingertips over his abs. “You are icy, beloved.”

  Some guy gave up that shirt? Poor man. “You are doing all our clothes shopping from now on.” He was so warm. “It’s almost as nice as you.”

  Ladon answered by pulling her shirt over her head. The cavern’s cold bit into her now exposed belly and a shiver moved across her chest, to her neck and into her jaw. Her teeth chattered.

  “You’re cold…” Ladon pressed his full weight against Rysa’s goosefleshed body and enveloped her between his heat and his dragon’s soft, shimmering warmth.

  A stuttered sigh rolled from her throat.

  “Always make that sound for me.” Ladon stripped her jeans down her legs but groaned again because he couldn’t get them off over her boots.

  A quick pang of what could only be a little help here moved from him to Dragon. The beast rolled slightly to lift Rysa higher, but he didn’t unlace her boots or yank them off.

  A come on followed. The beast humphed.

  “Stop arguing.” Rysa pushed Ladon away long enough to remove one of her boots. He snatched her up into the air before she could get off the other.

  Ladon pressed his face against her breastbone. His arms tightened and more pressure than he usually used—more of his physical strength—pressed into her back and waist. His shoulders curled forward. He moved one thigh between her legs.

  He held her the way he’d held her the first time they kissed, when he said “Don’t leave.”

  “Ladon,” she whispered. “You’re here.” She clung to him just as tightly as he clung to her. “You came back. You came home to us. You came home.”

  A new sob erupted from her chest. “I’m sorry I didn’t stop him. I’m sorry! I’m—”

  Ladon’s kiss silenced her fears. It quelled the surge of anxiety and it gave to her all she had been missing—his love. Her safety. His mind, soul, and body.

  One boot and bra still on, her jeans hanging off her leg, it didn’t matter. She wiggled down in his arms, her back again pressed into the beast and her front against Ladon’s hard body. Dragon shifted slightly, to help her move until she was low enough to rub her face against Ladon’s diamond of chest hair.

  She unbuckled his belt and released his fly. When she took him in her hand, he looked up at the chamber’s ceiling, his eyes hooded, and a long, low exhale rolled from his throat.

  He scooped his hand under her backside and with one quick, brilliant movement of his other hand, ripped off her panties. Elastic snapped against her thighs.

  Her panties landed in the fire. A flame burst upward, followed by a loud crackle and a sudden flare of brightness.

  A full, rocky-sounding, gulp-like chortle pushed up from her belly and into her throat. It tightened there, but forced its way out anyway. “You burned my underwear.” He just set fire to the one thing she used to cover her naughty bits.

  Ladon hadn’t noticed. He didn’t care. Neither did the beast. They had their woman and humor be damned, they knew she wanted her man as much as he wanted her.

  He thrust into her faster and with more force than she expected. He’d been so restrained, but this was not at all tentative. He moved the way she remembered—and the way that shot lightning through every cell in her body.

  Ladon pressed her hips into each thrust. He rolled his pelvis each time he pulled out to rub against her clitoris, and waves of pleasure lapped her belly, then upward, into her chest and breasts.

  “Mine,” he groaned.

  This, in the tight energy between him and his beast, inside Ladon’s heat and against his living, breathing body—this was her paradise. She touched not only his chest and his back and felt his thrusts; she touched all he revealed to her. All he trusted her to heal.

  “I… love… you,” she said, her voice staccato but strong. Her throat wanted only to moan and sigh. Her body wanted only to ride him into bliss. But he needed to hear the words of what she felt as much as he needed to feel her desires in her touches.

  A low rumble pushed from Dragon’s chest and through his hide as a soft undulation of his coat against her hips—and Rysa’s need for them, her need to feel Ladon, overwhelmed her need to heal his soul. Her muscles remembered how to move to maximize the pleasure of his hard, brilliant body. She drank him in—all of him, the texture and glow of his skin. The wonderful, deep sounds of his voice. The highlights and shadows cast by his dragon, and the heat of them both. The energy that resonated through her bones. All the touches. All the physical.

  He was alive and he came home.

  Ladon slammed against her with a power he rarely used during their lovemaking. She slammed back, her own orgasm rocketing from her lower belly out to her limbs. Her fingers knotted in his hair and her nails dug into his upper back. Her entire body shook.

  She bit his earlobe.

  His rumble filled the cavern chamber, echoing from one side to the other, then back. It built as fast as his orgasm, and when he slammed into her one last time, he thundered.

  Dragon rolled onto his back with his belly upward. His hide erupted with every color and pattern the beast could make. Lights danced over the cavern’s ceiling. Stars twirled in the air. He made visual the brilliance consuming Rysa’s body.


  Ladon gripped her legs. He held her on him, his arms carrying all her weight as she wrapped her legs around his waist, and kissed her deeply.

  Her seers unfurled, as did her healer. They wrapped themselves through Ladon’s love-rumble. They drank it in and they used it to solidify this moment for them both.

  “Unedited and raw,” she whispered.

  Ladon, half-drowsy but still holding her against his front, his muscles loose and his head on her shoulder, grinned.

  “You rumbled.” And with such strength she knew the sound had echoed all the way down the tunnel and into the baths.

  “Hmmm….” He hummed against her neck. “Do you want to do it again?”

  Every bit of her tingled. “It’s not even our honeymoon.”

  She felt another grin against her neck. “Can ghosts clear away debris?”

  Did Nate clean up the dust and the cobwebs instead of stripping out the plumbing and electrical? Could she thank a ghost?

  “I will always love you.” Rysa rubbed her cheek against his. “Debris or not.”

  Slowly he dropped her legs to the ground. She bounced a little, to balance on her one booted foot, and leaned against him.

  Dragon rolled onto his feet. The big beast shook his head and sneezed, then scratched at his belly.

  “He says he prefers our rumbling sex.” Ladon kissed along her hairline. “He says we are correct mates when we rumble.”

  “We?” She didn’t rumble.

  You do, the beast signed. Your seers resonate.

  Yes! she thought. “That’s the best wedding gift anyone could ever give me, Dragon.”

  Yet for some reason, the idea of ghosts still bothered her, as if what should be theirs was now public. She pulled up her jeans.

  The loud, down-the-tunnel rumbles probably made her feel embarrassed, that’s all.

  What else could it be?

  Chapter Forty-One

  Daisy hadn’t wanted to sleep in their too-bright room any more than Gavin, so they pulled the futon through the short tunnel and into the baths. She snuggled against his side, half asleep and warm and beautiful. He heard her soft breaths as much as felt them against his shoulders, and for the first time since pushing his new aids into his ears, he felt stable.

  The velocity of the world stopped pressing him against the wall of the universe. Here, the volume of the caverns held him in place.

  He could live here, if the Dracae allowed it. But he doubted Daisy wanted to spend her life caring for only two dragons and a couple of flittering bats.

  Before she’d drifted off to sleep, she rubbed against his side and mumbled something about feeling tired from AnnaBelinda’s tour. She’d also said something about feeling nauseated at dinner but had chalked it up to the fear and the tension of the past few days.

  He’d never seen her sick. The Praesagio medical team checked her over before they left, and Rysa’s dad did a second check after he arrived. Gavin would ask her to talk to Sandro again tomorrow anyway. Make sure that murdering son of a bitch Aiden Blake didn’t do something they all missed.

  Gavin’s stomach mirrored the flipping and flitting of the bats moving along the cave’s ceiling. They squeaked and his belly squawked. They flapped and his chest flopped. He did not like the thought of Daisy ill.

  He closed his eyes and listened to the clear chiming of the stream. The dragons must have engineered the waterfall so that it harmonized with the cave’s natural acoustics. The air flow from the tunnels leading into the baths whispered as part of the chord. Sleeping out here was like resting inside a musical instrument.

  He’d been so focused on Dragon’s colors and patterns that he’d never thought about the beast’s other senses. Not that he would have noticed the tones here without his special high-tech hearing aids. Did Derek and Rysa pick up on the acoustics? Did they understand the balance and centeredness of the space?

  He suspected that if he had stayed in their room, he’d be feeling a lot more than simple jitters in his stomach that, out here, the cave countered.

  About twenty feet deeper into the cavern, a soft, barely visible glow flickered from the tunnel leading into Sandro and Mira’s room. They talked also, in low tones Gavin picked up as hushed whispers. Every so often he’d catch a “baby” and a “solstice.” He tried not to listen.

  Twenty feet in the other direction, a brighter light tumbled from Mr. Pavlovich’s room, along with the occasional sound of rustling. Gavin suspected the reading of reports and the writing of orders. He hadn’t asked. Again, he tried not to listen.

  Farther still, from the tunnel into Anna and Derek’s apartment, a shimmer danced into the baths. Not quite visible, and not quite audible either, the shimmer reminded Gavin more of waves lapping a shore that wasn’t there, as if, at night, Sister-Dragon radiated the power of distant suns.

  Daisy’s breathing slowed and smoothed out into the shallow inhalations of sleep. She lay with her head next to his shoulder but not touching, and her arm thrown over his, with her fingers on the t-shirt he’d worn to sleep in tonight. Best avoid the embarrassment of sleeping naked with Mr. Pavlovich’s daughter, if the man decided to go for a walk in the middle of the night.

  Gavin did prefer to be close to her, more so than he’d ever wanted with any of his other girlfriends. Perhaps her background healing factor worked on him as well; it might, since she’d managed to heal him three times now. Or perhaps he liked the contact.

  Ladon did. Derek, as well. Neither man was shy about touches and hugs. AnnaBelinda also, but in a more restrained manner. Having dragons around must make people want to cuddle.

  Gavin scratched his belly. It must be nice to touch when you needed to touch, and not be made to feel less for it.

  He closed his eyes again, but this time, he concentrated on the tickle of Daisy’s breath on his shoulder, and the pressure of her fingers on his belly. She’d shifted so her leg almost touched his, and her warmth moved from her skin to his under their blanket.

  The brilliant wonders of Daisy’s body were as special as his miraculous hearing aids.

  A low rumble echoed from the far end of the baths, from a lone tunnel that, according to Derek, led to the upper reservoir. The wave washed over where he rested with Daisy, and off toward the front of the cave. It moved not only in the air, but also in the rock itself as a slow, barely perceptible vibration.

  Gavin chuckled.

  Daisy moaned. She rubbed at her face with the back of her hand and opened her eyes. “Hmmm?” She blinked a few times. “What was that?” Slowly, she rolled onto her back. “Not an earthquake, I hope.”

  Gavin rolled onto his side so he could kiss the base of her throat. “I don’t think that was an earthquake of the geological kind.”

  Another low rumble washed down the length of the baths.

  “Haven’t heard that in a while.” Now Daisy chuckled. “So much for a rumble-free, sound night’s sleep.” She scooted closer.

  Gavin moved his kisses lower, to her upper chest. Soon, he’d reach the hem of her camisole.

  A new rumble originated from the tunnel into Anna and Derek’s apartment, and washed toward the back, in the opposite direction of the first. This one felt higher-pitched, and faster.

  Gavin chuckled again. “So it’s not just Ladon.” He nudged aside the top edge of Daisy’s camisole with his chin. “Can you do that?” Might be an interesting sensation.

  Daisy stroked his shoulder. “I suspect it’s purely Dracae.”

  Her nipples had hardened to tight nubs and poked distractingly through the thin fabric covering her chest. Gavin nudged aside the camisole and ran his tongue around the closest.

  She shuddered, but not in a good way.

  He pulled back. “Are you okay?” He kissed her breast above her nipple. “Did that hurt?”

  She nodded yes.

  Her breasts occasionally became tender before her period. “Sorry.” But sometimes she liked a little extra sensation. “I’ll be gentle.” He circled her nipple
with his finger, his touch light and teasing.

  Her face tightened. His touch did hurt. Gavin pulled back his hand.

  Daisy snuggled closer anyway. “Maybe tomorrow.”

  Gavin curled his arm around her shoulder and molded his body along her side. “I don’t like you feeling sick.” It wasn’t right, and it opened an entire can of what-ifs he did not want to think about. What-ifs that mostly involved evil Fates. “Talk to Dr. Torres tomorrow, okay? Please.”

  “I will.” She swirled her fingers over his hip in slow, absent arcs. “I was going to talk to him about Shifter birth control, anyway. So we can stop using condoms.”

  A familiar tingle took hold in Gavin’s lower abs. Blood flow changed. Daisy’s sweet, feminine scent suddenly flared his need to feel and touch. But she didn’t feel well.

  “We’d have to go back into the room,” she mumbled, her voice sleepy. Her breathing had slowed again, too.

  Daisy fell asleep curled in his arms. The tension and hysterics of the past several days must have finally, completely caught up with her. Otherwise, why would she be sick?

  That had to be why.

  He wanted to lick her face. Just slobber a full lick right across her mouth.

  Gavin jolted. What the fuck? he thought. Where did that come from?

  Daisy, thankfully, did not wake up, and rolled over. She sighed once, her face in her pillow, and was back to her peaceful, if queasy, rest.

  The desire to lick her—lick her like a goddamned freak—vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

  Maybe the stress of the last week broke something in his normal head. Perhaps he should talk to the doctor tomorrow, too.

  Gavin settled down into their futon, under the flitting bats and next to the singing stream. He should pop out his aids, set them with his book and his glass of water next to his side of the bed, but something told him that for tonight, he needed to leave them in.

  Someone needed to listen for phantoms.

  Aiden Blake cuddled up against the interloper’s back. He formed himself against the boy’s body the way he once had spooned with his Daisy, and draped his arm over the boy’s ribcage.