by Tessa Adams
Desire was a flame within her, her recent orgasm nothing more than foreplay on the way to something bigger and better. Her body was straining for it, her blood on fire as Dylan canted her hips up and brought her closer to his mouth. He nuzzled her with his lips, pulled her clit into his mouth and bit down just enough to send red-hot sensations wicking through her.
“You’re killing me!” she gasped, her hands clutching his hair as she tried to shove him away, tried to bring him closer. He’d taken her so high, she barely knew what she was doing, barely knew what she wanted.
“What do you want, Phoebe?” Dylan’s eyes swept up her body to lock with hers, even as he licked around her clit again and again.
She tried to answer, but all she could do was whimper. Her body was out of her control, aching and trembling and straining against him. Even worse, so was her mind. Her most formidable weapon had been reduced to mush, and it scared her almost as much as it aroused her.
But Dylan seemed to sense her loss of control, to revel in it, and he refused to let her go. Instead, he whispered to her—wicked, wonderful, wild things that made her temperature climb even higher.
“Come on!” she finally screamed, the muscles of her thighs burning as she thrust herself against his mouth again and again.
“Do you want to come, Phoebe?” His dark, delicious voice swept over her exposed, heated flesh, sent shivers quaking up her spine, through her womb. “Do you want me to bring you off with my mouth, nice and soft and safe?”
“Yes!”
“Or do you want my cock?” He licked her from clit to anus. “Do you want me to lift you up and shove inside you?”
“Oh, God.” It was a whimper, a plea, a cry for relief, but Dylan wasn’t ready to relinquish his power yet. He kept at her with his mouth—with his tongue and lips and crazy words—until she balanced on the edge of a precipice she’d never reached before.
“How do you like it, Phoebe?” He flexed his fingers in her ass, and electricity shot through her. “Do you like it hard or soft? Rough or sweet? Short? Or do you want it to last all day?”
She didn’t answer, and he punished her with a swift suckle on her clit, one that had sweat pouring down her, mingling with the water from the shower. But that wasn’t quite enough to take her over. “Come on, sweetheart. Tell me what you like. Tell me what you want.”
“I want you!” She screamed it, tears of frustration and pleasure and need flowing down her cheeks. “Any way, every way—it doesn’t matter. I just want you!”
Her words—so true but so embarrassing—must have been what he was waiting for. With his free hand, he squeezed her nipple between his thumb and forefinger, tugging at it until fire cascaded through her entire body. At the same time, he pulled her clit into his mouth and worked it hard. By the second flick of his tongue, she was coming. By the fourth, she was flying. And by the time he lifted her, turning her in midair so that her cheek was pressed against the cool marble of the shower stall, she was so far gone that she was nearly blind with it.
“I need to fuck you!” he growled, shoving her legs apart and sinking into her with a slow, single-minded purpose that sent her spiraling up to the stars one more time.
He was going to lose it, Dylan thought as he frantically worked himself inside Phoebe. She was so tight, so hot, and he’d pushed himself so far that there was no way he was going to make this last.
Still he tried, determined to make it good for her, determined to show her that she could trust him to pleasure her. To take care of her.
His cock dragged against her sensitive nerve endings as he worked it into her, one slow thrust at a time. Part of him wanted to press in hard, to sink himself all the way to the hilt. But she was tight after her orgasms, and making sure she felt good was more important to him than his own satisfaction.
But she didn’t want to take it slow. Reaching behind her, Phoebe sank her fingers into his ass and pulled him forward at the same time she slammed herself backward. And then he was in her all the way, his cock seated so deeply, he swore he could feel her cervix against its tip.
She gasped and he tried to pull back, to make it easier for her, but she dug in her nails, held him in place. Then started working her hips back and forth, working him until he was seeing stars and his powers were at towering heights.
As she moved, he held himself still through sheer force of will, letting her take as much or as little of him as she needed. But it was killing him, desire a broken chain within him while his powers ricocheted inside him, searching for a way out.
The dragon sensed the power—power it hadn’t felt in far too long—and screamed, wanting the pleasure that came with release of the energy. Magic spiraled inside him, driving itself higher and higher, driving him and the dragon to a fever pitch until he had to move.
“I’m sorry,” he gasped as he started to thrust into Phoebe hard.
“More.” She whimpered, her fingers clenching and flexing on his ass. “Dylan, I need—”
He slammed into her again and again, reveling in the feel of her sex squeezing him with every forward press of his hips. Moving his hands from her hips, he slipped them over her stomach to cup her breasts.
Power tingled in his fingertips and he gave in to it, released it in little electric currents that zapped her already hard nipples into a tightness that made her whimper and scream and thrash against him.
“What are you doing?” she asked, her voice shaky and suddenly unsure.
“Take it!” he groaned against her neck. “Take me.”
He moved his hand down to her clit, sent the same jolts of hot electricity through her there, too, and she screamed, her body convulsing around his. And still he wasn’t done, his hands and cock and body red-hot from the power surge her climax gave him. He poured the power into her—everywhere they touched he lit her up, until she was coming again and again, each climax leading into another, more intense one.
“Dylan!” she cried, her body strung out and spiraling beyond her control. “Help me. Dylan, please help me.”
“I’ve got you, Phoebe. I’ve got you. Let go. Let go and let it take you.”
Harnessing his magic, he channeled as much as he dared inside her, opened himself up and spilled light and flame and energy into her in a powerful orgasm of the spirit. She screamed, her body convulsing as one final orgasm claimed her. Her body milked his, and the hot, hard contractions of her pussy sent him up and over the edge with her. Pleasure more intense than any he’d ever felt before shot through him, and he emptied himself inside Phoebe in a long series of pulses that seemed to go on forever and had him gasping her name.
Around them his power bounced off the walls, off them, in a kaleidoscope of bright, ever-changing colors that burned hotter and hotter with each jerk of his body. Watching as his colors—his heat—surrounded Phoebe, he knew he’d never seen anything more beautiful in the half a millennia he’d been alive.
She was dead, Phoebe thought bemusedly as colors—sapphires and reds and deep, dark purples—whirled before her eyes. That was the only explanation. Dylan had fucked her to death, had given her so many orgasms that her heart had simply given out. The scientist in her wondered how many orgasms a woman could have before she actually expired from pure pleasure, while the woman simply reveled in the loose, well-used feel of her body.
Closing her eyes, she concentrated on getting her breath back. But every sense she had seemed so alive—as if Dylan’s lovemaking had somehow intensified everything. Her skin was incredibly sensitive, so sensitive that the rapidly cooling water beating at her shoulders and breasts almost hurt. Despite the water in her face, she could smell Dylan—as sweet and spicy as early morning in the desert. She used the last of her energy to turn her head and kiss his shoulder, letting her tongue sweep up a few drops of the water that lingered there.
“You’re going to kill me,” he groaned, stepping away from her long enough to turn off the shower and grab a couple of towels.
She felt too good to tak
e offense, even though it was obvious that he was the one who had nearly killed both of them. Holding out her arms, she let him wrap the dark emerald green towel around her, then watched with interest as he did the same to himself.
“Can you make it to the bed?” he asked.
“Of course I can.” She shot him an offended look, then headed into the bedroom. She would have landed on her ass with the first step if he hadn’t caught her and pulled her into the shelter of his body.
“Yeah, steady as a rock, you are.”
“It’s your fault.”
He grinned, brushed his mouth against her own. “That is something I will take great pleasure in being responsible for.” Then he swept her into his arms and carried her next door to the bed he’d found her in earlier that morning.
After they were settled beneath the covers, Dylan pulled Phoebe into his arms. His fingers toyed with her glorious hair, shocked at how many different colors made up the wild red curls. There were strands of flaming red, of gold, of burgundy and of a rich, true red he’d never seen before—at least on a human head.
“You spend an awful lot of time looking at my hair,” she murmured sleepily against his chest.
“It’s beautiful.”
She laughed. “My one vanity. Of course, I usually keep it up in the lab, and since I work all the time, no one ever sees it.”
“I like being one of the few who gets to see you with your hair down.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
A comfortable silence stretched between them for a while, broken only by the rustle of the covers and her sweet sighs as he stroked her back. It felt so good to lie here with her like this, a part of him never wanted to leave. They could just stay curled together forever and let the world pass them by. He was tired of trouble, tired of trying to solve problems that seemed unsolvable.
But those were things he couldn’t change—just like his position and his need for a dragon mate. He pressed a kiss to Phoebe’s forehead and briefly wished that things could be different—that the two of them really could stay together for longer than her trip to New Mexico.
Duty first. His father’s voice rang in his head. The clan comes before you. Before your happiness. Before your family. Before anything and everything. It was a lesson he’d learned too late, but he had indeed learned it. His relationship with Phoebe was just one more thing that would pay the price.
Because his thoughts were too depressing to contemplate, he asked idly, “What made you become a doctor? And a biochemist researcher at that?”
She stiffened against him, rolled over so that her back was to him. In the light of the room, without soap on them, he could see the scars more clearly than he’d been able to in the shower. There were four of them—long and jagged and still a little raised, as if she hadn’t received the proper treatment after the injury. Just the sight of them rushed fury through his body, made him livid with the desire to rip her stepfather apart with his bare hands.
Without thinking, he leaned over and kissed one of the jagged lines. She jumped as if she’d been burned.
“Don’t,” she choked out.
“They’re not your fault.”
“How do you know? They could be completely my fault.”
He kissed a second scar, then turned her to face him. “No. They’re not.” He smoothed her hair over her face. “Nothing you could do would deserve this.”
She swallowed heavily, looked away. “My stepfather was a real bastard. He was a drinker and a failure who liked to blame everyone else for the fact that he was such a loser. Mostly, he liked to blame my mom, because she was sick and couldn’t defend herself.
“He used to yell at her all the time, terrible things about how useless she was because she was sick, how she couldn’t satisfy any man, and he was an idiot for having married her. Sometimes he hit her. Sometimes he did worse. He usually hurt her when I wasn’t around, because he knew—” She stopped, took a deep breath. When she started talking again, her voice was so low, even the dragon had to strain to hear. “But sometimes he waited to start in on her until I got home, because he wanted to hurt me, too.”
Phoebe didn’t say any more, but then, she didn’t have to. He could see her—young and full of temper and strength—defending her mother from drunken rampage after drunken rampage, being injured time and again. He wanted to ask her the details, to find out just how much she’d suffered, but her face was closed off, her body stiff. So he let it go, though his dragon shifted and snarled—a demand for answers Dylan wasn’t sure either of them could handle.
Pulling her more tightly against him, he whispered, “Go to sleep, sweetheart.”
She snuggled even closer, closed her eyes and slowly, so slowly he thought he was imagining it at first, her body began to relax against him. Inch by inch, degree by degree, until her breathing was even.
Just when he was sure she was asleep, she spoke in a low, sad voice. “My mother had a radical form of lupus. She lived in really terrible pain for a long time, before the disease finally killed her. Three years later, the same disease killed my baby sister.”
He closed his eyes, hurting for the girl who had been left so totally alone in the world. At least when his family had died, he’d had his clan to rally around him—aunts and uncles and family friends who lent him more support than he deserved. She’d been on her own.
It had happened a long time ago—obviously before she’d gone to medical school. But her pain was brand-new to him. As she drifted into sleep, he held her slender, fragile body against him and cried for her when she couldn’t cry for herself.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Phoebe woke, fourteen years old and locked in a nightmare, from a sleep so deep it had felt like death itself.
He was there, his black eyes flickering with red. That meant it would be a bad one, meant her mother wouldn’t have a chance to talk him down. She ran forward, tried to put herself between the monster and her mother. But he swiped at her with a curled claw, sent her reeling, headfirst, across the cold tile into the pale yellow wall.
She was a little disoriented, a little shaky; her head had hit the wall hard. But she was conscious enough to know that he’d caught her with some of his claws—she could feel the blood dripping down her back, could feel the tattered edges of her shirt fluttering around the wounds.
The pain was excruciating, worse than anything he’d ever done to her before, and it made the climb to her feet much slower and more difficult than usual. She wanted to stay where she was, to cower in the corner and whimper, but he was making those sounds. And her mother was screaming.
She turned, wobbly on her feet and more than a little light-headed. He was on her mother, more monster than man now, and her mother was sobbing as he sank his teeth deep into her shoulder.
“Leave her alone!” She charged him, but he shrugged her off, sent her careening into the entryway wall. She slammed into the mirror and it fell to the ground, shattering. One of the pieces cut her leg as it broke.
“Don’t hurt her! Stop, please!” She screamed the words, scrambled across the floor on her hands and knees because her right leg refused to support her. He kicked out, caught her in the face hard enough to make her ears ring and the room around her go dark.
She awoke later to horrible sounds. Her mother wasn’t screaming anymore, wasn’t even crying. Instead, she was whimpering, a soft, inhuman sound that made the light dusting of hair on Phoebe’s arms stand straight up. Where was he? she wondered fuzzily. Had he had enough? Had he left? God, please let him leave before Larissa got home from school. She didn’t know what time it was, didn’t know how long before her sister’s bus stopped at the end of the block. She just prayed it was enough.
She heard a sound to her left, turned her head to investigate. Froze as she found him crouched there—half human, half beast—staring at her with feral eyes. Her mother’s blood was on his mouth, strands of her hair caught in his ferocious claws. And he was coming straight for her.
/> Her heart stuttered in her chest; her breaths came in sharp gasps. No, please, no—Then he was upon her, snatching and ripping at her new skirt. At the hot-pink panties Larissa had bought her for her birthday. The pain was overwhelming, mind-numbing, unendurable. And yet she endured, for long, horrifying minutes as he tore her apart.
Oblivion beckoned, the blackness more inviting than anything had ever been. But she forced herself to stay conscious, to persevere, terrified that if she let herself slip away, he would kill her.
As he grunted and sweated and cursed above her, she let her hands fall wide. Just a little longer, she told herself. Just a few more minutes and he’ll be—She cut her hand on something sharp. The pain barely registered, was nothing compared to the rest, but something else did. Something so insidious that she could barely form the thought.
And then she was doing it—her hand clutching at the long shard of glass as she stabbed him in the back again and again. He roared, grabbed her in his sharp, shiny teeth and started to shake her. She stabbed him again, turned the makeshift blade in a circle. Gasped as his blood flowed onto her hand.
He reared back, his eyes burning like hellfire, and she knew she was going to die. Bracing herself for the blow—
Phoebe came to in a cold sweat, shivering and shocked and more than a little shaken. She glanced around the room warily, told herself that she was okay. She was safe in Dylan’s house. He was sound asleep beside her, and everything was fine. She wasn’t back in that kitchen, wasn’t underneath her stepfather. He was dead, burning in hell for what he’d put her mother through.
Shoving off the covers, she headed for the bathroom on unsteady legs. Turned on the tap and splashed water on her face until she nearly drowned. Then gave it up and turned on the shower. She didn’t know why she bothered; she wasn’t going to feel clean until she washed. It had been a long time since she’d had the nightmare, but she still remembered that much.
She took a long shower, let the hot water wash away the remnants of the nightmare that had haunted her for nearly twenty years. By the time she stepped out again, she felt nearly human. Emotionally fragile, but human.
