Where Sleeping Dragons Lie (Skeleton Key)

by Cristina Rayne

  “Is this what you want?” he asked, his voice deepened with rising lust as he reached a hand down beneath the waistband of her breeches to her naked sex and began to lightly rub over that little button of nerves in slow circles with the roughened tips of his fingers.

  She cried out and bucked her hips. “Yes! Your mouth—please—!”

  Taron removed his hand and made short work of removing the last of her clothing. He spread her thighs wider with his hands, and she gasped as she watched him lower his head between her legs. The feeling of his hotter-than-a-human’s exhales on her moist center was indescribably erotic, making her throb more painfully with arousal until she almost couldn’t stand it.

  A cry was wrenched from her throat at the first lap of a skillful tongue, and Briana clutched at both his hair and the blankets of the bedroll as Taron teased wave after wave of pleasure from her sensitive bud until she was jerking her head wildly from side to side and screaming with it. When her orgasm came, her entire body seized with the release as pleasure like she had never experienced before flooded her entire body and made something in her mind stutter and stop. It seemed the intense spasms would go on forever as Taron continued to skillfully massage her clit with his tongue.

  “No more, no more!” Briana begged, tugging at his hair as she writhed mindlessly and tried to buck her hips against the hand Taron had pressed firmly onto her lower abdomen to keep her from doing just that.

  Either he took pity on her, or the sound of her begging shattered the last of his control because suddenly that hot, hot mouth was devouring her lips as though he was determined to suck the life out of her and his equally hot, silky-hard member was pressing insistently against her still-trembling passage.

  One hard thrust and his cock entered her all the way to the root. Her cry of pleasure/pain was swallowed greedily as her thighs gripped his hips tightly. Damn, but she nearly felt split in two! Even when he had stood naked before her after shifting outside his castle, she hadn’t given his member more than that initial glance as she had been too busy being bashful about his sudden nudity. She was suddenly grateful that she hadn’t snuck more than an accidental peek or else she would have probably been too frightened to take the whole of him.

  Taron kissed the tears beginning to leak from the corners of her eyes as instead of pounding her into the ground as she had expected, his initial thrusts were slow and shallow, allowing her to get used to his sizeable girth. Only when she was able to finally relax and take him more easily did he begin to thrust powerfully and deeply, stroking nerves deep within her that no other had ever touched until her body was once again throbbing with building pleasure.

  Briana relaxed her vise-like grip on his shoulders and slipped her fingers into his hair at the nape of his neck. She shivered when she realized that he was looking down at her with dragon eyes, his pupils thin and vertical along with irises the color of flames. It was somehow both sexy as hell and frightening at the same time.

  “Taron,” she breathed his name again, loving the way his eyes seemed to flash with an inner light whenever something she said or did elicited a strong emotion in him.

  His hips sped up, his thrusts becoming more jarring and erratic as he alternated between soft, sweet kisses that were no more than a caress of lips and a sharing of air and sucking aggressively while tangling tongues, tittering on the brink of ecstasy. Briana was close to the edge, too, her passage squeezing his cock more tightly as her body stiffened that one second before everything within her exploded for the second time with one final, heavy thrust that nearly made her black out.

  Then liquid fire abruptly flooded her passage, and Taron was biting at her neck with a groan and thrusting hard and deep once again as he climaxed. Briana clutched tightly at his shoulders and hung on for dear life.

  When Taron’s hips had finally stilled and Briana’s body had stopped shaking so badly, he let out a sigh that was equal parts satisfaction and exhaustion and rolled them until she rested heavily onto his chest. As her face pressed up against his heated skin that still smelled strongly of fresh ashes, she noticed that he was not sweating at all, the bastard.

  She had never felt this emotionally and physically wrecked after sex, and she wasn’t sure how to feel about that fact. No doubt this dragon-shifter had just ruined her for other men. Maybe that had been his intention all along, starting with that incredible kiss he had given her in the tower. Maybe he had hoped she would choose to stay with him even then. Not that she could blame her current dilemma entirely on him. After all, it did take two to tango.

  Briana closed her eyes and buried her face into his chest with a frustrated sigh. “You don’t play fair,” she muttered just a bit resentfully.

  What the hell was she supposed to do now?

  Taron planted a kiss on the top of her head.

  “No, I play for keeps.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  It wasn’t until early the next morning, bleary-eyed and watching a gloriously naked Taron hunt around the space for his discarded clothes that Briana thought about the skeleton key again and realized with a jolt of panic that she had no idea where it was at the moment. She remembered having it up until Taron had pulled her into his lap and kissed her. Had she dropped it then, or somewhere between Dagon’s cot and her bedroll?

  She sat up, blankets pooling forgotten around her waist and began looking around for her shirt. She vaguely remembered Taron tossing it aside after yanking it over her head…

  “Briana?”

  Taron had paused after pulling on his breeches, a forest-green tunic in hand, and was now staring down at her with a hint of lust as well as concern. Realizing her boobs were on full display and her nipples erect, Briana quickly covered up with a blanket and shot him a half-hearted glare.

  “Have you seen the skeleton key?” she asked. “I dropped it somewhere around here last night.”

  He raised an eyebrow, before pointing to a space over on her right, his expression suddenly opaque. “It’s right there next to your breeches.”

  She turned to look where he had pointed and sure enough, the key was lying on the rug only a few inches away from where her head had just been resting. How in the hell had it gotten there? She slowly picked it up, half-convinced that it would be freezing to the touch just as it had been after she had used it to open the door into this world, but the glass-like substance was only cool.

  A vision of the key growing legs and walking to the back of the tent in search of her while they had made love last night flashed within her mind’s eye and Briana shuddered. Just thinking about the bugged out eyes of the skull possibly watching them have sex was the stuff of nightmares.

  “This thing is really creeping me out right now.”

  “As I said last night, we can just lock it away if that’s what you truly wish,” he said carefully.

  Briana sighed and clenched her hand around it. She said nothing, unsure what she should say, or even what she wanted to say.

  A warm hand firmly lifted up her chin, making her start. She hadn’t even heard him walk over. For a dragon, he sure moved around as silently as a cat.

  Taron planted a gentle kiss on her lips that made her heart ache. “Hey, it’s all right, remember? You’ll soon learn that immortals are incredibly patient beings.”

  She flashed him a small smile. “You mean stubborn.”

  He laughed. “Yes, that, too.” He dropped her brown shirt into her lap. “Get dressed. If you’ll sit with my brother, then I’ll go see about breakfast.”

  “Let’s hope he waits to wake up until you’re back. I can imagine the fun I would have trying to explain who I am when I can’t speak your language or he, English.”

  Taron smirked. “One smell and he’ll know exactly who you are to me.”

  Briana looked up at him sharply. “On second thought, forget breakfast. I’ll go wash in the stream again, instead.”

  “You’re so adorable when you're shy,” he said fondly as he finished dressing.

&nb
sp; “I’m not shy,” she grumbled. “You just have no shame.”

  His laughter at her expense followed him out of the tent, but she really couldn’t fault him for teasing her so much when she made it so easy for him.

  After dressing, washing her face using a pitcher of water and a metal basin, and finger-combing her hair, Briana searched around the tent for something that would allow her to create a makeshift necklace to hang the key around her neck. The only think she could find was a black scrap of the same kind of linen-like material as her shirt and breeches and what she guessed was a small whittling knife. She settled down onto the stool beside Dagon’s cot and set to work cutting the cloth into a strip narrow enough to twist to somewhat resemble a cord necklace.

  By the time Taron returned with a plate full of an undeterminable type of meat and slices of a green-colored fruit, Briana had finished making her necklace and the key was currently tied to it like a charm and the necklace around her neck. The key rested against her chest, hidden beneath her shirt. Deciding that it was probably better not to ask about the meat, she accepted the food with thanks and without question.

  “He hasn’t so much as twitched the whole time I was watching him,” Briana said as they ate.

  “My father once had a Soul Sleep last a hundred and twenty years. It took him almost two days after his Dragon Flame was given back to him for him to awaken. I know it’s the human way to always be on the go, but in this matter, there really is nothing more to be done but to wait.”

  She nodded and then nearly dropped the piece of fruit she was holding when she realized that a pair of sunset-colored eyes that were not Taron’s were now staring up at her. She started to say Taron’s name, but he must have noticed that Dagon was awake at the same time because he suddenly leaned forward and begun talking to the older dragon-shifter in his language a-mile-a-minute.

  Through that whole discourse, Dagon kept looking between Taron and her with an unreadable expression, speaking only a few phrases here and there that had the intonations of questions before he finally nodded and rose from the cot into a sitting position. Briana hastily scooted her stool over so Dagon could swing his legs over the side if he so chose.

  Even though he was Taron’s brother, this was the king of the dragon-shifters. Forget not being able to talk with him, she had no idea how she was supposed to act around him. Was it rude to look him directly in the eyes? Was it all right to offer her hand to him for a shake?

  However, Dagon saved her from working herself up into an anxiety attack by nodding towards her and saying his own name followed by a few words she didn’t know. She immediately bowed her head and replied, “Briana Wright. It’s nice to meet you, too.” She then turned to Taron and added, “Can you tell him that last part for me?”

  He grinned. “Of course. I definitely need to start teaching you Draknar sooner rather than later.”

  She agreed. She was tired of feeling so awkward around everyone. The thought brought her up short. Her easy acceptance of language lessons was as though she already expected to be in this world for some time. Was it her imagination or did the skeleton key suddenly feel a little bit colder against her skin?

  Taron abruptly took her hand and urged her to stand. “Come on. Now that my brother’s awake and I’ve told him what has happened to our father, me, and this kingdom, we need to go meet with the soldiers of this camp.”

  Briana marveled at how calm and collected Dagon was after being told that his father had been assassinated and the kingdom plunged into a civil war while he had been in his Soul Sleep. She wondered how long he had meant to sleep in the first place. True that two hundred years was probably a drop in the ocean in the whole scheme of things, but two hundred years was two hundred years. A lot could happen in that time even for an immortal. In this instance, a prince had become a king in the worst possible way.

  The next few hours were a flurry of conversations and activity that Briana mostly sat clueless through as she was loathed to ask Taron anything while he was so obviously up to his eyeballs in war plans with his brother. That’s why it took her a moment to sense the rising tension in the group, but once she had, it wasn’t hard to guess its source. The more she watched Taron and Dagon speak with each other, the harder and harder their expressions became and the blanker the surrounding soldiers’ faces became until Briana started to worry that they were about to come to blows.

  Feeling useless, she could only watch silently from a stool next to Taron and hope she wasn’t going to have to get between two snarling dragon-shifters before long. Then Taron spat something that sounded like an expletive and straightened up from where he had been leaning close enough to his brother to literally butt heads.

  It seemed Dagon had won the battle, whatever that battle was. Even so, the dragon king didn’t look triumphant at all. If she had to say, Dagon just looked sad as he regarded Taron’s angry face.

  Briana hesitantly touched Taron’s hand, wanting to comfort him but not sure what was wrong, what he needed.

  Taron turned to her and shook his head. “There’s no need for you to fret,” he said quietly. “My brave but foolish brother just made a decision that I’ve been trying to save him from making.”

  Her eyes flitted over to Dagon, who was watching them out of the corner of his eye while listening to one of the ranking soldiers, and then back to Taron’s grim face. “What can I do to help?” she demanded.

  He reached over beneath the table and linked their fingers together. “Just stay by my side,” he replied gruffly. “Stay by my side while we all watch my brother challenge Jathar of the House of Blue Stone to a fight to the death.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Briana had expected the group of royal messengers Dagon had sent into the midst of the stone dragon’s blockade to parlay with the enemy to not return for at least a day. However, an hour after they had first departed, their camp looked like a colony of ants scrambling around after a firecracker had been set off among them. The enemy had accepted the dragon king’s challenge.

  One-by-one, the soldiers had shifted into their firedrake forms until a magnificent dragon army stood among the trees like a surreal fantasy painting.

  The last to shift were Taron and Dagon. From his tone as they talked animatedly, she got the sense that her lover had tried one last time to talk his stubborn brother out of the fight, to no avail. Finally, Taron just sighed and leaned over to embrace his brother fiercely before stepping away to allow Dagon to shift.

  He then walked over to Briana and reached over to tug softly at the cloth necklace around her neck. “If the worst should happen, the new king will demand my head in the name of peace. For the sake of my people, it’s something I will not attempt to avoid. I have already instructed Ylda to make certain you are given an opportunity to use this key.”

  Briana flashed him a stricken look. “This is why I hate monarchies,” she said thickly. “All these stupid rules just for the sake to retain power.”

  Taron bent down and kissed her soothingly on the forehead. “I know, but sometimes those same rules in the right hands can usher in a longstanding peace.”

  A thunderous roar sounded behind them as over a hundred red and black dragons flapped their wings and took to the sky.

  “Looks as if that’s my cue to shift.”

  Like his brother, Taron embraced her hard. However, before he released her, his lips crashed down onto her own and kissed her hard and desperate as though it would be their last.

  Briana felt as if she was tearing off a scab from a wound when he finally pulled away and she had to release his tunic from her grip. She struggled not to cry as she stepped away from him so he could shift.

  The skeleton key felt like a cold, dead weight against her chest.

  For perhaps the last time, she watched Taron transform into a magnificent firedrake. Then she stepped into his open palm as he wrapped it securely around her body and then his other cupped over her head.

  “You have to find a better way f
or a human to travel with a dragon,” Briana scolded once they were in the air and her stomach had stopped doing flip-flops.

  “You are the only human I want to soar the skies with,” came his prompt answer.

  She couldn’t help but smile. “That’s so cheesy.”

  “But no less true.”

  Within minutes, Taron had landed. Once Briana had been set down onto the ground, she saw that they were on the edge of a cliff with a clear view of a vast grassland that Taron informed her was the palace lawns. High up to the left along the face of a mountain that rose higher than the clouds, she could just make out the palace, itself, a magnificent structure carved directly out of the face of that mountain. An army of thousands of firedrakes waited in formation at the base of the mountain beneath the shadow of the palace.

  As Briana looked to the right, her mouth went dry when she saw an equally impressive army of blue stone dragons.

  “A front row seat to the fight of the century starring my older brother,” Taron growled bitterly. “We should all be so lucky.”

  She reached over and rubbed over the scales of one of his forelegs in a manner that she hoped was soothing. Could he even feel her touching his scales or were they like fingernails? So many questions she hadn’t had time to ask him about his nature. She prayed with everything in her that when this was all over, she would get that chance to ask them.

  Briana’s attention turned back to the scene unfolding far below them. She squinted as she saw one of the dragons in the front break off and fly to the center of the field.

  “That’s the bastard who started all of this,” Taron snarled, his rage almost palpable. “Jathar.”

  Almost immediately, the stone dragon formation split down the middle with military precision, and a lone firedrake flew through the opening from the back. She didn’t need to see Taron stiffen to know that the red and black dragon was Dagon.