by Jory Strong
“To be continued,” Taine said against her mouth.
“Agreed.”
He hit lights, siren and gas pedal, peeling away from the other black sedans and the Hummer.
Saffron laughed, and blushed. Every one of the IRE agents they were speeding away from had to know the reason for the hurry.
Where’s the fire? her mother used to ask on those occasions when her father was driving and passed the ten-miles-over-the-speed-limit mark. And inevitably, the two of them would exchange a glance that had their children closing their eyes and trying to scrub the notion of their parents having sex from their minds.
Saffron checked the speedometer. Taine was pushing twenty over the limit.
The siren and lights cleared the way, making it safer. But the speed kept her heart pumping fast and her anticipation building.
It was like riding in the engine, racing toward danger and action. She laughed and Taine said, “Share?”
Their eyes met and she grinned. “Just thinking, Where’s the fire?”
His gaze heated and his nostrils flared. He pressed her hand to the front of his jeans and she clamped her thighs together, savoring the burn in her sex.
“A huff and a puff and I could burn the clothes off your delectable body,” he said.
She grinned, her gaze flicking to the message on his T-shirt. “The danger of messing with dragons?”
“One of them.”
He sped up. She thought the sedan must have a lot more under the hood than what came standard.
They went airborne when he left the street and headed down the sloping, curving driveway to IRE HQ. She let out a little yelp, lifted her free hand as if she was in a roller coaster car.
They whizzed past parked sports cars and her modest red Corolla. Swung around to the back of the house and came to a fast stop.
Seemingly in a heartbeat she was out of the sedan and penned against the passenger-side door. Taine’s mouth covered hers, hot and hungry. His tongue thrust against hers, promising his cock as their pelvises ground together.
A jerk of his hands sideways and the buttons on her shirt were pinging against concrete. A sweep of those same hands and the shirt had disappeared altogether.
It wasn’t the huff and puff of threatened fire but the end result was the same. He undid her bra, tugged and it was gone.
Sunshine and air hit her skin. Her rational mind broke the surface of drowning need long enough to remember where they were and the convoy of vehicles that would soon be arriving.
“Inside,” she said on a gasp.
“Definitely,” Taine said, undoing the front of her jeans and shoving his hand into her panties. “I absolutely need to get inside you.”
Her laugh was part sob as he grazed her erect clit. She whacked him on the back. “Inside, inside.”
He thrust his fingers into her and she moaned, but managed to clarify. “The house. Inside the house.”
His lips prevented her from saying more. The pleasure delivered by his thrusting fingers submerged her in pure want. Her channel clamped, clutched at them, and she was helpless to do anything but moan and rock and fuck his fingers deeper into her body.
He tore his mouth off hers. “You’re right. We’ll be interrupted sooner if we remain out here.”
Taine swung her into his arms. “My clothes!”
“I’ll come back for them.”
He carried her into the house as if she weighed nothing. Stopped in front of a door off the hallway and set her on her feet.
Taine kicked off his shoes. Peeled off his T-shirt and dropped his jeans.
Reaching behind her he opened the door into a bathroom with a long black marble counter and a shower stall bigger than the one in his apartment. She reached down, wrapped her hand around his hard, satiny cock and led him beneath the water.
This time she was the aggressor, pressing him against slick black tile, her mouth covering his, her tongue stroking, matching the up and down movement of her hand on his shaft.
She wanted him, needed him. The desire was raw and primal and powerful, like nothing she’d ever experienced with any other man, or after engaging with any other fire.
She fisted Taine’s hair, left his mouth to kiss downward. He panted, spun them so it was her back against the shower wall.
He used his strength to lift her. “Inside,” he growled and she wrapped her legs around his waist, guided him to her opening.
He pushed into her, the muscles in his arms flexing as he held her lower body to his. His eyes burned with a fierce possessiveness that had her heart doing flips before it climbed into her throat as if it wanted to speak.
Taine claimed her mouth in a hard, demanding kiss. He thrust his tongue roughly against hers, matched it with the fast, relentless plunge of his cock, in and out, and in and out. Each thrust a claiming. Each thrust demanding her complete surrender.
She met those thrusts. Tangled her hands in his hair, tugged, but that wasn’t nearly enough of a shout of victory at having survived.
Her hands swept downward. She scraped her nails over his back as if marking him, claiming him.
His moan was part growl, a deep rumble that vibrated through her breasts so she ran her nails over his back again and again.
He slammed into her forcefully, each strike driving pleasure through her clit and into her pussy, each stroke gliding over her g-spot the way he had the night before, as if his cock and his cock alone could find that place inside her.
She reveled in it. Went up in flames because of it, even as heated water struck her skin. Welcomed the raw, hot splash of his semen inside her.
Alive. She was alive. They both were alive.
Long moments passed before their breathing returned to normal though she didn’t unlock her legs from around his waist.
Taine touched his forehead to hers. “I’ve never known fear like what I experienced when that house became fully engulfed while you were inside it. If the others hadn’t held me to the ground I would have raced in after you.”
“I’m glad they did. And that you didn’t.”
She tried for lightheartedness and failed. Her heart thundered, trying to drown out the warning bells going off in her head.
Danger! Danger!
Only the panicked feeling that accompanied the warning said it was already too late to avoid the inevitable pain that came with falling in love. It hurt to imagine him losing his life because of her. It hurt to know that he was courageous enough to care about someone whose everyday life exposed them to danger—and that she wasn’t courageous enough to expose her heart.
Yet.
But she was getting there.
She touched her mouth to his, her channel rippling and clamping on his cock. The kiss lasted forever and not nearly long enough.
He held her gaze and her heart melted at the uncertainty she saw in his eyes. Taine said, “Yesterday, when we were at The Deep, I…”
“You?”
He sighed. “It was the perfect time but I…”
Her heart spasmed painfully. “Say it. Whatever it is, just tell me. I’m a rip the bandage off kind of girl.”
“I’m a dragon. The waitress at The Deep is a siren and the bartender a merman.”
It took a heartbeat to process. And on the second heartbeat she wondered if he’d been playing around with magic so long that he thought he was a dragon.
It took several additional heartbeats to find the courage to say, “Okay, show me your dragon form. I assume you have one.”
“I do, but I can’t show it to you.”
She searched his eyes, looking for signs of crazy and finding only honesty.
How could she not believe after everything else she’d seen since being assigned to IRE and Supernatural Ops?
“Let me guess, shifting to your dragon form would blow out the bathroom walls and bring the second floor crashing down on us.”
He laughed. Gave her a hard, fast kiss and then breathed fire.
It struck her fac
e and neck and the slopes of her breasts in a hot, erotic caress.
A small, girly girl shriek escaped before she could prevent it. Holy shit! And Jesus forgive her for the blasphemy. But holy shit!
“So you weren’t joking about huffing and puffing and burning the clothes off my body.”
“Your delectable body.”
His gaze dropped to her mouth, her breasts, heated and his cock began hardening inside her.
Her channel clenched on him. The temptation was there, to abandon conversation and give in to desire, but she needed answers and real world concerns would soon intrude.
She was surprised they hadn’t already been interrupted. Time was running out. They needed to find Elon Moates and the egg.
It didn’t change her need to get her head around this. Her thoughts flashed to the night before, when they’d gotten back to her apartment, to the orgasm to beat all orgasms, the one that’d felt like it blew off the top of her head and rocketed her into a version of the snow globe on his cubicle desk.
Had she known what he was subconsciously? Seen him on an unconscious level because of her sorcerer’s blood?
She licked her lips. “So you do have a dragon form?”
“Yes.”
“Let me guess. You’re dark blue and silver.”
His gaze snapped back to her face. There was definitely a purr in his voice when he said, “Exactly right.”
She lightly slapped his muscled biceps though her chest tightened. “IRE, what does it stand for?”
“Interspecies and Realm Enforcement.”
Part of her didn’t want to know. Ignorance was bliss—until it wasn’t.
“Were you born here?”
“No.”
“You came through a portal?”
“Yes.”
“How long ago?”
“Twenty-five years.”
It felt as if her lungs had diminished in their capacity to hold oxygen. “As a child?”
“No. As an adult.”
He looked twenty-nine, early thirties at the most. “How old are you?”
“A hundred and fifty as measured in this realm.”
Falling for him had to be karmic payback for all the times she’d cut and run as soon as a guy started feeling something for her.
This was crash and burn territory. She’d get old and he’d keep being mouth-watering, panty-drenching gorgeous. Making the real question: Would the highs of being involved with him be worth the lows that were guaranteed to follow.
She’d have to get back to herself on that one.
Dredging up a smile, she found some humor. “Wonder if my friend Analia has some kind of second sight. Right after I got the call from Animal Control about Emerald, she picked up a little dragon statue and told me that if I wanted something scaly in my life, I should hook up with a dragon shapeshifter. Of course, I didn’t believe such a thing existed at the time.”
“Now you do.” Taine gave her a quick kiss. “You might want to rethink the name Emerald. Your pet is a he.”
“You can tell?” she teased. “One lizard knows another lizard? That kind of thing?”
“You’re lucky I’m a tolerant kind of dragon male.”
His mouth came down hard on hers though a moment later he growled at the pounding on the door.
It opened and Crew stuck his head into the bathroom.
Saffron’s face flamed. He couldn’t see much of her. But her legs wrapped around Taine’s waist left no doubt as to where Taine’s cock was.
“Maksim says: Enough fucking around. Time to get your asses to the meeting room.”
There was no choice but to put personal concerns aside. Glad for the change of clothes Taine retrieved from the sedan, and with her thoughts and emotions under control, Saffron joined the others at a round table in a meeting room.
Sitting to the right of Crew was another specimen of mouth-watering gorgeousness. He had reddish-brown hair, a short beard, and a piercing stare.
“This is Kellen,” Maksim said.
“Your dog,” she blurted, having apparently left her mouth filter in the shower.
Sensuous lips kicked up rather than turning sulky and pouty. Kellen said, “I’m actually my own hound.”
Maksim shot a questioning look at Taine, then indicated the small, rigid man at his right. “I’m not sure you’ve been officially introduced. This is Anders. He’s responsible for evidence and artifact collection and transport. “
Anders wore the same censorious expression as he had the first time she’d seen him, when Taine had said, The guy is a total gnome.
She’d taken it figuratively then. She took it literally now.
“That charm should be turned over for safekeeping,” Anders said in a voice that straddled whiney and sanctimonious, which wasn’t an easy feat.
“You’ll get the charm in due course,” Maksim said.
Saffron opened her mouth to contradict him but Taine beat her to it. “We promised the sorcerer’s sister that it would be returned.”
“Then we’ll honor that promise.” Maksim looked at Saffron. “We’re running out of time to stop whatever Elon Moates has planned. What did you see? What happened when you were in the house?”
Her heart jumped its way into her throat and her skin instantly slicked with sweat. For a beat she was standing inside an inferno, protected from it by a thin bubble of magic.
Magic. She hadn’t had time to process the reality of what had happened in the sorcerer’s house before Taine had laid something harder to deal with on her.
Her heart fluttered. He was one-hundred-and-fifty and looked thirty-two at the most. She would grow old, would die in fewer years than he’d already lived.
Taine’s hand tightened on hers beneath the table, returning her to the moment. What had she seen? Nothing useful.
“He had an office. The shelves were lined with books. There were blueprint-like rolls, easily three or four dozen of them in a holder next to his desk. I should have gone for the less obvious—”
“No,” Kristof said. “Learning what kind of spells he’s working with or capable of casting trumps when it comes to knowledge. Did you see anything? A symbol of any kind?”
“Nothing. As soon as I touched one of the rolls, they all went up in flames.” She shuddered. “It was like lighting a half-dozen fuses. The fire spread in ways fire doesn’t spread and all at once the entire house was engulfed.”
“Booby-trapped,” Kristof said.
Maksim nodded. “Not all that surprising. And symbolic whether he intended it to be or not. The egg is a massive bomb in this world.”
Saffron rubbed a damp palm against her jeans. “But it can be sent back, right?”
“We’d have to get it to ground zero,” Gaige said. “And there’d have to be enough time to create a portal. That’s not a simple magical working.”
“Containment might be the more viable option,” Maksim said, turning his attention to Crew and Gaige. “What’d you learn from Elon Moates’s father?”
Crew sighed. “Nothing useful. He absolutely believes that Elon doesn’t intend to burn San Diego to the ground. I’m not sure he’s convinced his son has the juice to pull an unhatched phoenix into this realm, but he was convincing when he said that if what we say is true, then Elon would use the power its birth will generate to fuel some other spell.”
Maksim drummed his fingers against the table. “Kristof, chances of success when it comes to containment?”
“Depends on how much time we have and how good the containment spell he’ll have in place is. If we had twenty-four hours to layer a spell over his, then deal with the aftereffects of his magical working, I’d say we could keep San Diego from turning into ash and rubble. The odds of success go down drastically the closer we get to the egg hatching. And that assumes he’s got decent shielding in place.”
“Considering the fire at Cleveland National Forest,” Gaige said, “I don’t think we can assume he’s got the situation fully under control. I
t might already be a given that some part of this city is going to burn.”
Kristof gave a slight nod. Crew said, “It’s also entirely possible that the end result of his spell could be equally devastating to the city.”
Maksim’s expression became more grim. “True. There are realms touching this one where portals are being prevented from opening with good reason. We may not have any choice but to allow the spell working to happen then handle the consequences.”
“There’s a third option for dealing with the egg if we can find it before it hatches, a combination of the other two,” Kristof said.
Maksim’s gaze slid from Kristof to Saffron, then back to Kristof. “It might come to that if there isn’t time to get the egg back to ground zero.”
Saffron chilled. “Come to what?”
“No,” Taine said, his hand tightening on hers and his voice hard-edged with the promise of violence.
“Come to what?” Saffron repeated.
Chapter 13
Kristof turned toward Saffron and met her eyes. “Those of us with sorcerer’s blood can become portals for sentient magic.”
“Like a soldier falling onto a live grenade,” she said, shivering, remembering Juan Ramirez, one of the men in her father’s unit. He’d done that, sacrificed himself for others on his second Middle East deployment.
Kristof nodded. “It can be like throwing yourself onto a live grenade. Or it can be something simpler, like drawing blood with a knife that belongs in a different realm and wants to return home.”
Saffron was pretty sure that with the phoenix egg, it wouldn’t be that easy. She balled her free hand beneath the table rather than reach up and grasp the charm that would probably allow her to get close to the egg. “Is being a portal for sentient magic survivable?”
Kristof’s eyes said probably not in this case. His mouth, said, “Every situation is different. You don’t know until you know.”
But the real question was: Would she have the courage to do what needed to be done if the time came?
She wanted to believe the answer was yes. But then everyone wanted to believe that they would act heroically. And in the moment of their testing, plenty of people discovered that they lacked courage, that they couldn’t sacrifice themselves, that in their moment of truth they froze or fled instead of fought.
