by Kim Harrison
“I was young,” he began. “Young and arrogant and foolish. I was the firstborn son of the great Laird MacKay, and I thought I had the right.” How wrong he had been. But then, with age came wisdom, and though his physical body showed no signs of the span of his life, he certainly had the years to claim great insight.
The wild yearning humming in his veins slowed to a low simmer as he spoke, and he expected the second, less pleasant memory he was being forced to recall to begin a sour roil in his gut and burn his tongue like acid. But a hundred years had apparently dulled the pain and degradation of that moment, for he felt himself relating the story as though it was just that—a story, an unfortunate incident that had occurred to someone else.
“It was a harsh winter that year, with little food to be found, and when I discovered a band of gypsies…” he cocked his head and met her eye, “your ancestors, I presume…hunting on my family’s land, I tried to drive them off. One of the old women—your great-grandmother—was not impressed by my grandiose behavior or my threat to remove them bodily if they refused to leave of their own free will. She cursed me. Threw a bottle of some thick, amber liquid at my chest, which she claimed were dragon’s tears. It soaked immediately through my clothes and onto my skin, not burning, but tingling. I could feel it seeping into my pores, spreading through my body.
“That was when she began to chant. A language I couldn’t comprehend at first, followed by one that I could. She told me I would be forever hunted, trapped in a form between man and beast, the bodies of man and dragon becoming one until I learned the gifts of kindness and generosity, of putting others’ needs before my own.
“Almost immediately, I began to change. I grew hot, nearly unbearably so. My flesh, my blood…I could barely breathe from the heat and the pain, but when I did, those breaths hissed with smoke and sometimes fire. I could feel my eyes changing. To this,” he said, waving a hand in front of his face to encompass what he knew Laura saw when she looked at him.
“At some point, I lost consciousness. When I woke, the gypsies were gone, as though they’d never been there to begin with. I staggered home, thinking I’d imagined the whole thing, or perhaps that whatever the old crone had thrown at me had caused me to hallucinate. It wasn’t until I arrived back at the keep—not this one, but one built later, where my family resided—that I came to understand it was all too real. By then, the scales had broken out to cover most of my body. As soon as the villagers and my family saw me, they began to scream, and cast me out for the demon I had become.”
Story told, he fell silent, and for a moment, Laura remained so, too. Then her brow puckered and with censure clear in her tone, she said, “Your own family did that to you? Couldn’t they understand? Didn’t they at least want to know what had happened to you?”
He shook his head, once again stunned by her quick acceptance of both him and his accounting of past events, as well as the fact that she instantly jumped to the defense of the youth he’d once been.
“It was a different time. Things that today would be considered merely unfortunate were then thought to be the work of the devil. They ran me off with curses and prayers in the middle of the night. I came to this keep, which had been empty many years by then, to hide, and have been here ever since.”
“Still…”
Laura didn’t know what else to say after that, so she let her words trail off, her mind racing with the comparisons between her great-grandmother’s version of the incident with Dougal MacKay and what he had just told her.
She’d listened to Dougal’s deep, Scottish brogue with keen interest and more than a modicum of exhilaration, not doubting his claims for a second. Any other sane person might have, but she knew better. Though his tale had been flavored by his personal viewpoint, the details were too close to what she already knew of the legend not to believe and know that what she’d heard all of her life had really happened. That this man, cursed to life in the skin of a beast, really existed.
There was no denying that the markings on his body and the vertical slits of his eyes made him look like a dragon, which had been one of the hardest parts of her great-grandmother’s story to believe. But if that could be true, then everything else could be, too.
“Can I see?” she asked, slowly climbing to her feet and drawing him up with her. Her palms gently explored every inch of bare skin she could find.
She found him fascinating, and handsome beyond belief. It didn’t help, either, that she remembered every touch, every kiss, every moan and thrust from the many erotic dreams he’d starred in while she slept.
Dougal didn’t move, didn’t tell her she could or couldn’t look her fill, so she continued to explore, loosening the ties at the front of his shirt.
Everywhere she glanced, there were scales. The flickering, orange-ish glow of the candle still burning in the middle of the room actually accentuated the colors, making the pale greens, blues, pinks, lavenders, and yellows glitter and glow. It was like staring into a bowl of precious gems or standing directly before a disco ball.
Wanting to see it all, she slipped her hands beneath the bottom hem of his shirt and peeled it slowly upwards. He raised his arms without prompting, letting her lift it up and over his head.
She bit back a gasp at the sight of him. He was glorious, a true masterpiece. And it was only moderately due to the dragonlike markings lining his chest and abdomen, wrapping around his waist to his back, spreading down beneath the waistband of his pants.
They were beautiful and fascinating, no doubt, but his body would have been a work of art even without them. He was sculpted and firm, each muscle smooth and well defined. He was the epitome of manliness, every woman’s fantasy.
Her fantasy come to life.
Her hands trailed along his washboard abdomen, around his waist to his back, where the same rough texture of scales covered the skin there, as well. She let her fingertips drop lower, just inside the top of his pants.
His stomach muscles tightened as he inhaled sharply, and a thrill rolled through her own belly. She was being exceptionally bold, not at all like her usual self, but she simply didn’t care.
She knew what she wanted…Dougal, again, just like last night.
“Laura…” His voice was a harsh whisper of sound through clenched teeth.
His hand clamped on her wrist, keeping her from dipping any lower, but she flexed her fingers, tugging against his hold in an attempt to delve deeper beneath his waistband.
“Laura,” he growled again. “Don’t. You don’t know how long it’s been…how much I want…”
His words trailed off as excitement skated through her veins. If he’d been hiding from humanity for a hundred years, then it was a pretty good guess that he hadn’t had sex in that long, either. The thought of being the first woman he’d touched in a century turned her wet in an instant and made her ache.
He let her have her hand, and she immediately moved it to the clasp at the front of his pants.
“I do know,” she told him softly. “And I want, too.”
If she thought there would be any gentleness in a man who’d been celibate for a century, she was dead wrong. The minute she spoke and he realized she wouldn’t try to stop him, he caught her under the arms and backed her against the nearest wall.
She gave a yelp of surprise, her fingers slipping from the front of his trousers. But it didn’t matter. Holding her to the wall with his body, he reached between them to wrench open her own jeans and strip them down her legs.
In one swift motion, he had the pants, her underwear, and her boots completely off, leaving them in a pile on the ground. Then he moved back to his own zipper, shoving his pants down just enough to free his rigid erection.
She watched his every motion with a sense of awe and anticipation. Inside the cups of her bra, her nipples puckered painfully, and she licked her lips, eager for what was to come.
Rising out of a nest of tight black curls, his arousal was long and thick and covered with the same pat
tern of scales as the rest of his body. She didn’t think she’d ever seen a man this hard, this enflamed, with each ridge and vein of his straining erection standing out in stark relief.
She reached for him, wanting to feel that heat and sturdiness, but he slapped her hand away. With any other man, she might have taken exception to that and walked away, but not with him, not during this particular encounter.
His hands clamped on her ass, lifting her off her feet while he pried her legs apart with one knee. She knew what he wanted. She wanted it, too.
Wrapping her arms around his neck, she crawled up the back of his calves and thighs until she was at just the right height for his entry. Ankles locked behind his back, breasts rubbing his chest through the thin cotton of her top, she held on tight and bit her bottom lip as he plunged inside, filling her to the hilt.
He started to thrust—no preliminaries, no tenderness, just pounding into her again and again. Her breath was coming in pants, her nails raking his sweaty back and scraping at the rows of scales there.
She moaned his name, arching even closer, her inner muscles squeezing and milking him, begging him to come. Instead, he stopped. His chest was heaving, his breaths blowing in and out in huffs of exertion.
Her own breathing was none too steady. “What’s wrong?” she gasped out. “Why did you stop?”
He leaned forward, resting his brow on hers. “You made a noise. I didn’t want to hurt you.”
She tried to laugh, but it came out as nothing more than a strangled, oxygen-deprived wheeze. “You weren’t hurting me,” she told him without a hint of hesitation. Her fingers tunneled through his hair, clutching the back of his head as she gave a demanding little tug. “If you hurt me, I’ll yell ‘ouch,’ otherwise, keep doing what you were doing.”
One dark brow winged upwards. “You’re sure? You want me to…”
“Yes,” she stressed, tightening her grip on his hair. “Fuck me, please.”
It took a second for her words to sink in, but only a second. In the next instant, his eyes turned stormy and narrowed with erotic intent. Then his mouth swooped in to cover hers in a kiss so hot, it nearly singed her eyelashes.
His grip tightened on her butt and he was moving again, banging into her like he was drilling a hole through the stone wall at her back. She loved it, every pump, every flex, every grind. She thrust back, angling her hips and meeting him halfway.
Sliding his hands from the globes of her bottom, he let them skim her hips, her waist, up under the material of her fitted tee to her chest. His palms were rough and callused, heightening the sensations of his touch as he pushed her bra up and out of the way so he could cup her breasts.
He kneaded the soft mounds, pinching the nipples and scraping them with the side of his thumb and tip of his nail. The action sent rockets of ecstasy into every cell of her being. And where they were joined, each time he filled her, he hit her clitoris, making the sensations even stronger.
Pulling her mouth from his, she made sounds she’d never heard come from her own lips before, and she even thought she might have exhaled a puff of smoke, testament to the heat that pulsed through Dougal’s entire system.
The muscles of her throat tightened as she threw her head back, cracking her skull into the stones at her back. She barely felt the sting, focused instead on the excruciating pleasure building in her veins, in her belly, deep in the engorged tissues of her feminine channel.
Her nails dug into the meat of his shoulders as his thrusts gained even more speed. “Yes,” she groaned, spurring him on, wanting more, harder, deeper. Everything now, now, now.
He gripped her buttocks again, yanking her forward and back as he gritted words through his teeth in a language she didn’t understand. And then she broke apart, coming hard enough to shake her to the core and make her scream.
Beneath her, Dougal pounded into her twice more before stiffening with a shout of completion and pouring his essence into her. She felt every burst, every tremor, the walls of her sex rippling with a second orgasm as it tried to suck up every drop.
For long minutes, they stayed as they were, propped against the wall like two marble statues. Struggling for breath, lacking the strength or energy to move so much as an inch.
When Dougal finally recovered enough to lift his head from the crook of her shoulder, it was to center his glowing, serpentine gaze directly on her face.
“Thank you,” he whispered, and then he kissed her, a light, almost reverent brush of lips on lips.
CHAPTER 4
THEY ENDED UP COMPLETELY NAKED ON THE PILE of blankets in the corner through the rest of that day and into the next. Between bouts of incredible, combustible, mouthwatering sex, Dougal told Laura more about his life since being cursed…How he’d survived, how he’d remained hidden from the world for so long, how he’d tried in as many ways as he could think of to do selfless deeds and remove the magical enchantment her great-grandmother had forced upon him.
She found him fascinating. His struggle and subsistence; how intelligent he had to be to have remained invisible, yet find everything he needed, such as food and clothing.
And she told him a little of her life, of her family, of the dreams and compulsions that had brought her here to find him. To her amazement, he didn’t hold her great-grandmother’s actions against her or carry any animosity toward her family. He had, it seemed, learned his lesson about messing with gypsies.
At his request, she explained some of the details of the modern world, things he’d never had the opportunity to see or experience. She wanted to take him out and show him everything, introduce him to society and help him acclimate back into a normal existence. Not to mention find a way to help him remove her great-grandmother’s curse.
Though he held no grudge against her for her ancestor’s actions, she felt the guilt of it all the same. Yes, he’d been cruel to her people when they’d been desperate and starving, just trying to survive. But that had been more than a hundred years ago, and she thought that whatever his crime, he’d certainly paid enough of a price for it by now.
And if his version of events was accurate, they knew the key to removing the spell and returning him to his regular appearance—an act of selflessness, or becoming a more understanding, generous person. She wasn’t sure exactly how to achieve that, but certainly there were things they could try.
Dougal, however, didn’t seem nearly as interested in the idea of venturing out into the world as she’d hoped, and she supposed she understood why. The last time he’d revealed his markings to someone other than herself, he’d been threatened and ostracized.
She didn’t want to believe the same thing would happen to him in this day and age, but she couldn’t be certain. And it was possible that even if he weren’t reviled for his affliction, he might be enough of an oddity for scientists and the media to turn his life into a nightmare of flashbulbs and needle pricks.
So maybe he was right. Maybe it was better that he stay here, at least for now. They could discuss other options later.
At the moment, his attention was focused on more important things, anyway…like making love to her as frequently and creatively as possible.
She’d had her share of lovers in the past, and would have thought that a few of those encounters qualified as being quite risqué. Now she realized that for all her experiences, before meeting Dougal, she might as well have been a nun.
He did things to her body that made her eyes roll back in her head, took her to heights she hadn’t known existed, took her in ways she hadn’t thought possible.
After reviving enough from their energetic bout against the wall to go at it again, he’d turned her over onto her hands and knees and taken her from behind until she was panting for release. He’d sunk between her legs and consumed her like a man dying of thirst who’d finally found an oasis. And when she recovered, she was only too happy to return the favor.
As much as she’d enjoyed every touch of his hands and mouth and body, and every ear
th-shattering orgasm he’d wrung from her, she thought she enjoyed having him in her mouth even more. She liked his taste and smell, the unique texture of his long, hot arousal against her tongue. She liked leaning over him, being able to explore his body with her hands while she watched his face contort with pleasure.
Her hands smoothed over his flat abdomen, narrow hips, and muscled thighs, slipping between to toy with the soft, twin globes of his testicles. The extra caress drove him crazy, causing his hips to cant off the floor in an effort to get deeper, closer to the pleasure she was bringing him.
Hiding a grin, she licked the plum-shaped tip like a lollipop, around and around in one direction, then back around and around in the other. His moans grew lower and more frequent, the thrust of his pelvis more powerful. And she moved with him, rolling, riding, never letting her concentration waver until she’d brought him off as thoroughly and violently as possible.
Crawling back up the length of his amazing body, she smiled and kissed his cheek before nestling close to his side. He tucked his arm around her, using his other hand to brush a stray strand of hair away from her face.
“Mo gaol,” he murmured, pressing his lips to her forehead.
“What language is that?” she asked. The tips of her fingers drifted through the light sprinkling of hair covering his chest, circling his nipples and counting the lines of his rib cage while she rested her head on his shoulder. “You’ve used it before, but it’s not one I recognize. Is it Scottish?”
“Aye,” he answered in a low voice, his brogue slightly more pronounced than usual. “Scottish Gaelic. It’s what my family spoke most often when I was growing up.”
“And what does that mean—what you just said?”
He hesitated a moment, and she felt him tense beneath her. She was about to lift her head and look at him, to find out what the problem was, when he answered.
“My love,” he told her, tone rough with emotion. “Mo gaol means my love.”
A wide grin spread across her face while a blossom of happiness she’d never felt before unfurled in her chest. At any other time, with any other man, it might feel as though things were happening too fast. But here, now, she knew it was absolutely right. Thanks to the stories she’d heard about Dougal since childhood and the dreams she’d been having about him on a regular basis since adulthood, she felt as though she’d known him forever.
