Sold To The Dragon Princes: The Novel

by Daniella Wright

  “You’re in my house,” I pointed out, gritting my teeth. “And I think it is my business what you do while you’re here.”

  “I paid you very handsomely to stay here, Miss Truwent.”

  His use of my last name irritated me even more. He was studying me with his eyes, which were narrowed and obviously angry.

  “You did,” I said, “but I was under the impression you’d be working when I allowed you to stay here.”

  He shrugged. “I’ve paid a week. I’m staying.”

  “Fine,” I said. “But I don’t know what you’re afraid of. Seems to me like it’s pure laziness.”

  His eyes flashed hot. He stood up and approached me, then knelt down in front of my chair. It was surprising that he’d get so close. It was arousing, too, the scent of him, the look on his face, both infuriated and somehow seductive. It reminded me of how close and intertwined we’d been in my dream and I felt my face grow hot and red.

  “You don’t know anything about me,” he said through clenched teeth, his face directly in front of mine, only a few inches away. “I have done nothing wrong. I won’t be spoken to this way.”

  I held my chin up defiantly, not shying away from his face. He glanced at my lips in an almost imperceptible flick of his eyes, but I noticed. I scraped my teeth over my bottom lip and held his penetrating gaze.

  “And what are you going to do about it, Mr. Monroe?”

  “I can think of a few things,” he said, his voice low and sultry. For a moment, I forgot we were fighting. I thought about really kissing him but had never been that bold. Instead, I slapped him.

  “Don’t be forward,” I said warningly. He stood up, brushing his fingers over his red cheek. Then he grinned sardonically.

  “I’ll leave you to yourself,” he said, his voice curt. “Good day, Miss Trewent.”

  And then he swept out of the room.

  I sat for a moment, stunned at my behavior and his. I stared at the door, wondering if he would walk back through. I immediately wanted to apologize but my pride wouldn’t let me, so I left and went downstairs to find Bess in the kitchen.

  “I wanted to talk to you,” she said to me, and I took a seat at the counter.

  “We have to figure out some way to pay Lawrence,” she told me seriously. I sighed and looked down at my hands, my fingers tapping impatiently on the marble.

  “I know,” I said, then reluctantly, “I’ll have to sell my grandma’s jewelry.”

  Bess looked horrified and sympathetic.

  “No, you can’t.”

  “There’s no other choice, Bess,” I said, my eyes welling up with tears. The jewelry was the last valuable thing I had left and the only thing that remained of my grandmother, who had always been so sweet to me as a child. “We have to. But I can’t—can’t do it. Will you take them into town and sell them for me? I don’t think I could bear it.”

  Bess nodded heavily and put her hand on my shoulder as I began to cry. It was the last thing I wanted to do, selling the jewelry, but I was desperate to keep my home. There was no other way.

  Chapter 5: Laird

  I heard Naomi crying in the kitchen and was terrified that it was because of me. I felt guilty about having snapped at her, having been so harsh when all she was trying to do was help. I was too sensitive about my writing—ridiculously so, and I hoped I hadn’t hurt her on my first day staying at her place. She had been kind enough to let me hide out here and I had treated her like a rat.

  “I’ll have to sell my grandma’s jewelry,” I heard Naomi say, pressing myself to the wall to listen. I wasn’t one for eavesdropping but I had to know why she was crying. I listened as she asked Bess to take the jewels to town and sell them for her and my heart twisted in my chest. She sounded so heartbroken, so forlorn. I knew what I had to do. I made sure that Naomi wasn’t behind Bess as the woman left the room and stopped her a bit down the hallway.

  “Bess,” I said, “I heard what happened. I want to help.”

  She looked at me, her eyes studying my face. “How?”

  “I’ll buy the jewels,” I told her, pulling out my billfold. “I’ll buy them all.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “It’s going to cost you.”

  “Here,” I said, putting the money into her hand. It was more than any old jewelry was probably worth but I needed to be able to help, needed to save the jewelry that was so precious to my hostess. “Is that enough?”

  Bess counted the money and nodded, something flashing in her eyes. Amusement, maybe, some kind of mirth that I didn’t understand. It wasn’t just that she was happy with the money, it was that she was interested in me. Perhaps why I’d done it. I hadn’t thought about the why and I probably couldn’t explain it if I tried.

  “Please don’t tell her,” I asked. “I know she’s proud.”

  She nodded. “I’ll go into town anyway and pretend to sell them.”

  “Good,” I said. “Thank you, Bess.”

  She grinned at me. “No, Laird, thank you.”

  Bess missed dinner that night while she was in town. It was just Naomi and myself, sitting across from each other at the large table, occasionally making only the politest of conversation. It killed me that things were so tense between us and knew it was my fault. Despite the fact that she’d slapped me, which I perhaps deserved, I wanted to be on good terms with her.

  “Naomi,” I said, as she began to clear the table. “Please sit.”

  She shot me a look but sat down, crossing her arms over her chest. Her eyes were fixed on mine and she did not look away, even as I began to speak.

  “I’m sorry about our argument earlier,” I told her earnestly. “I shouldn’t have snapped at you.”

  She sighed. “It’s fine. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

  “You were right, though,” I said. “I should be working. I’ve had the worst writer’s block and it’s destroyed any ability I had to work.”

  “Well,” she said, biting her lip. “I’m sorry for slapping you.”

  “Are you?” I asked, my eyes drawn to her pretty pink mouth. “Some women quite enjoy that sort of thing.”

  There was a half-smile on her lips. “As do some men, I’d imagine.”

  I felt her eyes on my face and looked up to meet them. They were bright and expressive, dancing with amusement. I reached forward across the table before I knew what I was doing and pushed a strand of lovely red hair out of her face. My fingers brushed her cheek when I did so and her lips parted as she watched me, not pulling away. For a moment we stayed like that, my hand held out to her, and then she cleared her throat.

  “I might be able to help you,” she told me.

  “Oh?”

  “My granny used to tell me romantic stories about the women in my family. I know them all by heart by now. She used to sit up with me at night and talk when I couldn’t sleep. I can—I can tell you the stories, if you think it’ll help.”

  I thought about that. I didn’t know how much I liked the idea of somebody else giving me the material for my work. I had always been fiercely independent about it, locking myself away until it was done. I hardly let my editor make changes, for fear that the original intention behind the story would be gone. Still, it would mean getting to spend more time with Naomi. I had to admit that I wanted that, wanted to be near her. And I admittedly wasn’t doing very well coming up with anything on my own.

  “We can try it,” I agreed, and she lit up in front of me. My heart fluttered in my chest at the look on her face, so sweet and excited.

  “Great,” she said, then went shy. “Um, you’ll have to pay in advance for every week for the rent. I wouldn’t ask for it if—“

  “It’s fine,” I said. My family was in shipping and very wealthy, plus I had the money from my book sales. It was no problem to help her, I just didn’t want her to feel guilty about taking my money. “Please, don’t worry about it.”

  She looked satisfied and still a little shy. I wondered what she was thinking about t
he way I’d touched her. It had been deeply inappropriate, really, and yet I couldn’t seem to help myself. She hadn’t seemed to mind, either.

  “I think I’m off to bed,” she said, and I felt a little disappointed to lose her company. I nodded, though.

  “Good night, Naomi,” I told her as she stood, throwing her long hair over her shoulder.

  “Good night.” She smiled at me one last time, then turned and left me alone in the kitchen.

  Chapter 5: Naomi

  I met him the next day in the library, sitting next to him at the desk as he arranged his pen and paper. I watched him work, enjoyed seeing his process. Everything had to be lined up just so—his bottle of ink at the top right corner of the desk, the pen just near it. I was quiet as I let him get ready, waiting patiently for him to tell me to start.

  “Are you ready?” he asked, turning his head to me. He caught my eye and held it; something electric passed between us, and I couldn’t help but wonder what exactly he was asking me that I was ready for. I wasn’t ready for him, that was for sure, and yet I found myself entranced all the same.

  “I’m ready,” I told him, then started my story.

  My great-grandmother had not fallen in love immediately. In fact, she’d hated her husband with a passion when she first met him. She was a nurse; he, a doctor. She always told my granny that she found him insufferably arrogant when they’d first met, that she could hardly stand to be around him for longer than it took to fill him in on a patient’s status or have him sign a piece of paper. On her birthday, much to her surprise, he’d brought her a single red flower—a carnation, something simple that she came to love dearly through the years. That flower got them talking and soothed some of the negative tension that had been between them, but not all of it. They still didn’t get along most of the time and my great-grandmother almost considered leaving him all together and finding a new doctor to work with. Still, he brought her another flower at Christmas, then another for Valentine’s. My granny told me that her father had said he’d love my great-grandmother since the moment he met her, that if he’d come off arrogant he hadn’t meant to. Eventually, he told her of his feelings. She was so shocked she quit right away, went off to Scotland for three years. She thought about him the whole time, of his flowers and his hands, and when she went back she’d found that he was still alone, still waiting. They married the very next day and had three children together.

  It took me more than an hour to get through the details of the story. Laird listened patiently, jotting down notes and sentences as I spoke. Occasionally he would catch my eye and smile, a smile that brightened his handsome features and made him all the more appealing. Something was happening between us, something I’d never experienced before. Our mutual attraction was overwhelming and a little frightening.

  I didn’t tell him this, but I couldn’t help but to imagine the two of us woven into the stories. Like my great-grandmother, I had not liked Laird at first glance—I thought him arrogant, a lecher, a cheater like my last beau. He’d began to win me over during that first carriage ride and since then, other than our fight, I had enjoyed his company greatly.

  The days went by and turned to weeks. I told him many stories—sad ones, like that of my aunt, who lost her husband at the young age of thirty to influenza. I told him also of the happy ones, of the love-at-first-sight story between my granny and my grandfather. He would sit and write and I would talk, sitting next to him. Each time I told him a story with a happy ending, I thought of the two of us as characters. I would blush and be glad that his focus was on his paper when I imagined us making love, consummating the passion that was growing between us. For her part, Bess would encourage us to be alone. I knew she was trying to stoke the flame of our attraction and tentatively welcomed her interference. She would arrange intimate lunches or send us off on a picnic so that we could be alone as we worked on the project.

  We were having one such picnic one beautiful, sunny afternoon when he put his pen down, my story finished. There was a long quiet moment that we looked at each other, and then he reached forward and pulled my face to his, placing a soft kiss against my mouth, then another, and I parted my lips to respond to the warm, delicious taste of him. His tongue teased mine, his hands not roaming but firmly holding me close to him while he kissed me. I needed more; I was strung tight as a wire with all the tension between us and his mouth on mine had made that wire snap. More forward than I had ever been, I brought my hands to his chest and ran them over the hard lines of his muscles. He responded by deepening his kiss and gliding his hands over my neck, my back, finally my hips, which he pinned to the ground as he gently laid me down on the blanket that covered the grass.

  “Naomi,” he said softly, his lips then on my neck. He nipped at the skin there while his hands moved under my dress to gently caress the soft skin of my thighs. I thought I’d melt right then, the v between my legs growing swollen and hot.

  “I have wanted you since the moment I met you, darling,” he said, finding my lips again. “I can’t stop kissing you.”

  “You don’t have to,” I said against his mouth. He gave a low growl of desire and slipped his tongue in my mouth, fingers brushing up and down my thighs until I couldn’t take it anymore. I reached my hands under my dress and took hold of one of his, bringing it upward to place it on my mound, which was wet enough to soak through my underthings. He smiled, lips still pressed to mine, and began to stroke my slit with two of his fingers. I was panting while he petted me, arching my hips up against his hand. It was wanton and wild to be giving myself to him this way and yet I found I didn’t care, I wanted him so badly I would have done anything to become closer to him. The tension between us had been building and building for weeks and now it had burst into flames that only he could quench. His hand slid into my undergarments and touched my bare mound, teasing the opening with the tip of his finger. He pressed it into me slowly, then another, pumping them in and out while I whimpered beneath him. His thumb found the bud between my legs and he stroked that, too, pressing against it and rubbing it in slow, rich circles. I held my breath and lifted my hips against his hand, wishing as hard as I could that it was his shaft inside of me, that it was his mouth on my bud.

  He pulled his hand away just before I could come and I moaned in frustration, rubbing my thighs together to replace the sensation of his strokes. With one last nip of my bottom lip, he sat up and looked down at me with a soft smile on his face.

  “I don’t want to do this yet,” he told me. “Not out here.”

  He stroked my hair back from my face and kissed me softly once more. “I want you naked in my bed, Naomi. I want to tease you until you’re hot and wet and begging.”

  “Take me then,” I pleaded with him. “Now.”

  He shook his head and grinned that wicked grin, the one that could charm anybody and get him out of any trouble. It drove me crazy. I leaned forward to lick his lips, my tongue demanding entrance, and he allowed me in, allowed me to taste him again. My hands ran through his hair and I sat up and climbed on his lap, straddling him as best I could in my dress. I felt the hard ridge of his shaft pressing upward against my folds and wiggled my hips back and forth along his length, causing a groan of pleasure to escape his lips. I had hoped it would change his mind, that he would take me right there on the grass, but instead he stilled my hips with his hands and pushed me gently off of his lap. Then he stood, offering me a hand, and when I took it he laced our fingers as he helped me stand.

  “Better go inside now,” he said, smiling at me and gathering his things from the ground. “Bess will worry.”

  “Bess has been trying to make this happen for weeks,” I pointed out, and he laughed.

  “I thought she was up to something. You women are sly.”

  “She has my best interests at heart,” I said, standing on my toes to peck his cheek. He held my hand as we walked back to the house, our palms and fingers fitting together as perfectly as I imagined our bodies would.

/>   Bess raised her eyebrows and shot me a smile as we walked in hand-in-hand, our bodies pressed together as if we were attached at the hip.

  “Hello, Bess,” he said charmingly, flashing her one of those reckless, beguiling grins. “It seems your plotting turned out well.”

  “I knew it would,” she said, almost smugly. He laughed and squeezed my hand, brought it up to his lips to kiss my fingers. I looked at him adoringly, my eyes locked on his, and heard Bess slip quietly out of the room to give us our privacy. He took me into his arms then and kissed me like I was the air and he was a drowning man, sliding his hands up from my hips to my neck to hold me close.

  “What next?” I asked, panting from the way he was making my body feel with his simple yet tempting touches.