by A. C. Arthur
When her body trembled with need, and his dick jutted hard and long from his body with eagerness, he pulled his mouth away from her, rising over her to stare down at her wanting and waiting. Wrapping his fingers around his dick, he felt the tip covered in pre-cum as he stared down at her glossy wet center. The primal growl that ripped free from his chest to his throat echoed throughout the mountain.
Behind his closed lids, he saw his beast flying through the sky in one eye and her soul identity smiling back at him in the other. Opening his eyes quickly, Theo pulled his hand away and thrust deep inside of her. The growl came again, and this time mingled with her moans and whispers of his name.
He moved in and out of her quickly, pounding into her while she lifted her hips to meet his every stroke. The urgency was speared by something unfamiliar to him, a quest, a deep-seated hunger that was finally, uncontrollably breaking free. He was there and then he wasn’t. The pleasure of her honey-coated walls gripping him tightly, sucking him in deeper, combined with the sound of her voice, calling to him, welcoming him, was too much. It lifted him, carrying him to unchartered territory, but he continued to pump, to dive in, knowing full well what the outcome would be.
“Hot little warrior,” he whispered. “That’s exactly what you are. My hot little warrior.”
She slipped a hand between her legs so that she was rubbing her clit while he thrust into her, and he couldn’t tear his gaze away from that erotically delicious sight. His dick was harder than ever before, pushing deeper inside of her until she bucked beneath him, screaming with her release. But even as she shattered around him, he couldn’t stop thrusting into her. Her fingers tensed, still pressed to her clit, and he clenched his teeth, biting down on another growl that threatened to tear him apart. He watched his length sink into her body, going so deep it looked like they were conjoined, then pulling out, covered with her release. And in seconds that growl ripped free, his release tearing from him with a forceful jerk of his body and a final surrender of his soul.
Chapter Sixteen
It was morning. She couldn’t see the sunlight or smell the fresh morning dew on the air, but Shola knew that morning had come. It awakened her with a start and trepidation burned deep in her stomach.
She eased away from the comfort of the blankets and the warmth of lying so close to Theo. Once she stood and gathered the dress and shoes she’d worn last night, she glanced back at him. The man who had become her lover and the dragon who would be her protector.
Last night had been fun, a memory she would carry with her for however long her life continued. But today was a new day, and her destiny still awaited.
There was a bathroom a few feet away from this chamber and around another wall. She found it and dropped her dress and shoes to the floor before climbing into the open shower. Pewter fixtures extended from the jagged stone walls. She turned one handle and waited for warm water to spray from the nozzle above. Turning her back to the water, she tilted her head and closed her eyes as the water drenched her face and hair. She had just lifted her hands to her hair so she could make sure water seeped through its thickness when heat so intense it felt like her body were actually on fire rose from her toes to the tip of her nose. Hands at her waist soothed the ache in her skin that had begun to form and her eyes snapped open. “What are you doing?”
“Taking a shower.” He dropped a kiss on her shoulder. “With you.”
She opened her mouth to say something else along the lines of a protest but he reached around her, grabbing one of two bottles from the shelf and poured the pale blue liquid into the palm of his hands.
“For years, I’ve used only two types of soap.”
Shola wanted to say something, but she wanted whatever she said to make sense, and right now she wasn’t sure that would be the case. Having sex with him was one thing, but this, it was intimate on a level she hadn’t anticipated, nor did she understand.
“One is a normal man’s soap that Bleu routinely puts on the shopping list and is eventually delivered to the Towers before being driven out here.”
There were loofah sponges attached to sticks hanging from a notch in the wall, but he ran water into his soap-filled palm and then rubbed his hands together, building a strong lather.
“But this one,” he said, bringing his soapy hands past her face before touching them to her shoulders. “It reminds me of you. I haven’t used it much, and I bought it on impulse months ago, but when I first came here last night I thought of it and of you.”
She could not help but inhale the scent—fresh rain, or a waterfall, clean and pure. She liked it and the feel of his hands smoothing the scented lather over her skin. He massaged each shoulder, letting his hands glide up to her neck, then down until he gripped her breasts.
“I am not used to this,” she admitted when his fingers moved down farther to spread more soap over her torso.
He caught her gaze and held it for what seemed like forever, but in reality was just a few seconds.
“Neither am I,” he told her finally. “It’s just soap; that’s what I said last night when I came in search of the scent. It’s how I knew you were at the Towers last night. One minute I was seething with anger, and the next I was smelling you.”
It sounded odd, and if it were under any other circumstance she may have taken offense, but when he reached for the bottle and poured more soap into his hands, she found herself enticed.
“I do not...cannot—” The right words would not come.
“It’s a shower,” he said as if he knew exactly what she had failed to say. “And afterward, we’ll return to the Office and go about our day. You’re unsure, and so am I. But I don’t want to deal with any of that right now. I only want to be here in this moment.”
He talked while his hands slipped farther down her torso to glide right past her navel and slip between her legs. She almost stumbled at the instant jab of desire and slapped her palms on his bare chest to remain steady. His muscles bunched and tensed beneath her hands and he continued to move his hands between her legs, dragging soap along her lips and inner thighs. She kept her hands on him while he moved methodically soaping every part of her body.
When he pushed her beneath the spray, she sighed when the water pulsed over her skin.
“Feel better?” he whispered against her ear.
“Yes.” It was the truth and when she felt his fingers in her hair next, she shook her head. “You cannot. I need—”
“Shampoo with conditioner,” he finished for her. “I have some. Though it’s not for women, it’ll still do the trick.”
She knew he had the shampoo because she’d seen it when she came into the bathroom after the last time they had sex. And he was right, it was not her normal product, but after all the things that had happened last night, she wanted to feel the water all over this morning, needed to replenish herself from head to toe.
“I can do it.”
He pushed away her hands the moment she raised them to her head. “I know you can, but I want to. I want to help relax you.”
Oh he had done that very well several times throughout the night. That was her body speaking; her mind and spirit were still thoroughly confused and out of sync.
He didn’t wait for her to respond but took the bottle of shampoo from another shelf and poured some into his hand. If her mind and spirit were not on board with him washing her hair a few moments ago, they were singing a different tune the minute his fingers began scraping along her scalp. Not too fast and not too slow, he raked her scalp, blending that action with soaping all of her hair.
“How many times have you done this before?” To other women? That echoed in her mind, but she figured he knew what she was asking.
“Never.”
When she didn’t respond, he turned her to face him and she fought to keep her gaze on his face and not lowered to his chest or abs or other places.
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nbsp; “I’m not in the habit of lying to women, or anyone else for that matter. If you ask me a question and I answer it, you can take it as the truth.”
“I believe you.” But she didn’t know how to react to the knowledge that she was the first to be in this position with him.
“Good, now let me finish before I mess this up.”
Shola smiled because there was nothing he could do to mess up this moment for her—the moment she first yearned for something more from her life than what was her destiny.
* * *
Warrick stepped out of the shower and grabbed a thick burgundy towel. He wrapped it around the lower half of his body and walked into his bedroom.
Enes was sitting in the chair across from his bed. She was one of his favorites with her short-cropped platinum blond hair and hazel-and-yellow-tinted eyes against a copper-toned complexion. That’s why he’d elevated her to general manager at Twilight, the most popular club in Burgess.
“We didn’t have a meeting scheduled,” he said after walking past her and going straight into his closet.
On the left were suits, arranged in order by color, jackets on the top bar, pants on the bottom. Straight to the back of the closet were shirts, again arranged by color. Ties had two specially made racks, and shoes took up one full wall.
Seven minutes after going in, Warrick came out with an outfit for the night and dropped the towel to the floor. She watched him, like always, admitting that she probably knew his body better than he knew it himself, an intriguing thought, if she were his type.
“They want the money now. We have it. We should—”
His cutting glare stopped her next words. She swallowed, the sound loud in the otherwise quiet room. He stepped into his boxer briefs and sat on the edge of the bed to pull on his socks. The pants came next, and then he stood, grabbed the shirt and pushed his arms into the sleeves.
“You’ve been distracted,” she continued. “It’s understandable with the wed...ah, ceremony coming up. But business goes on. Enforcers have been all over the place, so attendance at the club’s been down.”
“Increased enforcer presence can be laid at your feet.” As a rule he didn’t believe yelling was always necessary to get his point across—no matter how irritated he might be with someone.
“You told me to take care of her.”
“Taking care of her meant changing her so that she’d become one of us and thus keep our secret. It didn’t mean killing her and leaving her body in the hotel room still dressed in her uniform from the club.”
The entire hotel incident still bothered him days later. Enes had been told to take care of Grace, a server from the club, who had showed up at the hotel room where he’d been scheduled to meet someone else. The mistaken identity hadn’t been caught until it was too late—after he’d fucked and bit her. He’d called Enes to handle the situation, and Enes had killed the girl. Hoan thought it was messy and irresponsible. Warrick agreed but didn’t give a damn what that demonic thought. He was more concerned with the fact that his orders hadn’t been followed and had been contemplating how to deal with the situation.
“You initiated the exposure.” Defiance and disdain were clear in her tone.
His fingers froze over the first cufflink on his shirt. “Excuse me?”
Enes leaned forward, resting her elbows on her thighs and looked up at him, eyes glittering gold.
“You showed Grace who you were. She came to deliver the food you’d requested. And you knew she wanted to be with you. You’d known that for months and yet you’d never told her that wasn’t a possibility. What happened that you ended up revealing yourself to her?”
He wasn’t used to being questioned, especially not by his children, so he grit his teeth and let his next words marinate while finishing with the first cufflink and moving on to the next.
“You shouldn’t have killed her,” he continued in a slow, but nonetheless deadly tone. “And don’t think I’ve forgotten that you need to be punished for that deed.”
She popped up out of the chair like something had burned her, crossing over until she was standing directly in front of him.
“Punish me for doing what we started? I’m the only one with my head still in this game. If you could keep your dick out of every human that breathes in your direction, we wouldn’t be in this predicament!”
Her eyes were full vampire, teeth bared, hands fisted at her sides. He could smell the arousal that coated her folds. Moving faster than even she could, he cupped her mound through the thin pants she wore, and her thighs trembled.
“You work for me,” he said through clenched teeth. “Who I fuck is none of your concern.”
Desire flickered in her eyes but she didn’t flinch. “Until you need me to kill for you.”
Warrick raged on the inside. He could have thrown her out the window at that moment, snapped her neck or ripped her throat out the way she’d done Grace. But he didn’t because Enes was his child, just like any other that he turned, so there was always going to be a bond between them. Which was one of the reasons Warrick had cut back on whom he decided to drink from, in Burgess at least. There were a few in his higher command that he assigned the task of recruiting now. Enes was one of them. Yet, she still wanted more.
In that regard, Warrick had nothing to give her, and she was too valuable to him to be killed.
“Don’t forget you are here because of me. Ever!” He stared at her intentionally hard so that not only were his eyes more golden than hers, but actual sparks of blood appeared in his irises. It was a sign of supreme power, one meant to send a vampire to its knees in front of its superior.
But Enes wasn’t like other vampires. While she did look away from him, she didn’t move. Warrick believed it was because she liked his hands on her, no matter the form. With that in mind, he pulled away from her and she stumbled back onto the bed. He grabbed his belt and finished dressing.
“I’m through being diplomatic,” he began after he’d stepped into his shoes and bent over to tie them. “Now that we have the attention of the enforcers, let’s make them earn their pay.”
“We must make our payments first,” she insisted.
“Fuck them! I’m through paying those pompous human cocksuckers for the privilege to do business in this city. When I have the power to rule this realm, they’ll be paying me!”
And that time was coming sooner, rather than later. The convergence was near, and there was only one thing standing in the way of his success. Theo Masters, that dragon bastard, had what belonged to Warrick. She was the key, and he planned to get her back. Even if he had to kill a dragon or two in the process.
* * *
Theo was on his last set of push-ups, his arms and legs burning with the intense two-and-a-half-hour workout he’d put himself through, but the physical exertion was exactly what he needed after the night and morning he’d had. It was late, almost twenty-four hours exactly from the moment he’d done the unthinkable.
He went down, pushed up, went down, pushed up, driving himself to a point where it almost seemed like a punishment. That would make sense considering he’d done exactly what he’d told the others not to do since the moment they arrived in Burgess.
Do not use their power. Do not use any of the magick that was bestowed onto them upon birth. Function like a human in every way, even when dealing with the preternatural, unless there was absolutely no other option. And then, at that point, use extreme caution. Exposure was the enemy, more so for them than any other type of being. Even though there were some in the Human Realm who knew of the preternatural element that lived alongside them, the majority were still in the dark, whether by choice or simply via ignorance. Two worlds were allowed to exist as one on this realm, and for the most part, none were the wiser. This was the only realm where that was the case. This was the only realm that hadn’t witnessed the wrath of a Drakon.
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bsp; Humans didn’t understand what they feared. In fact, they hated it to the point of feeling their only option was to destroy any and everything that was not like them. He’d seen this over and over again throughout the centuries he’d been on this realm. They even did this to their own species. That which did not look or act like a certain race within their fold, couldn’t possibly be considered the same. It was a ridiculous and destructive notion, especially considering how many different races and species they knew absolutely nothing about.
It was a pity the way humans judged and were judged, and yet, the preternatural had their own hierarchies and rules that had carried them from one war to the next as well. Still, it had never been Theo’s intention to shift while on this realm and to blatantly appear where any human could see him in his true form.
But Shola’s life was in danger. So there’d been no other choice.
Down and then up, down and then up. He’d stopped counting the push-ups after he’d cleared one-fifty and that was at least fifteen minutes ago. Down and then up. Down and then...black twist front leather loafers stepped into view. Theo continued for three more push-ups before easing back to rest on his knees and then coming to a stand.
Bleu wore herringbone tweed slacks and a gray, yellow and white button front shirt in a design that Theo was certain would make him dizzy if he continued to stare. He looked away and walked across the mat floor of the gym. This room was larger than the two levels of the building downtown where humans paid a membership fee to work out, and had much better equipment.
He took a seat on the weight bench. Bleu followed him and now stood with his arms crossed over his chest, staring down at him.
“Speak your mind,” he said to the watcher.
