Page 60 of Dragon Chaos Around

His mouth met hers. Not the exploratory kiss from the workshop—not the careful, first-time mapping of lip against lip. This was the kiss that the workshop kiss had been a rehearsal for. His hand came to the back of her neck—one hand, cupping the base of her skull, his fingers threading into her hair with a grip that was firm enough to tilt her head and gentle enough to make the firm grip devastating. His other hand found the curve of her waist and pulled, and the distance between their bodies closed to zero, and the October air ceased to be cold.

Heat. The full, deliberate weight of it—the warmth she had spent weeks cataloguing in degrees and fogged windows, arrived all at once and undeniable. He was not burning. He was holding. She could feel the difference in the stillness of his hands, the patient containment of a body that was not entirely human choosing, carefully, not to overwhelm her—seven centuries of discipline aimed at letting her be the one who decided. She had decided. Her hands on his chest registered the heat through the fabric and her mind produced one clear thought—I chose this, and I would choose it again—before thought became irrelevant entirely.

She broke the kiss. Gasped. Pressed her forehead against his jaw. His pulse hammered against her temple—fast, hard, a rhythm that was not human—urgent and layered, each pulse doubled.

“Your eyes are doing the gold thing,” she said against his skin.

“They do that.” His voice had dropped into the layered register—the human range underscored by the deeper harmonic that vibrated in her teeth. His hand tightened in her hair.

“It’s very dramatic.”

“I am a dragon.” His mouth found the curve of her ear, and the words landed against the sensitive skin below her earlobe with a heat that made her spine arch. “Everything is dramatic.”

She laughed. The sound came out breathless, pressed against the line of his throat, and the vibration of his response traveled through her—not a laugh but its close relative, the low rumble that built in him when amusement and desire collided.

This is happening. On a rooftop. Above the convention. With a dragon whose body temperature could power a small furnace and whose voice is doing things to my nervous system that violate several laws of biology.

“Inside,” she said. “Unless you want the LED panel crew to get an eyeful.”

“The crew finished at eleven.”

“Then we’re alone up here.”

His hands stilled on her body. The gold in his eyes blazed—full, unbroken, the same total surrender of silver to gold she had witnessed during the near-shift on the sidewalk. Except this time the gold was not driven by territorial fury. This was the other catalyst. The one she had been orbiting for weeks without touching.

“Alani.” Her name in the dragon-voice. The layered harmonic wrapping around the syllables and turning them into a sound that belonged in a cathedral or a cave or any space designed to hold a reverence too large for ordinary rooms. “If we go inside⁠—”

“Inside,” she repeated. Kissed the hollow of his throat. The skin scorched against her lips. “Now.”

THIRTY-FOUR

CHAOS

He had imagined this.

He would not pretend otherwise—not to himself, not with the dragon roaring its approval through every nerve ending in his body. He had imagined this since the walkthrough. Since the first handshake, when her palm had been warm and her grip had been sure and the contact had rewritten the chemical composition of his blood. He had imagined it in the archive while she wept. In the workshop while she welded. In the office while she dismantled his strategic errors with a timeline and a righteous fury that had no business being as attractive as it was.

He had not imagined it would feel like this.

The penthouse. His territory. The door closing behind them, the city pressing against the floor-to-ceiling glass, the convention’s glow painting the walls in distant color. She walked backward through the room without breaking eye contact—navigating his furniture by instinct, her hands still gripping the front of his shirt, pulling him forward with a confidence that undid him more thoroughly than the kiss had.

She was not tentative. She was not cautious. She moved through his space the way she moved through convention floors—with ownership, with intent, with the absolute conviction that she belonged in every room she entered.

The bedroom door. She reached behind her, found the handle without looking. Pushed it open. The room beyond was dark except for the city’s light through the windows—Manhattan’s glow filtering in silver and gold, the convention site visible in the distance through a wall of glass that made the bedroom feel suspended in the sky.

She stopped at the edge of the bed. Released his shirt. Looked up at him.

“Hey.” Soft. The single syllable carrying a warmth that the rooftop kiss had been too urgent to hold. She reached up and touched his face—her fingertips tracing the line of his jaw, his cheekbone, the crease between his brows that deepened when his control was under strain. “We don’t have to⁠—”

“Alani.” He caught her wrist. Brought her hand to his mouth. Pressed his lips to her palm—the center, where the skin was soft and the pulse beat visible and the heat transfer between them ran both directions. “I’ve been exercising restraint around you for seven weeks. The restraint is no longer available.”

Her smile—God, her smile. Radiant and wicked and delighted all at once, the smile of a woman who had spent years making herself smaller for men who couldn’t hold her full size and who had found a dragon who considered too much a starting point.

“Good,” she said. “I was getting tired of the restraint.”

He kissed her. Different from the rooftop—slower, deeper, with the deliberate focus of a man applying a lifetime of patience to the task of learning her mouth. The way she opened for him. The sound she made when his tongue traced her lower lip—the one she bit when she concentrated, the one he had been tracking since their first meeting. The small, sharp inhale that turned into a moan that turned into his name spoken against his mouth in a voice that broke on the second syllable.

Her hands moved to his collar. Unbuttoned the first button, the second. Her fingers found the skin beneath—the hollow of his throat where she’d touched him in the office, where the dragon ran closest to the surface. Her palms flattened against his chest and he hissed because her hands were cool against his burning skin and the contrast was electric and his dragon roared.