Page 62 of Dragon Chaos Around

She wanted with a greed that startled her. Not the careful desire she’d brought to previous relationships, where she measured her enthusiasm to match her partner’s, where she dimmed herself to avoid being too much. This was full-volume wanting. Dragon-scale wanting. She pulled him closer and ran her nails down his spine and the scales beneath his skin rippled under her touch like a living current and he made a sound against her throat that was not human—a low, resonant growl that bypassed her ears and landed directly in the base of her spine.

More of that. Whatever that sound was. More.

His mouth traced the line of her throat. Down. The heat of his lips against her skin left a trail that burned after he moved on—not painfully, not like flame, but like sunlight concentrated through glass. Precise. Targeted. He kissed the dip of her collarbone, the curve of her breast, the soft skin beneath. His tongue traced a path that made her arch off the bed and grip his hair and the silver strands were hot against her fingers like wire fresh from a forge.

His hands learned her. Slow, thorough, mapping the geography of her body with the same obsessive attention he applied to his archive. The swell of her hips. The dip of her waist. The ticklish spot at her ribs that made her yelp and kick and swat his shoulder, and the sound he made in response was unmistakably a laugh—a real one, low and startled and pressed into the curve of her stomach like a secret.

“That was a laugh,” she gasped. “The Dragon King is laughing. In bed. This is going in the report.”

“There’s no report.” His mouth moved lower. His breath fanned hot across her navel. “If there were a report, it would be classified.”

“Giselle has a spreadsheet for everything. Trust me. There’s a report.”

“Alani.” His voice hit the frequency that resonated in her bones and made the light fixtures hum. His hands gripped her hips, and the grip was firm, and his eyes looked up at her from the level of her stomach, and the look on his face was the most villain thing she had ever seen in her life and she had spent her life studying villain expressions and this one destroyed every entry in the archive.

“Stop talking about the spreadsheet.”

She stopped talking about the spreadsheet.

She stopped talking entirely, because his mouth continued its path and his hands held her steady and the heat that poured from his body enveloped her, and he applied everything he had spent eight hundred years learning to be patient for, with a focus and precision that dismantled her composure piece by careful piece, and he was thorough.

His mouth traced the line of her hip. The inside of her thigh. He settled between her legs with the focused intention of a man who had waited forty-nine days and who intended to make every second of the wait justify itself. His breath against her was a furnace-draft and his tongue was precise and unhurried and devastating, and the first stroke drew a sound from her that she would have been embarrassed by if she had possessed the capacity for embarrassment, which she did not, because his hands were gripping her thighs and his mouth was there and the concept of embarrassment had been incinerated along with every other higher brain function.

He learned her. The way he learned everything—with obsessive attention, cataloguing every response, adjusting his approach based on the data her body provided. The flick that made her gasp. The pressure that made her moan. The slow, deliberate rhythm that made her spine bow off the mattress and her hands fist in his hair and her heels dig into his back and the October night outside the penthouse windows dissolve into irrelevance.

When she came, the sound she made was not a word. It was a frequency—high, broken, pressed into the pillow she’d grabbed at some point, her back arched and her toes curled and his hands still holding her hips with a grip that would leave warm imprints on her skin that she would find tomorrow and trace with her fingers and remember.

He rose over her. The silver shimmer along his shoulders and spine brighter than she’d seen it—almost luminous, the scales pressing close enough to the surface that she could see the pattern: overlapping plates, each one the size of a coin, following the architecture of his skeleton like armor assembling from the inside.

She reached up. Pressed her palm flat against his left shoulder—the epicenter of the shimmer, the place where the scales pressed hardest. The texture beneath her hand was no longer a ghost. It was real. Solid. Smooth and warm and impossibly, beautifully other, and the man above her shuddered so hard the bed frame creaked.

“Alani.” Wrecked. His voice cracking on her name.

“I have you.” She held his gaze. His irises had gone the color of molten silver in the moment before it pours—not cold, not calm, but white-bright with heat. The man inside the dragon inside the man looked at her and she saw all of it—the carefully maintained distance, the armor of control that had kept him intact through every loss and every goodbye. She saw it and she held it and she did not look away. “I have you. Come here.”

He came to her. The restraint—the line that had been theoretical since the rooftop—dissolved. He entered her with a groan that vibrated through her body from the inside, his voice resonating in her ribs, and the heat of him was staggering. Internal, total, a blaze wrapped in a man wrapped in a dragon who had waited forty-nine days and eight hundred years for this and whose body communicated both timescales simultaneously.

She wrapped her legs around him. Drew him deeper. The scales at his shoulders rippled under her hands with each thrust and the pattern was mesmerizing—a wave of silver-white light that pulsed in time with his movement, the dragon’s biology written across his skin in a language she was learning to read.

He moved and she moved and the rhythm they found was immediate. Not the careful choreography of a first time between strangers. They had been building toward this for seven weeks through arguments and gifts and an archive tour that had been more intimate than most sex she’d had, and the foundation they’d laid meant the rhythm came easy—hard and slow and then faster, his forehead pressed against hers, his breath ragged, his gaze locked on her face as if breaking eye contact would break the spell.

“Your eyes,” she managed, breathless, her nails raking his back, the scales catching under her fingertips. “Your eyes are⁠—”

“Gold. I know.”

“All gold. Not even a little silver.”

“The silver is—unavailable.” His hips drove forward and she lost the ability to form commentary for several seconds. “The silver requires—control—and the control—” Another thrust. Deeper. The bed frame protested. —has left the building.

She laughed. The laugh turned into a moan that turned into his name, and his mouth swallowed the sound, and his hand found her thigh and hiked it higher and the angle changed and her vision went white at the edges.

Close. She was close and he knew it—the dragon’s instincts reading her body with an accuracy that human lovers never achieved, tracking the hitch in her breathing, the tightening of her hands on his back, the way her heels dug into his spine. He shifted. Drove deeper. The heat between them was a living third presence—his fire and her response, fused, radiating outward until the sheets burned warm and the air above the bed shimmered like a heat mirage.

She broke. The orgasm hit like a wave cresting—a full-body convulsion that tore his name from her throat and arced her back off the mattress and clenched around him with a force that dragged a sound from his chest that was not human. Not remotely. The layered dragon-voice surged, resonant and raw, a sound that vibrated through the bed frame and hummed in the windows and would have terrified her if she were not already so far beyond fear that the concept had become irrelevant.

He followed. Two more strokes—hard, final, the rhythm breaking—and the gold in his eyes flared brighter than the city light and the shimmer across his shoulders blazed silver-white and his entire body went rigid and the sound he made was her name in the dragon’s voice, spoken with a reverence that turned three syllables into a prayer.

THIRTY-SIX