Page 80 of Dragon Chaos Around

His mouth stayed on her hip. Traced the outline of the dragon his body had drawn on hers. Then lower. Her fingers tangled in his hair—silver strands hot against her palms—and she pulled and the sound he made against her skin vibrated through her abdomen and into her spine. He peeled the midnight blue lace down her legs with his teeth and his hands and his complete, focused attention, and when his mouth found her she stopped worrying about the schedule and the Ball and the jacket on the armchair and every thought that existed outside the radius of his tongue.

“Chaos.” His name came out like a prayer offered in a language she was inventing in real time. Her back arched off the mattress. Her thighs locked around his shoulders. His hands gripped her hips—holding her steady, holding her open, the heat of his palms branding crescents into her skin. She came with a sharp cry that the penthouse windows sent echoing back to her, her body bowing, her hands fisting the sheets that she had warned him about wrinkling and that were now thoroughly, irreversibly wrecked.

He rose over her. Morning light gilded his shoulders. The shimmer at his skin pulsed. She reached for him—pulled the last of his clothing away, wrapped her hand around him, and the groan that tore from his throat made the windows hum.

“This is going to wrinkle the sheets,” she said. Breathless. Grinning.

“The sheets are not on the damage log.”

“The sheets are on the hotel’s damage log. We’re in a penthouse. There are standards.” She guided him against her. His forehead dropped to hers. Her smile softened into the unguarded, unfiltered expression she gave to the things she loved most—villain stories, convention floors, costumes that exceeded their design brief, and him.

He entered her and the morning expanded.

This was not the shattering intensity of the rooftop or the primal urgency of the archive. This was slow. Present. Her eyes stayed open and so did his and the eye contact was more intimate than the act itself—two people seeing each other completely, without the veil of urgency or the excuse of darkness. Morning light. Clear eyes. The honest, unhurried pleasure of bodies that had learned where to press and where to linger and how to move in the specific rhythm that made the other person’s breath catch in exactly the right way.

She laughed again. Mid-motion. Because he hit a spot that made her toes curl and the curl knocked his ankle and the ankle disruption shifted his weight and the weight shift pressed him deeper and the depth drew a gasp that became a laugh that became his name in her mouth like a celebration.

“You’re laughing,” he observed. His voice was steady. His body was not.

“You knocked my ankle with your dragon-temperature feet.” She wrapped her arms around his neck. Drew him closer. “Your feet are unreasonably hot. This is a design flaw.”

“Dragons do not have design flaws.”

“Dragons have feet that could fry an egg and a voice that makes the light fixtures hum and an inability to maintain a fitting schedule. These are design flaws. I accept them.”

“You accept the design flaws.” He moved. Slow. Deliberate. The rhythm that made her breath stop and her fingers dig into his shoulders. “All of them.”

“All of them.” Her voice went thin. “Every single—” The breath caught. Her back arched. “—every single overheated, dramatic, villain-collecting, Shakespeare-attending—” Another catch. His name. His mouth on her throat. —lizard flaw.

“Dragon.”

“Lizard.” The word dissolved into a moan that he swallowed with his mouth and that vibrated between them and that was, he decided with the absolute certainty of a being whose experience base spanned a millennium, the most perfect sound in any language he had ever heard.

They came within seconds of each other. Her first—the orgasm rolling through her body in a wave that arched her spine and locked her legs around him and tore his name from her throat in the register she reserved for moments that overwhelmed her. Him after—two strokes later, his forehead pressed to hers, his eyes open, watching her face, because he had learned that the sight of her in release was the thing that broke him and he refused to miss it.

The morning held them. Sunlight on tangled sheets. The convention glowing through the windows. Their breathing evening out in the warm, light-filled room.

“The schedule,” Alani said, is destroyed.

She did not sound upset about it.

FORTY-SIX

CHAOS

The recovery was efficient. Because Alani directed it, and Alani directed everything, and the fact that she had been in bed twelve minutes ago did not diminish the authority with which she issued instructions from in front of the bathroom mirror at a volume that carried through the penthouse.

“Hair goes up. The style I prepped last night—silver pins, low twist, the two face-framing pieces stay down. Makeup is pre-planned: dramatic eye, clean lip, contour that could cut glass. Jewelry: the silver cuff I designed and the earrings Crystal is bringing at noon.” She pointed at Chaos through the mirror. “You. Sit. Don’t touch the jacket until I hand it to you. Your hair needs product and I’m not letting you use whatever you’ve been using for the last seven centuries because it has no hold and no texture and you look like a shampoo commercial from 1987.”

“My hair product is perfectly adequate.”

“Your hair product is a travesty. I bought you a replacement. It’s on the counter. Matte finish. Medium hold. You will look incredible and you will thank me.”

He picked up the jar. Read the label. Set it down with the expression of a man confronting modernity’s latest assault on tradition.

“This says sea salt texture spray.”

“It says perfection in a bottle and you will use it.”