Page 74 of The Dragon’s Good Girl

I lift my hand and lay it against the ridge of his jaw.

His gold eye closes, and a deep purr rolls through him, so powerful I feel it beneath my feet.

Something in my chest squeezes so hard it almost hurts. I knew what it meant when he let me into his private rooms, but this feels different. There are no walls around this part of him, nothing human he can hide behind, and he’s still standing perfectly still beneath my hand.

“You’re beautiful,” I whisper.

The sound that moves through him is so deep I feel it everywhere.

Then one of his wings lowers slowly until the edge settles onto the grass beside me.

It takes me a moment to understand what he wants, and another to decide whether he has completely lost his fucking mind. Apparently I have too, because I gather the blanket around myself and start climbing.

It is neither dignified nor easy, but Soren holds himself steady while I make my way up the warm slope of his wing and onto his back. The scales are smaller where his neck meets his shoulders, but still hot even through my jeans, and there’s a raised ridge in front of me that gives me something solid to wrap my hands around.

A vibration rolls through him, and then Soren’s voice is suddenly inside my head.

Hold on, Angel.

I nearly let go instead.

“What the fuck?”

His laughter rumbles through the vast body beneath me.

Mate bond. When I’m in this form, I can speak to you through it.

“You might have mentioned that before getting inside my head.”

I just did.

I’m still deciding whether that deserves an argument when his wings spread wider.

Now be my good girl and hold on.

I barely have time to tighten my grip before his wings come down. The first beat tears the ground out from beneath us, the second takes us over the trees, and by the third I can see the mansion below, every glowing window shrinking as we climb. Cold air tears past me hard enough to steal my breath, but Soren beneath me is furnace-hot, and I press myself closer to his body.

For the first few minutes, I hold on with every available muscle.

Then he banks.

It’s slow and careful, nothing like the violent turn my imagination supplies when I realize what he’s doing, and suddenly the whole city is spread beneath us in ribbons of white and gold. Streets I know by heart become thin lines; buildings that tower over the street fit beneath the sweep of one wing. The world looks completely different from up here, and somewhere in the middle of staring at it, I realize I’m not frightened anymore.

I laugh.

The wind steals most of the sound, but Soren feels it anyway. A rumble begins beneath me, so deep that at first I mistake it for the movement of his wings, until I recognize what it is.

He’s purring.

That makes me laugh harder.

I lean into the heat of him while the city turns below us, my hair whipping across my face and the blanket threatening to escape no matter how tightly I’ve tucked it around myself. I lose track of how much time we spend up there. Eventually the cold fades into the background, I stop thinking about how far away the ground is, and somehow flying over the city on the back of a dragon starts to feel almost normal.

Eventually, Soren turns us toward home.

He brings us down with care, circling once before settling onto the lawn. I wait until his wing lowers before climbing off, much less gracefully than I climbed on, and the moment my feet touch the frost I turn to watch him change.

The sheer scale of him folds inward until his massive shape disappears beneath the man I know, his glamour restoring the clothes he was wearing before the shift along with the rest of his human form. A few bronze scales linger along his shoulders and throat before those disappear too, leaving Soren standing on the frozen grass, watching me with gold still burning through his eyes.