Queen of Dragons - Shana Abe

So she didn't truly make the bed. She only found a bureau stuffed with clean linens and tossed those over the lumpy mattress. There were no coverlets or even blankets stored anywhere else in the room, but there were five sets of sheets, and that seemed sufficient. It was warm still and she wasn't planning actually to sleep. But she could at least be comfortable while she waited for the earl to return.

She crawled to the center of the bed. She lay flat on her back with her arms out and stared up at a ceiling of smoothed plaster. She did not feel tired. She felt very, very awake.

Rufus Booke was not in the garden. Not as smoke, not as man—not as anything. Nor was he in the sky. Kimber hunted for him a good two hours, going back into the town, even back down to the pools of the spa—closed this late, the water lapping in tongues against the tiled stone, not even a single lamp for light—but Sir Rufus was no longer anywhere nearby.

Kim wasn't worried. Not yet. Booke was a good man but, more important, a cunning one. If he'd gone to ground, there would be a reason for it. Chances were, however, he'd only gone back to Darkfrith.

It was where Kim was going with Maricara, as soon as he could fetch her. If Honor Carlisle had ever been here, she wasn't now. He would have picked up something of her by this point, even if it was just the princess's mystery song.

But there was nothing. And as Lord Chasen, he could no longer afford to remain publicly.

He maneuvered down a thinly smoking chimney near her end of the hotel, emerged at a grate clutching the remains of a smoldering log and burnt tinder. Embers brightened and broke apart as he sighed past, but there was nothing of him to ignite. Kim poured away untouched.

A woman slumbered in the wide, curtained bed. Her maid was on a cot in the adjoining room. Both of them snored.

He glided out from under the door.

The room that held Maricara was still unlit. Even the rainlight had darkened to ash. He stood a moment in stillness by the window, letting what light would come fall across his skin, so that she could see him.

But she was also asleep.

Maricara did not snore. She was on her side amid a swirl of sheets, her hair a sable slash across the cambric, her arms folded and her legs bent. It was how she had slept in the abbey.

She had been naked then, too.

Kimber crossed the chamber without sound. He tested the mattress with both hands, then eased atop it. She shifted with his weight but did not wake, so he moved closer, settling down in front of her this time, his head upon his arm, examining her face.

They were so beautiful, all of them. He'd never thought on it much before, but the truth was, it might even be considered a weakness of their kind. Their unblemished bodies, their thick locks, the inches and corners and shimmering colors of them that all joined to create a being beyond simple man: It marked them for what they were. Not human.

He'd long ago grown accustomed to it. In fact, Kim vividly remembered his first impressions of London as a boy. Rooted in the city odors and noises and violent eddies of disorder were people, real people, who were very plainly a different sort of species from his own.

Their skin pocked with disease. Their teeth yellowed, and fell out. Their heads were shaved to stubble beneath their wigs and still they swarmed with fleas and lice; they smelled of their food, and their sweat, and whatever refuse they had last trudged through. Some of them were kind and some of them were not, but to a young, wide-eyed lad, their state of constant human decay had been both repellent and fascinating.

Retreating back to Darkfrith was like stepping into an alternate world, one in which everyone he knew lived suspended in their own unique perfection. No filth, no lice, no gap-toothed, drooling grins. His kin were born to a certain hard grace and they died in the same state. In between, they ruled the stars.

Maricara was no different. In rest, in lightning or candlelight or splashing rainfall, she remained lovely.

His hunger for her, the craving that ate through his bones, was as fierce as ever; in her every form, in her every motion, he responded.

The tribe had an overworn adage: Uncover the heart; wed the fire. Kimber had always assumed it was an oblique reference to the drakon's legendary passion. But it was about love.

This sleeping young woman—clever, mysterious, royal and obstinate—was his fire. She had been for all of their lives, and it was simply a whim of the fates that it had taken exactly this many years for their paths to wind close enough to intersect.

Perhaps it was another weakness, this desire to love and be loved. This profound and ardent recognition of what was meant to be for the course of their lifetimes. Kim didn't know. Right now, on this bed with her, he did not care. Come hell or high water, come sanf or extermination, he could not let go of her. Even as she scorned him, even as she ducked and turned away, he could not let go.

He'd been lonely without her. It seemed now so patently obvious a child could have pointed it out to him, but he hadn't known. All his years alone, witness to the matrimony of his family and friends, and he had been lonely. He'd had his responsibilities to fulfill him, his position as leader and lord. He was Alpha and godfather and uncle; he was heir to a great tradition and estate. For some reason, he'd always thought that that had been enough.

Certainly these things had consumed his days and many, many nights. He had labored at each role, grasping at duty and honor to guide him when he needed them, emerging back into the light as he could. He'd thought he was content. That, somehow, all that had made him content.

But it wasn't so. He'd been missing something so powerful, so basic, Kimber had never even guessed at its enormity; it was like trying to comprehend the diameter of the earth just by measuring a single grain of sand.

He'd been missing his mate. His helpmeet, his partner. His destined wife.

No more, he thought. It was a notion both so foreign and so true that he whispered it aloud.

"No more."

Kim lifted a hand, tracing his fingers above the contours of her face. He did not touch her skin. He didn't need to. He could feel her without touch, the curvature of her cheekbone, her fine nose, her full lips. Winged eyebrows. Lashes over closed lids.

Maricara came awake. Her eyes did not open, but he felt that as well, her sudden awareness. Her body didn't even tense.

"I want to kiss you again," he said quietly.

Her lashes lifted. She gazed at him in the dark.

"Will you let me?"

The fingers of one hand curled a little tighter beneath her chin. "Yes," she said.

So he lowered his fingertips to her cheek. He stretched closer, because she did not move either toward him or away, only lay there in her bed of sheets, the linen rucked up between her knees, her arm and shoulder free.

Her skin was cool, much cooler than the air around them. He traced the corner of her mouth with his thumb, her lower lip. She continued to gaze at him, her eyes a smoky reflection of the last light of the chamber. He touched his nose to hers, exhaling as she exhaled, allowing their breath to mingle. Her lips turned up. She began to lower her head, to pull back, so he spread his hand behind her neck and brought his mouth to hers.

She stiffened. That was fine; he knew what to do. He knew how to taste her, to be as slow and gentle as she needed, massaging lightly the tension in her neck, until the tightness under her skin began to slip away like the water down the glass windows, and the sound of the storm became a drumming in his veins, her heartbeat, his desire. She was smaller and slight and not the same as him; and yet she was the same, because her lips parted, and she began—tentatively—to kiss him back.

Kim drew nearer. He lifted one leg and hooked it behind both of hers, letting his fingertips now discover the delicate path of her spine, following it down beneath the sheets. Oh, she was warmer there, so soft. He sucked at her lips and smoothed circles at the small of her back, his every motion tugging at the layers of cambric that pulled between them.

Her lips grew less tentative, her responses longer, deeper. When he opened his eyes he found her watching him, intent.

He rolled on top of her. Without looking away from her face he found a loose corner of one of the sheets and tugged at it, then tugged harder.

The linen ripped easily, threads popping like paper along a seam. He was left with a long, frayed swathe, a weightless floating in his hand.

Kimber drew them both upright; Maricara's arms swiftly crossed her chest to keep the sheets in place. He brushed noses again, moved his mouth to her cheek, her eyes. He waited until her lashes fluttered closed and then took the blindfold he had made and placed it around her head with both hands.

She held motionless, wet lips, clenched fingers. He sat forward on his heels to tie the ends behind her, loose enough so that she could pull it free if she wished. Tight enough so that she could not see. When it was done he nudged aside her hair to press a kiss to her throat, fleeting at first, then harder, opening his mouth to savor the faint trace of salt on her skin. Pulling her closer. Marking her with his teeth. He felt her hands become fists against his chest.

Fire.

He smiled against her, drew his tongue up the flushed heat of her neck to her earlobe. Her jaw tipped away from him, allowing him more, so he took it. He tasted her and breathed her in and listened to the anthem of her heart pumping, rushing to match his own.

With his arms hard around her, they lowered back to the sheets. Maricara licked her lips, dark and luscious red, the pale blindfold a tease and a foil, his safeguard for this moment, for kisses and stroking and the luxury of her flesh against his.

He pressed his hips to hers; they sank deeper into the feather bedding. She was slim and real beneath him, unbelievably real. He'd imagined her for so long, dark nights of sweat and longing and dreams that wrung him dry. To have her here at last, their bodies clinging in the humid warmth, her thighs parting under the last wisp of sheet between them—

He started to move, small thrusts, urgency singing through his blood even as he forced himself to be careful, to be measured and deliberate. But she brought her hands up to his hair and pulled his head to hers. She said his name against his lips.

Caution began to crumble, tiny pieces of him falling away down an endless steep cliff. He pulled the sheet from her in a long, languorous slither, revealing the wonder of Maricara in parts: right breast, left; deep pink nipples. Her rib cage, lifting and falling. Her belly. Lower than that, the curve of one hip.soft dark curls; he dragged his fingers through them and nearly could not breathe with want; she made a whimper in her throat.

Kim bent his head. He let his cheek graze one nipple, turned his lips to it, a lap of his tongue. She hardened instantly, an exquisite puckering in his mouth—and the sound she made now was purely erotic. He did it again while pressing the heel of his palm against her mound, feeling her arch. Her fingers twisted painfully against his hair.

"Maricara."

"Yes?" Her voice came thin, breathless. It broke with the stroking of his tongue.