Queen of Dragons - Shana Abe

"Maricara."

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

"Ma belle dragon." Another kiss, his fingers slick. She lifted her hips as he bit gently at her lips.

"Oh—yes. What is it?"

"Just so you know"—he slid a finger inside her, God, so hot and wet,—" this ...is ravishment. And you're doing—a wondrous fine job of it."

She began to laugh, tiny hitches of sound, still breathless and a bit uncertain. Kim took away his hand and lowered his body, nestling against her smooth folds, probing, pushing into her; the laughter abruptly died, replaced by a swift gasp and then.yes, then, her arms sliding to his back and her knees drawing up, taking him deeper.

He put his forehead to hers, finding the fabric that hid her eyes, closing his own so that he would be blind too, so that together they could just feel.

She did feel. She felt things she'd never before guessed could exist: a man's hands on her with reverence, caressing her, strong fingers cradling her head, holding her for his kisses.

The way his body filled hers, no pain, but a rising thick pleasure, an aching that spread from the core of her to lick along her senses. Butterflies transformed to scarlet bright flame.

Movement, their dance together.

His weight upon her, welcome and taut, every muscle, every ragged breath.

The hair on his arms, his chest and legs. The smooth, strong planes of his back, the hard curves of his buttocks.

His face to hers. Her name, other words, English and softly slurred, caught between a whisper and a groan.

Mari didn't need sight. What she needed very desperately she could not even define—relief from the flames, release from the aching, the joy that was coming up hard to consume her. And she didn't know how it happened: One instant she was woman beneath him, stretched and amazed and afire. In the next she shattered into sweetness, a terrible bright bliss that lifted her body and drove shock waves to her atoms and sent her spinning up out of control to heaven, to him. And she never Turned at all.

Kimber caught her there in his arms, roughly, and pressed so hard into her that it hurt. But she wanted it, she reveled in it. As he shuddered and gasped into her hair, Mari felt herself smile, ferocious. Her legs lifted to cross her ankles over his waist; he could not escape. Her arms clasped him tight against her.

She rubbed the blindfold off in her dreams. He lifted it carefully from her, let it fall from his fingers to the far corner of the bed.

Her head lay at his shoulder, her hand flat over his heart; even though he'd tried to move as gently as he could, he woke her. She shifted a little, stretching, then settled back warm against his side.

Kim thought she'd sink back into slumber. Instead, her hand began a slow drift down his chest, to his stomach, drawing lazy, featherlight patterns across his skin that brought him wide awake.

Her voice came scratchy with sleep.

"What sort of dragon are you?"

"Large," he breathed, and used his hand to push hers down farther. He felt her smothered laugh. "I meant, what colors?"

"Ah. Hmm." Her fingers closed over his shaft. He lost his breath with the sensation. "Red and blue. Some gold."

She began to stroke him, up and down, squeezing, releasing. She used her nails to lightly score his tip. "Will you show me someday?"

"I think it's safe to say—you'll have ample opportunity to—see me as dragon."

Her hand stilled its astonishing torture. He felt her head tilt as she looked up at him.

Kim lifted up to an elbow, reaching for her hip. "Black dragon. I plan to ensure it."

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The sound of the rain peppered her dreams. They weren't truly dreams, more like colors and perceptions and meandering thoughts. She slept in a haze, never fully surrendering to the depths of complete silence, struggling to remain at that cusp of awake: the scent of sulfur and storm in the air; her cheek on his chest; his breath stirring her hair.

It was strange. It was extraordinary.

It had been so long since she'd been with a man. She'd forgotten this, the intimacy of a rainswept night, entangled legs, the weight of a masculine hand upon her waist. But then, in the slow-moving fog of her thoughts, it seemed to Mari she could not have forgotten what she had never before known.

She did not feel anxious in her repose next to him. She felt secure. She felt as if his heat and his embrace and his torso pressed to hers were all things that had been conspired to be—for ages, for her lifetime. She felt that she could sleep like this forever.

And that, of course, eliminated her last hope of real slumber.

It was not yet dawn, but she'd always been able to see well at night. In the deep quiet light that latticed the chamber Maricara studied Kimber Langford, curious.

It was odd to see a man so relaxed around her. No one relaxed around her, not really, not even Sandu. On occasion she would pass one of the looking glasses hung in the castle and catch a hint of her own reflection: silvery hair, silvery eyes, gowns of deep color and skin paler than the moon. She was a winter beast hidden behind a human face, a piercing gaze, a ghostly peril. When she smiled her lips curved cold and beautiful, no matter how she tried to warm them. When she lifted her hands they gleamed with rings and the fuency of her movements; she could circumvent neither.

Before her marriage, Mari had been a brash, grubby maiden, her hair escaping from scarves, her skirts a muddy mess, as delighted as all the other children to romp through the hamlets and meadows. But as a wife.

No wonder her people would not drop their guard for her. The grown woman staring back at her from mirrors with creamy shoulders and plucked brows didn't look anything like Maricara. The creature there shone clear-eyed and diamond-hard, and looked fully capable of devouring man or cattle alike. It rather frightened her as well.

Ah, but this man.this powerful, lovely man, was not afraid of her. He was also a beast and an earl, which seemed to be something like a prince in this country, and he was not afraid. And he was tender, and he was strong, and he was drakon.

She touched a hand to her mouth, observing his. She pressed a kiss to her fingers, remembering how it felt to kiss him instead. She followed the contours of his eyelashes and remembered the intensity of his gaze, the last thing she had seen before he fixed the sheet around her eyes: his own, alight and brilliant, green cool depths and a hunger that had stilled her to the bone.

She'd let him blindfold her. She'd trusted him, beyond the Dead Room, beyond her body and her sight. She'd trusted him, and he had risen to it.

This wasn't love. It was new and unfamiliar, but she had seen love before, and this had to be different. It was lust, certainly, and the inevitable collision of their dragon natures. It was pleasure and astounding satisfaction; every time he touched her, every place, she felt a physical, hot delight. Tangible, like dipping her fingers into the gold dust that lived in the rivers of the mountains, spreading their glimmer across her skin.

Love wasn't glimmer. Love was struggle and anguish, stratagems and long nights of weeping into pillows. Every legend of the drakon involving love ended in full-fledged tragedy; even Mari knew that.

Her parents had scoffed at it; Amalia and Zane had been fully snared. A handful of drakon from the villages professed it, but traditional marriages were arranged. Love might come after that; it might not. Most people trudged on with their lives anyway.

Every now and again flared some great, feverish ardor between a young Zaharen couple, but they always gave the impression of being more miserable than not, prone to sighs and dramatic gestures and extravagant public declarations such as I will surely die without him.

She, on the other hand, wasn't going to die without anyone, and that was perfectly acceptable. In fact, it seemed to Maricara that falling in love was perilously close to what the sanf were so eager to do: rip a hole in a drakon chest. Steal from it the beating flesh of the soul.

Just like her own, Lord Chasen's heart was veiled. All she had glimpsed of it was a knot of thorns and passion. That was also acceptable. She understood knots, and quite enjoyed passion. She had no wish to delve deeper than that.

Power. Position. Desire. She was comfortable with these things. They were surely enough to keep her content.

But.

Kimber's palm shifted against her. He sighed and whispered something in his sleep and slid his hand down her arm.

.. .he was so very like her, more than anyone she had ever met. And so very beautiful.

Mari closed her eyes. With the earl's face turned to hers, she allowed herself gradually to lapse back into that place of rain-scattered slumber.

When she looked next around the room the light had shifted, a gray so dense it was like peering through cheesecloth. Nothing much was clear, save the man standing over them.

Rhys.

Their eyes met. He wore no clothing; his face was expressionless. Without the emerald or hoop in his ear he seemed nearly without life, another specter from her dreams. His hands were loose at his sides.

His lips made a taut smile. His eyes followed the shadowed lines of her figure entwined with Kimber's; the night had been warm and then they'd made it warmer, and together they slept atop the covers.

Mari was a panther, she was a king. She let Lord Rhys's gaze rake her body and did not move.

"Countess," he murmured, and inclined his head.

Then where there had been Rhys, there was smoke, and then simply air. But for the slight creaking of the door upon its hinges, she might have imagined it all.

They flew back to Darkfrith in silence. The clouds had roiled and thickened into a mantle of cotton by the last magenta flare of the dawn. The air still felt of rain but none fell; below them the earth awoke beneath a trillion liquid drops, each one catching the reflection of the sky, the pair of dragons that pierced the pinkened mist in a line, appearing and disappearing according to the whorls of the clouds.

Well, one dragon. The other remained higher, better hidden. Mari wasn't so incautious as to fly openly through the morning. But she did, at times, allow a claw or her tail to reach down and break the vapor beneath her, leaving a furrow of clarity in her wake that nearly at once puffed and amassed and rolled back together again.

Kimber kept within a wingspan. When she'd Turned to dragon after their ascent he had done the same; they both knew he wouldn't be able to keep up otherwise. But Mari hadn't Turned for speed. She could pretend she'd done it because she needed to, because it had been too long since she'd knowingly scraped the atmosphere with her body, and all that was true. Existing strictly as woman or as smoke denied the most important part of her.

But beyond that, beyond speed or function, she'd done it because she knew it would be forbidden. And she wanted to see his reaction to that.

He gave her none. As a dragon he only flew extremely close, so close she could make out the fantastic etching of his scales, rich metallic hues of sapphires and the ruby sun, his eyes brilliant green and lined with gold.