A dragon knelt for no man. But she was more. A maiden sacrifice given to his kind since the Dark Ages. A pure, vibrant soul that might appease the hunger of his dark, insatiable heart.
He unstuck his tongue from the roof of his mouth and cleared his throat. “Do my inhibitions offend you, my lady? I’m trying to be a gentleman.”
“I want you to be as you are,” she whispered.
His laugh was dark. He stood. Her muscles tensed, but she didn’t back down. She turned that haughty nose up at him and stared him straight in the face. “What are we doing here?” he asked. “You fled from me before. What’s changed?” Another thought occurred to him, and he raised his head, searching the forest. “Or do your father and brother lie in wait for me?”
“And if they did?”
He looked back down into her beautiful, wise eyes. “Let them come. It was worth it to see you fly.”
“They don’t know I’m here.”
He let that knowledge settle quiet and heavy in the darkness of the forest. He circled her. His feet made no sound on the thick cushion of pine needles. “You hear that? Nothing moves. The animals have fled.”
“They scent you.”
“Yes. Does that frighten you?”
“I am Owl. I do not fear the silence or the dark.” She seemed so composed, but she was not unaffected. Her pulse fluttered beneath the thin skin of her wrists. Her woman’s scent filled his nostrils. He knew his irises were slit, inhuman. Part of him wanted to shield them from her so that she wouldn’t see the monster within. But another part of him was tired of running. He wanted to take her at her word.
She held her ground when he stepped to her, toe to toe. She barely came to his chin. She was young and slender as a willow reed; he could break her in two with his bare hands. But her soul fire burned within, hotter and brighter than the North Star. He bent down to taste it, and her lips opened in welcome beneath his demanding mouth. The taste of pine and mountain wildflower assailed his tongue. He could drown in that kiss. He angled her delicate chin up so that he could take the kiss deeper. A soft moan escaped her throat.
And suddenly it was too much. The darker part of him wanted to seize her mouth and breathe in her soul fire for his very own, but he didn’t want to take her like that. She had put all her trust in him by leading him here alone and naked. He wanted to be worthy of that trust. This couldn’t be just a lark by a brazen girl. He wanted—no,
needed
—it to mean more to her.
He dragged his mouth away. “I don’t know what Norgard is planning.”
“He doesn’t matter.” Her breath came hard and fast as if she’d just flown a mile. “I thought we could make our people see reason. We could force them to cooperate by our love—”
“Love?”
“Does that shock you?”
“What is love?” He raked a hand through his hair. “Many women have spoken of love—no, hear me out. It’s my face, my smell, my body. All Drekar have it. They love this human shape. But not me.” He laid a hand on his chest. “Those protestations of love always shatter like thin glass in the forge.”
“But I’ve flown with you, Brand. I’ve seen the dragon, and I’m still here. How many have done that?”
“None.”
She smiled. “And still I speak of love.”
“Yes. You would join with your enemy simply to avoid war?”
Her laughter rang in the stillness of the forest. “I’m much too selfish. The thought crossed my mind, but this is my life. I won’t settle for that. This isn’t for them anymore. I want you for myself.” She speared him with her tawny eyes, and he felt his feet take root. He couldn’t move from this ground if his life depended on it. He was like the great tree Yggdrasil, and she was the center of his world. “Do you, Brand Haldor, take me as I am?” The question rang in the quiet forest. Only the rushing water down the falls marred the silence.
The solemn tone seemed natural to this moment. He straightened his shoulders and gave his words the full weight of his vow. A dragon could not lie. “I do.” He was unfamiliar with Kivati ritual, but the words rolled off his tongue, almost as if he’d walked this moment in a previous life. “Do you, Alice of the Kivati, Owl Woman, daughter of the Raven, take me as I am?”
“I do.” She seized his hands in that moment. A wave of sensation rolled up his skin from his fingertips to the nape of his neck. He pressed his lips to her welcoming mouth. Gods! He tasted sunlight and summer, and he wanted to curl round her bright burning soul and never leave. He wrapped his arms around her and hugged her body to his. Skin to skin, her soft curves to his hard planes. Deepening the kiss, he lost himself. Her tongue danced with his, just like their winged dance only moments ago. First a dance of courtship across the cloud-strewn night. Now a dance of mating beneath the pine boughs and hanging moss.
“Take me,” she whispered. Her demand thrilled the dragon. She wasn’t cowed by the beast. He would demand all from her. More than she could dream of. But he had the feeling she could sate his inhuman appetites. He’d come searching for freedom, and found it in a woman who would take every dark and twisted part of him. He kissed her again.
Sensation rocked Alice’s heated body. The fine mist couldn’t cool her down. His skin abraded her sensitive nipples. His manhood thrust against the curve of her stomach. She sensed the loneliness inside him like a rent in the universe. Blacker than black. A great sucking emptiness that demanded to be filled. For a moment she was afraid.
Brand broke the kiss, breathing hard. He ran his hands over her back, gentling her, soothing her. “I won’t hurt you.”
Her laugh hid her nerves. “Do your worst. I am more than a match for you. The blood of the Great Goddess runs in my veins. I am more than a woman; I am Kivati. Two souls beat in my breast. The elements are my handmaidens.” She summoned the Aether to her and sent it whipping through the clearing to knock needles off the trees. The earth at her toes and the wind at her back lent their strength. The ancient trees and great Sky God watched over her. The spirits of her ancestors walked these shores and sent their love through the Aether. No soulless dragon could take all of her. Her love went on and on, eternal and everlasting, stronger than the blackness inside of him aching to be filled.
“Alice,” he murmured against her lips. “I don’t deserve you.”
“I know.” She tried to communicate that love in a way he would understand in the deep primitive part of him. She relaxed into his hold, let his large masterful hands learn her shape. She’d seen him explore the world with his fingertips, and now he used them to explore every inch of her body: the hollow in her throat, the delicate ridges of her spine, the curve of her waist, the dimples low in her back.
He caressed her bottom and molded her to fit the shape of his desire. He pulled her up and against his shaft to let it tease the hot, wet pulse of her. Her feet no longer touched the mossy ground. Her legs wrapped around his body, and his thick muscled thighs supported both of them. His breathing, like her own, came heavy. He dropped to his knees with her still wrapped around him.
Lady be—she couldn’t get enough of his taste and touch. Sensations washed over her. Skin to hot skin. The taste of cinnamon and smell of heated iron in the forge. The musk of an aroused male. She planted kisses along his sculpted jaw, then moaned when he dropped his head to suckle the delicate skin of her neck. Her pulse raced with the beating of the great heart of the earth, and she felt that pulse center, wild and wanton, in the slick throb of her womb. She needed him to fill that empty space, even as he needed her to fill his empty heart.
He pulled away and took a deep shuddering breath. “After three hundred years, I am made new again. Forgive me—”
“There is nothing to forgive. Let yourself go.”
“Alice. Love.” His arms shook. He lifted her and pulled her down, hard and fast, on his shaft. He pierced her center, and she almost thought she’d split in two like an oak tree hit by lightning. She kissed him to chase the brief pain away. “Is it too much?” he asked. He kissed a tear from the crease of her eye.
“Too much.” His artist hands kneaded her tense shoulders. They worked their magic down her back, coaxing her body to accept him. Her inner muscles relaxed. Her insides turned to liquid need. The urge to move gripped her. She pushed his shoulders trying to angle herself higher. “No,
more
. Lady be, can’t you move faster?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Laughing, he rolled them to the ground so that she straddled him. Her knees sank into the soft moss. He twined their fingers together, giving her support, and showed her how to ride him. She was struck by his generosity. Here he was, an ancient, deadly being, and he gave all his power to her in an instant. No man had ever valued her so highly. She had always been the Raven’s daughter. She had always had to fight to be recognized on her own merit.
Brand saw her and only her. He didn’t care who her father was, or if a Thunderbird might be competition.
“Come back to me, love.” Brand ran a hand over her cheek and drew her gaze back to his. “There now. A man likes to know his woman’s dreaming about him at a time like this.”
She raised herself slowly and settled again hard. The movement shook the laughter from his face. His lips parted.
“Better?” she asked.
“Do that again.”
She did, and was rewarded with his moan. Again. And again. Until her womb quivered. Her legs barely held her up. Her limbs had turned to pudding, while his body was taut as a bowstring beneath her.
Bending, she licked the place where his neck met his shoulders. His eyes rolled in his head. “I love that I can do that to you,” she said.
“You can do anything you like to me. I’m molten glass beneath your hands.”
“Molten? You feel pretty hard to me.”
His chuckle reverberated down to her thighs. “You haven’t seen anything yet—”
“Show me.” She licked the crease of his lips. “I want to fly higher.”
With a groan, he rolled them again, and she found herself flat on her back, legs in the air, with two hundred pounds of well-muscled man over her. “
Min lilla gull bit
,” he growled low. His powerful arms bracketed her head. His body shook from holding himself back. “You only had to ask.”
The Animal in her loved this primitive display of possession. He was aggressive male, claiming his stake inside the warm heat of her body. He drove into her again and again, building the glowing embers to leaping flames. Frissons of energy snaked up her body and out to her fingertips. A wave of sensation engulfed her, and she cried out his name.
Brand watched Alice shatter as the orgasm rocked her. When she opened her eyes again, they were filled with wonder. It spooked him that a sensual act would put an innocence into her gaze, when it should have taken it out. But then a slow smile swept her, and the curl of her lip and twinkle in her eye spoke of a feminine power that he could never master. She was a goddess come down to earth. What hope did his immortal, black heart have to hold out against such power?
So he kissed her with everything in him. He tasted her lips and danced with her tongue and gave himself over to her wise, wise keeping. All the while he kept up the rhythm of their bodies together. The drums from their waltz echoed in his mind. Her soul burned like a bonfire, and he drove toward its welcoming warmth. He wanted a piece of it. Wanted one taste of heaven.
“You’re holding yourself back,” she murmured beneath his lips. “Be mine tonight. Let me see you, love. All of you, not just this man-shaped half.”
“I don’t want to hurt you—”
“You can’t. I give myself to you freely. Take it. Take me.”
The darkness in his breast roared. The dragon reached for her shimmering soul, brighter than gold, brighter than star fire. He felt her tighten beneath him again, and this time he seized her lips. As she trembled, a wave of energy rolled up her body. It reached his mouth and he welcomed it, a dazzling burst of light on his tongue. Her life energy connected them and rolled through his body with the roar of a tidal wave. For one brief, glorious moment, his inner darkness lit with the glow of a thousand suns.
He let himself go, and his orgasm ripped through him. His mind flashed white. And he knew peace.
Alice lay in the clearing across her lover’s chest, sated and languid like a cat in cream. His beautiful hands brushed up and down her back. He paused to trace the designs that swirled up her spine.
“A tattoo?” His voice rumbled beneath her ear.
“Owl feathers. To always remind me of my totem half, even in this human skin.”
“I like it.”
“Thank you. The ink was applied during my totem ceremony, when I became an adult in the eyes of my people.”
“Were you always able to Change into an Owl?”
“No. Not until I was thirteen. The Lady gifts us our totem Animal when we become adults.”
“Any Animal? Or is it dependent on your parents?”
“Any Animal as She wills it. But She often wills it to be similar to our parents. My brother is Raven, like my father. My mother was Owl. Could you always shift to dragon?”