“You know,” she whispered on a sudden bout of boldness. “I’d really, really love your cock in my mouth.”
Rune, usually so capable, powerful, and almost graceful in his movements, came the closest to stumbling she’d ever seen him get, and Hadyn laughed, the joy of it filling the en suite bathroom and echoing off the rock walls.
“Your wish is my command, love,” he growled.
Then stepped into the large glassed-in shower. Hadyn closed her eyes as the hot spray of the water hit her body and quite happily gave herself over to this particular moment.
Chapter Thirteen
Rune checked the corners and crags of the large underground cave that served, essentially, as the basement of the Huracán headquarters. The natural space had always been a part of this mountain, hidden deep inside it until they’d come along and discovered it. Perfect for their needs. When they’d moved in, they’d tunneled out from here, creating a dragon-sized back door. Every mountain needed a back door, or several. This was what he’d based the formation of an escape route in his own mountain on.
The space here was currently filled with people, and he couldn’t say he liked it. Neither did Vilsinn. The cave troll stood as far back as he could, not rolled up as he sometimes did, but standing to his full height, watching every move happening in the space.
Meanwhile, Rune stood back, in the shadows, watching closely. Ignoring all the glances cast his direction—speculative, suspicious, curious, blatantly accusing.
He sneered at the last guy. Go ahead, fucker. I’m in a piss-poor mood as it stands. Pick a fight. I dare you.
The dragon, Gold Clan by the eyes, turned away.
Rune didn’t even give the guy another thought, turning his gaze to his teammates instead. Hadyn was tucked away out of sight for now. She’d meet everyone after the explanations, at his insistence.
Hall and Kanta had each sent him hard looks, which he’d returned unblinkingly. A few subtle sniffs in his direction told him, even after showering, he still had her scent all over him.
No wonder.
He and Hadyn hadn’t slept much last night, even though he kept insisting they needed it. The problem was, he couldn’t keep his hands off her. He’d woken her multiple times, hard and aching and needing to see if she screamed every time.
She did.
Hell, the time before the last, he’d fallen asleep embedded inside her, still half hard, and woken fully hard, still inside her, and all he’d had to do was shift his hips. She’d woken on the sexiest damn moan he’d ever heard.
His dick twitched against the seam of his pants, and he stuffed the memory away, to be taken out later when he could do something about it. Like fuck her in front of all these dragons, her face a picture of sexual pleasure so intense they would have zero doubt whom she belonged to.
“What do you think?” Deep asked beside him, yanking his thoughts harshly back to the present.
Funny how, after all that time apart, wondering what Deep thought of him—the day Rune had disappeared from the team, the older dragon hadn’t been around—they had slipped so easily back into the relationship they’d always had.
Rune’s gaze slid across the room to Finn. He was a different story. True, they worked as a team now, reaching out to each other. But the break in their relationship…that might be too deep to fill.
Now was not the time to fix it, either.
Rune glanced around the room at the gathering. His old alpha and mentor had been greeting each arrival as they’d shown up. Dragons from every clan, and from a good number of settlements around the country. Across the way, a female-born shifter from the Black Clan nodded at Deep. Shula, he’d been told her name. Apparently Lyndi had helped her get her mate, Bree, back from the Alaz team last spring, and now they had each other’s backs.
But most had come because of Deep. He had spent months, longer in fact, reaching out to the communities, telling them what had been happening. Some believed, many were skeptical, but clearly he’d impacted enough.
Rune had not called in his own favors. The men who’d joined him in rescuing mates had sacrificed enough, and the dragons who owed him had lived rough lives. He never planned to call in those markers. So he’d take what he could get from other sources. These were better numbers for his side at least.
Would these people stay when they heard what they were needed for, though?
Deep would be asking them to turn their backs on an ingrained belief about rogue dragons to rescue two, and that was the easy part. Rune’s experience was that most creatures, once they settled on a truth, burrowed in like a tick, and there’d be no changing their minds. Only catastrophe seemed to do that, and even then, some burrowed deeper, clinging to the only reality they knew as the world flipped everything on its head.
“I think if I had your touch with people, I could have saved more mates,” he said, answering his old mentor’s question.
Deep clapped a hand on his shoulder. “You saved mates when the rest of us turned a blind eye.”
Rune ducked his head, needing a second to grapple with those words. Is that really what Deep thought?
“I’m proud of you, Rune,” Deep said, slow and serious. “Always have been.”
Rune lifted his head to take in the man who’d been more father to him than his own ever had—firm guidance tempered by true affection. The thing was…other than Finn, the loss of Deep’s support had hit him the hardest when he’d left. Not that the older dragon had turned against him, exactly, or blamed him, but he also had never reached out.
Granted, that wouldn’t have been easy to do. Still, Rune had taken that decades-long silence as Deep and Calla being disappointed in him, thinking Rune could have handled it differently, which he probably could have.
“I could have done better,” he voiced a small part of what he’d been carrying for years. “Saved more. Justified losing the faith of my team, my brothers.”
“You did what you had to do,” Deep said. “And you did enough.”
Rune shook his head.
“Look at me, son.”
He did, almost flinching at the light of pride glowing in the deep blood red of Deep’s flaming eyes. The acceptance there. It had been a long time. “You did enough,” Deep insisted.
The tone of his voice reminded Rune of the early days as enforcers when Deep had been alpha—one that brooked no argument. He was right, and if you wanted to argue…don’t. Though he’d tempered that with a fatherly kind of leadership.
When they had first been sent to the Americas as a team—all of them alphas, all hot-headed, and all masters at the art of war—Deep’s response to all that was to sit each of them down for fatherly chats every so often. Usually when they needed their heads pulled out of their asses.