Somehow, in a blur of motion, he had them across the room and her naked. He stepped back to strip himself and a laugh burst from her at how she was bare to his blazing gaze with barely a whisper of the fabric moving against her skin.
“That’s handy,” she murmured, grinning up at him.
He froze, hand at the button of his pants, the skin across his cheekbones flaring red.
“What?” she asked, suddenly shy.
“Don’t ever stop smiling at me,” he said in a voice gone smokey.
The combination of such sweet words with command in every syllable had a rush of wetness coating the inside of her thighs.
He inhaled sharply, then, in another blur of motion so fast she couldn’t track it, was undressed and had her on the bed, his head between her thighs, lapping at her. Her body was right there with him. She speared her hands through his hair, holding him against her as he used his lips on every part but the one she wanted.
She groaned. “You going to pop the clutch again?”
He chuckled darkly at that, and the sound shot straight to her heart, winging her soul to the heavens. Because he was…happy.
In a way, dragon shifters—and she’d bet especially her serious, uber-responsible black dragon—had a hard time with happiness. Almost as though the emotion was buried so deep inside them, they couldn’t reach it. That she could pull that response from him made her feel like a light, showing him where the happiness had been hiding in the dark. Only now she was using her hands to frantically tug him up her body, making impatient little noises as he stopped on the way to tease her with kisses and nips.
Then he was there, settled between her legs, his face hovering above hers, dark eyes pure fire and the softest smile lingering around his lips.
“I thought I was going to be the impatient one after being stuck in that fucking infirmary,” he murmured.
She shook her head, her bangs falling into her eyes, and he swept them back with a finger, then laid his lips to hers. Not soft anymore. This kiss was one of claiming, hard and demanding, the taste of her on his tongue, and she answered with demanding kisses of her own, sucking his tongue into her mouth, nipping at his lower lip.
“Gods above, love,” he breathed the words. “You were built for me.”
Then, with no warning, he pressed into her.
On a long, indrawn breath, Hadyn’s back arched off the bed as he drove slowly, relentlessly into her body, stretching her, filling her up until he was balls deep and every part of her was his.
“Look at me, love,” he said softly.
What she found in his expression threatened to steal her heart completely, and she sort of melted around him. He put his forehead to hers. Then he moved.
Gods, how he moved.
She didn’t know a man so powerfully built could be so…sensual. Every stroke, every shift of his hips a mastery of her body. Slow at first, so slow that she found herself anticipating that moment she was full again. Then faster, building the sensations, layering them inside her, all while her heart contracted around the way he held her. As though she were…precious.
Her orgasm, when it came, started soft and sweet, before building to a hard rush, tumbling her under before wringing every last drop of pleasure from her body. She shuddered as she clenched around him, riding the sensations through each crest, Rune’s own shout of completion as he swelled inside her only sending her over again as heat filled her from the inside.
Not fire. She knew he’d never risk her life that way.
But heat, nonetheless.
By the time she came back to herself, she was panting, skin slick with sweat. Rune, too, his forehead still to hers, eyes closed as he inhaled slowly.
Then he opened them, and she gasped at the sparks of emotions, like stars glittering in an endless onyx sky, flickering at her.
“Mine.” He dropped a kiss on her lips, as though sealing his words inside her. Her heart did what her body had just done, tumbled over and over and over itself.
“Mine, too,” she said. Then chuckled. “I should warn you, I have a feeling I’m going to be worse than dragons when it comes to being possessive where you’re concerned.”
Rune pulled back and grinned down at her. “Somehow I don’t think that’s true.”
She shrugged a single shoulder. “Look twice at anyone else and reap the consequences.”
He kissed the tip of her nose, sending a jolt of happy surprise through her. She hadn’t thought he’d be a casual toucher. “I’d like to see that,” he teased.
She sniffed. “Consider yourself warned, that’s all I’m saying.”
His disbelieving grin only widened, and his cock, still buried inside her, thickened.
She raised her eyebrows. “Oh… Yay me!”
With a deep chuckle, he dropped a slow, mind-stealing kiss on her lips, then shifted his hips in a way that pulled a gasp from her. “If I only get eighty years with you, I figure I better make use of my time.”
Then he was kissing her again, but the words still registered. Rune wanted to keep her until the end of her days? Not just a few years or until she started to age?
Her heart took off like a bird, fluttering inside her at that realization…and at the sobering thought that they faced limits.
The second time they made love, she absorbed and reveled in every single second, not wanting to miss a thing about this man.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Rune stared at the monitor in front of his face, his brows lowering. “That can’t be right,” he muttered to himself.
He checked a few things and even ran a quick diagnostic on the equipment, but the readings didn’t alter in any way. With a small growl, he grabbed the microphone that hooked into a mountain-wide PA system. “Boss,” he said, the old habit suddenly natural again. “You’d better see this on the double.”
Within minutes, Finn was in the room. Several other footfalls pattered down the hallway, but Rune didn’t wait for them. He pointed at a blob on the screen—actually a ton of tiny blips that converged into one reading. “We know this is our people. They’re almost here.”
Usually, dragons couldn’t be tracked on radar that easily. Impossible to tell the difference between dragons and other things. However, they’d been in contact with Levi, who had provided exact coordinates and timing. Rather than split the group up, he’d kept them together. Stealth wasn’t possible, not when the Alliance was well aware they’d been routed, and their numbers improved any chances of surviving an attack.
All of which had made it damn easy for those in the Alaz mountain to track them.