The Dragon Prince's Promise (Dragongrove Book 5) Page 11

  His forehead was pressed to hers, his breathing uneven, even as he held her ass, even as he pressed her against him.

  “Lay back,” he breathed, his tone demanding.

  She scrambled to comply, a little thrill tearing through her at the decisiveness in his voice. She would do anything he asked—anything.

  A moment later she lay before him, watching him with breathless anticipation.

  He dragged his hand back through his hair, ignoring the pieces that fell across his eyes as he did. “Fuck,” he said. “Fuck, I want you.”

  She was desperate still, writhing against nothing, desperate for his hands or his lips or his cock. He just watched her silently, his eyes dark and hungry.

  She slipped a slender finger downward and circled it around her center once, and then again. She hissed sharply at the contact, delirious with desire, crazy with hunger for him, a primal kind of need that her own hand couldn’t possible satisfy. She tried anyway, strummed her fingers over her clit, watching him the whole time with hooded eyes.

  He nodded and watched her intently, a dark figure standing where he’d been since he’d kissed her, his expression ravenous. She continued her strokes against herself; she was inexplicably, impossibly building toward something, and when her breathing grew ragged and her heart thundered against her chest he spoke.

  “Stop.”

  She did—she obeyed as soon as the word left his mouth. Her finger lingered there, but didn’t move. She silently pleaded for him to come to her.

  “Spread your legs,” he said, watching her intently. She let her knees fall apart, splayed completely open before him. He nodded again. “I don’t want you to come on your hand,” he said. “I want you to come on my mouth.”

  And then he was kneeling before her, and his tongue was sweeping through her folds and making torturous little circles around her center. It wouldn’t take much; she was so close, and as soon as his tongue ran over her clit, slow and deliberate and swirling, she came undone. Her knees locked around him, her feet pressed into his back, her entrance quivered and clenched around nothing. She came down slowly, and he was so persistent with his thorough licking that by the time she was able to think or breathe or move again, she was almost ready to come a second time. She really didn’t want to be empty again, really wanted his cock in her, so she reached down for him and tried to pull him up and over her.

  “I want you to come on my hand first,” he murmured against her thigh. “Is that alright?”

  She shut her eyes and fell back against the bedding, nodding frantically. “Please,” she said, “please, I want all of you.”

  “Soon, El,” he murmured, and then swirled a big finger around her entrance and slid it inside. “Fuck,” he said, “love, you’re so wet.”

  It didn’t take much with his finger in her and his tongue on her clit, and when he guided a second finger in she came hard, clenching on him and shuddering around his hand and crushing his head between her knees. She was mad for him still, desperate for him inside of her, and before she had even regained her senses she pulled him up over her.

  She kissed him hard and wound her hands in his hair. She held him an inch from her and studied his face. “Now,” she breathed, even as she rubbed her hips against his hard length, his pants still infuriatingly between them. “Now, please.”

  He chuckled and leaned back on his heels, and a moment later he was nude before her. He was perfect; the most wonderful thing she’d ever seen.

  She sat up to reach for him, and wrapped her arms around his neck and scrambled onto his lap and kissed him again. She pressed her lips against his jaw and his chin and his neck, she pressed her nails into the hard muscle of his back, she pressed her heated flesh against his hard length. Her legs were spread, straddling him, and he held her to him with a firm grip at the base of her back.

  He was so close—she could shift slightly and he’d be inside her. She wanted to, tried to, but he was already moving against her, his cock rubbing through her folds, the head of it caressing her clit. It was perfect—delicious—and she moved with him, still rubbing against him, and when he leaned forward to take her nipple into his mouth, she came undone.

  Her legs were quivering, her heart was thundering, her core was pulsing and clenching and desperate to be filled. She clung to his shoulders, and his grip on her was as tight and steady as ever. He shifted slightly.

  He pushed into her—slowly, to accommodate his size—and the delicious fullness of him had her moaning and writhing and whispering his name. When he was fully seated—when she felt as if she couldn’t possibly be stretched further—she wriggled on his lap and caught his lips in a searing kiss. That seemed to snap the thin tether of control that he held onto.

  His hands went to her hips, holding her just above him. He slammed into her and she called out, her grip tight on his sculpted arms, her core full of need and full of him. It didn’t take long for him to coax another orgasm from her—and when she recovered, and when she could breathe again, he locked his arm around her waist and rolled her over, so that she was on her back and he covered her.

  She could feel every sweet inch of him. Every thrust echoed through her body, every kiss went straight through her core. She could hardly keep her mouth from his face—he was too sweet to not kiss every moment, and she dragged her lips through the stubble on his jaw and up to flick her tongue across his ear.

  He reached down to caress her clit, even as he fucked her, even as his length filled her. Between the delicious fullness and the scorching friction she came undone again. This time when she clenched around his cock and shuddered under him, he growled and breathed her name and came undone as she did.

  She clung to him still, her legs around his and her arms around the broad expanse of his back. He was propped on his arms, seeming to try not to crush her, but she frowned and pulled him down on her. She wanted his solid, sure weight on her. She wanted to know that this was real, that this had happened, that he was hers and she was his.

  He grinned at her as she pulled at him, his obnoxious hair falling across his eyes. He rolled onto his back and then pulled her to him, on top of him, still letting her press against every inch of his golden skin.

  She pressed her palms flat against his chest and rested her chin on them, looking up at him. “We should do that more often,” she said.

  He laughed, and for another moment she could forget their troubles, she could just laugh and pretend that they weren’t stuck in an impossible situation. So she did laugh with him, and pressed a line of kisses across his chest, and eventually settled so that her cheek was on his arm and her body was next to his. Both of his arms were around her, both of his legs tangled with hers, and the sure weight of him next to her was one of the best things she’d ever felt.

  “When do you have to...work?” she asked, hoping for an answer that she knew wouldn’t come.

  “Soon,” he said. “Soon, I can feel it.”

  She nodded absently, and he tilted her chin up to look at him. “And then I’ll be right back here, El, I swear. Can I just hold you for now?”

  She nodded again and nuzzled her face against him. He was lovely and sweet and warm, and before he needed to leave, she was already asleep.

  Twenty

  The storm passed more pleasantly than she’d imagined it could have: with Tate’s flesh against hers, with her legs around her waist and her arms around his neck, with his fingers or tongue or cock inside of her.

  When she saw the sun again, two days later, she was almost disappointed. There had been something sacred and secret and stolen about the time they’d spent in the cave, hidden from the weather, wrapped in each other. She didn’t want to return to the real world; even if the real world wasn’t so very different, she would at least have to acknowledge that this would be coming to an end.

  When he returned from where he’d disappeared down the passageway and found her staring out at the sun, mournfully, he wrapped his arm around her waist and pressed his lips
to her ear and asked her what she thought about returning to the heated spring.

  She turned toward him and grinned. “Will you touch me this time?” she asked. “Or will you make me beg, again?”

  He laughed at her and kissed her briefly. “Every second,” he promised.

  •••••

  He’d kept his promise, in the hot water. His hands had never left her—her side or her face or her back or her breasts, and when they were finally finished he delighted her further by having had the foresight to bring what was needed for a fire.

  He strode to the shore and lit it right there, and when it was warm and roaring he called her there too, and helped her into the dry sheet that he held out for her. When she was dressed and not as chilly, he pressed a soft kiss against her mouth.

  “Tell me how you came to be at the palace,” he said as he wrapped her tightly in a soft blanket, holding her hair from her as he had once before. “I asked you once, but you never answered.”

  She smiled wryly. “You called me pretty when you asked. I was distracted.”

  “Alright, well I promise not to call you pretty this time,” he said. “Tell me?”

  She was silent for a moment, her gaze fixed ahead, staring at the bank on the other side, the steam from the water clouding the sight. “It’s hard to tell.”

  “Sit with me, then.” He pulled her by the hand and guided her to the ground. He fetched another blanket to put across her lap, and then he sat next to her, angled so that she could lean back against his side. It was nice, so she did.

  When he moved his arm around her waist and pulled her closer to him, she didn’t fight it. “My mother died before I can remember,” she began, into the silence, “and my father loved her so much that he packed up my sister and I and carted us off to the forest. We spent many nights under the stars while he built a little cabin with his bare hands. My father, who’d been an tailor all his life, took his two young daughters—I couldn’t even walk yet—and built us all a home to live in by ourselves.

  “He never spoke of her; I don’t know that he could. My sister was six when she died, though, and she told me everything about her that she could remember. My mother was superstitious, and my sister told me about faeries and goblins and gremlins and everything else that only exists when you’re not looking. Not dragons, though,” she said, aiming a sly smile at Tate. “Sometimes, at night, I think about the stories I learned about, and if I close my eyes I can pretend that it’s my mother telling them to me. But I don’t even know what she looked like. I never thought to ask.” She looked up at him for a moment, and she saw that his eyes were closed, but he squeezed her waist where he held her, so she continued. “My father thought that because of her fixation on the lore, that maybe he could find her, could find her spirit, in some small way. And where better to do that in the forest that she’d loved?”

  “Hmm,” he said, and then pressed his cheek against her hair.

  “The house burned when I was eleven. My father was drunk, as he usually was, and he burned too.”

  “I’m sorry,” he breathed against her, but she shook her head. She didn’t want sympathy, she just wanted it out there.

  “My sister was away already. She’d left the year before, furious to have a father who kept her from friends and a life, so she’d packed her things and left. She promised to come back for me once she had a foothold somewhere, but she never did. I don’t like to think about what might have happened to her.”

  “What did you do?” he prompted, after she’d lapsed into silence for a minute.

  “I found town,” she said. “We didn’t live too far from it, although we never went there. My father hated it. I found a woman who looked kind, and I told her my plight, but she...didn’t care. And I found another, and another, but no one cared for another little street orphan. I didn’t matter.”

  His grip tightened around her, and she let her head relax onto his shoulder.

  “I slept outside, most nights, in little alleyways or on the covered stoop of a shop, if no one shooed me away. Sometimes the stable master would take pity on me and there would be an empty stall, so I’d have a roof and soft bedding, at least. The man who owned the inn was kinder than anyone else, and he let me do little chores for him, in exchange for my dinner. I would sit in by the fire and eat, trying to thaw my bones.

  “One night I was doing just that when I saw a woman—someone new, which was always a novelty in town. She was lovely—the loveliest woman I’d ever seen. I couldn’t look away from her, because she looked just exactly how I’d always pictured my mother.”

  “And I remember sitting there, forgetting to eat, just staring at her, and thinking that if my mother had lived, perhaps I would be sitting at her table with her, and eating dinner with her, and minding my elbows. Instead of—what I was doing. And she noticed me staring at her, and she called me boy and asked me about my dinner. I told her I wasn’t a boy, that I was Elsie, and then she smiled at me and asked me if I’d like to come with her.”

  She looked up at him again, and his gaze was fixed across the water, where hers had been before.

  “Madame Brodeur, she told me was her name, once we were in her carriage. I’d scarcely even seen a carriage before, and hers was so fine and trimmed with gold that I was sure she was some kind of royalty. She didn’t live in town there, she lived in the city, the real city. I’d never seen the city, and as I set off for my new life I felt a kind of optimism that I hadn’t felt since before my sister had left.

  “She was kind to me, and she gave me a bath and cut my hair and bought me finer dresses than I’d ever owned. And then she took me to her home. There were a dozen women living there, and I remember thinking that they were the most beautiful women I’d ever seen. They wore embroidered gowns trimmed with lace, and their faces were always painted in the most flattering ways. One of the ladies was very fond of elaborate hairstyles, and when she saw that I wanted to learn, she spent lots of time with me to teach me. She treated me like a little sister—they all did. I loved all of the effort that went into being pretty there, because I’d never known a life where pretty things were anything other than frivolous.

  “They were courtesans—whores,” she said. “I didn’t know it at first; I was eleven and didn’t know very much about the world. I learned quickly, but I didn’t care. They were kind to me, and I felt like I had a place that I belonged.

  “It was a strange kind of childhood, there,” she continued. “I didn’t have much to do. Madame Brodeur furnished me with books and a tutor, and I learned to read and write, and about history and politics and mathematics. I learned to sew and to play music and especially about social graces.”

  She looked up and directed a wry smile at Tate, and his grip tightened around her waist.

  “It was an easy life, much easier than it might have been if she hadn’t found me that day. I never questioned her kindness. I never thought to. She reminded me so much of the mother I’d built in my head that sometimes I forgot she wasn’t my mother, that she had no reason to take care of me as she did. But I learned eventually why she cared at all about what I learned.

  “When I was sixteen I was given a bill, outlining every cent she’d spent on me since she’d found me. Every lesson, every night of lodging, every single meal I’d ever eaten. I couldn’t leave, she’d said, until it was all paid off. I understood then why she cared about my education—the smarter I was, the more well-spoken I was, the more she could charge for me to be a...companion.

  “I put it off as long as I possibly could. I became more inventive with my hair styling, until I could charge the ladies there, and all over town, to do it for them. I made and sold sachets that they would keep in their rooms, to hide that they hadn’t bathed recently. I made little gifts to sell at the winter solstice, I made beautiful fans to sell in the summer. I sewed gowns, I even tried to paint portraits of the ladies. I was able to put it off for three years.”

  She was quiet for a long moment as she loo
ked across the water, as she let the rising steam dance in front of her. “You don’t have to say anything more, if you don’t want to,” he murmured.

  She shook her head. “Eventually I’d done everything that I could, but my debt to her continued to rise—I was still living in her home, I was still eating her food. I’d been there long enough, and been unavailable for long enough, that there was some...demand for me.

  “Madame Brodeur decided that she would auction off my virginity.” Elsie smiled when Tate growled at that, and patted his arm comfortingly. “It was too late for that—I’d had a...friend when I was a bit younger—but I don’t think that mattered. I dreaded it and I began to plan my escape, until a man—Reis—came to the brothel. He told me an interesting story.”

  Tate nodded at the name.

  “He told me of a palace waiting for a queen. He told me that if I promised to serve him first, and the queen second, that he would pay my entire debt and I could leave the same day.

  “It was an easy decision. It wasn’t even a decision, really—I was going to leave regardless, but this way I wouldn’t be running from debtors. He didn’t tell me about dragons until later, and I didn’t believe him until I saw him turn into one.”

  He tightened his arms around her. “I’m glad he found you when he did,” he murmured against her hair.

  She nodded slightly and furrowed her brows. She wasn’t sure why she’d told it in that order, but...it was hard to consider everything.

  She twisted around in his arms, and pressed her lips to his jaw and then her cheek to his cheek. “Do we need to get back?” she asked, already knowing the answer.

  Twenty-one

  Elsie’s days had transformed from something tedious and boring into something lovely and decadent; the nights that just a week before had seemed to stretch endlessly were suddenly never long enough.