Forbidden Embers (32 page)

“Cecily, darlin’, sweetheart. Please. Please. Please.” The words poured out of him, tumbling from his mouth one after another as he lost himself in her. As he gave every part of himself over to her. His brain, his body, his straining, aching cock. He gave her everything, and in return she gave him the most unbelievable pleasure of his life.

Electricity coursed down his spine, and he didn’t know if it came from her or if it was just because of what she was doing to him. And in those crazy, lust-crazed moments, he didn’t care. All that mattered was her. And when she lowered her head and took the tip of his dick in her mouth, nothing in his life had ever felt so good.

Arching into the wet heat of her mouth, he thrust his hips again and again. Begging her to take him deeper. To take all of him. He couldn’t help it. Nothing in his long, long, long life had ever felt this good. Nothing would ever feel this good again. He was certain of it deep down in the soul he so rarely liked to think about.

She moaned deep in her throat, and that one sound, on top of everything else, sent him careening over the edge. He thrust furiously against her, driving his cock deeper and deeper into her mouth. Deeper and deeper down her throat as it closed tightly around him.

He tried to rein himself in, tried to stop himself from taking her like a madman. But he was in a frenzy, his dragon so close to the surface that he could no longer tell what was him and what was the beast.

He strained against her, desperate to get deeper, desperate for her to take every part of him inside her. His cum boiled up hot and uncontrollable. His hands clenched onto her shoulders, and for a minute he really did fear hurting her. But then she clutched at his ass, his thighs, pulled him even deeper down her throat as her tongue tickled the sensitive spot at the base of his head. He lost it completely and came apart in her arms.

His orgasm was a vicious explosion that took over every part of him until everything around him ceased to exist. Until the only things in the world were her and him and the incredible fire that burned between them.

Ecstasy consumed him, enveloped him, burned him alive with his own flame. With hers. And still she took him, swallowing every drop of his cum and then sucking him back to wild arousal.

Dazed, desperate, determined to get inside her before he turned feral, he turned her so that she was facedown on the bed, her hands wrapped around the iron slats of the headboard. Then he locked his hands over hers on the iron slats and positioned himself behind her. With one hard thrust, he buried himself balls-deep inside her.

She gasped at the invasion, but she was wet and hot and tight, so tight that he couldn’t have stopped even if he’d wanted to. And he didn’t want to stop. He never wanted to stop. He wanted to fuck her forever.

And that’s what he did. Taking her from behind like the animal he sometimes was, he fucked her and fucked her and fucked her.

Fucked her until she came around his cock, her sweet body milking him like there was no tomorrow.

Fucked her until she bucked wildly against him and came again.

Fucked her until she screamed his name and begged for mercy.

And still he didn’t stop. He couldn’t. She had broken something open inside him, something that he had kept buried his entire life, and there was no shoving it back down. It was wild and feral and uncontrollable. And it needed her. Needed him to mark her, to claim her, to spill his cum so deep inside her that she would never get his scent out of her skin.

When she came for the fifth—or maybe it was the sixth—time, he slipped a hand down the curve of her ass and pressed his thumb inside her anus with one unapologetic thrust. She screamed his name, her lithe, strong body bucking beneath him as she came again.

He felt the contractions start deep inside her, and he knew, in that moment, that he was hers. That she owned him. That even as he took everything she had to give, he belonged to her.

The knowledge, combined with the incredible pleasure of her orgasm, was too much. He couldn’t hold on any longer, couldn’t hold anything back. Grabbing on to her hips so hard that he was sure he left marks, he pushed forward at the same time he slammed her back against him.

She screamed, a loud, wild cry that raked down his nerve endings and pushed him right over the edge of the precipice. And then he was flooding her, his cum jetting into her in rhythmic pulses that gave her what he had never intended to give another person.

W
hen it was over, Cecily slid peacefully back into sleep and Logan just lay there, listening to her breathe for the longest time. In, out, in, out. She was so beautiful that it hurt to look at her, with her blond hair fanning out around her head like a halo. He wanted nothing more than to settle in next to her and stay there, touching her, cuddling her, loving her, for as long as she would let him.

Panic assailed him at the thought, gripped him by the balls and wouldn’t let go. Forgetting his earlier wishes, he scrambled out of bed and nearly fell on his ass in his desperation to get away from her—and his feelings for her.

His throat was parched from fear, and he walked toward the bathroom on trembling legs, calling himself a pussy even as he did so. He’d spent his life locked in battle, had fought more wars than he could hope to count, had taken on the world alone for centuries. And yet here he was, shaking because of one little dragon whose head didn’t even reach his shoulder.

Flipping on the bathroom light, he found a glass sitting on the counter. He filled it with water, drank it all in one long gulp, though his hands were shaking so badly that he ended up spilling a third of it onto the counter.

He cleaned the mess up with a hand towel, then filled the glass again. Only after he’d finally succeeded in washing away the dryness coating his throat did he look in the mirror at the shuddering mess he had become. His eyes were dilated, his skin was pasty white and his breath was seesawing in and out of his lungs like he’d just run a half dozen miles or so full-out.

What was he going to do?

What the fuck was he going to do?

He couldn’t have fallen for her, couldn’t be in love with her. Doing so would be incredibly stupid, and while he was a lot of things, he was rarely stupid.

And yet feelings were building inside of him that were so real, so powerful, he couldn’t deny them. There was this sense of rightness that he felt whenever he was near her. The need he had to hold her, to protect her, to make sure that no one—least of all those bastards her father had left in charge—ever had the chance to hurt her.

But how could that be? How could she have come to matter to him so much in such a short time? How could she have broken down every barrier he’d erected? He’d come to destroy her, goddamnit, to rip her clan apart,
factionnaire
by
factionnaire
. Brick by fucking brick. How could he have been so insane as to fall for her when he knew what he had to do?

But when he’d been sitting in that parlor with her that night, holding her while she cried for a little girl she’d never met, he’d known there was so much more to her than he had ever wanted to believe. It was bad enough that she kept him hot and hard all the time, that she made him lose perspective on things much bigger than the two of them, but when he saw how much she cared about her people, she melted him.

She fucking destroyed him.

He’d deliberately asked her about the lab, had watched her closely as she answered. Had waited for some sign of guilt, of remorse, of knowledge about what was going on there, but she’d been a blank slate. Two days ago, he would have believed it was because she was a hell of an actress. Tonight, he’d been afraid to hope that it was because she really didn’t know anything about the virus or what her father had done.

And if that was the case . . . He let out a shuddering sigh. If that was the case, there was no way he should be able to look himself in the fucking mirror. Because then he was as bad as all of her
factionnaires
, huddling around her, keeping secrets and doing their best to destroy her in an effort to save themselves.

Sickened, disgusted and afraid for the first time in he couldn’t begin to remember when, Logan bent over the sink and splashed water on his face. Tried to wash away his guilt and confusion as easily as he did the sleep from his eyes. It didn’t work, but as he was drying off, he saw something in the mirror that sent his world spinning off its axis.

It can’t be,
he told himself as he squinted at the mirror.
It can’t be,
he repeated as he looked down at his right arm in shock.

But it was. Jesus Christ, it really was.

His tattoos had changed, shifted a little, so that the jagged lines on his arm had somehow come together in a faint band around his bicep. A mating band.

The first of the three that formed when a dragon met the woman he was destined to be mated with for the rest of his life. When complete, they would lock he and Cecily together for the rest of their very long lives.

He stared at the intricate black ring in disbelief, shocked at how beautiful it was. He’d seen them before, of course, on his mated friends’ arms, had always known that they were incredibly artistic, but he’d never realized just how gorgeous they really were. Probably because he’d never paid much attention to them before, and because the band had never been his. Or maybe it wasn’t the band that was so beautiful, but the feelings that brought it forth.

Unable to stop himself, he traced the band with his finger, learning all of its twists and turns. It was surprisingly delicate—like Cecily—yet sturdy, too, the links and connections well-defined.

He told himself to stop looking at it, to pretend he’d never seen it, but he couldn’t stop touching it. It felt amazing. Warm, mystical, welcoming. It felt like Cecily. It felt like he’d always imagined home would feel, if he ever managed to find it.

How could he have known? How could he possibly have guessed that after four hundred years he would find his home? Here in the middle of enemy territory.

The thought jerked him out of the fantasy he hadn’t even known he’d been weaving and landed him in the middle of reality with a solid thump. He was an idiot, a fucking idiot, to get caught up in the magic of it even for a second when he knew the truth.

This story didn’t have a happy ending.

How could it? He had lied to her from the very first minute he’d met her, had accepted her invitation into her clan with only one goal on his mind: to destroy everything she wanted to save. And even if he didn’t, even if he went against every instinct he had and settled for simply destroying the lab, he couldn’t take back the fact that he had lied to her. Had betrayed her trust. Had coldly and deliberately used her.

Besides, he couldn’t just let everything else go. Not after meeting her
Conseil
and getting up close and personal with so many of her
factionnaires’
thoughts. Cecily might not be the evil incarnate he’d once imagined her to be, but the people she was surrounded by were. There was no way he could leave her with any of them alive. Every single one of the
Conseil
had to go—including those who Cecily considered her friends.

No, there was no future for him and Cecily. Despite the fact that he wanted her like he’d wanted no other woman, despite the fact that he had fallen in love with her, despite the fact that he was well on his way to respecting her and what she was trying to do, he couldn’t pretend that everything was going to be all right.

If he stayed with her, if he stayed here and abandoned the Dragonstars, he would forsake every ounce of self-respect he had. If he tried to make it work, if he destroyed the lab in secret and killed off her
Conseil
the same way, and then she somehow found out, he’d be dooming her to only half a life. After they’d bonded completely, after their mating was complete, if she found out that he had betrayed her, it would destroy her. Mates didn’t betray each other, didn’t lie to each other, sure as hell didn’t build a life on deception.

No, he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t finish the process, couldn’t let the bond complete itself. If he did, they’d both be damned. And while he already was, he could not stand the thought of bringing Cecily down with him. Which meant there was only one thing for him to do.

He had to lock his feelings for Cecily away, hide them so far inside himself that even he forgot they were there. If he did that, if he succeeded in convincing her that he didn’t care about her, then the mating ring would fade and Cecily would be all right. She could marry someone else, have children with someone else, and never be the wiser. And while the thought of her letting some other man touch her made him furious, made him ill, the thought of destroying her was a million times worse. If he did anything else, if he tried to believe in fairy tales or the fact that she might someday be able to forgive him, then he would end up ruining not only his life, but hers, as well.