Light His Fire: Paranormal BBW Dragon Shifter Mail-Order Bride Romance (8 page)

She grinned and Ares kissed her hard on the lips again. He tugged her head back by grabbing a fistful of her hair, making her lean back. Water glistened on his body, streaming down the curves and plains of his muscles as the waterfall splashed droplets on him. His blue and gold eyes burned with need and she knew she must have had the exact same look in her eyes. She
wanted
him, more than she’d ever wanted anything.

And for once, she wasn’t going to hem and haw about whether or not she should go for it.

“Is it too much for you?” he growled, barely contained desire pressing against the edges of every word.

“Fuck me,” she said back, almost spitting it out.

With expert precision, he moved her hips up, letting his thick head press right against her pussy lips. Her nails were scraping down his shoulders, trying to hold onto him as he kept her right where he wanted her – right where she wanted to be.

“What do you want?” he asked, a note of teasing in his tone.

“I want you to fill me with that fucking cock of yours,” she begged, her back arching in anticipation.

He didn’t need to be told twice. He thrust into her and her universe shifted again. Colors burned and exploded behind her eyelids and that tightness that had tied her up so completely loosened immediately. He plowed into her hard, and after a few strokes, sunk into her completely. Only the roar of the waterfall could muffle her cries of ecstasy.

Pearl pushed her head back, bouncing up and down on him with the hunger of a woman left without the right kind of cock for too long. Hell, he was by far the best she’d ever had – he was better than anything she could have imagined.

Ares yanked her back by her hair and quieted her screams with his mouth. She kissed him back hard, scratching his neck as she clung to him. He should have been cold to the touch in the lukewarm water, but he felt like fire against her, heating her with his presence. She was surprised he didn't make the water boil around them.

“Damn, you’re tight,” he hissed through clenched teeth when she gave him a chance to speak a few words.

Pearl grinned, squeezing down on him and getting a satisfying groan in response. He obviously noticed her toying with him, because he grabbed her by the hips with both hands and pumped up and into her twice as fast. She was going to say something, but her words turned into squeals of delight instead.

She held onto him for dear life, their breaths growing more and more ragged. The waterfall was making little prisms of light scatter around them, creating tiny rainbows in the last rays of the sun. The tight ball of need that had been growing and growing in her with every day she spent away from him was now on the verge of exploding. When he buried his head into her neck and sunk into her to the base of the shaft, it finally shattered and took her right along with it.

His skin tasted salty as she bit into it, her orgasm shaking her with its intensity. She clamped down around him and dragged him right along with her, his release just as powerful as hers. When the peak passed and she was left weak in his arms, she could barely comprehend where or who she was. It wasn’t an entirely unappealing state to be in. She could have stayed like that forever if she’d had to.

If anyone had asked, Pearl couldn’t have recited how they’d got back out of the water and up the side of the mountain. But, so they had, and it wasn’t long until she was sitting on Ares’s lap in the back seat of his truck, wrapped up in blankets and curled up snug as a bug in a rug. Her head was resting on his shoulder and she was listening to the beat of his heart, strong and steady.

“What do you want, Pearl? What do you really want?” Ares asked, breaking the silence.

His hands were brushing through her damp hair and she couldn’t recall when she’d felt so safe before. Warmth pooled in the pit of her stomach, hearing his voice and wishing they could stay on the backseat of that beat up truck forever. The bottle of champagne was empty now, but she didn’t need the bubbly to feel completely and utterly satisfied.

“I want a man I can depend on. Kids. A home. Doesn’t have to be big, just mine, something I built up with my own two hands. I want to make my mark and build my own path. I want a love that lasts and a man I can lean on when I can’t stand up by myself.”

The words just flowed out of her. She didn’t need to coax them out from somewhere deep, dark within her, or look for what to say in hopes that it would sound smart or sexy. Right then and there, Ares Goldplains wasn’t a demanding, stubborn, pig-headed dragon, but a man she felt good being next to. A man she felt so good with that she had to wonder if that was how it was always supposed to be – and the thought wasn’t scary.

He kissed the top of her head, falling quiet.

“What do you want?” she asked after a pause, trailing her hands down his chest and along the ridges of his abs.

His skin felt gritty under her touch and she wondered how his scales would feel.

“I want to be that man.”

Ares reached for something in the pocket on the back of the driver’s seat. He fished out a small pendant on a thin chain. It seemed to suck in the light around it and glow at the same time. He placed it in her palm and she sucked in a breath in surprise. It was hot to the touch, just like he was.

“What is it?” Pearl asked, looking at him.

His blue eyes kept sucking her into them time and time again. She didn’t mind at all.

“That’s a dragon stone. I know it’s too early to make any promises, but I want you to know that if you’re ever in any trouble, you can call for me and I’ll be there. Just wear this and I’m never too far away. Okay?”

She looked at the strangely pulsing pendant in her palm and then locked her fingers around it. Maybe it was too early for big spoken promises, but she didn’t mind the implication of them.

“Okay,” she said.

He kissed her forehead and then her lips, and happiness spread through her like wildfire, hot and fast. For that evening, Pearl clung to the hope that things could work out exactly as she wanted them to. He could be that man, she could be a woman worthy of a man like that, and everything would be perfect.

But of course, things were never that easy.

CHAPTER NINE

Pearl

Things weren’t all sunshine and roses down at Mae’s General Goods. In fact, if anyone were to ask Dalton North, he’d say that things were pretty much completely shitty at that point.

Hurricane Pearl had been flying through the store for the past few days and there seemed to be no stopping her. As far as Pearl was concerned,
nothing
was where it should be and was never going to be. That might have been a slight exaggeration had anyone else said it, but when Pearl Mae Landon said it, people were going to believe her.

She could hear hushed voices as she restacked some cans of peaches for the umpteenth time that day without being completely satisfied with where, how and what they were. Her lips were twisted in a mild snarl, one that had made at least one werewolf contractor back right out of the store when he’d laid eyes on it. The shifters knew when a battle wasn’t worth fighting, and Pearl sure looked like she was ready to go a round or two.

“What’s going on?” Pearl heard Danni’s gentle voice ask.

“I don’t know, ma’am. She’s been a right pain in the…“

“Dalton!”

“Sorry. She’s been in a foul mood for a few days and I dunno what it is. She better knock it off though or there ain’t gonna be anyone here for the opening. No one wants to deal with a storekeeper who looks like she’ll snap someone’s neck.”

Pearl snorted to herself. She was going to have to have a stern talk with Dalton later. He had a right to his opinion –
No way I’ve been that bad!
– but he was going to have to keep his big mouth shut if he was going to be talking to her future clients! She twisted one of the cans around on the stack absently and the whole pile came tumbling down with a clatter.

“Motherfucker!” Pearl bellowed over the store.

That got a chuckle out of a werebear that was setting up some of the lamps near the dairy freezers, but he shut up real quick when Pearl tossed him an earth-scorching glare.

“Sorry, Miss Mae,” he said, having picked up Dalton’s mannerisms.

The man scuttled down off his ladder and disappeared somewhere where her glares couldn’t make the gates of hell open up beneath his feet – nothing like a woman scorned. Pearl sunk down onto her knees and started gathering the cans, muttering choice curses under her breath.

How could you be so dumb! You knew he was just a player. Just one date? My ass! Never trust a dragon you meet on a dating site!

Thoughts rattled through her head and she was so immersed in her personal angry pity party that she didn’t even notice that Danni had come and started helping her pick up the cans. When they both reached for the same one and their hands brushed, Pearl jumped back with a start.

“Hell! Danni, you scared me!” Pearl said, clutching her chest.

“You okay? Dalton’s worried about you,” Danni said, her imploring eyes seemingly staring right into the depths of Pearl’s bruised soul.

Bile burned in her throat and Pearl nodded quickly, turning her eyes down to the floor again.

“Yes, I’m fine. Just a bit on edge about the store opening, is all.”

She jumped up and kicked a few cans into the haphazard pile they had built. She’d get to stack that again – joy. Danni gave her a look that told volumes.

“Shit. It’s that obvious, huh?” Pearl asked, smoothing a hand through her hair.

Danni just nodded in confirmation and took Pearl’s hand in hers, squeezing it. Human contact was right on the border of being painful. It reminded her far too much of being in Ares’s arms that night a few days ago. She pulled her hand away carefully and motioned for Danni to follow her.

They walked through the store, already crowded with merchandise, and through the small storage area right next to the sales floor. There wasn’t a lot of room to play with and Pearl couldn’t afford big freezers yet anyway, so she’d placed most of the goods out and made a little office nook for herself behind the stacked boxes and crates. It was complete with two secondhand leather chairs that may or may not have been a rich burgundy color at one point. Pearl slumped into one of the chairs and Danni took the other.

“What happened?” Danni asked.

“It’s silly.”

“It doesn’t look silly.”

Pearl huffed. It
was
silly – her reaction to it anyway. Wasn’t she a little too old to be having tantrums just because a boy didn’t call her? She certainly
felt
too old for it. This was something she would have expected from Dalton and his girlfriend Missy – tears and bad moods and doors slamming. But she was far past her teenage years and, yet, here she was, sulking like the best of them.

“He didn’t call.”

“He didn’t call?”

“Or text. Or reply to my message on SassyDate. Or show up at the store. Or show up at all, for that matter. I haven’t seen or heard from him in days. It’s like he disappeared.”

“I assume we’re talking about Ares?” Danni asked, tying her fingers in her lap like she was settling in for a long session with an unhappy client.

“Yes. That bastard dragon didn’t even have the decency to tell me he just wanted to get laid and then leave. I can’t believe I let him fool me like that! I mean, how stupid do you have to be to think that a womanizing asshat like that guy wants something more than a night of fucking around?”

“Okay, reel it back a bit. What happened exactly?” Danni asked, her brows furrowing into a small frown.

There was something so entirely soft and soothing about her voice that Pearl could feel herself relaxing just a tiny bit. Or maybe it had something to do with the fact that she’d been dying to bitch and moan about all of this to someone other than herself? Either-or, the words started coming out of her and she couldn’t stop them even if she’d wanted to.

“We went on a date. And I know I’m being melodramatic about this because I
told
him it was just one date. I was entirely prepared for
just one date
. But then it happened and…”