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“It is indeed.”He cupped my face with his hand and stroked my cheek with his thumb, his eyes still heavy with sleep. “I wasafraid to wake up,” he said out loud. “Terrified that it was all a dream.”
I held up my arm, displaying my mating mark. “It’s real. We’re bound by fate for an eternity.”
I crashed my mouth to his and climbed on top of him, straddling his naked body and resting myself on his cock. I leaned forward to position him at my entrance, our mouths devouring one another. But before I could slide myself down his shaft, he sat up, broke our kiss, and flipped me around so that my back was to him. He got to his knees and put his hand between my shoulder blades and pushed my chest down to the bed. I jerked when he pressed his tip to my wet core.
In one smooth motion, he slammed into me. I moaned at the feeling of being filled with his considerable length.
His arm wrapped around me, hand lightly holding my throat, and lifted me until my back was against his chest. My head leaned back to rest against him, my fingers tangled into his hair. He was buried so deep in me in this position. Ryker licked up the column of my throat to my ear.
“This is exactly what I envisioned last night, what I couldn’t get out of my mind when we were dancing and you were grinding your ass against me,” he whispered.
The thought of last night heated my skin.
“Say it,” I breathed. I needed to hear it. I could never hear it enough.
His voice was low and lethal. “You belong to me.”
We danced, grinded, and fucked each other until we were both limp on the bed from pleasure. He got off the bed and walked over to a basin filled with water. He touched it with his finger to heat it, steam rising into the chilled air. He wet a cloth, ringing it out, and came back over to the bed. He cleaned me gently before tossing it aside and resting against me again.
“I love you. Beyond the bond.”
“Beyond the bond.”Ryker kissed my shoulder with such tenderness as he held me to him.
We lay there in comfortable silence, soaking in each other for a long while.
“Do we have to go back?” I broke the silence. I knew we needed to get back at some point but for just a little while, I wanted to stay here with him, in our place away from the rest of the world where it was just the two of us.
“Not today, little gem. I need at least today with you all to myself.”
Normally, mates would hole up somewhere for weeks or months after sealing the bond. It was the primal instinct for the males to impregnate the female, which could take quite a long time. I didn’t have to be concerned with that. I had already taken my yearly elixir in the summer. But that didn’t make the instinct to be isolated with my mate any easier to overcome and only have a single day with him. We couldn’t afford to ignore our responsibilities any more than that.
A different kind of hunger had us getting out of bed. The only clothing I had was what I wore last night and my top was somewhere in the chamber of the cave. Ryker pulled out one of his shirts from a wardrobe for me to wear and he put on a pair of loose pants before we left the alcove to find something to eat.
He didn’t have much food in the alcove where he had a small kitchen, but enough to tide us over. We ate bread, cheese and fruit at a wooden table. He only had one chair, so I sat perched on his knees and I mentioned to him that he would need to get another one if we would be spending any amount of time here, to which he protested and said that he enjoyed me on his lap, and we both laughed.
Ryker held my hand as he gave me a tour of the cave, showing me all the different alcoves, most of them filled with gems embedded in the walls.
“I see you have a thing for gems,” I said with a wry smile.
He shrugged. “I think I took on more of my Spirit dragon than I was intended to. I’ve come to love hoarding precious treasure all for myself.”
“So this,” I gestured to the glimmering stones around us. “Is how you got all your wealth?”
“I suppose. It’s all natural and native to the mountain. Theron dug out the cave for me after I had become Lord, when I needed some place to get away, and it was then that I discovered that the mountains are filled with them. Terbis wielders mine some of it, in moderation, and while that seems like Oryn is keeping the precious jewels to itself, it’s so that we don’t damage too much of our lands.”
So misunderstood.
Even as a Lord, he was still just a male, one who had spent his life protecting his Nation and its people. When he was at the cave, he didn’t have to be Lord of Oryn, Worthy by Xareus, he could just be Ryker.
“Do you like being a Lord? Ruling over Oryn,” I asked as he led me down one of the tunnels deeper into the mountain. A roaring sound was getting louder and louder and I could feel the rumbling through my terbis.
“Most of the time, I do. But there can be difficult decisions to make, and those are the days I wished I wasn’t. But I have never strived torulemy people, I want toleadthem. I want them to willingly follow me rather than cower in submission,”
My response was taken from my mouth when we came down into a large cavernous opening on the other end of the tunnel. The sound was deafening as it echoed off the rocky walls from the waterfall that came from the top of the cave. A magnificentcascade of rushing water gushed from within the mountain into a sparkling river. The water was so clear you could see straight to the bottom.
I breathed easily. It wasn’t the water that scared me, but the unknown of what lurked within it. I was fine so long as I could see through it and reassure myself that there weren’t creatures hiding in the depths.
My face brightened into a wide smile. The water looked refreshing and I was utterly filthy. I made my way to the edge of the water and I started to take off Ryker’s shirt from my body.
