Page 61 of Dragon Chaos Around

Not audibly. The roar was internal—a detonation contained within the cage of his ribs, a vibration that ran from his sternum to his spine and that Alani registered too, if the widening of her eyes was any indication.

“I can feel that,” she whispered. Her hands pressed harder against him. “The—vibration. Is that⁠—”

“The dragon.”

“The dragon is vibrating.”

“The dragon is reacting.”

“To what?”

“To you. To this.” He was unbuttoning her blouse. His fingers moved with the same care he applied to artifact handling—each button released without haste, each inch of revealed skin treated as a discovery worth cataloguing. “To the fact that you are touching me and the dragon has been wanting you to touch me for approximately forty-nine days and has not been subtle about it.”

Her laugh caught in her throat as his mouth followed his hands—kissing the curve of her collarbone where the blouse parted, the brown skin that emerged beneath the fabric. She gripped his shoulders. The fabric of his shirt bunched under her fingers.

“Forty-nine days.” Breathless. “You counted.”

“Dragons count everything.” His mouth traced the line of her collarbone to her shoulder. “Minutes. Degrees. The number of times you bite your lip during programming meetings.”

“How many.”

“Seventeen. Average. It rises to twenty-three when we disagree about panel formatting.”

She pulled back far enough to look at him. Her blouse hung open, her bra visible beneath—midnight lace, because she was Alani and she treated everything she wore as an intentional statement, including the layers no one was supposed to see. Her eyes were bright. Her breath came uneven.

“You’re reciting statistics,” she said, while undressing me.

“The statistics are relevant.”

“The statistics are insane.” She grabbed his shirt. Pulled it over his head in a single motion that disrupted his dignity and revealed the body beneath—lean, hard, the kind of musculature that came from a species designed for flight rather than display. The skin stretched over his shoulders caught the city light and shimmered—the metallic quality that surfaced when his control slipped, brighter now, more pronounced, a faint silver glow that mapped the line of his shoulders and followed his spine down his back.

She stared. Her hands found his shoulders—the place where the glow concentrated, where the dragon lived closest to the surface. Her fingertips traced the shimmer and the skin beneath her touch was not smooth. Not rough. A texture between the two—the ghost of scales pressing upward from within, not breaking the surface but present, a map of what lived underneath.

His breath stopped.

Her fingers explored. Down the ridge of his shoulders, across the span of his back, following the line of the spine where the shimmer brightened with each inch. The scales beneath the skin responded to her touch—pressing upward where her fingers traced them, the texture sharpening from ghost to substance, as if the dragon was rising to meet her hands the way a cat arched into a stroke.

Not a cat. A dragon. Absolutely not a cat. Do not compare the ancient predator you are touching to a cat. He will never let you live it down.

He was trembling. Not visibly—the tremor was deep, beneath the muscles, originating from the same place as the vibration she had noticed earlier. The tremor of a body containing an enormous force and struggling to hold the line between control and surrender. His hands gripped the edge of the bed behind her, white-knuckled, and his head had dropped forward, and his breathing had gone ragged, and the temperature in the bedroom had risen from October chill to midsummer heat in the span of thirty seconds.

“Chaos.” She cupped his face. Lifted it. The man she had been arguing with and kissing and investigating alongside for seven weeks was gone. What looked back at her from behind those eyes was older, wilder, held in check by a restraint so absolute it had become its own form of violence.

“I need you to tell me,” she said, “if this is too much. If the dragon⁠—”

“The dragon is not the problem.” His voice was wrecked. The layered register vibrated between them like a struck bell. “The dragon has no restraint. The dragon does not require containment. The man is the one holding the line, and the line is—” He shuddered. Her hands were still on his face, her thumbs tracing his cheekbones, and every point of contact burned. “—the line is becoming theoretical.”

She kissed him. Soft. The softest kiss they had shared—no urgency, no pulled shirts, no gripped fabric. Her lips against his, her hands on his face, her body close enough that he could feel her heartbeat through the lace of her bra and the bare skin of his torso and the vanishing distance between them.

“Then let it go,” she said against his mouth. “The line. The restraint. The eight hundred years of holding everything in.” She held his face—the truest thing about him, the part all the armor couldn’t reach. “Show me what happens when you stop holding.”

THIRTY-FIVE

ALANI

What happened was heat.

His mouth took hers and the kiss was not a kiss but an event—a transfer of energy that started at their lips and radiated outward through her body in a wave that melted the coherent thoughts she’d been holding into a warm, golden blur. His hands moved with a focus that made the previous seven weeks of controlled composure look like the preamble it had been. He unhooked her bra with a dexterity that would have been suspicious if she’d had the capacity to analyze it. He laid her on the bed and followed her down and the weight of him—lean, burning, the muscles shifting beneath skin that glowed faintly silver in the dark room—pressed her into the mattress and she wanted.