Page 24 of A Matter of Dragons

Above me, Doshir gasped. His pace faltered as his body stiffened. His cock pulsed inside me, fast and hard, and feast day fireworks exploded across my vision. I fell back against the blanket, spent and panting, as the stars whirled above me. That was— That was—

Fire. An orange jet of flame exploded across the night sky.

I froze.

That wasn’t feast day fireworks. That wasn’t an orgasm. I traced the streak of flame across the stars, toward the Knife’s Edge mountains. To an enormous, winged monster rising in the night sky.

The dragon.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Doshir

Damn, that was amazing.

I let myself smile as Rayne's body sagged into the silk, her eyes wide and glassy, her lips parted and her cheeks flushed. In the warm afterglow of my own release, I even felt a reluctant, grudging sort of gratitude for my father’s constant lessons in seduction, in how to properly please women of several species, even if I’d always wanted to be appreciated for more than being a dragon, or the damned badge of honor that came with fucking one.

I’d wanted something like... this. Like this beautiful noblewoman in my arms, a woman I’d managed to charm, seduce, and pleasure without leaning on my draconic anything. Just as Doshir, the charming shopkeeper who was, as far as she knew, entirely human. My lips curled as I watched Rayne try to chase her breath.

Oh, this was just the beginning. I wanted to taste her next, to run my lips along those smooth thighs, to explore every curve before burying myself in her again, letting loose that part of me that had been chained up for far too long.

Rayne's eyes blinked, then focused on my face, and she smiled softly, almost shyly. My cock twitched, a tiny flicker of life despite the fact that I’d just spent everything that I had. By the Mothers, this woman could light the sky on fire. She could—

Rayne gasped. Her body went rigid in my arms; her eyes were now fixed on something behind me. A moment later she twisted out of my arms and pushed up to a crouch, one hand on her hip.

“What in the king’s name is that?” she growled.

The earth felt like it was dropping away beneath me. I staggered to my feet and turned around, my body stubbornly refusing to hurry, as though I were trapped in a nightmare and all my limbs had turned to stone. I knew what I was going to see, damn it. I knew it even before I raised my eyes to the Knife’s Edge.

Fire. Two orange teardrops wavered against the looming walls of the Knife’s Edge like lunatic beacons. As I watched, another plume of flame exploded against the night sky, momentarily illuminating the enormous, tattered wings of a dragon.

Oh, shit.

Mad Scarlett was on a rampage, and it was my damned fault. I hadn’t gone to reason with her, despite my mother’s rather insistent request that I do exactly that. I’d sent away for information about her, I’d fretted over how best to approach her, but I hadn’t actually done a damned thing. A scream rose thinly in the night air, followed immediately by another, and then another.

The dark silhouette of Mad Scarlett rose higher in the sky until she crested the Knife’s Edge and hung suspended against the distant moon. Fire poured from her open mouth and spilled across the stars. She didn’t look like she was targeting Cairncliff, thank the Mothers. She was just flying around, spraying fire, being crazy.

Still, this was one hundred percent my fault. And this was something I had to fix. Now.

I spun back toward Rayne. Oddly, she was not cowering in fear. No, the beautiful woman who’d just opened her body to me was standing beside a stand of ferns, balanced on her toes, her tousled skirts falling in a rumpled mess around her. Something flashed in her fist, catching the weak moonlight. I narrowed my eyes. Was that a dagger?

“That’s a dragon,” Rayne growled.

My eyes refused to leave the dagger in her fist. Rayne held the little blade like she knew how to use it, and somehow, that struck me as the biggest absurdity of all. She’d had a blade under her dress this whole time? And now she was ready to wield that tiny scrap of metal against a dragon?

Who in the name of the Mothers was this woman?

I shook my head, dismissing the question. Irrelevant. My concern right now was getting Mad Scarlett to shut the hell up and go back into her cave without destroying Cairncliff. Or killing me.

And to do that, I had to get Rayne back to her inn. Without giving myself away. Shit. I ground my teeth together, my gaze flashing between Mad Scarlett belching flame across the night sky and Rayne, balanced on her toes in a heavy velvet dress with a comically tiny dagger in her fingers.

Mad Scarlett screamed. The sound seemed to tear the night wide open, as though the very mountain gods themselves were crying their pain to the heavens. I watched Scarlett’s wings beat across the stars as she climbed upward in a tight spiral, screaming her rage and pain.

Oh, this was not good. This was very, very not good. My skin crawled, tensing for the transformation from my human form to my draconic form. I had to get up there now, while she was still climbing. If she decided to drop into Cairncliff spraying fire from that height, it would be catastrophic.

I spun back to Rayne, my mind decided. Still, my chest pinched as I took in the beautiful woman standing before me, her blade flashing in the moonlight. She was so damned gorgeous, and her kisses had been like drowning in frost wine, and the way her whole body had tensed as I’d led her over the crest of her first orgasm made my cock so stiff it hurt. I ached to pull her inside, to close the shutters and lock out the rest of the world, to let Mad Scarlett rain fire and destruction all over my city while I enjoyed one damned night with an amazing woman.

But then I thought of my shop, of all the things my father and I had collected over the decades. Of the golden teacup made by dwarves and my newly re-organized shelves.