Dark Embers (28 page)

“Dylan, I need more,” she whimpered, ripping her mouth from his. “I need—”

“I know, sweetheart. I know.”

Reaching between them, he ripped off her shirt like it was so much fluff. And then his mouth was on her, skimming from her neck to her breastbone to the plump undersides of her breasts.

As he sucked one hard nipple into his mouth, lightning split the night sky above them, followed closely by thunder. She barely registered it, any more than she registered the hot rain that bombarded them as more thunder rolled through the sky.

“I thought you’d be disgusted with me,” he murmured, his lips racing across the slope of her breast, licking rainwater off as he went. “I thought you wouldn’t—”

She cut off his words with a kiss—her lips, her tongue, her teeth working in concert to devour his lips. She tasted like honey, smelled like vanilla, and all he wanted to do was absorb her into his body, into his soul. The anger and jealousy that had been riding him for the past three days finally drained away once and for all, leaving only desire in their wake.

Ripping his mouth from hers, he trailed his lips across her cheek and down her throat. She moaned softly—though it could have been the wind—and he lifted her until she was wrapped around him. Her arms encircled his shoulders while her avid mouth covered every inch of his face, every centimeter of his neck. It was his turn to groan when her tongue found his collarbone and began licking the rain off it; he’d never have guessed it was an erogenous zone, but then again, with Phoebe, everything turned him on.

His hands went to the button on her pants and he tried to undo it, tried to yank down the zipper. But he was too aroused, his fingers clumsy with the lust pounding through him like heavy-metal music. Desperate, devastated, determined to feel her naked against him, he slipped his fingers inside the waistband and gave one sharp tug.

The material split down the middle and pooled around her feet. He slipped one hand beneath her ass and lifted her up until her hot pussy rested against his hard, aching cock.

“Dylan.” Phoebe moaned his name as she twined her legs around his waist, and he nearly shot his wad right there. She was completely open to him, completely vulnerable, passion, desire, need pouring from her and enveloping him as the storm continued to rage around them.

Pulling back from her grasping hands and seeking lips for a second, just a second, Dylan stared at her. Memorized her. He wanted to be able to remember her just like this—soaking wet, desperate for him, the elements around them as out of control as she was.

But she was having none of it. Instead of letting him hold her away from him, she just wrapped herself more tightly around him, until her hot, wet center was pressed directly over his aching cock. Whimpering, she rode him, her hips lifting again and again as she struggled for completion.

He wanted to give it to her—needed to bring her off with a strength that was nearly a compulsion. He didn’t understand the strange force working its way through them, didn’t understand why their need was at such a fever pitch, and he didn’t care. All he wanted was to take her. To take her and take her and take her until she knew that she belonged to him. Until he could smell himself on her and the others could, too.

The realization that he wanted her for more than that moment—more than a little while—hit him hard, and the sudden, urgent need to be inside her hit him even harder. With one powerful thrust, he sank home.

Joy. Ecstasy. And a hunger he was afraid would never be satisfied. He thrust into her again and again, a powerful slamming of his body that he would have worried about any other time. But she was taking it, taking him, as if she craved his unrestrained desire.

“Harder. Harder. Harder.” She repeated the words again and again, her hips rising and falling with every thrust of his. He tried to hold back as he usually did with other women, worried that he’d hurt her with the dragon’s unrestrained strength.

But she wouldn’t let him, as she moved her body over and above his in a way designed to make him completely insane. He groaned, tried to hold her still until he could regain some control.

“No,” she gasped, struggling against his restraining hands. “I want it all. Give it to me.”

Still he hesitated. “Phoebe—”

Her inner muscles suddenly clenched around him so tightly that he saw stars, the movement like a velvet vise over and around his highly sensitized cock.

“Fuck, Phoebe,” he groaned before he could stop himself. He didn’t say anything more, couldn’t say anything as he waited for her to do it again.

She did, and he grew longer, bigger, heavier as emotions he’d never felt before coursed through him.

She belonged to him, and he would kill anyone or anything that tried to take her from him. She was his, and he would protect her with the last breath in his body.

His thrusts grew harder, less restrained, more out of control, and she took them. Took him—in a way no one else ever had before or ever would again.

The need to orgasm rose inside him—urgent and intense, a painful ecstasy raking him with sugared claws. But even more intense was his need to make sure Phoebe came first. Slipping a hand between their bodies, he stroked his thumb over her clit. Then again and again as he leaned down and took her nipple into his mouth.

She screamed and bucked against him. Because of his rough penetration, she was swollen and more sensitive than she had ever been before, and he fully felt every shiver of her body. It made him even crazier, until he was biting her, slamming into her, bruising her. Her sobs grew wilder, out of control, and finally—finally—he felt her inner contractions pulling at him. With a groan, he gave himself to her, flooding her with all that he had, all that he was, while he took all that she was inside him and sheltered her close to his soul.

CHAPTER TWENTY

S
he’d been run over by a freight train, Phoebe thought as Dylan slowly lowered her to the ground. He kept his hands around her waist, which was a good thing, because she doubted—sincerely—that her legs would support her.

“What was that?” Dylan murmured as he skimmed his lips across her shoulder.

“I’m not sure, but I wouldn’t mind if it happened again. Later.” She glanced down at the ground around them. The rain was still coming down, not as heavily as it had been during their lovemaking, but enough to obscure her view of the desert floor.

“I can’t find my clothes,” she complained.

“I don’t think it would matter if you could. They’re not exactly what I would call wearable.”

She thought of how it had felt to be wanted by a man so much that he actually wrenched the clothes from her body, and decided that the loss of her favorite pair of jeans was more than worth it. Of course, while the concept was great in theory, it also left her with a little bit of a dilemma.

“So, you can always do the dragon thing to get back to town—shimmer yourself invisible or something. But what am I supposed to do?” She gestured to her nude body. “It’s not like I can just walk through the laboratory parking lot in my birthday suit.”

“We’re not going back to the lab tonight
. . .
or to town.”

“Okay.” She glanced around. “Do you mind me asking where, exactly, we are going? Because while I don’t mind making love out here—especially when it’s with you—I have to admit that I’m not all that fond of desert creepy-crawlies. Certainly not fond enough to lie down on the ground and hope for the best.”

“Not a camper?” he asked with a grin.

“Not particularly, unless you count Motel 6.”

“Who would have thought it? The good doctor’s high maintenance.”

She looked down her nose at him. “If by
high maintenance
you mean that I prefer to spend the night somewhere where I don’t have to worry about scorpions, snakes or spiders in my hair, then yes, I am high maintenance.”

“You
don’t
have to worry about them—they don’t come near me. Something about the dragon. I promise I’ll keep you safe.”

“Dylan,” she said warningly. “You’re going to want to stop messing with me.”

“Or else?”

“I don’t know, but it will be suitably diabolical. I have a twisted mind.”

Again his grin flashed, and despite the threat of a night spent in the desert, she realized she liked seeing him like this—if not carefree, then at least not weighed down by the responsibilities he usually wore so seriously. “I like your twisted mind.”

“Mm-hmm. I bet. Anyway . . .”

He held out a hand to her. “Come with me.”

She took it grudgingly, then let him lead her a few feet through the rocky sand, intensely glad that she still had her shoes. When he stopped in front of what looked like a yawning, black chasm in the earth, however, she pulled back. “What are you doing?”

“Taking you to my home.”

The look she shot him was skeptical. “I was at your home, baby, and it looked nothing like a big hole in the ground.”

“That’s the house the king keeps for guests who don’t know he’s a dragon—business associates, wayward scientists, et cetera.”

“King, huh?” The title freaked her out enough that it took her a moment to hear the rest of his words. She’d sensed that he was the clan’s leader, but to hear it confirmed—to hear him call himself king—made her stomach somersault in a way that was much more unpleasant than when it had happened during their impromptu ride through the desert.

“Don’t get all tripped up on it.” He started into the cave, pulling her along in his wake. “It’s no big deal.”

“Yeah.” It was her turn to snort. “Right.” As she looked around, she said, “Hey, it’s dark in there. Can’t we come back later on, when it’s light? I’m a scientist, not a desert-trekking girl. This isn’t exactly my strong suit.”

He murmured a few words she couldn’t quite catch, and the entire cave in front of her lit up. “Oh,” she gasped, turning shocked eyes to him. “How did you do that?”

“Magic.” He winked, but she couldn’t help wondering if he was serious. He was a dragon, for crying out loud. If that was true, why couldn’t other fairy-tale things be true, as well?

“Hey,” she asked as they climbed down the mouth of the cave. “What else can you do?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you can shift. You can make light appear out of thin air. What else?”

His lips twisted in amusement. “Isn’t that enough?”

She flushed. “Well, yeah. I just thought—”

“Sssh.” He pressed a quick kiss to her mouth. “Maybe I’ll show you sometime.” And then he pulled her the last few yards into the cave. At the first glimpse, she froze, awed. She’d never seen anything like it.

It was nothing like she’d expected it to be—no bats, no creepy-crawlies, no dark and frightening corners. Instead, the front room where they were standing was filled with incredible rock formations—speleothems, she thought they were called—some of which stretched from the thirty-foot ceiling to the ground. White, icelike structures that looked like huge Christmas trees covered in frost. Soft, round globes grouped together that reminded her of popcorn. Small bushes in orange and red and green that looked a lot like the coral she’d seen during her one and only scuba-diving trip, and sharp, crystal-like spears in myriad colors that covered much of the walls and ceiling. The light he’d created bounced off all of it, making rainbows in some of the translucent formations.

“My God, Dylan, it’s gorgeous.”

“You haven’t seen anything yet.” He pulled her along, into one of the many rooms off the main one. “This is the parlor,” he said, drawing her in close.

“The parlor.” She looked around at the room filled with priceless antique carpets, huge, overstuffed couches and natural cave formations that had somehow been incorporated as both art and furniture. There was a large craggy shelf covered in jewel-tone pillows, making it look more like a duvet than a rock formed through thousands of years of pressure. And the walls—Jesus, the walls were embedded with jewels of every shape and color, some as big as her head.

“Are these—” She stepped closer to the wall, traced one.

“Yes.”

“Seriously?” She touched what she assumed was a diamond. “Gemstones?”

He shrugged, but those black eyes were watching her closely. “Dragons like their pretties.”

“I guess.”

“Do you want it?”

“Want what?”

“The diamond.”

She started laughing, then realized he didn’t look like he was joking. “I think the three million dollars you gave me is quite sufficient. Besides, what would I do with a rock the size of a watermelon?”

He seemed to relax at her words, a subtle unbending of his muscles that set her teeth on edge. “I’m not a treasure hunter, Dylan. I’m not here for your money.”

She started to say more, then stopped, dismayed, as she realized that was exactly why she was there. Not for what he could give her now, but she never would have come to New Mexico—never would have been with Dylan—if he hadn’t bought her off at the very beginning.

Her stomach lurched as she wondered whether Dylan was thinking the same thing: that he’d bought more than her professional services with his money, and that she was just delivering.