Deryk (Dragon Hearts #2)(14)
“Yes.”
“That’s— It’s disgusting to take away a person’s free will in that way.”
Deryk knew Chloe had thought so too. “How do you think my brothers and I have managed to survive for fifteen hundred years?”
“Have you ever used that compulsion on me?”
“No.”
“Will you ever?”
“No.”
Her eyes narrowed with suspicion. “You said that too quickly.”
“I answered truthfully.” He shrugged. “I can’t and never will compel you to do anything.”
There was no doubting the sincerity in his tone. “I should thank God for small mercies.”
“Goddess,” Deryk corrected. “My mother would be horrified to think I prayed to anyone else,” he explained at her questioning look.
Izabella’s eyes widened. “She’s still alive?”
“Goddesses are immortal.”
“But your father was human?”
“Yes.” Deryk wasn’t going to go into the details of who his father was at this point. The rest of what he was going to tell Izabella was enough for her to take in for now. “My brothers and I were all born within one week of each other on the island of Annwn. We lived there until we were aged thirty-five in human years.”
“Annwn?”
“It’s the Welsh Otherworld, and an island where the fae live.” An island that was invisible to the human eye. Something else Deryk intended keeping to himself for now. Nathaniel had told him Chloe had met that explanation with complete disbelief and scorn.
“What happened when you reached thirty-five?”
“We stopped aging and entered the human realm. We’ve been here ever since.” He paused for the beat of a second, then two, before continuing. “Searching for our fated mate.” Again, the explanation as to the initial reason for the brothers having come to the human realm could wait.
“In the human realm?”
He nodded. “We thought, until six months ago, they would be female dragons.”
Izabella’s shoulders tensed and her back tightened. “But they’re not?”
“So far, Nathaniel is the only one of us to have found his mate. She’s human, with a small amount of dragon DNA.”
“And I’m guessing he met her six months ago,” Izabella said shrewdly.
“Yes.”
“And what does this have to do with me?”
Everything, Deryk’s dragon inwardly shouted gleefully.
The stupid bastard still thought this was a done deal.
“Last night,” Deryk continued evenly, “the first time I breathed in your scent, I knew you were my mate.”
Izzi stared at him. She could see the sincerity in Deryk’s expression, knew he believed what he was saying. It was just— Nonsense, the practical side of her nature dismissed. But wasn’t the fact that dragons existed at all, and she had known all her life that they did, just as unbelievable?
“You knew, without the two of us having spoken so much as a word to each other, that I was your mate.”
Deryk’s jaw tightened at the skepticism in his tone. “Yes.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“It is what it is.”
She gave a shake of her head. “I can’t be your mate.”
“Oh, but you are,” he stated with certainty.
“Maybe I didn’t word that correctly. I don’t want to be your mate. Apart from the fact I’ve only just met you and don’t even know you, your life is in Wales and mine is here in Russia,” she continued determinedly. “I’m also only partway through my law degree. But there’s no reason why the two of us can’t meet up again once I’ve finished it.” She could only hope Deryk would have met another woman who could be his mate in the interim.
Then why did the thought of Deryk with another woman suddenly fill her with rage, on a visceral level, that she had never encountered before?
Izzi’s eyes narrowed. “You still haven’t explained what you did to me and why I feel the way I do.” Color burned in her cheeks at how wantonly she had behaved earlier this evening, mewling and rubbing herself again him, her only thought to have Deryk pleasure her. That wild clamoring had abated for now, but the unease inside her told her it could return at any moment.
His throat moved as he swallowed before speaking. “When a dragon shifter mates he bites his female on the back of her neck, it infuses an aphrodisiac into her bloodstream in exchange for a little of her blood.”
“And that means they’re mated?”
“Yes.”
Izzi breathed out the air she had been holding in her lungs. “I think I would have remembered if you’d bitten me.”
“I kissed you at the palace last night.”
Her eyes narrowed at the way he was now avoiding meeting her gaze. “And?”
“We discovered when Nathaniel mated that the aphrodisiac is also produced in our saliva in response to meeting our mate.”
“So when you kissed me…?”
“Yes.”
“And that’s why ever since, I’ve been consumed by this torment of physical arousal that won’t go away?”