Deryk (Dragon Hearts #2)(16)

“As far as I’m concerned, it works exactly like that.” She began pushing him toward the door.

“The sexual hunger will come back.”

Her cheeks burned. “Then I’ll find some other way to deal with it.”

Deryk spun round so quickly, he had to grasp Izabella’s forearms to stop her from stumbling and falling. “No other man touches what’s mine,” he roared.

Izzi reared back at the fierceness of his tone. Anger rather than compulsion, because Deryk had seconds ago admitted he couldn’t compel his mate— She was not his mate!

She couldn’t be. If she became his mate, she would have to spend the rest of her life with him. Go back to Wales with him. To this castle he and his brothers lived in.

Her life was here in Russia. Her parents were here. So were her brothers and their families. Her friends too. She might no longer consider Pyotr in a romantic light, but he and Tanya were still her friends.

Deryk said the mating, once begun, couldn’t be reversed.

“I hate you right now,” she told him vehemently.

“I can’t blame you for feeling that way—”

“And don’t even think of using that placating tone with me,” Izzi scorned, her gaze moving over his obviously aroused body. “Not when I can see how much the thought of a mate excites you.”

He grimaced. “I’ve been in this state since I first breathed in your scent.”

“I walked into your bedchamber, you breathed me in, and that really was it for you?”

Deryk shook his head. “I detected your perfume the moment I walked into my bedchamber shortly after I arrived in St. Petersburg.”

Because Izzi had been in there earlier talking to her mother while she prepared the bedchamber. “I want you to leave now,” she said with a calm she was far from feeling. As Deryk had predicted, the arousal was returning. She could feel it once again clawing inside her and taking possession of her body, causing her nipples to ache and between her legs to burn with a need to be filled. “I want you to leave now.”

His gaze raked over her with merciless thoroughness. “My dragon won’t allow me to abandon my mate when she’s obviously in discomfort. I won’t allow it.”

Her cheeks burned. “A discomfort you created!”

“Yes,” he acknowledged quietly. “Look, I know this isn’t ideal for you, or what you expected for your future. But I give you my word, I’ll be good to you. Concerned only with your happiness and well-being. I will also be completely faithful to you for the rest of my life.”

Izzi snorted. “How can you promise that when you have probably had hundreds of lovers in fifteen hundred years?”

He didn’t attempt to deny it. “For me, there is now only you.”

“But you don’t love me any more than I love you!”

“Love will come—”

She shook her head. “You don’t know that.”

His mouth twisted. “I know Nathaniel and Chloe are so deeply in love with each other, it’s nauseating.”

Izzi would be lying if she didn’t admit, to herself at least, that her curiosity was piqued where Nathaniel and Chloe were concerned. Most especially Chloe. How had the other woman, also human, coped with learning she was the mate of a dragon shifter? Was she really happy with Nathaniel? Could Izzi be happy with Deryk, a man, a dragon, she had only just met?

“What will happen to Nathaniel when Chloe dies?”

“You won’t have known the parents of the Romanov brothers,” Deryk continued, “but their mother was human too originally.”

“Originally?” Izzi had never heard that before. Did her parents know?

Deryk nodded. “The mating prolonged her life.”

Izzi’s mouth went dry. “By how much?”

“She was twelve hundred years old when she died.”

“And you think that will happen to Chloe too? To me?” She might live to be twelve hundred years old?

“We have every reason to believe so, yes. There are also other…changes. Chloe has only been with Nathaniel for six months but already she is able to sense Nathaniel’s thoughts and moods. The baby too.”

“What baby?”

“Chloe is almost six months pregnant.”

Izzi felt her the blood drain from her cheeks. “She became pregnant almost immediately after the two of them got together?”

“Yes,” he answered guardedly.

“Will that— Would that,” she corrected firmly, “happen to me too if I agreed to this mating?”

“Probably. The intensity of dragon mating fever is caused by the need to procreate.”

Not only did this man, this dragon, think he was going to mate her, but if she accepted the mating, he intended to immediately get her pregnant too? Deryk and his brothers might have been born to ten different goddesses, but there were seven of the Romanov brothers, born to a single human mother.

“Absolutely not,” she bit out firmly. “I will not become some sort of baby machine so that your family can procreate.”

“Believe me, that isn’t going to happen,” Deryk assured hastily. “Chloe has already voiced her own objections to that possibility, and Dylan is working on something right now to prevent a further pregnancy until she and Nathaniel decide they want another child.”