Deryk (Dragon Hearts #2)(17)

“Birth control for dragons?”

“Yes.”

“Dylan is another one of your brothers?”

He nodded. “Our healer.”

“No.” She gave a vehement shake of her head. “I refuse the mating.”

“Izabella, I can’t just walk away from you,” Deryk pleaded. “Not now. You belong— We belong together.”

“I don’t belong to anyone.” Izzi knew exactly what he had been going to say before he corrected himself. “And I don’t want anyone to belong to me either.”

“I’m yours, whether you want me or not.”

Deryk Pendragon was the man of every woman’s fantasies. Beyond handsome, and sexually experienced in a way that made her toes curl. A man, she knew from the coffee shop this morning, every woman looked at and wanted for her own.

And he was hers?

Heady as that realization was… “From what you’ve told me, you have no more choice in this mating than I have.”

“I’ve had fifteen hundred years to know what I don’t want,” he told her grimly.

“That isn’t the same as meeting someone, getting to know them, falling in love with them, and then the excitement of building a future together.”

“And that’s what you want?”

“Yes!”

“Then we’ll do that,” he assured her.

“After you’ve completed the mating?”

His lips thinned. “Yes.”

“No.”

“If I leave now, in a few hours’ time, you will once again have desperate need of me—”

“My body might, but that isn’t me,” Izzi bit out through clenched teeth. The trembling of her body seemed to be increasing by the second. A few hours’ time? She needed Deryk again right now, damn it! “I really, really hate you right now.”

He winced. “I’m sorry you feel that way. But if you will only let me—”

“I think you’ve already done enough, don’t you?”

Deryk knew Izabella’s condemnation of his actions was fully merited. It had just seemed like a dream come true, the end of a lifetime search, when he realized he had finally found his mate. So much so, he hadn’t stopped to think of the impact the mating would have on Izabella’s life.

Or he hadn’t wanted to think of it.

Selfish bastard.

Yes, that was exactly what he was, he acknowledged.

What he had always been?

Not where his brothers were concerned. Chloe too now, no matter how much the two of them liked to spar verbally. But in every other way?

Yes, probably, he admitted self-disgustedly.

Fifteen hundred years of living had created a deep-rooted cynicism inside him. Toward everything but his family. To women. Life. The whole fucking universe. A cynicism that had dissipated the moment he had breathed in Izabella’s perfume and known she was his mate. Now all Deryk could see, feel, and hear was her. Izabella. He would do anything for her. Anything at all.

Except leave her.

But she needed time to adjust, to accept him and their mating, and time was something neither of them had. He had meant it when he told her the two of them would die if the mating wasn’t completed. Sooner—much sooner—than later.

He breathed heavily. “Dragons are very territorial, and the Romanovs are expecting Bryn and me to leave Russia in two days’ time.”

“Then I wish the both of you a safe journey,” Izabella came back dismissively.

He shook his head. “I can’t leave without you.”

“And I’m not leaving with you.”

He drew his breath in sharply. “Do you feel nothing for me? Nothing at all?”

There had, as Izabella accused, been hundreds of women in Deryk’s life over the last fifteen hundred years. Some he had even shared with his brother Nathaniel, before his brother’s mating. All of them women who had provided Deryk with the physical release his dragon demanded. Human women who would come to no harm from Deryk or his dragon, as the mating bite and the aphrodisiac were reserved solely for his mate. Despite those women’s entreaties to see him again, Deryk hadn’t cared for any of the women he’d taken after that one physical encounter.

It was beyond endurance that the one woman he did want, the one woman he and his dragon worshipped and valued and always would, wanted nothing to do with him.

Deryk could maybe even accept that as his due, after years of not giving a damn for the women he had used and as easily walked away from. But if he accepted her decision not to complete the mating, then Izabella would die too, and that was unacceptable. To him. To his dragon. It was part of their nature to protect their mate above everything and everyone else. From herself, if necessary. He couldn’t walk away knowing he was condemning Izabella to death by doing so.

“You—” Deryk broke off as the ring tone of his mobile, a heavy metal rock band playing one of his favorite songs, sounded at the same time as another ring tone played a popular female singer.

He pulled his mobile from his jeans pocket as Izabella picked up hers from the bedside table. “Bryn,” he read the name on his caller display. “You?”

“My father.” Izzi frowned, wondering if her father had somehow discovered she and Deryk Pendragon were supposed to be having dinner together this evening. If so, she knew she was in serious trouble.