Deryk (Dragon Hearts #2)(40)

To Deryk’s cave.



She quickly discovered the Scottish Highlands were even more ruggedly beautiful than the Welsh mountains. The last of the sun rising gleamed on the towering mountains capped with snow, blankets of heather spread out in the valleys below, with deer roaming freely. Several rivers snaked their way through the valleys, and Izzi could see a couple of lochs in the distance as Deryk’s dragon landed lightly on a rocky outcrop on one of the remotest mountains.

“Like it?” Deryk prompted, once again in human form.

Izzi sensed the uncertainty behind Deryk’s question. “It’s beautiful,” she assured him.

The frown cleared from his brow. “Let’s go inside, and I’ll start preparing us some food.”

It had been hours since either of them had eaten. “I hope you don’t mean to kill and cook one of those beautiful deer down there?”

He held up one of the bags they had carried with them. “I brought some food with me from Wales. I believe the steaks came from a cow. Which isn’t to say,” he added dryly as Izabella finally preceded him into the opening and smoothed passageway down into his cave, “I won’t hunt for deer some time while we’re here. Venison is one of my own and my dragon’s favorite meats.”

Izzi was too transfixed by the beauty of the cave she stepped into to take exception to Deryk’s comment.

If she had expected it to be a rustic space, barely habitable, then she was completely wrong. Admittedly, it was definitely a cave, but Deryk had installed a generator which provided the lighting and power for the small refrigerator. There were also two comfortable-looking leather-covered armchairs, and a huge four-poster bed covered in what look like black-and-white silk bed linen. Shelves were carved into one of the rock walls containing dozens of hardback books. There were also several paintings hanging on the smooth walls. Another area was obviously for cooking with the gleaming copper pots and pans on a kindle-fired stove.

She turned to Deryk. “How on earth did you get that bed in here?” The passageway into the cave certainly wasn’t wide enough to accommodate such a huge bed.

“I built it,” he dismissed as he placed their bags down on the bed.

“You built it?”

“I built all the furniture in here.” He nodded. “You would be amazed at how many skills I’ve learned in fifteen hundred years,” he added at her obvious surprise.

Izzi’s attention returned to the paintings. She recognized one of them as the view of the rugged Scottish mountains she has seen from the rocky outcrop outside. “You painted those.” It was a statement not a question.

“Yes.”

She was seeing yet another side of Deryk, other than the predatory dragon. A sensitive and artistic side she doubted he shared with many. Chloe certainly hadn’t mentioned it—and the other woman had seemed to talk about everything else. Off-the-charts erotic sex being one of them.

Izzi’s physical arousal had returned with a vengeance the moment Deryk placed her on the rocky outcrop and stepped away to shift back to his human form.

She looked up at the painted canvas as a distraction from that uncomfortable tingling beneath her skin. The rugged mountains seemed almost lifelike, as were the deer grazing in the valley below. “You didn’t just meet Bernini and Michelangelo.”

“No,” he acknowledged ruefully, in the kitchen area lighting a fire. “I assisted Michelangelo when he painted the fresco in the Sistine Chapel.”

Izzi turned to look at Deryk. It could take a dragon lifetime, she realized, for him to tell her all the things he had done and seen in the last fifteen hundred years.

A lifetime that would include that off-the-charts erotic sex.

Something she was badly in need of right now.

Deryk seemed far more interested in cooking the steaks than sex. “Can you prepare the salad?” he prompted distractedly.

By the time they had eaten their lunch, Izzi felt so physically uncomfortable, so aroused, she could barely sit still. She ached. Needed. Desired.

And Deryk hadn’t mentioned completing the mating once since they left Russia.

Had he changed his mind?

Had he decided death was preferable, after all, to spending a lifetime with someone as young and na?ve as her?





Chapter 14


“Do you want to finish our earlier conversation now?” Deryk suggested once they had eaten and cleared away.

Talk? Izzi didn’t want to talk, she wanted to—

“Of course,” she agreed as she rose smoothly to her feet. She wasn’t about to beg for Deryk’s lovemaking. The clawing inside her for sexual release wasn’t bad enough for that.

Yet.

Izzi was so tired, she was sure it was only that aroused buzzing inside and outside her body which was keeping her awake. Deryk must be exhausted too, after carrying her and a couple of backpacks as he flew through the night to Wales, and then on to Scotland.

Not that he showed any signs of it as he made himself comfortable in one of the two armchairs.

“You were going to tell me about your human brother,” Izzi prompted as she sat in the other armchair.

He nodded. “Arthur.”

“His mother wasn’t a goddess like the rest of you?”

“No, but we all had the same father.” He paused briefly before adding, “Uther Pendragon.”