Deryk (Dragon Hearts #2)(43)

“Son of a bitch!”

Izzi laughed at Deryk’s horrified expression. “You’re the one who left me alone with her,” she reminded him.

“Only so that I could talk to Dylan. I wanted to know… I needed to… He gave me the first dose of the dragon birth control he’s been working on,” he revealed flatly. “If we do go ahead with our mating, I want you to have a choice in that too.”

Izzi looked at him searchingly. Deryk still might not have told her he loved her, but everything he said convinced her that he did. That she and her happiness truly were all that mattered to him. “It isn’t going to harm you? Or stop there being a pregnancy in the future?” Having seen and spoken with a pregnant Chloe, Izzi now wanted that for herself and Deryk. Maybe not immediately, but definitely once she had completed her law degree, in all probability in Wales now, so she could be of some practical use to the Pendragon brothers. “It won’t affect the mating?”

“Dylan says not. Everything should be exactly the same except you won’t immediately become pregnant.”

“How do you feel about that?”

Deryk shrugged. “I want whatever you want, and if that means waiting a couple of years for young, then that’s what we’ll do.”

There is was again. Love. Except Deryk didn’t know or recognize it as that yet. Maybe he never would, but Izzi knew it for exactly what it was. “Then I suggest we both get undressed and complete our mating.”

Deryk’s fingertips touched the dark circles beneath her eyes. “You’re exhausted.”

“I’m also going out of my mind with lust,” she told him as she pulled off her sweater.

His eyes darkened to molten gold as he gazed at the fullness of her breasts cupped in a lacy black bra. “That’s the mating fever talking. Dylan is working on something else that might help with that—”

“And in the meantime?”

“We wait.”

“You can help me with the lust now,” Izzi insisted, the fever of desire in Deryk’s eyes a match for the one she felt inside her. “First by getting undressed, and then by taking me in that magnificent bed you handcrafted so lovingly. For your mate, if I’m not mistaken?”

She had realized in the last few minutes that there was no reason for Deryk to have made a bed like that for himself. Izzi very much doubted that, when Deryk visited his cave in the past, he had even been in human form most of the time. His dragon didn’t need a hand-carved bed and silk bed linens but his mate would. Deryk had waited for that mate long enough.

“Yes,” he confirmed.

Izzi reached behind her to unfasten her bra before slipping the shoulder straps down her arms and discarding it completely. “I’m here now.” She held the fierceness of Deryk’s gaze with her own as she held her arms out to her sides.

In surrender to her mate.





Chapter 15


The naked hunger on Deryk’s face as he stared at her robbed Izzi of breath and left her with no more doubt as to whether or not he still desired her.

The rapid beat of her heart sounded like thunder in her ears as she unfastened her jeans and pushed them down over her hips and thighs before removing them and her socks. She left on the miniscule pair of black lace panties. Out of shyness, not because she wasn’t totally committed to this mating. Deryk might have seen, touched, and had his mouth on parts of her body no one else ever had, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t still shy standing almost naked in front of him.

And a little apprehensive still.

This man, her mate, was going to bite her during the act of lovemaking.

“Are you absolutely sure?”

The ache inside Izzi became stronger, deeper, as Deryk made no move to approach or touch her, his hands clenched tightly at his sides. He looked so fiercely handsome, the total predator that he was. His eyes glowed, his face all sharp and harshly etched angles Izzi wanted to reach out and touch. That she needed to reach out and touch.

There was no space inside her for further doubt. Only the two of them, Deryk and Izzi, intent and focused on each other.

She nodded. “Absolutely.”

His breath left his lungs in a relieved whoosh. “Would you loosen your hair for me?”

She reached up to release her hair from where she had plaited it before they left Wales earlier. She shook her head until the golden silkiness cascaded over her shoulders and down the length of her bared spine, the ends curling softly against the cheeks of her bottom.

He breathed audibly. “You are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”

Izzi was sure, after fifteen hundred years, that couldn’t be true. But she so wanted Deryk to believe it… “Thank you.”

He looked pained as he shook his head. “What did I ever do to deserve you?”

Izzi stepped forward until she could feel the heat of Deryk’s body as a caress against her own as the two of them almost touched. “Exist,” she answered simply as she reached up to gently place her palm against one side of his face. “You’re the other half of me, as I’m the other half of you.”

A nerve pulsed in his throat. “Do you truly believe that?”

She nodded. “Yin to your yang.”

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You won’t.”