Dragon Bound (Elder Races #1)(23)

Dragos picked up a lock of her hair and fingered it. Then he held it up to the evening sunlight. He turned it this way and that, staring at the strands. He did nothing at all to keep her pinned in place. The possibility of her escaping from him was that inconceivable. The force of his regard was such that her whole body trembled. A flush of sensual heat torched any coherent thought she might have had left. Her sex moistened in a liquid rush.

She couldn’t have been more humbled, more mortified, or felt more naked. With a Wyr’s ultrasensitive nose, of course he could smell every minuscule body change. He had to be aware of her growing arousal. He could no doubt read every passing emotion in the pheromones she exuded, whereas she couldn’t tell anything about him. His gaze was so shuttered, his expression so severe, she knew nothing at all about what he was thinking—except—

Pia looked down the length of that tremendous male body as he held himself poised over her, down the long torso that tapered from those wide shoulders to the hips that looked so lean and tight. He was dressed for function not fashion, in jeans and a plain white Armani button-down silk shirt, rolled at the arms and tucked at the waist.

She sucked at her bottom lip, staring at the indisputable evidence bulging underneath the zipper of his jeans. The bulge, like the rest of his human form, made her eyes widen. Alrighty. As far as size went the details in the dream hadn’t been wish fulfillment in the slightest.

She wondered if he could still be aroused while he ripped her head from her shoulders. He was a dragon, a Wyrkind beast, by general knowledge one of the most ancient of the Elder Races and by reputation wicked and cunning and ruthless. Normal humanlike thought patterns just didn’t apply.

“Well, this is socially inexplicable,” she muttered.

“Hush,” Dragos said.

She hushed, blanked her mind and waited, while she watched him study strands of her hair.

Her hair had always seemed somewhat coarse to her, so thick and such a pale blonde it was almost white. The ends sparked with gold highlights in the sun. When she wore it loose instead of in the usual ponytail, it hung halfway between her shoulders and waist.

Dragos fisted his hand in the long bright strands and held it to his nose, inhaling. There it was. There was the mystery he didn’t know how to solve. He’d thought of it as wild sunshine, but that was when he’d had the merest scrap of scent on a piece of paper.

The actual reality floored him. Somehow her delicate feminine fragrance did more than capture the essence of the sunlit air. Somehow it took him back almost further than he could go, back to the morning of everything when he basked in transcendent light and magic. That ancient time, so piercing, young and pure.

He found his unhurried way back to the present and studied her hair again as he fingered it. It felt like Chinese silk, and the highlights were the same color of some alluvial gold deposits he had known. He had a thirteenth-century Peruvian statuette that was the same color. He dropped the handful of hair and proceeded to study everything else about this mysterious, unpredictable female.

“I didn’t think you would be so young,” he said. He felt the same wild surge of excitement he had in that other long-ago time, when he had lost control and crashed through the undergrowth in chase of—something. He looked at her supine body lying so still and submissive underneath him and exercised a ruthless clampdown on his self-control. “There is Wyr blood in you. Also human.”

He watched her long graceful neck muscles as she swallowed. “I’m twenty-five,” she said, her voice turning husky.

The predator in him noted she made no mention of the Wyr blood. But she gleamed with subdued Power, and he remembered in the dream she had been as luminescent as the moon. Had that luminescence been symbolic or literal? What Wyrkind or Fae would gleam like that? The Elves carried a light within them but not like what he had seen in the dream.

“Look at you,” he murmured, almost to himself. “You’re a baby, nothing but a moment, a heartbeat.”

She took a quivering breath. “I’m more than that.”

He quirked an eyebrow but otherwise ignored the faint protest.

For all her paleness she was rather jewel-toned. There were the gold highlights in her hair. The cream in her light skin was like pearls. Those large eyes that watched him with such frightened, perplexed arousal were a violet blue as deep as the midnight sky. Like sapphires. He could almost fancy he saw distant stars in those eyes.

He sat back on his heels and stood while he yanked her to her feet. “We’ll go now to wherever you are staying.”

She staggered a bit as she regained her footing, watching him with the wariness of a wild creature ready to bolt again. “Why?” she asked, dark blue eyes flashing. “You’re just going to kill me. Why don’t we get this over with already?”

“You have no idea what I am going to do,” he told her. That had to be true, because he didn’t know himself. He was awash in strange emotions and impulses. His lids dropped as he watched her face. He said, “I have a lot of questions. Just tell me what I want to know, and I’ll let you go.”

“You mean that?” She searched his face.

He laughed, a husky, wicked chuckle. “No.”

Fury flashed across her face and was dampened. “Fair enough,” she said, voice flat. She turned and strode toward the beach house.

Dragos followed, frowning. Just like he didn’t like the photo of her walking away from the camera, he didn’t like her voice dull and flat or her expression shuttered. It muted those jeweled tones. The fear and stress in her scent jangled, depressing the intoxication of her arousal, the addicting young wildness of her normal fragrance.