Dragon Bound (Elder Races #1)(25)

She asked, muffled, “Did you kill him?”

“No. Nor did my people.” The skin at the back of her neck was chilled. He felt the shiver ripple through her. “They found him earlier today. Bad death.”

“Damn that poor idiot. I tried to warn him.” She covered her face with her hands.

Jealousy spiked. His lip lifted in a silent snarl. She was his thief, nobody else’s. “You loved him.”

“No,” she said, wretchedness in her voice. “Yes. I don’t know. I thought I did once, but he wasn’t who I thought he was. After I broke things off with him, the bastard blackmailed me. I knew he was going to get himself killed. I even tried to warn him but he wouldn’t listen to me. He got what he deserved, but it’s still hard to hear about someone I used to care about.” She clenched her fists. “Let me up. I’m not going to faint.”

He released the pressure he had been putting on her neck. She sat upright in the bar stool. She looked composed but her skin was ashen. There were goose bumps along her bare arms and shoulders.

“You are too cold,” he said. “That means shock, I think. We will change that.” He noted the bottle of scotch on the counter by the sink. He retrieved the bottle along with a coffee mug from the cupboard. He poured a drink and shoved it into her hands. “Drink that while I find a blanket.”

She looked at him askance as her fingers curled around the mug.

“Yes, I know,” he said, impatient. “I am going to rend you from limb to limb. Someday. When I feel like it. In the meantime, you will not faint, you will get warm and you will stop being distressed.” His nostrils pinched. “I don’t like how it smells.”

Her pretty mouth fell open. “You don’t . . . like . . .” A hysterical giggle bubbled out and turned to outright laughter. She listed on the bar stool, the coffee mug tilting.

He covered her hands with one of his own, steadying the mug, and pressed a finger against her lips. “Stop that.”

“Sure.” She hooted. “Whatever you say.”

He wasn’t by any stretch of imagination an expert on emotions, let alone female emotions. Scowling, he tapped her lips.

“I’ll just, I don’t know, be happy until you decide to start rending.” She hiccupped. “How will that do, Your Majesty?”

“I was being sarcastic,” he said.

“Which is very reassuring, coming from a pissed-off dragon,” she told him. “Kinda like the whole ‘tell me what I want to know and I’ll let you go’ joke. Definitely has its own charm. I bet all your other prisoners love it.”

Her slender body continued to shake. She was out of control. He would get no sense out of her as long as she was this overwrought. Dragos cupped her chin. He stared into her eyes, intending to beguile her into a sense of calm. Instead he came up against a mental barrier. Intrigued, he inspected it, feeling along the borders.

The barrier seemed to be both natural and intentional. There was the echo of another feminine Power interwoven in it, a subtle presence very like her own and yet separate. It was an altogether beautiful construction, an elegant citadel that protected the female’s core.

This was why she was able to break the beguilement in the dream. He could batter that wall down if he wanted to, but that would be like taking a sledgehammer to an opal. There would be nothing coherent left to salvage of her afterward.

“Stop it,” she whispered. Her body had stiffened, straining away from his touch. “Get out of my head.”

He held fast and used his voice instead of his mind. “Quiet, female,” he murmured. “Be quiet now.”

His deep voice murmured. Tendrils of the sound curled into the air and wrapped around her. It soothed and reassured. Her breath shuddered and she grew still.

She stared in Dragos’s gold eyes. Impossible depths existed in those brilliant pools. She could fall into his gaze and never come out. “Valium’s got nothing on you,” she murmured. “Bottle that, and you could make another fortune.”

“You are calmer now,” he said. His severe dark face was inscrutable.

“Yes.” She wrenched her gaze away and stared into her coffee mug. She forced herself to say, “Thank you.”

He let go of her chin and hands and stepped back. “Drink.”

She looked up as he disappeared into the hall. Then she raised the mug to her lips and drank it all down. Scotch napalmed her veins, hitting her all the harder since she hadn’t eaten well the last week.

She put the mug on the counter and inspected her hands, felt along her jaw. She had taken a battering when he slammed her into the ground, but his handling of her since then had been quite careful. How remarkable. What did it mean?

He strode back into the kitchen, the light blue hoodie she had bought earlier bunched in one hand. He nodded at the empty mug and dropped the hoodie in her lap. She shrugged it on as he crossed his arms. Perched on the bar stool as she was, he towered over her even more than he would if she were standing upright. She had thought the house was quite spacious until he had walked into it.

“We will begin again,” he said.

She kept her gaze focused on his crossed forearms that looked very dark against the white silk shirt. The distance across his pectorals was extraordinary. On another man it would be too much. On him, those heavy muscles armored a body long enough to carry them with power and grace.