Page 12 of Drawn by Dragonblood (Blood Born #1)

Elijah

T he scent of Dakota’s release threatened to be my undoing.

My mouth flooded with drool, and my inner beast roared, causing every muscle in my body to tense.

I wanted to lay our female on the table, devour her pussy, lap up every trace of her cum that Jon had enticed from her body—because that was exactly what he’d done.

He sucked her essence off his fingers, teasing both halves of my being.

My dragon growled, and I struggled to contain the rumble in my chest rather than let the noise escape as it had earlier in the weight room. Jon had heard and seemed unsettled but had brushed off the sound without questioning it.

I glanced between my mates, want rivaling my sanity and my human side’s desire to keep them safe. Sexual tension radiated among the three of us regardless of our female’s orgasm. Sated seconds earlier, she still hungered for her husband. For me.

And Jon?

A tempting glint rested in his eyes as he turned his focus toward me, and his pinkie popped free of his mouth. He adjusted his bulge like a tease, begging to be tortured and sated.

Take.

Claim.

I breathed deeply, slowly leaking the exhale from my flared nostrils in attempts to calm my beast. My mates required true sustenance, not to be exhausted by my insatiable need to taste their flesh and feed them my cum.

And my human side desired emotional connection as much as my beast did the physical.

Dakota’s face remained bright pink as her focus flitted between her husband and me like a frightened hare ready to bolt.

“Would you help me with dinner?” I asked her, forcing a level tone and nonchalance to hopefully set her at ease.

“Yeah.” She cleared her throat and slid from the chair. “Sure.”

I tore my stare off her alluring curves I longed to have beneath my fingertips and focused on gathering what we would need to prepare our meal, the scent of her sex still thick in my nose.

“How does homemade marinara and angel hair pasta sound?” I asked, glancing over my shoulder at Jon, envious he’d had the pleasure of tasting her.

He leaned against the island, arms crossed and a sexy smirk dimpling his cheeks. “Anything from scratch sounds fucking heavenly to me after the shit we’ve been eating since climbing into these mountains.”

I grinned over his lack of refinement, enjoying the fact he came from a different era than I had gotten to experience while his age. His blatant honesty and adding curses to get his point across strengthened my desire to dip my tongue between his lips and lick.

Taste him.

A low hum of agreement escaped at my dragon’s suggestion, but I focused on the task at hand.

Dakota chopped an onion, and I preheated a sauté pan with olive oil before retrieving a pot to water to boil.

“Would you mind grabbing a bottle of red from the wine cellar?” I asked Jon, wanting Dakota all to myself for a few moments since I’d had her enticing husband alone for close to an hour.

“Sure,” he said, straightening from where he watched us work, his stare as potent as his musky scent in my nose.

“Downstairs, end of the hallway—another set of stairs and door on the right,” I told him.

“Got it.”

He stepped behind Dakota, pushed her pile of hair to the side and planted a kiss on her neck while smiling at me. “Be right back,” he murmured against her ear, causing a shudder to ripple through her.

His attempt at stating he was the sole mate of her tickled me and made my inner beast growl. Jon would learn. Eventually.

A small grin stretched my lips as the door shut behind him leaving me and my female without another’s presence for the first time.

“Sybil, music on,” I said, my smile widening as 2Cellos’s rendition of the Game of Thrones theme song began.

“Don’t you get lonely up here?” Dakota asked, her voice breathless and hasty as though she was uncomfortable without Jon’s presence. He wouldn’t be gone very long but hopefully just enough I could calm her spirit and make her receptive to the energy of my home and the blood calling to blood.

“A bit at times,” I admitted while pulling a few cans of organic diced tomatoes from the pantry. “I keep busy though.”

“With?”

“Work. Reading.”

“TV?”

I shrugged and set to opening the cans. “I’ll watch the news and weather on occasion, but find TV shows these days to be mostly nonsense.”

She nodded as though agreeing and pushed the diced onion off the cutting board into the frying pan. “Garlic?”

“There.” I pointed to the basket I’d gotten the onion from, and she moved across the kitchen on steadier legs as she grew a little more comfortable in my space.

Our space.

My insides purred at my dragon’s declaration. Everything around us, every part of me, belonged to Jon and Dakota, same as they did to me.

“Oh!”

I turned to find her smiling, her hazel eyes twinkling with happiness.

“This song is from Game of Thrones, isn’t it?” she questioned.

“It is,” I agreed, dipping my head.

“Jon loved that show.”

Cans of tomatoes opened and ready to go, I rifled through my spice drawer. “You’ve known him a long time.” I didn’t ask a question since their interactions a closeness most humans could only ever hope for.

“We met in seventh grade.” Her voice held a hint of sentimentality beneath the pure joy of having found what she’d probably thought as the one fate had intended for her.

Two .

The voice inside me stated yet another fact that made my soul soar. “And you’ve been together ever since?” I asked, unable to keep my eyes off her.

Cheeks tinged a deep pink once more, she nodded. “When I first saw Jon, I felt connected to him—like a sense of belonging, you know?”

She hadn’t really asked a question, but I nodded regardless.

“And the first time we talked to each other, I had this feeling that he was mine too.”

My heart ached with sudden desire to be seen by her in the same light.

I swallowed, forcing another nod. How could I possibly put myself between them and intrude on the love they shared?

Even though Jon didn’t seem the jealous sort, I feared heartache for one or both when the emotional barriers eventually came down between us.

Because they would. Being inside stone walls hewn by my ancestors would ensure the outcome given time.

Dragon grumbling beneath my breath about my weakness and refusal to speed up the process with manipulation, I went about getting plates and flatware to set the table. Equal measures of being torn and tempted warred inside me. “It’s a beautiful thing to find your person,” I murmured.

I felt her stare and glanced over to meet her gaze, ready for her questions.

“It is,” she agreed. “Have you—I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.”

“Go ahead,” I encouraged, turning to fully face her and give her whatever she desired of me. Information for now since she wasn’t yet ready for physical touch that would bind us that much faster.

“Have you ever fallen in love? Enjoyed the connection with that one person you were meant to be with?”

I nodded, having experienced similar sentiment upon walking into her and Jon’s camp earlier that morning. Fated mates didn’t always equal immediate love, but the tether proved equally as strong from what I remembered of my parents.

“It’s like...” She looked over my shoulder out the tall, glass windows letting in the beauty of the mountains freshly bathed by the rainstorm. “It’s like coming home where everything lines up in your life, like you recognize that other soul is a part of your future.”

My chest aching, I nodded again.

Dakota went back to her task, crushing the cloves of garlic with the flat of the blade before peeling them. “How long have you been alone?”

Her question hit me like a rushing gust of winter wind, stealing my breath.

I took a few moments to gather my thoughts and tear them off the heartache Dolyn’s leaving had inflicted.

In our early years together, he’d often asked for time alone which I’d agreed to.

Even though I’d found my true mates, the hurt of his complete abandonment a decade earlier hadn’t disappeared as expected.

My inner beast curled up deep inside, quiet for a change, allowing me a moment of human connection without his needy influence.

“I fancied myself in love once, but they didn’t feel the same,” I finally answered, keeping the part about a lack of our true bond to myself.

Answering truthfully about my lonely existence would reveal I wasn’t wholly human.

Dakota might have a fanciful mind, but I didn’t believe she was yet ready for the truth of who we were.

“I’m sorry.”

Empathy radiated from her words and the gaze I felt on the side of my face.

“Fate has a way of weeding out what doesn’t belong, and while I grieved for a long while, I’ve come to realize that person wasn’t for me.” I glanced at Dakota with a smile that wasn’t quite genuine.

“I’m still sorry, all the same.” Her whispered declaration and the pain in her eyes soothed me in a way nothing ever had. She offered comfort only my female mate I’d been seeking for years could.

My dragon lay quietly beneath her soft words when the lingering scent of her cum should have kept him restless with his need for us to mark her with ours.

“Thank you,” I replied, my voice low and rasped.

Cheeks turning pink once more, she returned to her task, the fall of golden tresses hiding her face from me.

The scent of Jon’s approach, the quiet shuffle of his feet on the stair’s treads reached me, rousing my dragon from his near slumber.

“So your taste in music isn’t all shit,” Jon said about the theme song at the top of the stairs, two bottles in hand.

Dakota whispered an admonishment, but honest, rare laughter burst from me.