Page 41 of Drawn by Dragonblood (Blood Born #1)

Elijah

L ike a veil of mourning falling over his face, Jon shut me out.

No!

My smile faded, and I stood, clearing my throat. Powerless to read his mind, I considered asking what bothered him but couldn’t begin a conversation that would erase the beautiful smile off his wife’s face as she gazed up at me.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” I said, my body tensed up tight along with the dragon inside me.

“It’s okay,” Dakota all but cooed, her eyes full of every emotion I felt deep inside my soul radiating back and forth between us.

Tchaikovsky’s “Waltz of the Flowers” filled the room as I rounded my desk, and my smile returned while considering which of the two had asked Sybil to play music.

For some reason, I didn’t believe it had been our sweet female.

“How’d it go?” Jon asked as I settled in my chair. He obviously wished to focus on things other than his apparent unrest, so I wasn’t going to push against his boundaries.

“Quite well.” Not finding what I needed after a quick scan of my desk, I hit the intercom button on my office phone. “Ashley?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Did you print out the files for R5872 like I asked for earlier?”

Her muttered curse came through loud and clear. “I’ll have them shortly, sir.”

I didn’t respond but turned my focus on my lovers, giving them my full attention.

Dakota still lounged on Jon’s lap, relaxed, her happiness reaching across my desk to soothe my annoyance over Ashley’s forgetfulness.

Jon, however, frowned and emanated a swarm of emotions, of which distrust hurt the most. What had transpired in our short separation?

If a simple conversation, Dakota seemed unaffected by it.

Perhaps a wayward thought had sent him spiraling in some way?

A reminder of past trauma? Some wound from before we’d met that demanded he put those walls between us back into place?

Regardless of what went on in his mind, they both smelled delicious and made me crave to have them naked and kneeling before me.

They’d had sex while at their apartment—the slight scent of their cum clung to them—but I wasn’t bothered by their shared intimacy.

I hated to miss watching or possibly participating but couldn’t fault them for trying to slake their thirst for what they really yearned for, even if Jon no longer seemed to be open to the progression of submission he’d seemed so graciously accepting of.

He needed assurance, of which I would gladly give him.

Eventually. Once we had complete privacy.

I focused on Dakota. “I’m sure a tour would bore you, mon coeur , but perhaps you would at least like to see the robots Jon has mastered with his dexterous fingers?”

Jon’s gaze lightened and flared with heat, exactly as I’d hoped for. Just short of a good boy I expected he might enjoy hearing, but I hadn’t wanted to sound manipulative. I’d merely spoken truth, nothing that Dakota hadn’t already declared about her husband.

For the next hour while touring the lab rooms, my thoughts raced.

As much as Jon wished to keep me from burrowing into his mind and heart, I’d already lodged myself there.

If not by the taste of my cum and the draw of our shared dragonblood, then by his submitting to my kiss, his body to my leading.

Like me, I expected he feared being hurt. Trusting the wrong man with his heart.

I needed to show him I desired more than just his body, that I wanted his every thought, his faults, and insecurities, to bear them all so he wouldn’t have to.

I longed to set him free, but I feared what seeing him on his knees again in such an act might require of him. I’d told myself after Dolyn’s disappearance that I would never trust a man who seemed to willingly present himself before me in an act of submission.

Dolyn claimed he had given himself fully while kneeling before me, and he’d ripped my heart out.

No. Jon’s act of laying his heart and body at my feet would be different than Dolyn’s untruthful act. There would be no question when my beta submitted himself fully to me. I would make sure of it one way or another.

Neither of my mates had the required authorization from the government to see half of the things I showed to them, but the two humans belonged to me—and I owned the items currently in my lab, so I didn’t fear showing them all I’d created and accomplished.

The armor, black and scalelike, drew them both to the glass enclosures the items were kept inside like a museum’s greatest treasure. Fingers pressed against the glass, they both stared. Dakota’s mouth parted as she took in how the overhead light glinted like a rainbow on the armor’s surface.

“What do you think?” I asked, wishing I could watch them both at the same time—see what emotions played on their faces, if they recognized what I’d fashioned for my robots. Both had admitted to dreaming about their alpha in our true form, a dragon covered in black scales like those they stared at.

Jon shook his head, his lips pressed tight as he stepped back.

He seemed doubly wary. Scared. Unsteady as reality and fantasy clashed in his brain.

Did he guess at the truth of what I was?

Who he was? Having stood before the cross in my dungeon I’d covered in the same scalelike material, I expected a riot of words clambered in his brain.

Dakota’s pulse thrummed in her neck, and she couldn’t seem to tear her gaze off what I had fashioned after my true form.

Shoulders tensed and hands shoving into his pockets, Jon glanced back at me, his gorgeous blue eyes shut down completely to any delving I might wish to do into his thoughts. “You dreamed of a dragon like I did as a child, didn’t you?”

“Something like that,” I found myself murmuring rather than giving him the truth as he deserved.

Oh, how I longed to tell them of our fate since their birth, lay every last inch of my soul bare to them, but until Jon knew my heart and trusted me, he would probably see me keeping the truth from them as a lie.

That was something I couldn’t afford him to think if he learned of the other fibs I’d told in attempts to keep them close by.

Manipulation .

I gritted my teeth.

“It’s beautiful,” Dakota whispered, her fingertips trailing down the enclosure. “Just like the dragon I dreamed about.”

The heat of Jon’s stare was like a lick of flames across my face, and I swallowed against the thickness in my throat over her willingness to state her thoughts aloud. She would have to be my focus, and hopefully, Jon would in time see I meant them no harm.

“We could go to my apartment and order some dinner, or we could eat out,” I suggested, my voice ragged and torn over what might lay ahead when I’d been so sure of having made progress in bonding with my mates.

“Takeout sounds good to me.” Dakota flashed me a smile, her huge pupils letting me know she wanted more than just dinner.

“Jon?” He still peered at me, unsmiling yet a hint of vulnerability thankfully showing in his eyes.

“Yeah. Sure,” he muttered, but Dakota didn’t seem to catch onto his unease.

She slid her hand into his, leaned her head on his shoulder, and brushed her knuckles over mine.

While I would have loved to claim her, let every person who worked for me see the three of us physically connected even if only holding hands, Jon wasn’t yet ready.

I laced our fingers together, offering the back of her hand a quick, chaste kiss, before releasing her.

“Come.” I led them, keeping my hands to myself lest my employees have something to gossip over.

Rarely did I spent much time in the New York office, and with things wrapping up on the morrow with one last early meeting, I looked forward to returning home where there would be nothing to distract me from assuring Jon of his place for a handful of weeks.

“Mr. Tolzman!” Ashley’s raised voice pulled me up short of the office exit. She hurried toward me, a file in her hands.

Both of my mates stiffened beside me as my secretary drew near.

“I’ve been looking everywhere for you!”

My inner beast purred at her nearness as he always did. Not in a sexual way but more along the lines of how I might have felt connected to a sister if I’d had one. It was the only reason I’d kept her on staff, since she had the memory of a toddler.

And same as every time Ashley came into close proximity with me, I thought of Dolyn.

Why, I wasn’t sure. They looked nothing alike with her dark hair compared to his golden.

Her height would have been dwarfed by his as well.

Even their personalities were opposites, although Ashley did seem to carry a sense of heaviness about her as my ex-lover had.

When she’d arrived for her interview, both halves of me recognized the woman needed looking after. It’d been that tortured look in her eyes that had made the decision an easy one even in knowing I would be reminded of all I’d lost every time I set eyes on her.

“The files you needed.” Ashley’s smile hid something as it always, but the usual sting of remembrance of Dolyn while in her presence didn’t prick at my chest with the same intensity.

Perhaps the final aspect of healing from my grief had begun—thanks to Jon and Dakota.

Heart lightened, I took them from her hands and stepped back, motioning Dakota into the elevator. “Thank you, Ashley.”

“Of course, sir. It was nice meeting the two of you.” She smiled at my mates before turning away, not waiting for Jon or Dakota to state the same.

I glanced down at Dakota to find her gazing after the woman, a frown denting her brow.

Jon stared after the woman as well, an even deeper dent between his eyebrows. He glanced at Dakota and snaked an arm around her back, tucking her close against his side in a possessive hold as if wishing to shield her from the smaller, unthreatening woman.

Had something happened between the three of them earlier in the day?

“Is everything okay?” I asked, following them into the elevator.

“Yeah, just fucking starved,” Jon answered first, seeming to force feigned relaxation onto his face. “Any place around here we can pick up a steak and some loaded potatoes?”

Choosing his redirection of our conversation for the time being, I pulled my cell from my pocket. “I know the place—and they’ll deliver.”

“Thank fuck.”

While en route to my apartment, Dakota once more sat between us, her fingers laced through Jon’s on her thigh, her head resting on my shoulder. A subtle hint of springtime flowers filled my nose, Jon’s wilder, fall-like wind beneath.

My mouth watered to taste them, to feel their bodies beneath me, but something unsettling had definitely changed the atmosphere around us.

I’d promised Dakota we would be together that night, and I had no plans to disappoint our female, but would Jon still be willing?

. The sexual energy between him and I would demand he play a part, but would he open his heart?

Would he submit his body once more to my command, or had whatever insecurity that had set him on edge close him off to the intimacy we needed to experience together in order to strengthen our bond?

Once inside my suite and surrounded by his alpha’s scent, Jon’s tension visibly eased in his shoulders as well as smoothing the line he’d had furrowed between his eyebrows.

Still, dinner at my small table proved a silent affair.

I’d expected more unrest, but the quietness zapped with energy and filled with heated glances, ripe with an aroma of arousal.

Every second not touching my delicious mates heightened my awareness of their pulses.

My inner beast roamed restless beneath my skin, desperate to become one with them.

Whatever had set Jon on edge earlier in the day no longer mattered as my mind focused on moving forward.

Soft classical played from the overhead speakers, and even Jon seemed so wrapped up in his own mind that he didn’t mention my lack of taste or tease me about my choice of music.

No easy grin lifted his lips, no smirk of arrogance, but I made myself content with the way he stared at my lips, with his enlarged pupils in the candlelight of my penthouse suite.

He couldn’t hide or deny his desire for his alpha, same as I couldn’t for him.

Dakota, in her usual display of servitude that gave her great joy, insisted on cleaning up our dinner things.

Jon and I sat before the windows overlooking Manhattan, me with a glass of wine, his hands empty and resting on his thighs.

We studied each other, him with an inquisitive stare while I allowed him to seek out the truth of what he longed for in my eyes.

The tension between us went beyond sexual, and while we’d once been vulnerable with each other in the dark of my home, the wall he’d erected to keep himself safe once more sat like a literal mountain between us.

I considered ordering him to kneel at my feet so I could touch his hair, his face, assure him with gentle caresses that he held half of my heart forever and always.

I considered crawling across the space between us and resting my cheek against his knee, showing my beta that he owned my soul, and I would go to any lengths necessary to prove it to him.

Torn between figuring out exactly what he needed, I held my silence and remained in place.

Dakota approached but hesitated from sitting beside either of us.

She was our buffer, I realized in that moment, a bridge to span whatever distance Jon’s mind had placed between us.

I set my wine aside and stood, holding out my hand.

She moved toward me and slipped her palm against mine, eyes luminous in the dim light.

Dakota would be my focus, our female’s desires all that mattered.

Knowing Jon would follow in whatever way I led, I decided to take advantage of that fact.

Maybe he just needed to fuck his thoughts from his mind and find the peace he’d been experiencing earlier in the day when I’d dropped the two of them off at their apartment.

“Tell me what you want, mon coeur ,” I murmured brushing her hair away from her flushed cheeks.

She licked her lower lip, her gaze flitting to Jon and back. “I want to watch,” she whispered, her cheeks tinging pink at the confession.

Yessss .

Lust sprang to life inside me as my dragon rumbled his approval.

Stomach tight in expectation of refusal, I focused on Jon’s face—his parting lips, the slight widening of his pupils as I allowed my desire for him to show on my face.

Perhaps he would allow me to love him, but if not, I would give him all of me, everything he desired if it meant easing his fears.