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Chapter Four

I ssa stood back and let Kris go past, careful to keep her distance. Out in the hall he paused before the colorful door, staring at the raised scene carved into its surface—it didn’t look like a single man so much as some other creature with many heads and tails.

She wanted to say something encouraging, give him a warm caress for comfort, but she’d felt the static push of his magic even in the small gesture of trying to take his hand earlier.

It had been an unusual, tingling sensation, but not entirely unpleasant at first. More like the first plunge of cold feet into a hot bath—something she knew would require acclimating to before it began to feel good.

Kris closed his eyes and his shoulders rose and fell with a series of deep, meditative breaths.

Issa watched while he stripped, first pulling his dark shirt over his head.

He swiped the fingers of both hands back through his shiny black hair, then traced part of the outline of the huge dragon tattoo that coiled around his torso.

The image glowed as though imbued with its own power, separate from Kris.

He hooked thumbs into the waist of his simple drawstring pants, pushed them down, and stepped out of them.

When he placed his palms against the door, he closed his eyes again. With a slight effort, he pushed and the doors swung open.

It wasn’t a chamber that the doors revealed, however, but a narrow staircase leading down. Without a word or a look back to Issa, Kris descended. Lights in the walls of the staircase sprang to life in advance of his passage.

Issa followed a few paces behind. The staircase turned once, then continued, opening shortly into a small, sunken chamber.

In the center of the chamber was a low, round, and oddly shaped altar carved into smooth, undulating waves.

It was made of the same enchanted stone as the temple that had been her bed for the last five hundred years, carved from exquisite white jade that luminesced with faint energy.

Kris would add his own to it soon, and hers would be fed to it through him.

She watched him enter the room, her heart pounding at the monumental moment she was sharing with him.

He was the Catalyst—the one Dragon who held the key to awakening the rest of the brood.

She’d learned of the Catalysts and their mates.

The longest-lived dragons were always mated to a Catalyst. Perhaps they lived so long because of the bond.

And Catalysts always bonded other dragons, but only ones the Council deemed worthy.

Issa had had her eye on him for more than one reason, but his appeal had overshot her ambition with his first word to her. Now she ached to have his hands on her, his thick cock inside her, certain that the experience would be more than memorable, in spite of his inexperience.

Beyond the center, the room was divided into five equal segments of varying colors of smooth jade, radiating from the center upward in a series of widening tiers.

There wasn’t a hard corner in the place, not even the edges of the tiers, which were all beveled as smooth as the column and the altar.

Issa was reminded of the eddies of air currents she would catch when she’d first learned to fly as a young dragon centuries before.

The memory caused a pulse of the energy that made her ache.

She needed to give the collected power to Kris, and soon. But first, he had to let her touch him.

Still ignoring her, Kris stepped carefully down the tiers into the center of the chamber, then up onto the altar.

The room grew brighter with a glow that emanated from every surface, particularly in the center where he stood.

He crouched down, running his hands across the contours of the altar, which lit a little brighter under his touch before fading out again.

In the very center of the altar his hand circled around a deep, bowl-shaped impression, then slipped into it, drawing back fingers that glistened with clear, oily liquid.

From the back of the room, she caught the spicy aroma of concentrated dragon essence, potent enough to make her core heat up even more than the sight of Kris’s naked, crouching form.

While Issa watched, the clench of his jaw tightened and he acquired the look of someone bracing himself for something unpleasant.

“It won’t hurt,” she said gently, finally walking the rest of the way into the room and sitting on the edge of the altar a few feet from where he still crouched in the center.

“It always hurts, eventually.”

“This time will be different. You watched all the others together. Did they look like they were in pain? I hold inside me a volume of what they felt. Let me give it to you so you can understand. Trust me, you will love it once it begins.” She tried to reach out to him again, but he moved away, sitting on one of the higher sections of the altar and watching her.

This was going to be harder than she thought.

“All right,” she said and moved to the opposite side of the altar, reclining against another of the contoured backrests that faced the center. She kept her legs together, hands at her sides. “I don’t have to touch you. So why don’t you try to touch me first, instead?”

“Issa. All I can think about is touching you. I just don’t know where to begin.”

She nodded and reached into the well of essence in the center, drawing out a bit of it onto her fingertips. “Start like this.” She raised her fingertips to one breast and traced a glistening circle around one nipple. The peak of flesh tingled and hardened under her touch.

Kris slid toward her and knelt beside her a few inches away. His brows drew together and he clenched his fists. “It hurts even being this close. Doesn’t it hurt you too?”

“I feel heat, but the longer you stay this close, the nicer it feels. Have you never touched another?”

“My teachers stayed far unless training demanded it. Then it was always … uncomfortable. The humans I lived with never tried to touch me. Sometimes I thought they might, but something always changed their minds without my even trying to tell them so.”

Issa ached at the idea of the beautiful man never having felt the touch of a lover.

His eyes seemed so expectant now, and so determined at the same time.

She had the sense that he would do this even if it hurt him, and it might, but she would be here until it played out one way or the other.

Whether she had to comfort him or fuck him were only two sides to the same coin for her.

“Stay there.” She extended her hand, palm out halfway between them. “Place your hand against mine.”

Kris raised one fist and slowly unfurled it, stretching his hand out flat in front of hers.

His breathing quickened as he moved it closer and a sheen of sweat broke out on his upper lip.

As his hand came incrementally closer to hers, her hand tingled with energy and a soft glow appeared in the gap between their palms. Issa sensed her well of energy seeking to escape into Kris, but without her release of it through orgasm, it would have to wait.

“Close your eyes,” Issa said. Kris obeyed. Without the visual indication of their proximity, the draw of her energy seemed to take over, and his hand moved the remaining distance between them.

Kris let out a gasp when his palm met hers, fingertips flush.

“You’re soft,” he whispered. He looked at their hands in fascination when she spread her fingers slightly, allowing his to twine between and clutch her hand. “I feel like I might break you. Does that hurt?”

Issa smiled. “You can’t hurt me. Does it still hurt to touch?”

“No … it feels warm. Comforting,” he said with a note of wonder.

Without releasing her hand, he raised his other hand and tentatively brought it to the side of her face.

With the barest, tickling touch, he traced the line of her cheek, continuing with his fingertips down her neck and over her shoulder, down the length of her arm, and up past her elbow to the wrist of the hand that gripped his own.

He traced the entire path backward to her shoulder.

Issa’s breathing quickened, her heart pounding with each slight touch.

Kris’s eyes followed his touch and Issa watched his expression transform with each new discovery: the pliant silk of her lips, the wet texture of her tongue when she darted it out to taste the tip of his thumb.

He pressed and caressed and sometimes pinched just a little while he explored.

“I’m made like you,” she whispered.

“I know,” he said. “But I already know what I feel like. You feel much nicer. Does Erika feel like this? The other women?”

Issa smiled and nodded. “They’re all just a little different, but mostly the same. Dragons feel different from humans, too. You’ll see.”

“How?” he asked.

With a tiny surge of energy she let her scales show, her skin growing a brighter lavender and shimmering in the ambient glow of the altar beneath them.

Kris swept the flat of his palm along her arm. “You feel the same as before.”

“Yes. Humans are a little smoother—softer. That’s all.”

He grew bolder with his touch, brushing both palms down her chest and around the sides of her breasts. He cupped them both, pushed them together, then released them, watching with fascination while they sprang back to their natural shape.

“I think women are a lot softer,” he murmured.

“We are, yes.” She sighed when he cupped her breasts again and dipped his head to taste each pert nipple. After several seconds of him doing laps around her nipples, during which Issa thought she’d lose her mind, he raised his head and pressed his mouth against hers.