Page 9

Aodh inclined his head, shoved a hand through his hair, and exhaled loudly. A rumble filled the room.

The harsh sound did what her hand could not: silenced her.

Kai didn’t move. This is it.

He inhaled and exhaled again. The rumble was quieter but still present.

Lowering his hand, he looked at her. His eyes were predominantly sapphire-stained opal again, only a thin ring of black around them.

“Drahks have not eaten humans for centuries, only during wartime. Since the first treaty with the world’s leaders, we have not had to demonstrate our might with flame or bite. ” He snapped his teeth.

She flinched.

“Besides, Morlie is too frail and sickly to be worth the bother.” He chuckled. Then his gaze caressed her from the top of her head to her tattered shoes. He couldn’t see much with her legs bent before her, but it didn’t stop the emerald and crimson leaching into his eyes.

Regardless of the anxiety sitting like a stone in her stomach, her skin flushed, and her blood began to warm with desire in response.

“Now you.” He leaned forward, wrapped his thick, hot hands around her ankles, and pulled.

Because she had once again locked her arms around her knees, he dragged her whole body closer to him. She swallowed as sparks raced along her nerves from his firm touch.

He placed his lips right beside her ear. “I do plan to eat you, mate. When I do, you will enjoy it.”

Kai couldn’t deny that Aodh’s sensuous, rough tone and the erotic picture he painted in her mind made her nipples taut and caused the heat that rested low in her belly to swell to a blaze at the apex of her thighs. It took everything in her not to turn her face into his and beg him to ‘prove it.’

~YH~

She shifted away from him. Kai turned her face to the right and gulped, choking down several deep breaths, and tried to get her mind and body to align.

Hell, she wasn’t sure which of them was out of line since her mind was playing images of Aodh licking and nibbling all over her body, and her body was responding to it in lustful ways that yearned to have the big guy touch her.

He carved visual depictions like a prehistoric human across the deep walls of her brain.

The erotic hieroglyphics of sensual bodies entwined were haunting her senses, making her feel things she’d only read about, watched in old vids she stumbled upon.

These are things no girl on the cusp of womanhood with such a bleak, unsure future before her should have been fascinated with.

As she got older, she envisioned finding a man to kiss her, touch her, and drag his hands over her body in a way that would cause her to writhe in levels of pleasure she honestly didn’t understand.

Now, Aodh was taking those few naughty scenes, destroying them with his hot, passionate words, and rebuilding them anew.

“Aodh...please.” She panted. Needy. What was she asking him for?

He growled, and his hands tightened on her. There was a bite and sting from his nails, just barely puncturing her flesh. Her mind screamed for her not to analyze what she felt or what made such an impression on her skin. Claws?

This man was a beast—a monster.

She choked off a moan and swallowed. “I need space.”

There had never been more complicated words uttered.

Aodh inhaled but released her and moved back. He rose slowly, his body claiming and taking up the space as if he owned it. In some ways, this was his world. All was his.

“You need care.”

There was a lilt of gentleness to his words. It acted as a balm to Kai’s overwrought senses. Her legs trembled as she stood. It took more strength than she wanted to admit, forcing her knees, shaky as they were, to lock.

Pulling his gaze from her, he crossed to the fireplace. “I will send an attendant to help set the bath and bring fresh clothing. Food, too.”

“I can handle my bath,” she declared. If they healed her sister, she would already owe them enough.

He didn’t comment as he stooped low and blew a flame into the open space. The fire blazed and remained.

The quick flame she witnessed coming from his mouth still shocked her, even though she no longer wondered how he’d made the fire catch when there wasn’t kindling to hold the blaze.

Even though Aodh said his kind weren’t magicians, a level of magic existed in things like an eternal flame burning in an empty grate.

However, she would keep those words to herself.

As he stood, he glanced in her direction. His eyes slowly roamed along her body from face to foot before he exhaled and started toward the front door.

“Start your bath. Someone will come. I need to meet with the elders, but I will return and take you around after you rest.” Halfway to the door, he stopped and faced her again. His voice crossed the space, “Do not leave this room without me.”

Crossing her arms over her chest, she held back the response to tell him where he could shove his commands.

She’d spent the last few years protecting herself and Morlie in a dark and cruel world.

A world that made a woman fight to survive in ways that had nothing to do with the lilac, second sun in the sky.

But she wasn’t stupid and didn’t know enough about these dragon-shifters to go tromping around.

Aodh may not want to make a meal of her and Morlie, but could he speak for all those in his Thunder?

“Fine.”

After a sharp nod, he left.

She went into the bathroom. The classic, modern fixtures surprised her.

The room she and Morlie lived in was only a closet-sized place with a toilet and sink to cleanse their faces and bodies.

Like most things she’d seen here, the room was stone.

The light cream-colored counter was a highly-polished surface.

It was so glossy she could see not only each of the different-sized particles and sediments in it that made the most fascinating pattern but also her reflection.

It seemed distorted, unfamiliar in a way.

Tipping her head up to the mirror over the sink, she was horrified.

The reflection staring back at her over the basin would make her deceased mother weep. Her mom had always prided herself in making sure no matter their situation in the underground city, they should do everything to look their best.

“You don’t have to be a Consumer to look great.

” Her mother’s words echoed in her head, making her heart ache deeply.

Their parents had made plans and created and hung vision boards on the walls of their small two-bedroom family apartment of goals for them after the surface was open and habitable again.

They’d drawn imaginative dreams along the limited ceiling that capped them in the solar-powered dwelling space about how their lives would be and the changes in how they lived, what they could do, and where they could go.

Her parents, Preston and Viola, were newlyweds in a place called Iowa before the first earthquake hit. But they provided a history for her and her sister of life outside the underground. Their parents told them of a world they believed would be available.

“You were wrong,” Kai whispered to her parents’ memory, and the image reflected in the mirror.

A tiny ember of anger burned on the back side of her heart, something she did not want to acknowledge.

Her mom and dad had weaved a fantasy through words and pictures that gave her and Morlie false hopes.

When the world opened again, it was nothing like the space they had known. It was worse behind the wall.

Kai blinked and erased the past. There were things there she hadn’t unpacked yet, and she wouldn’t do it now in a strange land.

She focused on her hair, which was more tangled than cute coils, and the clothing that hung off her frame was dirty and worn.

It shook her that Aodh could want to kiss or do the other salacious things he hinted at with her looking the way she did.

Perhaps the mating lure made him blind to the horrors of her appearance.

She had never had a reason in the Dispatch District to purchase homemade face tints, but now, seeing the exhausted, plain, and drawn look on her face, she wished she had something to improve her image.

Shaking her head, she turned away. The rest of the bathroom was just as spectacular as the sink.

All the fixtures were jewel-encrusted. More extensive and brighter than the rings in the top pocket of her father’s service jacket she wore, her parents’ wedding rings.

Kai had slipped the three rings from her parents’ hands after they drew their last breaths.

She’d had to sell her mother’s engagement ring to pay for their room until Kai had gotten a full-time position in the collection depot.

However, she’d held onto the rings like she gripped the reins of her sister’s life.

How could Aodh and his people have such luxurious amenities?

It boggled her mind. If his kind had not had to go underground, hoarding all their most valuable possessions like those in the Consumer Providence, then had they robbed and taken claim of what others had left as they ran for their lives?

Some made it to safety, but most did not.

She set those thoughts aside until she got more information on who the dragon people were.

When she spotted the big-ass tub beside a gigantic glass-enclosed shower on the other side of the room—she and five other people could fit in—excitement bubbled up.

Of course, thinking of the large man who owned this space, it made sense.

But, for her life, she could not imagine Aodh being the type of man to lounge around in a bath.

It had been so long since she’d bathed, she was having difficulty imagining herself doing more than standing at the sink and scrubbing away as much filth as possible.

She glanced back at the sink and considered it.