Page 105 of The Dragon Queen Complete Series Collection

Chapter 104

So many thoughts were racing through my head, but it was like they all cancelled out when he leaned in closer and ghosted his lips across mine. The touch was so light that I wondered if I’d imagined it. Maybe it wasn’t a kiss. Maybe he was testing the waters, seeing my reaction to him being that close. My brain was still stuck on ‘who is this?’ and, truth be told, the caring, nurturing man he’d shown me was one I trusted, who I felt a connection to. So, I didn’t pull away. When he felt no resistance, he hissed in a breath, then slammed his mouth down on mine, angling my head to kiss me with a wanton greediness that sent flames racing through my body.

At first my hands just sort of floated in the air beside me as my brain tried to process what was happening. Was this really Draven, the icily remote prince? Then his lips and tongue overpowered my thoughts and I lifted my hands to behind his neck to clutch at his dark curls. The moment my hands landed, he groaned into my mouth and speared his tongue deeper, then moved his hands too. He ran one to the back of my neck, the other to the base of my spine to tug me closer, to weld my body to his, making clear just how much he was responding to this…

And that had me pulling out of his grasp. Wide-eyed, panting, I took an unsteady step back.

I stared at him incredulously, trying to work out what was happening. It was as though the prince I knew had been replaced by someone else entirely. I thought I’d seen all his moods: angry, arrogant, smirking, annoying, frustrating and scathing, even the gentle man who’d saved me from being poisoned. But I’d never seen this man: the one who, ignoring my look of shock, swept forward to pick me up in his arms, deposit me onto the table, and slot his body between my thighs.

“I told you I am a greedy man who wants a taste of everything he believes is his,” the growl back in his voice, but this time softer, more hypnotic. “You thought I was talking about Brom; about the others in the wing.” He put an arm down either side of me on the table and leaned over me, shutting out everything else so that I was looking up into his piercing eyes, my entire focus was on him. “You assumed I meant I was jealous of your place at the centre of my wing, that I wanted to push you out, to take that place. But, sweetheart…”

That little pet name had me searching his face for signs of the Draven I thought I knew, looking for a sneer or a smirk or something else, but his intense look didn’t change.

“…what you need to understand is that I was viciously envious of each one of those bastards.” His hands slid down my neck, thumbing my restless pulse before finding the first toggle of my jacket and flicking it open. “They took so blithely from the woman I knew was mine. I imagined them working together to bring you to greater and greater pleasures, and I have never hated four men more.” I swallowed, under his spell, my chest heaving, as his teeth nipped at my neck, and his tongue soothed away the sting. “I should have been there.” He flicked open another toggle, then pulled at the collar of my jacket to bare the top of my shoulder, my collarbone and just a hint of the upper swell of my breast. He ran his nose along the exposed skin, breathing me in, then raised his head again. “I would have made sure each one of them worshipped every inch of you, and then I would have stepped forward to do the same.”

The humming song got deeper, more resonant, as Darkspire’s voice joined Glimmer’s. Their fierce refrain matched the throbbing intensity deep within me. Something was unlocked in me, from his words, his touch, his fervour, and I tore at his jacket until the toggles wrenched free and it hung all the way open, exposing his skin. That wasn’t enough. I needed to stake my claim on him so I raked my nails over his bare flesh, digging my fingers into his chest, his shoulders, his back, as I pressed myself against him, my face into his neck all to his sounds of satisfaction as he held me to him. With every panting breath I took, I drew his woody scent deeper into me; everywhere my body met his, he thrummed under my touch.

“Let me…please, my queen, just this once, let me show you exactly how it would’ve been.”

I rested my cheek on his shoulder to stare at this prince who had called me his queen. His head thrown back in profile. Flared nostrils pulling in gusty breaths. My marks on his skin. And one blue eye looking down at me through tempest-tossed curls as he waited for my response.

“You’re mine?”

I barely squeaked the words out, feeling like a mouse, not a queen.

“All yours,” Draven agreed, with a slow nod, “no matter what I might say or do in front of others.” He trailed a hand down the side of my face. “Remember that. I don’t have the luxury of wearing my heart on my sleeve like Ged and Soren, of proclaiming my love to the world like Brom or debauching you so fucking utterly like Flynn, but I can have this.”

He leaned down and kissed me. But this time it was a slow study of my lips, the whole deed drawn out so long that it became something else: an exploration, an opportunity to learn and an invitation to discover more. Like, why did I tug him closer when he went to pull away and ask if this is what I wanted? Why did I sink my hands into his inky hair, glorying in the slip of it between my fingers? Why did I claim his mouth, just like he claimed mine, our hands moving blindly to reveal more of the other, even though we couldn’t draw back long enough to look?

And then we did.

Draven lifted his head, to follow the passage of his fingers as they mapped the expanse of my bared shoulders. He drew my jacket and shirt down my arms. A tender expression crossed his face, and his eyes filled with something I’d never seen in them. Reverence, that’s what it was. Bringing his hand up to cup my cheek, he traced his knuckle along my jawline, down my neck to my collarbone. He lifted his eyes back up to mine as his knuckles stroked along the inner curve of my breast.

“Please, Pippin…”

I answered him by lifting his hand to place his palm right over the fullness. The heat of his touch sent a shiver through to my core and I gasped. My nipple tightened to a hard bead the moment he touched it and he lifted an eyebrow as though recording the information. Draven flicked his eyes to meet mine one more time as I sobbed out my approval. He licked his lips and then he struck, faster than a cobra. It felt as though he was everywhere at once, kissing my mouth and my neck, sliding one hand down my side while the cruel fingers of the other pinched pleasure from the aching point of my nipple. I moaned, shifted against him, and his hand slid down, dragging my hips closer to wedge them against him, that hard length rubbing right where I needed it.

And yet I wanted more.

A frantic little noise of pleasure escaped me, and then a particularly violent thrust of his hips against mine had the table rocking, threatening to unseat me, and we were forced to pull away from each other for a moment. He smiled like the boy I imagined he would’ve been, if not for the burden of his title.

“You’ll end up with a bloody bruise on your perfectly formed arse if we don’t take this to the bed,” he said. “Then your pack of lovers would descend on me and make sure I wore bruises twice as black in retaliation.”

“They wouldn’t fight against you.”

“Yes, they would. Against me, against my mother and my father.” He moved in closer, dropping soft kisses across my face, as if he couldn’t stop himself. “There’s something so deliciously treasonous about you that drives a man mad, making him forget everything he stood for moments before.”

“Well, if I’m keeping you from your true purpose…” I tried to make it a joke but my voice was a little too high, too thin for that.

“Or maybe you’re helping me discover what that really is,” he countered, stopping with his lips hovering just over mine. “Tell me to pick you up and lay you down on that bed, Pippin. Tell me to remove those leather pants you wear that seems designed to drive a man mad, the way they mould to your body.” He stared into my eyes. “Let us come to bed, just a man, just a woman, with nothing else between us, at least for a little while.”

“Yes,” I gasped. “Oh, yes.”

And so he swept me up and carried me over to the bed, laying me down and pulling the rest of my clothes off with flattering haste. I turned to my side to watch him finish undressing. The room was quiet now. The dragons’ song had died down when our earlier hectic passion had turned to quiet exploration of each other. As Draven stood beside the bed, loosening his leather pants, Darkspire lifted his head to regard us. The big dragon nudged Glimmer with his snout, and she climbed sleepily up onto his neck. He carried her into a nearby room and slammed the door shut with his tail as he went. We both laughed for a second in surprise. As he directed his gaze at me, the humour left Draven’s face and was replaced by a predatory look. He dropped down onto the bed on all fours, and stalked slowly towards me. My heart started to race as I watched him approach: dark curls, deep blue eyes, chiselled features. Broad shoulders and hard, lean muscles honed from years of weapons training. By the time he lay down to face me, my legs were moving restlessly and my breasts felt heavy and tight.

I stretched out a hand and ran my fingers down the pale skin of his chest, marvelling at the utter lack of softness, even though it made perfect sense to me. He was all hard edges and sharp teeth, our prince. I lifted my hand to his face and he turned his head to press a kiss to my palm, then he rolled us both to cover my body with his, pressing me down into the soft mattress, anchoring me to him. I couldn’t believe that I was with him, touching him and I ran my hands over every part of him that I could reach. When he captured my hands to hold them over my head, I blurted out,

“I feel like I’m going to wake up any minute.”

“Gods, don’t,” he groaned, then bent his head to suck hard on one nipple, my back arching up off the bed in response. “If this is not real, then dream on, I say.” His tongue flicked over the same hard bead, and he seemed to like the way it made me squirm. “At least not until I’ve had a taste.” He lifted his head and grinned at me, then let go of my hands to kiss his way down the length of my body.

I grabbed at his shoulders then his head, but he slipped out of my grip, pausing when he got to my pelvis and staring up the line of my body.

“When I walked in on you and Flynn, I didn’t know where to bloody look. At you, perfect in your pleasure, so fucking beautiful as he rutted you into the bed, or at him, imagining myself in his place.”

“Or imagining yourself in mine?” I asked, going up on my elbows to gauge his response, but I wasn’t able to do so as he pressed a very effective kiss to my hip bone, then another and another, going lower each time and I collapsed to my back. “Draven?” I gasped out his name as I felt his lips on my mound, the skin all over my body feeling overheated and slick.

“Some days I find it hard to fucking know,” he growled. “I don’t care about male, female, right or wrong, all I know is desire that drives me out of my head with need.” He pressed a kiss into my thigh. “Just like I’m determined to do to you.” And before I could say another word, his kisses burned a blazing trail closer and closer to where I ached until…

I hadn’t had a lot of experience with men putting their mouths on that part of me. But with that first lick? It felt like Draven seared me with a tongue of flame, branding me indelibly in a way I’d never recover from. His moan was muffled as my hands shot out to grip his skull, determined that he wasn’t going to have a chance to pull away and say this was all just one big joke. And he didn’t. Instead he seemed to take direction very well, spreading me open with his thumbs and then tasting the entirety of me, my whole body jolting when he flicked my pearl.

“Sensitive?” His voice was so damn smug, but I didn’t care. “Of course you are.”

And he set out to exploit that. He traced the entire shape of that bundle of nerves until I was panting like a dog, my thighs falling wider open. He delved in, sucking my pearl between his lips, then humming his pleasure, sending great waves of vibration washing over me, forcing the nub to roll against his tongue, his teeth until I was about ready to scream. Then he pulled away with a pop, licking me long and slow as his fingers shoved inside me. I twitched in response, part of me resisting the sudden intrusion, the other part glorying in that stretch right up until he began to move.

“Draven…”

His name came out as little more than a breath. I had everything that I needed and yet I didn’t. His pace was picking up, the thrusts of his hand punishing, but it was like he was removed from the experience somehow, pleasuring me, but not drowning in it like I was. I clawed helplessly at his shoulders, trying to drag him upwards when his fingers curled up inside me and I screamed his name.

“Draven…!”

The pleasure radiating out from my pearl seemed to multiply exponentially at that point, like I was a butterfly on a spike; his fingers, his tongue stroking the same point from without and within.

“Haven’t they taught you about this yet?” Draven said. “Tsk tsk… Your pearl of pleasure has deep roots inside you and they do like to be stroked.”

I writhed as he pressed harder, pleasure feeling like it exploded inside me with each pass of his fingertips, rolled on inexorably by his suddenly busy tongue.

“Draven, please…!”

“Come for me, my queen.” His voice was full of dark intent. “Bathe my face in your pleasure. Let me see, feel, experience, everything they did and more.”

There was a humming that got louder now, rising to a fever pitch inside my head. There was something fractious, sharp-edged about it, as if it cut into me as much as pleased me.

“Draven… Draven…”

My nails raked across his shoulders leaving red welts in their wake. I tried to pull him closer but he would not be swayed. His mouth, his fingers, his body worked to drag the greatest of pleasures out of me when he finally achieved his goal.

Gods.

My eyes snapped open and I stared blankly at the ceiling as my whole body jerked and twitched, wave upon wave of pleasure washing over me until there was nothing left.

Well, not nothing.

He crawled up my body then pressed lips that tasted of me to mine before collapsing down beside me, both of us fighting to catch my breath. But that hum persisted. It had me rising on the bed. Draven looked up at me warily as I went to my knees, then his eyes widened as I placed my knees either side of his hips.

“Pippin, we don’t have to…” His protests cut off as I ran my hands down his magnificent body, and watched the way he responded with hungry eyes. I was sure that I was catching the very first true reactions of his, the mask thoroughly dropped. Something that was reinforced when I took his swollen length in my hands. “Oh, gods, Pippin…”

“Am I your queen?” I asked him, right as he was thrusting his cock into my hands, his mouth falling open.

“Damn me all to hell, but yes, yes…” he groaned.

I moved swiftly then, the act taking on a ceremonial air, as if this wasn’t just two people having sex in the bed, but something far deeper.

My spine felt like it was made of willow, strong and yet flexible as I bent down to kiss him. His mouth was hungry, greedy, devouring mine even as he groaned out his response. Those sounds only grew deeper and more frantic as I shifted my hips, first sliding my saliva-slick folds over his hardness. His hands slapping at my hips, then his voice grew guttural as I notched the head of his cock against me.

“Tell me you’ll worship me always,” I said.

“Yes, Pippin, yes!”

“Tell me you’ll always be mine.”

That’s what stopped him dead, the head of his cock only just inside me, his control perfect as he stared up at me.

“You know I am.” His words were simple, direct, devastating. “I always was, from the moment I got off my dragon and saw you there at the quarry. I thought I was ready for anything. A simpering miss who thought she was to be elevated beyond her station. Some haughty backwater noblewoman, or even a simple creature who’d known only lazy days and summer harvests. But I wasn’t prepared for you.”

His brow creased.

“Not fucking you, Pippin. I knew I could never let myself actually care for my wife, lest she become another statistic, just like my brother. And yet you were so self-contained and graceful with it, brimming with this spirit that flashed in your eyes the minute you saw me. And when you looked at my riders? I saw it all then, the future we could’ve had if I was just another rider and you could be my girl, too.”

He held my gaze as his hips tilted upwards slightly, easing himself into me but with more than just his body. Draven had always seemed so brutal and destructive, yet he had just shattered all the carefully constructed barriers I’d built between us.

“Just give me this for today,” he panted. “Just a man and a woman, a queen and her loyal subject. Let me worship your body with mine. Let me feel the way it would’ve been if the fates were not so cruel. Give me this , Pippin!”

His hips bucked upwards in emphasis, and he impaled himself deep inside me. The fact that he’d spoken largely in past tense was driven out of my mind because all I could focus on was him – the feel of his body, the intensity of his gaze. Draven had me transfixed again, mesmerised. It felt like I was sinking into his steady regard even as he was thrusting up into me. We found our rhythm and moved together, perfectly in time, everything so well synchronised that when his breath grew ragged, mine did too. As I headed for the peak, I leant down and claimed his mouth.

The heavy swell of him within me, then the explosive burst, brought me to my own climax and beyond. His arms went around me, and we clasped each other tight, as our coordinated movements became twitching, spasmodic and instinctual. So of course we clung together, as if weathering a storm. But this was a tempest we had created together, one we leaned into as it blasted at us. Finally, as the gales of pleasure died down and peace returned, he rolled us over onto our sides, and he held me cradled against his chest.

I hadn’t cleared this with Brom, or with any of the men. I had no idea how they would feel about such a development and that’s when I felt a moment of crystalline realisation. I’d been angry at Brom for hiding a relationship of sorts, yet here was I initiating… something… without any kind of input from the men closest to my heart. Those very valid concerns seemed to vanish the moment Draven kissed me, twisting his hips slightly, his still hard cock buried deep inside me.

“Gods, I can’t seem to get enough of you,” he murmured, kissing me once, twice before thrusting more intentionally. “Tell me you’re ready for more. Please, Pippin. Say you’re not too sore.”

I did and I wasn’t. Some kind of devilry had me clinging to the prince as we spared no effort to see if lightning could strike more than once in the same place. It did, multiple times throughout the night, and eventually I fell into a deep sleep sometime in the early hours.

But when I woke up the next morning? I was alone.

Darkspire and his bondmate have gone , Glimmer informed me, climbing onto the bed. To do what they must.

What? I rolled over and slapped my hands down on the bare space beside me, my fingers crinkling a piece of paper left on the pillow. And what must he do?

He’s the first line of defence against the other queen , she told me as my eyes scanned the neatly sloping writing he’d left on the paper. He thinks he can sacrifice himself and bring an end to all of this, but that’s not how it works. Males provide a defensive line, to try and dissuade a queen from attacking their mate, but in the end, it comes down to teeth and claw, queen against queen, to determine who is fit to rule a territory.

I crumpled the paper in my hand, shaking my head as I rolled out of bed, stopping when I felt the ache. The ghost of Draven still lived in my body, but I pushed that to one side as I yanked my clothes back on.

“Where the hell have you been?” Flynn asked as I walked into the suite, his hands raking through his hair. “We were worried sick! I thought Draven had fucking killed you or worse.”

“Now, lad,” Soren said, before focusing on me. “Pippin will explain when she’s ready.”

“I…” My throat closed up, and words wouldn’t come out.

“Did he hurt you?” Ged said. “I’ll fucking kill him if he?—”

“I’m sorry.”

I got that much out, pushing past him and the others to hold the ball of paper out to Brom as a peace offering, but when his eyes met mine, I knew that he knew. Where I’d been, what had happened, because the same had happened to him. But did he feel betrayed in the same way? Brom took the ball with a nod, then opened it up.

“What the hell is going on?” Flynn asked, peering over Brom’s shoulders, then his eyes went wide.

“The prince has escaped back to Wyrmpeak,” Brom said in a tight voice. “He intends to rescue the cadets and see if he can bring them back here, or will at least see them safe before…”

“Before?” Soren prompted.

“Before he seeks to bring his mother down, all on his own,” Brom finished grimly.