Page 15 of Valor’s Flight (The New Protectorate #5)

Chapter Nine

He thought it was likely that he was still drugged. It was the only explanation that made sense to him. How else could he have ended up in Alashiya’s kitchen?

Taevas felt like he’d stepped back in time, or flown through a portal into an alternate universe, one where he was no one, nothing, and yet had everything he’d longed for.

He vividly recalled the first time he’d opened a package and beheld Alashiya’s work.

All dragons had a keen eye for luxury, particularly when it came to textiles.

They had tough but exquisitely sensitive skin, particularly on the undersides of their wings, so they were predisposed to being extraordinarily picky when it came to their clothing and bedding.

Taevas was pickier than most. He’d earned it. He’d kept so little of and for himself when he became Isand. Never having to feel the discomfort of filthy, homespun clothing or using rags for nesting seemed like a harmless but necessary indulgence.

Over the years, he’d touched the finest fabrics and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on his textiles — everything from tapestries to bath towels to custom suits. He knew luxury and craftsmanship at a glance.

So when he laid his eyes on the embroidered sash in a display case in a New York atelier specializing in magically-enhanced garments, he knew immediately that he’d stumbled upon a treasure.

That’s all it was at first: an honest appreciation of skill. He’d bought all the atelier had, to the delight of the sales associate, and proudly wore his pieces until he had an opportunity to request something custom. That was when things changed.

The pieces he bought from the atelier had been there for some time.

They smelled of aged fabric, the indefinable but unmistakable city scent, and the owner’s overpowering cologne.

Nothing offensive, but nothing particularly desirable, either.

But his commissioned piece — a silk shirt he’d sent to be customized with sigilwork and a flame motif — had returned to him smelling like the artisan herself.

Cypress. Woman. Home.

It’d startled him the first time. The scent perfumed the air around the open box.

It saturated the tissue paper that carefully guarded the shirt.

It clung to the fibers of the card included with the package.

A delicate pressed flower, a white thing he had no hope of identifying, fell into the palm of his hand as he extracted the note.

Thank you for your order! I hope you like the design. I loved every stitch. -A

The handwriting was delicate and loopy, exactly the kind he’d expect from an artist. And the scent of the card…

Taevas wasn’t a man moved by much. He’d experienced too much too quickly — ascended to the very summit of feeling so young that everything that had come since seemed to him a precipitous fall.

Privately, he suspected that something vital had been broken in him.

That mechanism that allowed his kin to chase their instincts, the wildest swings of their emotions, had a crack down its center.

It made him a good Isand. He wasn’t prone to fits or getting drunk on his own ego.

He could see things objectively and didn’t run into trouble chasing his own high.

His swagger was based entirely on objective fact, along with a keen understanding of exactly what he could get away with.

Mating instincts didn’t cloud his judgment.

Lust was blessedly clinical, and he harbored no secret desire to share his life with someone he could lose.

It wasn’t happiness, exactly, but it wasn’t misery, either.

Taevas existed at a pleasant equilibrium, and he took joy in his clan every chance he got.

There was nothing missing from his life.

If other dragons looked askance at him the longer he went without seeking out a mate, then they knew better than to mention it.

And then a flower fell into his palm, its nearly translucent petals turned lavender by the color of his skin, and he scented her for the first time.

The only thing he could equate it to was having a fuse pop in his brain.

In an instant, he’d gone painfully hard, his mind blank.

A soft, pleasant buzz filled his ears as he pressed his nose into the silk shirt.

He’d shoved his hand down his slacks before he’d even thought the action through.

It was utterly mindless, the animal urge that saw him pawing at his cock like he’d just discovered what to do with it.

There was no reason. Just the scent of her, so soft and earthy and warm, was enough to get him off.

It was pure luck that his assistant hadn’t stuck around after delivering the box.

There was no one to see him squeeze the swollen head of his cock or hear the wet sounds of his fingers moving up and down the slick shaft as pre-come slid from it.

There were no witnesses to the way his balls drew up tight against his body, his hips lifted from his seat, or the way his lips peeled back from his teeth in a snarl that was all pleasure-pain.

He swore he could feel her soft skin. He could taste her on his tongue — sweet and earthy and perfect.

It wasn’t just lust that compelled him, but the roaring need to claim, to mark.

He needed his seed splashed across all that beautiful, warm skin.

He needed to feel her cunt dripping against his hungry tongue.

He needed her to tell him who she belonged to, and see the dark, flushed purple shaft of his cock disappear into the hot well of her body. He needed, needed, needed…

Her.

The image of her in his mind was a shifting thing, but it didn’t seem to matter. He thrust into his fist with jagged rolls of his hips, his mind full of her. Her sighs and soft, fluttering touches were as real as his own hand.

She’d sound as sweet as she tasted. He knew it instinctively. She’d be supple and pliant and giving. It was in her scent, the very essence of her that fogged his mind.

He could see her in the nest, on her hands and knees with her fingers twisted into the blankets, her ass up and ready for him.

He’d coil his tail around the crease of her thigh, right where the wetness gleamed, and he’d drape his wings over them both as he came down over her, caging her in.

She’d never escape him. She’d never want to.

He could feel the satisfaction of thrusting inside her, knowing that she was his. No one could have her. No one could even look at her. She was his treasure and he’d fill her up again and again and again until—

Taevas didn’t regain some tiny shred of reason until he came with a pathetic groan into his fist, his spend sliding over his violet knuckles until it dripped onto his slacks.

The drops landed right beside the pressed flower, which had fluttered onto his thigh, making the scene appear like some artistic homage to perversion.

It was an earth-shattering experience, having his control stolen from him for the first time.

Taevas A?daja didn’t lose his mind. He certainly didn’t jerk his cock to the scent of clothing, for pity’s sake.

He’d run from his sitting room and directly into the shower, like he could rinse off the slimy, revolting feeling of losing control as easily as he could wash his seed down the drain.

The obvious result was that he shoved the shirt in a drawer and didn’t look at it for months.

He nearly threw it away but hadn’t been able to stomach putting something so beautiful in the trash.

The artisan had worked literal and figurative magic with her needle and thread, creating an art nouveau motif around the cuffs and collar.

She’d no doubt spent hours and hours doing it.

Though she would never know he’d thrown out her hard work, he would.

In the end, despite his revulsion at his lack of control, he couldn’t force his claws to unlock their grip.

The shirt stayed, unseen but quietly obsessed over, until the memory of her scent weakened him enough to dig it out again.

Even months later, the faint trace of her lingered in its fibers.

It was made all the more potent, he grimly discovered, by the addition of his own.

When their scents combined, it didn’t just smell like the best sex of his life. It smelled like home.

He put in another order the next day.

Taevas wasn’t entirely sure how it happened, except that it must have been in increments and through constant renegotiation with himself. It became something of an internal hostage negotiation — one of constant compromise with an ever-increasingly demanding aggressor.

He put rules on his obsession, hoping to manage it, but they were never enough.

Taevas couldn’t seek her out, though something in him frothed with the need. It was precisely that need which solidified his resolve.

Control, renegotiation, control.

If he wanted to indulge his whims, he could only do so with the stipulation that he could never, ever hunt her down. Rules were control of the seemingly uncontrollable. It put him back on top of a beast that threatened to eat him whole.

One order turned into two, then two dozen. He renegotiated with himself again and again, making allowances, fighting for control over himself and the growing monster of his need.

No one was allowed to touch the garments except the artisan, he demanded.

Not even the owner of the atelier. That concession to the needy beast came with the rule that Taevas couldn’t order anything that might hint at his obsession, let alone his desire, and he couldn’t, under any circumstance, communicate directly with the artisan herself.