Page 36 of Valor’s Flight (The New Protectorate #5)

Chapter Twenty-Two

He hadn’t woken up beside many women before.

None had ever been welcome in his nest, but when he was young and flush with hormones, he’d taken just about every woman he could to bed.

He was the youngest Isand, a war hero, and only in his twenties.

Eager to drown his sorrows and the poison of war in pleasure, he’d taken offer after offer.

The intricacies of how to navigate those temporary relationships had taken a while for him to understand.

He didn’t realize at first that sleeping over implied permanence, nor that women talked.

His father never thought to explain to him that it was best to kindly but firmly explain his boundaries, setting expectations before sex so no hearts could be broken.

These things he had to learn on his feet and, occasionally, through the well-meaning but often contradictory advice of the older men in what would become his Wing.

He did learn, though, and eventually he came up with a system that worked for everybody involved.

It was one built entirely on clear communication, non-disclosure agreements, and a predetermined time limit.

No woman slipped into bed with him without knowing the score, and therefore no woman left disappointed — outwardly, at least.

It made things easy, impersonal, and safe. Taevas couldn’t get attached to someone he could lose, and the women weren’t led to believe they’d caught the Isand after a night of passion.

He never meant to build a reputation as a player, but it was inevitable. Especially during the early days.

It bothered him at first and still did on some level.

Taevas didn’t love the thought of being known as someone who disregarded lovers like yesterday’s laundry, but he quickly realized that, inexplicably, people seemed to like the idea that he couldn’t be pinned down.

There was some strange draw to being the UTA’s most eligible bachelor and an incorrigible ladies’ man.

Even as his appetites waned with maturity, the image stuck in the collective mind of the populace and took on a life of its own.

Sometimes he wondered what people would say if they knew he hadn’t slept with a woman in years. Would they even believe him? He imagined sitting down for an interview to explain that he’d been in a committed relationship with a figment of his imagination built on little more than a scent.

The Isand’s Finally Lost It, the headline would read.

His Wing wouldn’t be surprised. They’d been looking askance at him for years, ever since he stopped taking partners for the night.

Vael, perhaps his closest friend and most recent addition to the clan since his mating to Taevas’s cousin Hele, had been watching him even more closely than normal lately.

The big, scarred dragon was too damn observant.

Despite the fact that he’d been on sabbatical from the Wing for over a year, busy traveling with Hele to find her fellow elementals, he still somehow managed to notice that Taevas couldn’t seem to stop checking when his next package would arrive.

For ten years, Taevas had managed to keep his obsession mostly under wraps, but he’d been slipping more and more.

In fact, he’d slipped so far that he landed in Alashiya’s nest. It should’ve been nothing but a triumph, with copious amounts of carnal delights to celebrate the occasion, but fate wasn’t that kind.

He’d finally gotten to touch her, to watch her as she came on his hand, and he was too damn injured to do anything else.

Taevas gritted his teeth against the chills that wracked him. At some point in the night, he’d crawled out of the nest to throw up in the bathroom. Alashiya had drowsily fetched him his toothbrush, a glass of water, and several more fever reducers before she helped him back into bed.

Not how I imagined my first night in the nest with her.

It was definitely not what she probably had in mind, with her dreams of Adon the gargoyle. Ridiculous. As if even a football team of gargoyles could satisfy the hungry thing he’d glimpsed in his nymph. Only a dragon could do that.

Only a dragon would do that.

Possessiveness bubbling in his gut like last night’s vomit, Taevas opened his bleary eyes to search for her.

He lay on his stomach, his miserable, useless wings folded against his back and his head turned toward her.

Alashiya lay on her side facing him. Her body was tucked into a tight ball beneath the blankets and her curls were a scattered explosion across the pillows.

Judging by the thin shafts of sunlight that made it past her curtains and all the moss on the windows, gods help him, Taevas judged that it was well past her normal wake-up call. She was typically up and moving at dawn, but he supposed that he had kept her up far later than normal.

It was another humiliation that he hadn’t done so for any pleasurable reason. After he’d made the colossal mistake of trying to embrace her with his wings, as instinct demanded, he’d been in too much pain to continue where they’d left off.

He wanted to. By all the gods, he needed to. He’d soared with clouds. Seen where the domains of the gods touched at the very edge of the horizon. Fucked every kind of woman in every kind of way. Fought to the death and experienced the high of somehow making it out alive.

And none of it compared to her.

Kissing her and watching her come had been without a doubt the best experience of his life.

It was like sipping from the river of life itself. He tasted the very essence of vitality when she blessed him with her touch. When she breathed against his lips, he felt a kinship with the gods as he finally understood what it must have been like at the beginning of all things.

The urge to tear something from himself, to hand over an offering of flesh and bone in exchange for a moment of her radiance, had consumed him.

His rational mind fled. It left only the devotee, the supplicant desperate to get his fill of the divine, and in that moment, Taevas as he’d known himself was lost forever.

In the light of morning, he didn’t want to think of what that meant.

He couldn’t, until everything was back as it should be.

Only then could he consider what it meant that he would never be able to sleep in a nest without her by his side again, or that when he thought of home, his internal compass had permanently reset itself to point to her.

Taevas sucked in a deep, shaky breath and reached across the infernal gap between their bodies to trail the tip of his claws over the curve of her exposed shoulder.

You shouldn’t be so far away, he silently scolded her. You should be under my wing always, metsalill.

He tried to pull her in during the night, but she’d stubbornly refused, too worried about accidentally jostling him in her sleep. And yet her head had somehow ended up close to his, her body coiled tight like she had to restrain herself from crossing the gap completely.

Taevas knew that even given a thousand years, he couldn’t have pictured a being as perfect as his Alashiya. It was a vicious blow to his ego to be so weak during their courtship period, when by rights he should’ve been showing her his fitness in all things.

Perhaps that was why it bit him so badly, the revelation that she’d fantasized about a sept.

Did she truly believe that it would take a group of gargoyles to take care of her?

He wondered if she’d dreamed of being whisked off to some cave stronghold or grotto, where a gaggle of hard-headed mates would fumble around her, trying to please her with no appreciation for her delicacy, her vibrancy, the elegance she wore like a cloak of silk over her shoulders.

Or perhaps she mostly dwelled on the image of a harpy, though only the gods knew why that might be.

Did she understand that they liked to scratch, claw, and bite?

That they were violently territorial? At a cocktail party, he’d once witnessed a male harpy rip two fingers off a man who touched his mate in passing.

As if that didn’t get the message across, the harpy had calmly offered one finger to his mate as a gift.

He ate the other.

Alashiya was too gentle for someone who could explode into violence at any time. His metsalill deserved a life of softness and luxury. One where she could be adored and fawned over and pampered and showed off proudly at a moment’s notice.

She was a being meant to be worshipped by all, not hidden away by clumsy gargoyles or jealously guarded by a harpy.

It was decided. A dragon was the only choice for her, because only a dragon could appreciate the finest treasure.

It was a truth he felt in his marrow, and yet he couldn’t peer too closely. The future seemed to play in front of him, so bright and full of life, but he refused to pull back that last gauzy curtain that separated him from it. Once he did, there would be no putting it back.

So instead, he contented himself with the knowledge that she was his, nameless and yet known in the core of every cell. He stroked the soft flesh of her arm, down to her crooked elbow, and up to where her hand lay on the pillow between them, fingers softly curled in sleep.

Such hands, he marveled. To make so much beauty, to coax life from the earth with just these fragile fingers… I could admire them for hours. Days. A lifetime.

Gently, trying not to wake her, he pressed the pad of his thumb against the edge of one of her nails. A frown creased his mouth. That’s no good. It’s not sharp at all.

And her skin… Gods, he was always thinking of her silky skin.

It was so soft. He could feel its delicacy under even gentle pressure with his clawtip.

He shuddered to imagine how fragile her bones were.

He knew nymphs were delicate creatures, but it was one thing to read about it and quite another to feel it.