To Enchant a Dragon by Amanda Milo Page 0,10

managed to shakily help her dig out.

Adella noticed my trembling limbs. I saw it in her worried gaze. But she didn’t press me to stop, and I wouldn’t have even if she’d asked. She needs the water, and something is more wrong with me than I knew. I’m glad I didn’t attempt to carry her out of here, because now I know I wouldn’t have succeeded. Not safely.

Before Adella nods off beside me, she may do it quietly, but my ears detect the hitches in her breathing.

She’s silently crying.

My heart strangles, the huge muscle torquing painfully enough that I rub at my chest scales to relieve the sensation.

On our first night of matehood, my female for life is not pleasured and satisfied as a new mate should be. This is unthinkable.

As her mate, especially during a mating fever, I should be devoting all of my attention to slaking our lusts and assuaging our driving needs. I’m not providing for her properly, and I only have myself to blame. As I lie curled around her, bringing my tail closer and closer until it touches her (and attempting not to feel a pang of sadness as she tries not to flinch at my tail’s touch), I vow to all that is dragon within me that at first light, I must be recovered enough to fly her to a new gulf or cove or bay where there’s enough damn seawater.

Without warning, I transform into a man.

It’s so sudden and so silent that I’m staring down at myself in shock, and Adella is none the wiser until she glances at me from the corner of her eye—and does a double take.

“Kalos?” she gasps—and it’s a question, as if she’s trying to reconcile how a man managed to sneak up on a full-grown dragon and soundlessly steal close to his mate.

“It’s me,” I confirm, drawing my eyes away from my scale-covered human hands with nearly blunt human claws. I cast an amazed glance around us—because everything just became gargantuan.

Either that, or I just shrank down to something vulnerably small.

I detest the very idea. I’m a dragon—I should never know the sensation of being small.

I should also never know what it feels like for any part of me to be vulnerable. And yet, between my very human legs, I have no scale-covered plating to protect a rather vulnerable spot, let alone hide my burgeoning desire for the female I’ve been snuggled beside.

Adella sees the evidence of my fever-stricken hunger and glances away, her eyes wide.

My eyes though are soon glued to the approximate place on a mermaid where a human man might couple with her. Adella has only the smallest front slit. I’ve never examined a merman’s tail-half beyond dangling him by the split end of it before dropping him down my gullet, but I’ve been told that they have a small spear-like copulatory organ called a gonopodium that folds out from the fins that grow on their fronts.

What this long-ago stored information tells me is that Adella is unlikely to welcome my advances when my own organ, even human-sized, is likely ten times as thick and large as a male of her kind, and from what I can see, too large to fit into her tiny slit.

And mating fever lasts a burning, fiery month.

I growl into my human hands, making Adella jump.

“Sorry,” I mutter, rubbing tiredly at my face. I think about testing my new limbs, likely the reason I’ve felt so uncoordinated half the day; it seems they move more independently than my dragon’s limbs do—but I decide against moving from this spot at all. If I rise, I’m afraid I’ll fall on Adella, in both senses of that phrase. I don’t want to excite myself by touching her further, and I’m not certain I can master human locomotion without some embarrassing flailing. I also don’t want to frighten her with advances she won’t want or can’t meet.

So I stay where I am, sitting half behind my mate, staring at her hungrily as she tries to keep her scales from drying out in this terrible place that does not meet her needs.

The reminder that I haven’t provided well for my female cools some of my ardor. Enough for me to grow aware of my human-form’s discomfort. Because if I thought my dragon self was less than enthusiastic about drowsing on packed wet sand while my mate keeps vigil in her pocket of necessary water, my new human form is equally thrilled at the prospect.