Hour of the Dragon - Heather Killough-Walden Page 0,141

warning of his talons where they curled into her abdomen, threatening but not piercing.

He heard her heart rate kick up a ton of notches and smelled fresh adrenaline pour into her blood. She frankly smelled delicious.

He’d been wanting to take this slow, to draw it out and make it last what felt like forever. But now that they were here and she was literally in his clutches, he was realizing that he’d wanted this for half a century. Black dragons have little to no patience as it is. That already felt like forever.

When her breathing came out in cute little ragged bursts and her small hands tried helplessly to curl around his claws where they held her, he wasn’t so sure he wanted to draw it out anymore. She was too adorable. And when she finally looked up at the rest of him and he saw his own visage through her eyes… he knew he didn’t want to draw it out anymore.

He was frightening to her, yes. His body was a scene out of an artist’s fantasy nightmare, his colossal wings spread against a backdrop of planets, galaxies, nebulae and star systems, his scale-covered body the length of several buses end-to-end. But he knew now how she truly felt as well. The words that described her uninhibited reaction skirted across her open mind; she was unable to stop them. My God… Magnificent… I can’t… unreal… all mine.

Her last words rocked through him. She was thinking that the glorious thing he actually was, larger than life and stunning, was the real Antares. Her Antares. Hence, she was thinking the dragon she openly gazed at above her – belonged to her.

Ares had always been the possessive one between them. He had laid claim to her five decades ago, not the other way around. Or so he’d always thought. But now here she was, so small and fragile, and literally caught between the razor-sharp talons of a black dragon – and she had the guts to think of that dragon as belonging to her.

Fuck.

It was the hottest thing he had ever heard.

He felt his chest rumble in a low growl and knew his eyes had taken on that menacing, promising glow. She went still in his clutches, all soft, yielding flesh and big lavender eyes and wild, wind-blown hair.

Yeah. He’d waited long enough.

I wanted you to know, he told her now, speaking his words like a caress across her mind. Her little body was growing so warm in his hands, her blood pumping so fast, and he caught another scent as well, an honest and uncontrollable side effect of the dominion he exerted over her. She was aroused.

If he hadn’t already decided to speed things up, that would have made the decision for him.

I need you to trust me, Annaleia. Because this was it. The ride was going to get bumpy now. He waited to see the flash of recognition in her eyes, waited a beat more to see if she would object.

And then he did what he both needed and wanted to do.

He began to shift with her in his arms, crushing her to him with a body morphing from dragon back to man. Only his draconic glowing eyes and wings remained when he slid his hand behind her to grab hold of her hair once again, gripping it tight. She hissed with something between surprise and painful pleasure. He caught more of her scent – shampoo, rain, and passion.

Ares pulled hard enough to force her head back, exposing the long column of her neck, and then he turned with her in the air and dove back toward the ground.

She wanted to scream, but she wouldn’t have the chance. His wings folded in behind him, leaving a shooting-star trail of lightning dust in his wake. He leaned in and inhaled the sweet, sweet fragrance of Anna’s blood where it pumped madly, riding fast and hard and close to the surface of her veins.

As her fingers again curled tight into the lapels of his leather biker jacket, Antares flooded her form with untold amounts of physical bliss. It was a buffer, one he hoped was enough. Because then he sank his very sharp fangs into her throat. This time, his little dragon did manage a scream, and it pierced the night. But it could not be helped.

This was how it had to be.

He would have to sink his teeth into Annaleia and take her blood three times. Three bites, one for each of