To Tame a Dragon - Tiffany Roberts Page 0,23

angled sharply toward his nose. His eyes were bright and glaring again. He searched her face, scowled, and withdrew from Elliya without warning, tearing his cock from her sex and dropping her.

Elliya fell, too surprised by his unexpected withdrawal to react in time to catch herself. She hissed when the wall scraped her back through the fabric of her torn robe, but the pain from the scrape was overshadowed by her backside hitting the hard floor an instant later.

Regret softened the dragon’s features for the space of a heartbeat, forming a barely perceptible crease between his brows and easing his scowl into a concerned frown. He swayed as though to reach for her.

With another snarl, he clenched his fists, spun on his heel, and stalked toward the cave’s entrance.

“Where are you going?” Elliya asked as she climbed onto her feet.

“Away from you,” he snapped over his shoulder.

His words shouldn’t have hurt her, but they struck true, as wounding as a spear through her heart. She and the dragon didn’t even know each other’s names, yet for a reason unknown to Elliya, he despised her. Despite that, she felt a deep-running connection with him. She knew he felt it too.

Elliya leaned heavily against the stone wall, not trusting her legs to hold her up without support. His seed dripped down her inner thighs, and she pressed them together, halting the flow.

She’d thought bonding with a dragon would have meant more. More…meaning, more connection. Instead, she felt used.

This was too much like what she’d seen from the males of her tribe, who took pleasure from their wives whenever they desired, considering it their due. Elliya had seen Dian approach his wives while they were working in sight of everyone, toss up their loincloths, and rut them with half the tribe watching. That wasn’t the life she had wanted.

“Dragon,” she called when he reached the opening at the end of the tunnel.

He paused there, a dark silhouette against the deep purple of the night beyond. When he spoke, his voice echoed back to her through the tunnel, becoming a rumble as deep as rolling thunder. “Do not leave this cave, human.”

The dragon spread his wings, looking suddenly massive though he didn’t even fill a third of the opening, and leapt into the night, leaving her alone in the dark.

8

Falthyris glided over a rocky landscape that should have been wholly familiar to him, but every aspect of it was wrong. Everything was larger, rougher, the distances greater. The whole world had changed around him to become something haunting in how right it should have been.

Of course, the world hadn’t changed at all—Falthyris had. And it had drastically altered his perspective.

The mating bond tethering him to the human pulled taut, just as it had the first time he’d left her. Were he to lower his guard for even a moment, were he to relax his will for so much as an instant, he knew that bond would drag him straight back to her.

He growled and pumped his wings in defiance of that urge, pushing himself a little higher, a little faster.

He had rutted her in the tunnel to relieve the pressure in his loins, to punish her insolence, to show her the price of forcing this bond upon him. But she had enjoyed it. She had taken pleasure from their coupling despite his anger, despite his roughness, despite his hostility.

Why? And why had it felt so good when she’d reached her peak, when her slick, quivering slit had clamped around his cock?

Why had he enjoyed those small, tender touches she had bestowed upon him so much? Why had that brief press of her lips against his roused such an intense feeling in him? It had been so powerful, so overwhelming, so incomprehensible—and he wanted more.

Falthyris needed solitude, needed peace, needed to reclaim control of himself and the situation. He needed to contemplate all that had happened since he’d first picked up the human’s feminine scent on the air. Everything had changed over the course of that brief encounter—the normalcy he’d known for centuries had been erased by a single touch.

But the one place he would’ve gone to find that peace—his lair, his sanctuary, his home—had been invaded by a human.

Not invaded. I brought her there. She was afforded no choice in the matter.

And what better a place for Falthyris’s mate than his lair? He could not lie to himself—he wanted her there. Even after finding release in her body, even with the Red Heat’s mind