To Tame a Dragon - Tiffany Roberts Page 0,29

while the Red Heat was pressing in on him and his cock was throbbing, twitching, and straining toward her.

He stared at those mounds, watching their peaks harden. There was no need to extend his tongue to pick up the perfume of her arousal on the air. Falthyris forced his hands to remain at his sides, balling them into trembling fists and clenching his jaw.

“Do you want me, dragon?” she asked, her voice husky, seductive, taunting. She shrugged off the robe, letting it slide down her body to pool at her feet, baring herself to him completely. Raising a hand, she trailed a finger between her chest mounds and down belly toward her slit, brushing it over the small, dark patch of short fur at her pelvis before spreading her sex for his lustful eyes. The female’s petals glistened with her essence.

Falthyris hissed. His hand darted to his loins to clutch his shaft even as his hips bucked toward her involuntarily. A thin string of seed spurted from his tip. “You toy with forces you cannot comprehend, mortal.”

“And you cannot resist me, can you?” she asked, letting her hand fall from her sex. “Even if you think me beneath you, you need me.”

“I do not merely think you beneath me,” he growled, taking hold of her bag’s strap and tugging it off over his head. He tossed the bag onto the floor at her feet. “And all I need at the moment is food.”

He turned away from her, pretending that the Heat wasn’t coursing through his body, that there was no force urging him toward her, that he was not equally frustrated and aroused. He crouched over the ox and plunged his claws into it, tearing off a chunk of meat.

In his natural form, he’d have devoured the entire ox in a few bites, but that wasn’t exactly possible in this body. He wasn’t sure how humans fit much of anything in their mouths with jaws that were so limited in motion and function.

As he was about to lift the meat to his lips, his back tingled—he could feel her glaring at him. He would not allow her to spoil his first meal in so long.

But it was not her glare or the sharp words they’d exchanged that kept him from eating as moments crept by. Instinct demanded something unexpected, and the demand seemed so right that he could not ignore it.

It demanded he feed his mate first.

Grunting, he tore off another chunk of meat with his free hand, twisted, and held it out to her. “Eat before I change my mind, human.”

His female’s nose wrinkled, and she drew back. “No.”

Falthyris’s brows fell, and a growl rose from his chest, pushed out by the sudden firestorm in his gut. He did not hold back his fury, though some part of him must’ve known how futile it would prove.

“How dare you refuse the food I have provided, you ungrateful wretch?” Dropping the chunks of meat, he sprang to his feet and closed the distance between himself and the human in a single stride.

The human stood her ground, shoulders squared, but her eyes flared infinitesimally.

Falthyris’s wings spread of their own accord, his bloody fingers curled as though he were about to shred flesh with his talons, and his heartfire blazed bright. “I have brought you a meal that could feed twenty of your puny kind. What have you done, mighty huntress?”

She glared up at him unflinchingly. “I caught a dragon.”

10

Elliya wasn’t surprised at the molten fury in his eyes—she’d known her words were the wrong ones to say as soon as they had left her mouth. She shouldn’t have taunted him, shouldn’t have pushed him, but she couldn’t hold her tongue, couldn’t help herself. She refused to keep silent while he belittled her and her people.

Had those stories of protective, dedicated, loving dragons she’d heard as a child been exaggerations based on mere slivers of truth? Yes, a female could claim a dragon with a touch. But everything else had been wrong.

If she brought this dragon home to her people, all she’d be doing was providing them another whiny, entitled male who thought himself the ruler of the world—but one who was capable of slaughtering their entire tribe if he chose to do so.

He could not harm her. She knew in her soul that such protection would not extend to her people.

The dragon roared. He grabbed her arm, whipped her around to face the wall, and flattened a hand on her back to