Vladimir (Russian Dragon Heat #1) - Carole Mortimer Page 0,32

beautiful in the soft morning light, with none of the usual tension in her body preparing her for fight or flight. Which, for Tanya, was usually fight.

Except last night.

Last night, she had decided to run from him, and by doing so had ignited every part of his possessive nature as man and dragon.

Later, when they reached the dacha, he had still felt angry with her for putting herself in danger, but it had been mixed with the tenderness of holding and being physically close to his mate. He thanked the fates now that he hadn’t given in to that anger and spanked her but instead made love to her. It was his dearest wish that Tanya stop fearing him, both as man and dragon, and he knew spanking her would only have added to her resentment of him after all she had suffered in the past.

“Go back to bed,” he encouraged gruffly. “I’ll go downstairs and make us coffee and breakfast and bring it up to you.”

“You will?” she echoed doubtfully.

He smiled slightly. “Do you believe me incapable of doing such mundane things?”

“In a word, yes!” She smiled. “You have this whole ‘I am Russian royalty and you are nothing but a serf’ thing going on.”

Vladimir narrowed his gaze, debating whether he should tell Tanya the truth, that he was Russian royalty, if only in the dragon world, and she would be his queen. “I do not believe I treat you in that manner,” he said slowly, still unsure whether Tanya was yet ready to hear of his royal status.

“Not intentionally, perhaps,” she allowed. “Your superiority appears to be a natural part of your personality rather than affected.”

Yes, perhaps the time had come. It was a natural introduction into the conversation rather than some grand announcement that could sound arrogant at best and condescending at worst. Anything else could lead to Tanya making an accusation at a later date of his having deliberately avoided the subject.

He drew in a deep and levelling breath. “Tanya—”

“There!” she suddenly cried, accompanied by her gaze once again being fixed out the window. “Something or someone is definitely out there.”

Then “something or someone” was about to be eviscerated by Vladimir’s dragon.

Chapter Ten

Tanya gave a shiver as Vladimir, still completely naked, pushed open one of the doors leading onto one of the large balconies Tanya had noted when they arrived. He stepped outside, shifting into his dragon as he did so.

Once shifted, his black scales rippled and glistened in the soft morning light. “Stay inside until I return,” he instructed in the deep guttural voice of his dragon before his wings spread and he lifted gracefully into the sky.

When they arrived, Tanya had wondered about the wide balconies on the top floor of the dacha. She now realized that they were somewhere the Romanov brothers, when they stayed here, could easily shift into dragon and take flight.

Majestic and graceful flight.

And utterly mesmerizing.

Those first two descriptions should have been impossible for such a huge creature.

But they weren’t.

And Tanya defied anyone not to be totally enthralled by and unable to look away from the magnificence of Vladimir’s dragon.

Her gaze remained fixed on him as a weak wintry sun now peeped through the clouds and turned black scales into gleaming obsidian. After the briefest swoop down to where Tanya thought she had seen someone or something watching the dacha, the dragon rose back into the sky again seconds later, that piercing dark gaze roaming the countryside as it searched for its quarry.

Tanya sighed her frustration. Obviously, Vladimir hadn’t found what she had thought was a person standing amongst the shelter of the trees.

Was this whole situation so surreal she’d now started seeing things?

Or perhaps she was still climax-befuddled and imagining things?

Well, they’d been her first ever climaxes and they had been mind-blowing.

Her cheeks heated merely thinking of last night’s intimacies. Lips and tongue, hands and fingers, all touching her in a way no one else ever had. All belonging to Vladimir, a chillingly aloof man Tanya hadn’t believed capable of feeling, let alone revealing such passion.

A passion and pleasure I still haven’t reciprocated.

Tanya felt almost shy about doing so. The men who had paid her had only required that she give them the necessary stimulation for them to ejaculate. There were no names exchanged, no tenderness either. Even the man who’d kept her exclusively in an apartment for several months had only visited her once a week, and on those occasions, he’d wanted her to pretend to be the