The Warrior King (Inferno Rising #3) - Abigail Owen Page 0,36

still cradling the back of her skull. She searched his face and almost seemed to relax beneath him, wariness peeling away, leaving curiosity. “Why?”

Didn’t the woman have any self-preservation instincts? She shouldn’t be lying beneath a dragon. One quickly becoming aroused, his hard length pressing into her belly.

I should stand up. Move away.

He didn’t, and she watched him with that gaze that was a combination of curious and assessing and waited for an answer.

Samael shrugged. “She’d said it reminded her of the family and life she’d willingly left behind.”

“I can’t imagine being a human dragon mate,” she murmured. “To have to leave behind everything you know. Everything you thought you were.”

“For love the fates have bound together since the time of your birth.” He couldn’t help the way his gaze dropped to her lips.

He knew how she tasted now, and the taste was becoming a craving. A fire in his belly.

Again, she wrinkled her nose. “I’ve always wondered if those stories are made up to influence those same human women into believing they have no choice.”

“I believe the bursting-into-fire thing makes them believe that,” he said drily.

“So, you’d have no trouble taking a reluctant mate?”

Was she trying to relay some sort of subtle message? Or was she really lying here beneath him debating this? With Meira, he suspected the latter.

He toyed with the soft strands of her hair, letting the tresses slide through his fingers. “I don’t think it’s like that. I think a dragon shifter’s need to protect his fated mate, at all costs, would keep him from hurting her in any way. It would make him not only want to make her happy… It would be a…compulsion.”

That’s what he’d seen with his own parents. His grandparents, too. Every mated pair in his clan, come to think of it.

It’s what he felt for her.

Meira smiled slowly, though her eyes reflected a sadness that ran as deep and dark as an underground river. She lifted a hand and whispered her fingertips over his jaw, that damn curiosity in her eyes growing, but at the same time, clear to him that she wasn’t really aware of her actions, just following a compulsion. “I hope that’s true. I never got to see it with my own parents.”

The sudden impulse to chase that sadness from Meira’s eyes about blindsided him, and he did his best to take every emotion he was feeling and shove it into a box in his mind.

Now’s not the time, jackass.

Forcing himself to unwind her hair from his fist, he pushed to his feet and offered her a hand, helping her up.

“Where are we again?” She’d said home, but whose? He looked around them at the new location. “And what the hell did we come through?”

Turning, he discovered a silver orb set atop a pedestal. Some sort of seeing-eye object? Perhaps a magical ward?

“We came through lawn art.” Meira’s voice held a not-so-secret laugh.

“Lawn art,” Samael echoed slowly.

A choked sound had him jerking around to find her holding back laughter, a hand covering her mouth. At his raised brows, she lowered her hand to reveal a full grin, and the dimples that had him clenching against the urge to tumble her back under him.

“Lawn art is something humans do in parts of the world. Decorations in their yard. Only I think Mother put it there on purpose—”

The twinkle in her eyes doused like a candle snuffed out by a sudden gust of wind, her smile a falling star, fading away to nothing.

“Oh gods,” she whimpered. “Mama.”

Then she turned away and, almost like a wraith walking a graveyard, pushed through a gate in the metal fencing that appeared to be constructed of some kind of ineffective chain mail, and moved through the tall, spring-green grasses beyond.

Keeping his mouth shut as well as his distance, Samael followed until they reached a spot near a charred tree, the blackened bark reaching into the blue sky in spikes. The ground here was equally green, but beneath, he could see the evidence of fire. He could also detect the distinctive scent on the air, though faint now.

In the middle of that healing scorched earth, a bloom of flowers lay hidden among the taller grasses. Many different kinds. A burst of color, vibrant and glorious.

Meira dropped to her knees, still silent. She sat that way long enough that Samael debated reminding her that she’d given her sister only thirty minutes to meet. Then she reached out and used her hands to dig beneath the flowers,