Dating A Dragon (The Mating Game Book 2) (7 page)

Cadence slept in late, and woke up alone…with a huge bouquet of flowers lying in bed next to her, wrapped in a ribbon. Next to it was a note, which said, “Good morning, gorgeous. Off to inspect some mines. Stay out of trouble. I can’t wait to see you tonight.”

After she showered and dressed, she went downstairs to eat breakfast, dining in a breakfast nook near the kitchen. As she finished up, she called and checked in with Daisy.

“You had sex,” Daisy said, and Cadence choked on her coffee.

“How in God’s name…”

“Your voice has that just-been-fucked tone to it.”

“Daisy!” Cadence gasped.

“What, too much? Pregnancy brain may have clouded my judgement, I’ll be the first to admit. So, was he good?”

“If such a thing had happened, I’m sure that he’d have been amazing. Not that I am confirming or denying.”

“Don’t schedule the wedding until after I give birth,” Daisy said imperiously. “And Wynona gets to come, of course. Wow, this will be like her dozenth wedding or something. And Harriet will make you more baby clothes than you know what to do with. Oh, she also sews a lovely wedding dress.”

“You are jumping way ahead,” Cadence protested. Then she glanced up. Phoebe had just strolled up, hands stuck in her jeans pockets, and was standing there watching her.

“What’s up, Pheebs?” she said.

“I know something.” Phoebe had a smug look on her face.

“Spill it, little fireball.”

“Orion’s mother is in the pigsty, cleaning,” Phoebe said cheerfully. “And so’s uncle Nikolai and Alcott. They’re mad.”

“Oh, crud. Daisy, there’s family mama drama happening. Gotta go.” She quickly hung up the phone.

Damn Orion. He was really not going to make any friends like this. Then again, she got the impression that he didn’t care about whether he made friends.

As she stood up, she saw Maude and Aurelia approaching her.

“Ready for training?” Maude called out.

“I hate to put it off, but I’ll have to do it this afternoon,” she said. “Orion punished his family for not telling me that you were trying to visit; he sent them out to clean the pigsty. I’m going to go help them.”

“Why on earth would you do that?” Maude asked in astonishment.

“Because I don’t want to be the cause of a fight between Orion and his family.”

“Well, you have fun with that,” Maude said, making a face. “I guess we’ll go into town to shop or something. We’ll see you in the south meadow at two this afternoon for training.”

Cadence went out to the pigsty, where Cynthia was waving a pitchfork around, looking furious.

“These pants are ruined,” she wailed to Alcott.

“Who wears silk pants to clean out a pigsty?” Alcott grumbled at his sister-in-law.

“Well, excuse me for not having any casual clothes! Oh, hello, Cadence,” she said, her expression deeply wounded. “I assume you came to laugh at us.”

“Nope,” Cadence said, and grabbed a shovel. “I came to help.”

“Not necessary. There’s no reason for you to even be here. At all,” Orion’s mother said huffily.

Cadence ignored her and set to work, ignoring the loathsome odors that perfumed the air and the squeal of the pigs that wandered in and out as she labored. Cynthia, Nikolai and Alcott worked silently, not acknowledging her presence. About half an hour later, her aunt and cousin came in.

“Wow, he’s making you clean out the pigsty? What a jerk,” Maude said.

“Right?” Cynthia agreed resentfully. “And he made Phoebe’s mother clean out the latrines this week.”

“And I thought our Dominus was a tyrant,” Maude said, grabbing a pitchfork.

“That is your father you’re speaking of, dear,” Aurelia said. She pursed her lips and thought for a moment. “But it’s true, he can be a bit of an ice-hole.”

“Ice-hole,” Maude snickered, and Cynthia started laughing too. Cadence kept her head down and shoveled. For the moment, nobody was trying to set anybody on fire, and she’d like to keep that going for as long as possible.

* * * * *

“I will never be able to dragon,” Cadence moaned after she’d tried for the fifth time to come up with a full-size snowball.

Her little puffs of frozen water were becoming smaller, not larger.

They were standing by a cluster of pine trees. Aurelia had created a snowfall that blanketed the surrounding area in wintry white, and Maude had coated the trees with ice. Meanwhile, Cadence was conjuring up snow marbles, not snowballs.

“I’ll be down to a single snowflake soon,” she groaned. “Why am I so lame?”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself. It just takes time. You’re getting much better at going scaly,” Maude said to her.

“You’re being too nice to her,” Cynthia announced, strolling through the trees, her boots crunching in the snow. She’d changed out of her pigsty clothes and was again elegant and regal in appearance.

“What do you mean?” Maude demanded.

Cynthia turned to face her. “I hear that she actually managed to summon a halfway decent ice blast when Viola attacked her the other day. Well, halfway is probably too generous.”

“Hey.” Maude scowled at her. “Watch it.”

“Please,” Cynthia snorted. “Obviously her powers come out under duress. If she wants to access her inner dragon, assuming she even has one, she’s got to actually work for it. When our dragonlings are young, we push them off the top of a steep hill. We blast fire at them. We make them actually work at it. Maybe she’s just weak, Maude. Maybe you Cheat-hams just don’t produce strong dragons.”

“Watch what you say!”

“Or what?” Cynthia took a deep breath and blew out a stream of fire at Maude, who quickly countered it with an icy blast of air.

But Cynthia kept advancing towards her, and her flame got hotter and hotter. Sweat poured down Maude’s face.

“Hey, stop it! Stop it right now!” Cadence cried out.

Cynthia kept moving towards Maude. Scales covered her body – glowing red scales edged with black. She was like a living flame.

She was going to burn Maude alive.

“Get back!” Cadence screamed. Or rather, she tried to scream. It came out in a blast of frosty air that met with Cynthia’s stream of fire. Suddenly hailstones were swirling in the shape of a mini tornado, blocking the flames. A giant hissing steam cloud formed. The ice on the trees melted and dripped.

Cadence reared her head all the way back on its long, snaky neck and let out a blast of icicle spears at Cynthia. Cynthia had gone full dragon now, as had Maude and Aurelia. Cynthia met the icicle barrage with fire, and an enormous cloud of steam boiled up into the air.

Cadence flapped her mighty wings in rage, lashed her tail, and let out another blast of icicle spears, hundreds of them. She rose several feet off the ground, then twenty feet, so she could circle away from Cynthia’s flame and blast her from behind. She could see it in her mind’s eye, the maneuvers that she needed to do.

Then it hit her. She was in dragon form. She was airborne!

Panic-stricken, she stopped flapping and fell to the ground with such a hard thud that the ground shook.

She felt her wings folding back into her body, tail shrinking and vanishing, curved claws retracting.

Her scales melted into smooth skin, and she was human again, staggering and stunned. She stood naked and barefoot in the snow. Maude shifted back into human form too, and ran up to them. Aurelia circled overhead, flapping her wings and watching Cynthia warily.

Cynthia stood before them in human form, naked and pale, her beautiful hair in wild disarray.

“Oh, my God, I shifted! I flew!” Cadence cried out in astonishment.

Cynthia glanced at Cadence with amusement.

“I really didn’t think you had it in you,” she said. “No, seriously, I didn’t.” And she shifted back into dragon form and flew off, letting out mighty streams of fire as she rose high above them.

“Wait, I’m confused,” Maude said, shaking her head. A big pile of snow slid off a pine tree and plopped onto her head, and she blinked and wiped water from her eyes. “Did she help you on purpose?”

“I think so, but I also think she’d rather jump off a cliff without wings than admit it,” Cadence said, watching Cynthia fly away.

“Hello, gorgeous! I hear you had quite the training session today,” Orion called out to Cadence, who was sprawled out on his enormous bed reading a Georgette Heyer novel.

He strolled over to her as she tossed the book aside.

“Furthermore, I heard that your dragon is one sexy beast,” Orion said to Cadence. “I can’t wait to meet her.”

“I hope that you get to meet her, but I don’t know. I mean, it’s true I can get scaly all over now,” Cadence said, holding out her arm and covering it with scales. Then they melted away again. “And my ice blasts are much bigger. But I haven’t been able to turn again.”

“All in good time. You’re making amazingly fast progress.”

“Flying was incredible,” Cadence mused dreamily, as he sat down on the bed next to her.

“Flying with you by my side will be even more incredible.” He ran his fingers along her arm, raising a trail of gooseflesh.

Then he looked her in the eyes. “You and I have been together. You really could be carrying my dragonlings now. And you know about the issues with dragons losing their clutches.”

“Yes.” Her smile faded. “It’s scary.” Normally a female dragon shifter would be pregnant for seven months, and in the final month would shift into dragon form and deliver her eggs. She would sit on them in dragon form in a nest for another month until they hatched. However, because of the rise in air pollutants and pesticides, dragon egg shells were so thin these days that dragonlings frequently didn’t survive the hatching.

“There’s a clinic in Pine Heights, about an hour from here, that’s been doing some experiments. The doctor there is world-renowned. Dr. Kowalski; she was recruited to work there all the way from Poland. They have had success with surgically removing entire clutches from the mother, coating the eggs with a special breathable substance made partly from the mother’s blood, and keeping them in an incubator.”

“I know of the clinic. How much success?”

“They’ve only done the process with three clutches so far, but they have had a one hundred percent success rate with them.” He frowned. “The best thing for you to do would be to start giving blood now, to ensure that there’s enough by the time they would need to remove the babies, which is at about four months.”

“Bring it,” she said. “If I’m expecting, then I’m willing to try anything to save my babies.”

“That’s my mighty dragoness,” he said. “Show me your scales again.”

She giggled. “Is this like ‘you show me yours and I’ll show you mine’?”

“Cadence Bergmann, I do not know what you take me for. What kind of a dragon do you think that I am?”

“Hopefully the naked kind,” she said, and showed him a ripple of scales before they sank back into her arms again.

“You are a naughty, naughty girl,” he murmured into her ear, nuzzling her. “How shall I punish you?”

“You could make me have multiple orgasms. I would absolutely hate that.”

“Well now…” he mused. “I suppose if it would teach you a lesson…”

“Oh, it would, it would,” she agreed eagerly as he began to strip off her clothes. She set to work too, skimming his shirt over his head and moving down to unbuckle his belt.

By the time their clothes were piled in a heap beside them, they were laughing and breathless.

Then Orion pressed Cadence back in the grass and she sobered, gazing up into his eyes and savoring the closeness of his big, strong body. He gazed at her, his eyes human but with dragonfire lurking in their depths. He licked his lips, his quick pink tongue moistening the flesh, and something clenched low in her body. She wriggled against him, inviting him to explore her body, to taste her – to take her.

He bent his head and placed a gentle kiss to her collarbone, and she sighed at the feel of his mouth on her. Tingles of arousal washed over her skin, making the fine, almost invisible blonde hairs stand on end.

He skimmed his hands down over her breasts, then followed them with his mouth, chasing the tingling trails left by his fingers with his lips and tongue and teeth.

Cadence almost purred as she arched beneath his lips, her pussy aching with the need to feel his touch. He kissed the soft swell of her belly, where their dragonlings might quicken one day.

She parted her legs, knowing she was slick with desire, that Orion would be able to smell the heady fragrance of her need. He groaned and buried his face between her thighs, kissing her mound then parting her lips with trembling fingers so he could press the flat of his tongue against her quivering nub.

She gave a little yelp of surprise that turned into a long, low moan as he ran his tongue around the sensitive bud then pulled it between his lips and suckled, setting lights flashing behind her closed eyelids.

As he lapped at her clit, he pushed his fingers inside her again – first one and then two – drawing them back and forth to create a tormenting friction against the dense bundle of nerves inside her.

Cadence gasped and tried to clamp her thighs together – a reflex reaction – but he withdrew his fingers from her sopping channel and used his palms to hold her open, helpless beneath his erotic assault. She tangled her fingers in his hair, holding his head against her and pushing against his face with her hips, giving herself over to the climax swelling and climbing and coiling in her belly. As he sucked on her clit, every muscle in her body tensed and she realized she was digging her fingernails into his scalp as the tension inside her shattered and skittered in electrical shards through her limbs.

Orion laid a last sticky kiss on her still-pulsing core, then kneeled up to admire her lying there, flushed and languid and breathing hard.

Before she had a chance to recover, he pulled her up towards him, as limp and compliant as a rag doll in her blissed-out state, and arranged her limbs so she was on all fours, her hips arched up and her sex wet and open to him.

She ached to feel the thick, hot length of his cock inside her again, to feel his hips flexing as he drove into her, to feel the warm weight of his body against her spine as he covered her and possessed her. She moaned and wriggled her rump, inviting him to enter her.

Orion braced his arms to either side of her, his cock nudging her entrance, and kissed the side of her throat as he worked himself inside her inch by delicious inch. She clenched around him, the feeling of his throbbing length catching at the lingering flutters of her orgasm and teasing them into a needy pulse.

Orion gasped and cursed as he thrust in counterpoint to the rhythm of her body, his muscled arms trembling with tension. The crinkly texture of his pubic hair tickled her sticky thighs and his heart thundered against her back as he worked to drive her over the edge again.

She felt her crisis building and she pushed back against him, urging him to fuck her harder, deeper.

He obliged, pounding into her with wild, uncontrolled thrusts and withdrawing quickly before plunging back inside again. Cadence was aware of nothing but the driving strength of his body, the frantic beating of her heart, his impassioned gasps and incoherent words, the rising, singing ache between her thighs.

He fucked her harder and faster, relentless in his passion, and she came, hard, spasming around his cock, her bursting juices coating his balls and her thighs. She shouted hoarsely as her body was shaken and rocked, and Orion went with her.

He gave a wild groan that turned to a roar as he spasmed inside her, thrusting again and again until the last aftershocks died away and they were both left exhausted and humming with sexual fulfillment.

He withdrew from her reluctantly, murmuring sweet nothings in her ear, and pulled her into his arms, holding her against his chest as their heartbeats settled from frantic syncopation into a steady throb, beating in time.