Tears of the Dragon (3 page)

Despite her fear of the creature, Khalia
felt indignation rise once more. “That is a vile, disgusting thing
to say! If I wasn’t a lady, I’d slap your face!”

He looked at her, his eyes narrowing, but in
a moment the corners of his mouth twitched, a smile threatening. He
curbed the urge when she glared at him, though his eyes still
gleamed with amusement and something else she rather preferred not
to interpret. “Your pardon, princess. It was merely a statement of
fact and not intended to insult you.”

His audacity bereft her of speech for
perhaps two heartbeats. “It is NOT a fact,” she snapped. “I am a
woman … human. We do not go into he--We do not come in sea--”

Both dark brows lifted that time. Instead of
releasing her, however, he moved his hands to her upper arms.
Grasping them firmly, he hauled her closer, dipping his head until
they were almost nose to nose. It wasn’t until that moment that
Khalia realized that he wasn’t gasping from exertion so much as the
effort to control his urges. His eyes were dark with hunger and as
he dragged in a deep breath, his features hardened. A tremor
traveled through the hands that gripped her.

As before, and despite all logic to the
contrary, her body instantly responded to the desire she sensed in
him. It moved over and through her like a wave of electricity,
making her skin prickle with hypersensitivity. Abruptly, she was
aware of her own body in a way she never had been before and him as
she had never been aware of another man. The heat of his body, his
scent, his sheer male magnificence rolled over her, annihilating
the last shreds of her common sense.

“
Your scent is as delicate as a lotan
blossom and as fiery as acid in my blood. If I were not disciplined
to ignore my primal urges because of my position in caring for the
royal family, I would have taken you myself. Not one male within a
twenty mile radius can resist your allure at this moment. I must
take you some place safe until your time has passed … or you will
have no choice in your mate, for the strongest will take
you.”

He might have been speaking gibberish for
all Khalia understood. His husky voice slid along her nerve endings
like the caress of a hand, sending warming, pleasurable, knee
weakening vibrations throughout her body. She sighed, unconsciously
lifting her lips a little closer in silent supplication.

She wasn’t certain when he ceased speaking
and his gaze focused on her mouth, but the rush of his breath, as
if a giant hand had suddenly squeezed the air from his lungs,
escalated want to need and she leaned infinitesimally closer.

“
Olgin’s balls!” he growled, setting
her away from him abruptly. “You tempt me to your peril, princess.
I am a soldier first. But I am still a man.”

Khalia blinked in surprise, but it was
several moments before the obvious crudity/curse filtered through
her heated brain and several more before the implications of his
last comment made a connection. She gaped at him in outrage then,
revolted by the very notion that she was so lost to all sense of
propriety as to encourage any man, let alone a … savage to think
that she was eager for his lovemaking, making no attempt to hide
either her outrage or her revulsion. “I tempt …
I
!” she stammered. “Your … primal urges have
fried your brain, you … you … whatever sort of creature you
are!”

His features hardened with anger. He caught
her wrists this time, slowly and deliberately forcing them behind
her back until she was forced to arch her back to relieve the
pressure. Manacling both her wrists with one hand, he just as
deliberately flicked the tatters of her jacket aside and cupped one
of her breasts, pinching the erect bud at the end. Something very
like a jolt of electricity went through her, but she wasn’t
certain, at first, if it was purely from shock at his familiarity
or something else entirely. When he lowered his head and replaced
his fingers with his mouth, lathing the sensitive tip with his
tongue and then covering it with his mouth and suckling, she lost
all awareness of anything beyond the mindless pleasure that
enveloped her, weakening her knees, constricting the air in her
lungs until she found herself struggling to breathe.

“
I am dragon … just as you are,
princess,” he growled when he lifted his head at last.

Khalia struggled to lift her eyelids and
focus on what he was saying. “I am no such thing. My parents were
human beings … not … not.”

“
Dragons?” he supplied, his eyes
narrowed now, his breath as ragged as her own. “Your sire was
human. Your mother, Princess Rheaia, was as I am--Dragon. But do
not despair, sheashona. I will not hold it against you that you are
only a half breed.”

Chapter Three

Khalia strongly suspected that Damien had
transformed himself into a dragon merely for the purpose of
intimidating her. If he had needed only the ability of flight, she
had seen that he could achieve that merely by producing wings at
will, so she could only consider his shift from man to fearsome
beast as premeditated and for that purpose alone.

It had worked, but she was not so spineless
as to allow him to know. In any case, he had grabbed her up and
taken flight without so much as a ‘by your leave’ and it had taken
her quite some time to adapt to the sensation.

She had witnessed the acrobatics of a
biplane on several occasions--it was 1920 after all and everyone
seemed convinced by now that airplanes were the future of
transport--but she had certainly not been foolhardy enough to climb
into one--if man had been intended to fly, he would have been born
with wings--and had never anticipated the possibility, or desire,
of doing so. To find herself suddenly whisked into the sky had been
a traumatizing experience, and she wasn’t altogether certain but
what the long term effects upon a person’s health would prove to be
detrimental. She was convinced that the heart palpitations it had
caused her already could not be considered a good thing.

Fortunately, they had not been airborne long
before, in the distance, she noticed what at first appeared to be a
jutting of rock on the very edge of the desert. Damien, she
realized was flying directly toward it, for within moments they
drew close enough that she could make out the regular angles and
twisted spires that denoted a manmade--dragonmade? --non-naturally
occurring formation. Before they had gotten close enough for Khalia
to make out much in the way of details, however, a dozen or so
‘dots’ rose from it, like a swarm of angry bees, and headed
directly toward them.

Remembering the dragon men Damien had
had to fight off of her, Khalia was instantly terrorized and it was
only by sheer willpower that she managed to keep a stiff upper lip
in the face of what appeared to be almost certain death. Not for a
moment did she believe these beasts could sense anything except,
possibly, that she was a female, but it seemed a moot point
when
they
were convinced that
she was ripe for mating.

She had always prided herself on her
imagination. Next to her intelligence, she had thought it a most
profound gift, for it allowed her to view the bits and pieces of
ancient civilizations that arrived at the museum and visualize the
civilization that had created them.

Unfortunately, at the moment, it also
allowed her to visualize an aerial battle between a dozen and one
primal creatures bent on being first to mate with the female Damien
had discovered…. And her lifeless body splattered on the ground
below while they continued to slug it out, unaware that they’d
‘broken’ the prize they were all fighting over.

For the first time in her life she perfectly
understood the look of abject terror on the face of female dogs
she’d seen racing before a pact of determined males.

“
Mercy!” she exclaimed when she
managed to collect enough spit in her mouth to unglue her tongue
from the roof.

She was glad she had refrained from
screaming in horror. She’d no sooner uttered the single word when
an insect struck the corner of her mouth with the velocity of a
shotgun pellet, proof positive that self-restraint was its own
reward.

“
It is the royal guard,” Damien
growled at her in that deep, gravelly voice that emerged from his
dragon’s chest.

“
Oh?” she managed, pardonably pleased
with herself that the single word seemed almost regally aloof,
rather than doubtful, or even relieved.

“
Let us hope that they are as
disciplined as I had thought.”

“
No! Don’t spare me the bad news. I
can take it,” Khalia said dryly.

He made a sound that might have been a
chuckle, or a snort, she wasn’t certain which, but the attempt at
humor didn’t particularly lighten her own mood.

The group of dragon men stopped well before
they reached Damien and Khalia, hovering, it seemed to Khalia,
indecisively, their great wings stirring the hot air from the
desert below. Not so much as a single word passed between them and
Khalia was surprised when the soldiers abruptly saluted in the same
manner that Damien had saluted her and then fell in around and
behind them. She glanced at Damien curiously. As if he sensed her
gaze, he tilted his head.

It was uncanny, really, that the eyes
watching her from that massive dragon head were so exactly the same
as Damien’s eyes. They were even the strange, almost purple color
of Damien’s eyes. One would have thought the man would disappear
completely once the beast had taken over.

“
You have no understanding of dragon
folk.”

It was not a question, rhetorical or
otherwise, but there was censure in the comment, Khalia felt
certain. She might have ignored the remark except that he’d already
spoken insultingly of her being a half breed. She responded to the
disapproval therefore even though it irritated her that she felt
provoked. Why should she care what his opinion of her was anyway?
She was an exceptionally well educated woman. She’d not only
graduated from high school, she’d graduated from a women’s college,
as well. “You’ll have to forgive my ignorance. They didn’t teach it
in my school.”

He merely grunted, which was almost as
annoying as the remark had been to begin with. She would’ve felt
better if she’d seen some sign that her sarcasm was at least as
irritating to him as his bigotry was to her.

“
Princess Rheaia should have seen to
it that you were better prepared.”

Khalia sent him a cold look. “If my mother
was Princess Rheaia, as you seem to believe, then she could hardly
be faulted for not preparing me since she died at my birth,” Khalia
lied without remorse. She didn’t for a moment believe her mother
had been this Princess Rheaia that he kept referring to, and she
knew very well that her mother had not died in child bed--she had,
for reasons Khalia had never been privy to, given Khalia up for
adoption--but she wasn’t about to let some complete stranger insult
her mother!

The dragon Damien frowned, but it was far
more thoughtful than annoyed. “Your pardon. You may rest assured,
however, that she would never have given you up unless she feared
for your safety, sheashona.”

Khalia sent him a startled glance and then
frowned, wondering if she’d mentioned that she’d grown up in an
orphanage, but she could not believe that she had. She’d never told
anyone. Had she, somehow, given herself away?

Before she could decide how to respond to
the remark, Damien settled on the ramparts of the castle and
released her. Around them, the other man-beasts landed, shifting
into perfectly ordinary looking men.

Upon consideration, Khalia mentally revived
the assessment. They looked like perfectly extraordinary men, well
built, handsome--and as bizarrely garbed as her captor, Damien.
Nevertheless, she would never have believed that they were other
than men if she had not seen them shift from beast to man.

To her discomfort, they knelt and saluted as
Damien had. She was still wondering what to say, or if there was
something she should say, when Damien grasped her arm and led her
from the ramparts and into the fortress.

Although more ancient civilizations were her
forte`, her position in the museum, if not her extensive education,
had made her somewhat familiar with the medieval period of Europe.
She was conversant enough in any case that she immediately noticed
that the fortress bore little resemblance to any castle she’d ever
studied. It was definitely not new, but neither ancient, nor
primitive. The exterior appeared to be constructed entirely of some
sort of stone that bore a strong resemblance to slate. She had no
idea what the probability might be of stone from her own world
occurring naturally on another, but the properties of slate, which
was that it was highly resistant to fire, seemed to indicate a
strong probability that it had at least that much in common with
slate. As they approached the massive door that opened off of the
ramparts, it swung open without a sound, belching a gust of chilled
air.

Khalia checked when she saw no one stood in
the portal, but Damien urged her on without even glancing at the
door. Glancing back, she saw it swing closed behind them just as
quickly and quietly. Frowning, she looked around the corridor they
found themselves in. The walls were made of the same material as
the exterior. The ceiling was one continuous arch from end to end.
She saw neither gaslights nor electric bulbs, no candles, no
torches in wall sconces, and yet a soft light enveloped them as
they traversed the long corridor, appearing before them,
disappearing behind them.

They had walked for some time when Damien
stopped before a set of arched double doors. Unlike the previous
door, this one remained closed. Khalia looked at Damien
questioningly.