Wicked Dark Dragon (Dragon Heat) (3 page)

She gulped as the dark-haired behemoth prowled ever closer. Keenly aware of her naked state and his, she squeezed her thighs together and covered her breasts with her arms. His gaze narrowed at her protective move but he didn’t try to stop her. Those green eyes of his had shifted to a frighteningly crimson shade and his pupils were elongated and thin like a snake’s. Like a predator, he pinned her in place with a menacing stare. She felt like a mouse tossed into a boa constrictor’s cage. This man could save her—or snap her neck.

With the chains keeping her on a short leash, there was no escaping his advance. Beast halted only inches from her. His intense body heat simultaneously shocked and soothed her. She wanted to snuggle in close and soak up that radiant warmth. Maybe tuck her face into the curve of his throat and breathe in the intoxicating scent of him, too.

As if sharing her thoughts, Beast lunged at her, the movement so stunningly fast that she squeaked with surprise and fear. He buried his nose against the side of her neck and dragged it along her skin, inhaling deeply with the slow slide. He made the strangest noise, almost like a purr, and rubbed his nose against the side of hers. His chin rested on her shoulder and he leaned into her. “I found you.”

With trembling fingers, Ivy finally dared to touch his battered face. The brightest pop of light illuminated her mind. For the briefest of moments, she saw the two of them frolicking on a beach, splashing in waves and laughing as if carefree. When the vision faded, his palpable relief washed over her.

When he breathed in deeply again, it finally occurred to her that he was using scent to identify her instead of her looks. “Did my face look different in the dreams we shared?”

He nuzzled her cheek. “Faces can be faked with cloaking spells and potions. The Knights have used them in the past.” He breathed in noisily, as if to convince himself she was real. “Scents are impossible to replicate.”

Belly quivering with excitement, she boldly traced one of the heavy black tattoos arcing along the side of his neck and dipping down his shoulder. “Is that what they’re called? The Knights, I mean.”

He reared back and frowned down at her. “Didn’t you know?”

She shook her head. Her lower lip trembled as the stress of her weeks in captivity finally hit hard. “I don’t know anything. They just—they grabbed me in that club, jabbed some kind of drug into my neck, and then I woke up tied to a metal slab in another room in this prison.”

Beast’s jaw clenched when she gestured to her neck while telling him about the sedative. Was he remembering the way she had been shocked to make him stop fighting? When he reached out to touch the collar, she grabbed his wrist, stopping him before he could touch it. “Don’t. They’ll shock me again.”

His teeth ground together so loudly she expected him to spit out crumbled bits of them. He made that rumbling noise again, and her eyes widened as she felt the strong waves of it shudder through her. His mouth settled into an apologetic line. “I’m sorry. That’s my thunder.”

“Your
what
?”

Rising to a kneeling position, he sighed loudly. “Later.” He found the shorts nearby, stood slowly, and dragged them onto his body. He winced as he bent down to grab the shirt and made a grunting noise. Now that he had stepped into a shaft of light from the corridor outside their cell, she could see the damage to his body.

“Oh my God! Your ribs!” She couldn’t believe he was able to breathe with all that terrible bruising and the dimpled ridges where the bones were obviously broken. “We need to bind those or something.”

“They’ll be healed by morning.” He ripped the T-shirt up both sides. “I’m too old to be badly hurt by a beating. It would take one of the Knight’s swords to kill me, and there aren’t any here.”

Her head swam as he tossed around the details as if she should know them. “Knights? Swords?”

“Let’s get you dressed first.” Beast draped the shirt over her head. He gave the heavy metal links a shake. “I could easily break these chains, but they’ll probably use this damn collar to shock you if I do.” Lowering his voice, he asked, “Are there cameras here?”

“No. They have them in the halls though. The Mind Miner—”

“The
who
?” He tied the ends of the ripped shirt together on each side to form a loose sort of dress on her.

“The woman in black who likes to dig through my head.” She gulped anxiously and tried to ignore the pulsing, primal heat that blossomed in her center. Her breasts ached and her nipples buzzed. He hadn’t even really touched her yet, and already she wanted to break her number-one rule and beg him to do wicked, wicked things to her.

“We call her the Seer. Every generation of the first family produces one female gifted with the sight.”

“What is the ‘first family’?”

Beast moved into the corner and sat back against the wall, using it to support his weary body. He opened his arms and gestured to his lap. “Come here, little bit. You’re freezing, and I’m warm. The dragon within me is snapping to be set free. Holding you will ease that torment and help me maintain control.”

She hesitated. Crawl onto his lap? Let him hold her? She had this torn shirt for modesty but she was completely bare underneath. Her gut told her he would do nothing to harm her or take advantage of her. The man had taken a beating and let himself be taken captive and all he wanted to do was hold her close. That wasn’t so bad. Was it?

“All right.” She moved closer and settled onto his lap. “What about your ribs?”

“I’ve had worse, sweetheart.” He wrapped those incredibly muscled arms around her and pulled her in tight. “Let me warm you.”

Oh, he was getting her hot all right. “My name is Ivy,” she said, thinking of the way he had addressed her with pet names. “In case you didn’t get my message.”

“I did. It came through loud and clear.” He brushed her tangled hair behind her ear and tilted her chin up. “You’re very smart, Ivy, and very powerful.”

“I don’t know about that last part. I think I was lucky.”

“Luck may have played a part, but there’s a great deal of potential inside you.” He tapped her chest. “There’s a reason the Knights are holding you here.”

“And you,” she said with a frown. “I had hoped you would bring reinforcements and bust me out of this hellhole.”

“Give it some time.” He rested his head against the wall and tugged her in even closer. “They’ll come soon.”

“Who? The other dragons?”

“The Brotherhood of the Green Hide,” he clarified. “We’re the ancient order tasked with protecting the dragons from the Knights of St. George.”

“What? Like the story from Bible school?”

“Yes, just like that. Many, many years before that incident, there was a young woman and a dragon who fell in love and made a baby together. Her family—”

“Killed her,” Ivy said quietly. A recurring dream flashed before her. “I’ve seen it. She was tied to a pyre, and her father slit her throat.” She shuddered with revulsion as the gory image of the woman’s last moments of life hit her. “It was night…and there were other dragons there. Two green ones, one of them lashed to a tree, and a golden-colored one. There might have been another one, maybe in the sky, but I wasn’t ever able to see him.”

“There was. He was called Reinhard the Barbarian then, but he uses Reynard now. The golden dragon was Niko. The two green dragons were brothers, Ignatius and Sixtus. Ignatius survived but bears the scars from that night. The death of Sixtus forced Ignatius to create the Brotherhood because our secret was out and there was no way the humans were going to leave us alone.” Beast gently grasped her chin and turned her head. His curious gaze locked with hers. “How long have you had these visions?”

“I’ve been dreaming about dragons and warriors—these Knights as you call them—since I was a little girl. I was probably six the first time I dreamed of dragons.”

“And me? Did you ever see me before we started to share dreams?”

“Not like this,” she said and gestured to his human body. “I have a feeling you may have been one of the dragons I’ve dreamed about though.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You feel familiar to me. I feel as if…as if I’ve known you my entire life.”

His expression pensive, Beast ran his thumb along her lower lip. “I don’t want there to be secrets between us. I’m not sure what this bond we share really is, but if it is what I suspect it might be, we absolutely must begin this journey with truth and only truth between us, Ivy.”

His ominous tone caused her stomach to clench nervously. “All right.”

“My name is Ian Madoc, but everyone calls me Mad.” His thumb moved along her upper lip, lingering in the little bow there, before continuing its trek. “I won’t go into my entire history tonight, but you should know that I’m much older than I look.”

Thinking of the clothing worn by the people in that dream that looked as if it belonged in the Ancient Roman era, she asked, “Were you there that night the woman was killed with her dragon lover?”

He shook his head. “That was many years before my time, Ivy. I was born in the Dark Ages, in what we now call Wales, but we’ll get into all that later. It doesn’t matter at the moment.”

“It probably doesn’t, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t fascinated by the very existence of you.”

He laughed, the sound so wonderfully rich and uplifting that she felt hope for the first time in weeks. “If you only knew how incredibly fascinating you are to all of us, but to me especially.”

“Me? Fascinating? Because of this thing I can do with dreams and seeing little glimpses of the future?” She poked his sculpted chest. “You’re a freaking dragon. That’s a hell of a lot more amazing than being able to get your mom to agree to let you go out on a sleepover or picking out the perfect prom date for your best friend or setting up your uncle with the perfect future wife.”

His eyes narrowed. “Is that your real gift? Matchmaking?”

Ivy glanced around nervously. There weren’t cameras in here, but that awful woman was always eavesdropping on her thoughts. “Yes. I’ve never been wrong. Not once.”

He exhaled roughly. “That’s why they want you. The Knights want to end the dragon race. They’ve been very successful at culling entire lines within our species. There’s a woman—a very unique and rare breed of dragon called a Naga—who is attempting to save her kind by mating with my cousin right this very moment.”

Mating? She schooled her features to hide her discomfort with the term. It sounded so cold and so very animalistic…but he
was
a dragon. Maybe it was different for his people. Perhaps mating was their version of marriage? Not brave enough to ask him about that just yet, she wondered about his cousin and this special dragon woman trying to save her kind. “Is it going to work?”

“I hope so,” he said sincerely. “Her line is too special to lose.” He coiled some of her hair around his thick, scarred finger. “If you can identify the mates for every dragon, and if some of those mates are defenseless humans, the Knights would only have to hunt them down and kill them to end us. It would be—”

“Genocide,” she said in a horrified whisper. Ivy rubbed her temple. “When they first brought me here, the Mind Miner—the Seer,” she said, remembering the word he had used, “was so interested in the dragon dreams, but I thought maybe she wanted to use me as a dream radar or something like that. You know, to locate more dragons.”

“That was probably why they snatched you in the first place. They had to have suspected you might have a connection they could exploit.”

“But I couldn’t do it. You’re the only one I’m connected to,” she explained. “It’s not as easy as the Seer seems to think it should be for me. It’s not like you guys are just running around flapping your wings!”

He chuckled. “We’ve been very good at hiding and blending into the human world. We’re only easy to track when we’re in heat.”

She blinked. “Wait. What do you mean by ‘in heat’?”

“We go through phases every three years. When we’re unmated, the urges are very strong during the heat phase, but once we have a mate of our own, it’s more manageable. When we’re in heat, we give off a scent that’s extremely noticeable.”

“Are you in heat now?”

“No. Why would you ask that?”

Her face grew hot. “Well, you smell really good to me. I thought maybe…”

He chuckled. “No, I’m not in heat right now. For what it’s worth, you smell very good to me, too. It’s probably because—”

“We’re mates?” She asked the question breathlessly, her heartbeat sprinting as the realization hit her. “That’s what this whole thing is about, isn’t it? You. Me. The dreams.”

He finally nodded. “Yes, but it may not be that simple for us.”

“Why not?” Her breath caught in her throat when he brushed his lips across her forehead. The intimate touch branded her skin. She wished his mouth would glide even lower and finally meet hers.

He avoided that question and asked a different one instead. “When you came to me in our last dream, you said you were like me. You had one human eye and one dragon eye. How long have you known that you were part dragon?”

“I figured it out after they grabbed me and brought me here. Even when I was little, I suspected I was different from other kids. I’ve always been more sensitive to things—sights, sounds, smells. Then the dreams started and then the ability to see these quick snapshots of the future, and I really began to wonder what the hell was wrong with me.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you.” Madoc gave the hair coiled around his finger a little tug. “Did you ask your parents if they knew why you were different?”

“Are you kidding? Can you imagine what sort of misdiagnosis I might have gotten in this label-happy world of ours? No thanks! I had enough baggage from being adopted and wondering why my biological parents abandoned me—”

“They didn’t abandon you,” he stridently interjected. “They loved you so much. They fought for you until the very end, Ivy.”

Touching his chest, she forced him to look at her. “What happened to my biological parents?”

“Not tonight, sweetheart,” he whispered, his voice suddenly tired. “It’s a tangled mess of a history we share, and I’m not sure I have the strength to get through it. I need to rest so I can protect you until we’re rescued.”