Free Dragon Fall: Masters of the Flame 3 (Mating Fever) by Elsa Jade Page B

her bed again.
    “Brunch,” he said slowly. “With a dragon.”
    Really? Of the things she’d said, he focused on brunch? “Presumably even dragons eat more than virgins. Whatever. I told you to forget it,” she reminded him. “I didn’t mean to impose.” Oh thank god, the elevator door opened.
    “Esme.”
    She took one step toward her escape when he grabbed her elbow and wheeled her around.
    She crashed into his chest, and his mouth crashed down on hers, and the whole thing was a glorious dragonwreck.
    Bracing herself on his broad chest, she opened her mouth, taking his tongue in the first heartbeat. He groaned and snaked his hand behind her, dragging her flush against him. The hard bulge of his cock nudged insistently against her belly.
    Some one was imposing.
    She twined her arms up around his neck, holding him fast. If he thought he was going to sneak away again…
    Maybe this wasn’t how one-night stands were supposed to work, but hell if she cared.
    His hand was up inside her blouse, rubbing the small of her back in restless circles and dipping below the waistband of her skirt to splay his fingers across her butt. She broke the kiss to drag her mouth down his neck to the laces of his shirt. The cords crisscrossed down from the notch of his throat to the center of his chest, a soft, knotted barricade across his skin.
    She played her tongue over the laces, darting between the holes, while her hand went to the rigid swell of his erection. Through the cords, she could almost see his skin—
    Bale cupped her chin and lifted her head. “I need to extinguish the fires.”
    “No.” She breathed across his throat. “I want to see you.”
    “No,” he echoed her, “you really don’t.”
    She reared back to stare up at him.
    Though his hand didn’t leave her ass, his jaw was clenched in denial. “I said I wouldn’t hurt you, wouldn’t frighten you,” he rasped. “I can’t…can’t say the same for the dragon.”
    “The dragon is you.” Wasn’t it?
    “It…has battles I can’t always fight.”
    “The petralys.” She took his hand and held it between her breasts. “Is it worse?”
    He inclined his head, but she sensed he was only half agreeing. “I am not free to pursue my own wants.”
    He was a dragon prince, but even he wasn’t free.
    She raised his hand to kiss his clenched knuckles. “I am free, though,” she said. “And easy. Maybe just for today, so you better jump on this chance.”
    His lips quirked as he looked at her. “Jump you?”
    “Unless you want to say no again…”
    He whirled her away from the elevator and pressed her up against one of the columns. She didn’t know much about caves, but she knew the rock formations grew from water slowly depositing droplets of stone over aeons, and the dry formations were technically dead. But though the column where she braced herself with her palms flattened behind her didn’t feel dead. The stone was hard, smooth, impervious…but glimmering with the hidden lights of the gemstones.
    Like Bale.
    She wrenched up her skirt and gasped at the cool caress of stone on her bare skin. He made a noise too—more of a cursing groan—when he realized she had no panties. Ha, she was getting better at this.
    She guided his hand to her mound, letting him feel the wetness gathering there. Whatever with the stone columns, she was very much alive. Her body vibrated with the promise of pleasure, and the fog that had lingered in her mind even after the alchemical intrusions had stopped was finally burning away. Vanquished by Bale’s touch.
    “Yes,” she murmured. “Oh yes.”
    He eased his middle finger into her body, squeezing the outer folds gently while he pressed the base of his thumb to her clit so that all the wild tangle of nerves down there fired at once, sending sparklers as bright as the burning gemstones across her skin. Writhing on his hand, she wrapped her fingers in the laces at his throat.
    “Esme,” he groaned.
    She tugged, pulling