Page 51 of Gemini Wicked

When you are a dragon shifter, when it is time to breed, that is how it is done.

Already my queen sways in my arms, flushed and breathless from the engine of her looming heat, her lush curves naked and burning like a fiery coal. I wrap one arm around her tiny waist and one arm around Lucius’ rangy frame and breathe… breathe deeply… while I wage a desperate inner war.

I pray I will not abandon all restraint and run mad under the blind mindless need of this mating rut.

Predictably, this pregnant silence (an apt phrase, no?) is broken by Vasili. My first love. My first rival. My desperate conundrum and my lethal obsession.

Vasili, who is finally mine.

My sweetheart.

Mine.

Of all my mates, Vasili Romanov is the most deceptive. And the most deadly.

“Well, darlings, it’s about time,” he purrs, rearing behind Zara like a rattlesnake and smirking at Lucius. “I wondered when that knot of yours would make an appearance, pet. In fact, I’ve rather wondered why he’s never made an appearance for me.”

With fangs fully extended and eyes red as embers in his feral face, Lucius Aries is a breath away from shifting. Seeing my headmaster so close to lost in his own rut makes my bones hum and my groin heat with a low throb of need.

Still, despite the pheromones flooding the air and his wolf growling under his skin and fighting to rise, Lucius manages to level Vasili an apologetic look.

“A wolf’s knot is a breeding trait,” our headmaster explains patiently, in his rough wolfish timber. “It’s an anatomical feature that typically only manifests during a mating rut, when a wolf shifter’s mate is fertile. I’ve, er, never before experienced one. This is my first rut. And, thus, my first knot.”

A knot? I ponder.

A dragon shifter does not grow a knot. My dragon cock has other unique anatomical features, which are always present but will be more so now (when we are breeding), to maximize our prospects for conception.

Still, Lucius could sprout tentacles like a sea kraken, and I would not be repelled.

He is Lucius. And I… I am his.

I am his in ways that my dragon and I are only beginning to comprehend.

“Blooming hell, love. A knot, is it?” Ronin rolls lithely out of bed, lean and luscious in those unbuttoned leather pants that barely cling to his hips, with his silky hair tumbled from Neo’s eager hands. He gives our bookworm a smoking look, then prowls across the room to join us near the fire. “That’s hot as fuck. Any chance after you knot our girl, you’ll have a bit of that knot left over for me?”

Lucius’ jaw elongates and his nostrils flare. Slowly, but very surely, his gentle scholarly demeanor is losing the battle to his beast. “I’ll knot you if you can take it.”

“Fuck.” Ronin’s voice goes husky and his tawny eyes smolder with rising heat. “Only one way to go on then, isn’t there?”

The wolf’s pupils dilate with hunger. His chest swells in a gravelly rumble of need.

The whisper of bare feet drags my stare away from this riveting exchange. Neo’s curly head pokes over Ronin’s shoulder, green eyes round behind his spectacles. “A knot? Really? Can I see?”

Neo’s wide-eyed interest finally curls Zara’s lush mouth, still parted with surprise, into a slow grin. “Hmm, yeah, I think we’d all like a closer look. C’mon over here where you can see better, baby.”

Ronin slings an affectionate arm around Neo’s brawny shoulders and draws him fully into our circle.

Wearing nothing but a pair of navy cotton boxers stretched tight over his ass, with a damp patch of precum blooming over his bulge, our Neo is a sight to behold.

But Ronin’s smoldering gaze never veers from Lucius.

After a questioning look at our headmaster, who permits this intimacy with a nod, Zara works Lucius’ houndstooth trousers down his hips. By now, his wolf wants him naked, so our headmaster’s trousers are on the floor, as Neo would say, shifty-swifty. Carefully, as though she is unwrapping a birthday present, Zara eases the wolf’s conservative boxers—in burgundy silk from an affluent label—over his magnificent package.

“Whoa,” she breathes, pausing in her labors to stare.

“Oh, fuck, sign me up for that,” Ronin mutters.

I hear myself grunt in heartfelt sentiment.

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