Page 8 of Drawn By Dragonblood
“So where are you from?” Dakota asked, sitting cross-legged on the ground beside where I squatted. She’d tugged on a sweatshirt, big enough to hide her braless, aroused state.
Elijah sat on my other side, his closeness warmer than the bed of coals in front of me. Something inside me felt that tug again, the need to sit at his feet and hope he gifted me a soft word or strong hand.
The fuck?
I blinked hard, erasing the picture from my mind.
“My home is just shy of two miles in that direction,” Elijah said, pointing toward the southeast as his scent rolled over me. He smelled of fire and brimstone, spice and sex.
I stretched my neck side to side, fighting off the strange lust stiffening my dick, even though I wasn’t exactly disturbed by the attraction I felt for him. Last thing I needed was to come untouched in my boxers. That would make for one hell of an awkward situation since I wasn’t exactly quiet when busting a nut.
“I didn’t think anyone lived around here,” Dakota said, a smile in her voice. “Your own Castle in the Clouds like that mansion down in Moultonborough?”
“Something like that.” That sensual smile played on Elijah’s lips again, and I focused on pouring boiling water over the dry oatmeal, wondering why the hell I didn’t care that he looked at my wife like he wanted to lick her from mouth to toes.
I handed Elijah one of the steaming bowls and a spoon while shoving my bitterness deep and attempting to not salivate over the man.
“Thank you.” Elijah’s full-on smile weakened my knees, and I sat with about as much grace as a two-year-old on ice skates.
At least I didn’t spill my cup of maple and brown sugar oatmeal. Yay?
Dakota shifted so our legs pressed together. Her usual affection or a silent assurance of her faithfulness, I didn’t know. Either way, I appreciated the action because my brain and body didn’t know up from down.
“Just out for a stroll?” I asked and spooned up a mass of the grossest breakfast food on the face of the planet.
“Something like that,” Elijah echoed himself, his voice softer with a hint of the smile lingering on his perfectly formed lips above a soul patch.
I ought to be suspicious of his lack of a real answer, but my usual caution had gone into hibernation or some such shit. What about the dark stranger made me comfortable over being sexually attracted to another guy? I shouldn’t trust the man, but something inside me wanted to.
Fucking yearned for it so damn hard I swore I’d fallen into an alternate reality.
I tore my gaze off the dude’s face and shoved the too-hot oats into my mouth. The burned tongue at least kept my twitching dick from swelling to the point of needing my hand.
Seriously. What the fuck was wrong with me?
Dakota was all I had ever wanted. Hell, I’d never even thought about another woman that way—let alone a masculine guy who would look fucking fantastic decked out in black leather and a harness.
I shook my head, blinking that image from my mind too.
From the first time I’d seen Dakota in middle school, I’d known she belonged to me and I to her. Like magnets, we had drawn each other in, and tearing apart at the end of every school day had been painful for me.
I found out later it had felt the same for her.
The first time we’d kissed, the longing for happiness that had haunted me every day faded as true joy flooded through me from the gentle brush of her lips and the sweet taste of her breath. And when we’d finally had sex? We had only been sixteen, but the stars had aligned, the off-its-axis world of my foster parent’s home righted.
I’d found heaven and a different kind of magic buried deep inside Dakota’s wet warmth.
It would be another two years before I could light out from where I’d spent my childhood filled with verbal and emotional abuse. An eternity of being told I was a worthless piece of shit, daily reminders that I was unloved and unwanted by the people who had created my sorry ass.
Whoever the hell they were.
I had no desire to find my real parents. They hadn’t wanted me, so why the fuck would I go looking for them?
Like me, Dakota had grown up in a foster home, clueless as to her parentage and desirous of a husband and a bunch of kids to love. But at least she’d been lucky in having foster parents who’d nurtured and cared for her.
We were peas and carrots, just like Forrest Gump had claimed of him and Jenny, but so far, we hadn’t been able to get pregnant. The push for that had ended when I’d been fired since I couldn’t provide for the two of us let alone a third little human. We’d discussed IVF, but that plan got shot to shit when I’d lost my income. Even though my swimmers had failed for the previous handful of years in giving my wife what she wanted. Dakota had gotten an IUD to ensure didn’t have a kid at an inopportune time.
“Are you heading toward Mount Washington?” Elijah asked, and I glanced over at Dakota rather than laying eyes on the man who made me question who and what the fuck I was.
