Page 3 of Dragon Fight

“Pippin?”

Brom said my name in such a way that he could have been querying whether I had finished my dinner, or asking to see if I wanted to take a stroll or sit in the library and read a book before bed. Or whether I wanted to acknowledge what this was: my first night as his wife. I straightened my spine, ready to face this challenge head-on, like I had done with everything else. Even when I stood tall, he towered over me. Brom shifted slightly closer, and I became heart-thumpingly aware that he was not just tall, he was so much broader than me. He was also much more experienced and I felt a sudden desire to give everything up and give in to him.

“Should we—?” I began to ask, but he moved in, sweeping me up and into his arms and then carrying me from the room.

“Yes. I’ll always say ‘yes’ to you.”

2

All my life I’d been told this day would come. As a little girl I used to wrap myself in my mother’s lace tablecloths and march down the halls of the manor, pretending to be a bride, much to the amusement of the maids. But I hadn’t dreamt of this: a burly dragon rider kicking open my father’s bedroom door and then laying me gently on the bed, looking at me like I was the most precious thing on earth. For a moment Brom just hovered over me, staring down at me until he reached out and stroked his hand along my cheek. My eyes fell closed, just so I could focus on his touch.

“Obsidian says to tell you young Glimmer has made it out to them and that they’ll keep her safe tonight,” he told me in a low, husky voice.

“She says she needs to forge bonds between her and her mates,” I said, daring to glance up at him, even though it felt insanely intimate to do so. I had no heat clouding my judgement, no borrowed lust to make me bold. Instead it was just me that reached up and touched his beard, scratching my fingers through it. “She told me I needed to do the same.”

“She will want to spend more and more time with dragonkind.” He took my fingers in his and then pressed a kiss to the back of them. “If you were queen-in-waiting, she would’ve been removed to the royal dragon chambers, to learn from Zafira what she was and wasn’t supposed to do and to begin to bond with Draven’s dragon, Darkspire.”

He smiled when I shuddered at that idea.

“Be assured that this is normal. She will never lose her bond with you…” His words faded away as I mentally reached for Glimmer, feeling her contentment and satisfaction, somehow knowing that the male dragons were clustered close to her, protecting her from the weather. “But she is creating space for you to take on additional bonds.” My focus snapped back to Brom, knowing then exactly who he meant.

For a moment we just hung there in time, me, his bride, spread out on the bed, and him, my groom. Then slowly, slowly, he reached over and placed his hand under my jaw, stroking down the column of my neck until he got to the open collar of my shirt. Any questions or worries I might have about Glimmer quickly evaporated under his touch.

His eyes took on a look of intense focus, as if he was fascinated by the way our bodies contrasted. His hands were so big and callused, I could feel the rasp of them as he mapped the meagre expanse of my decolletage, right before his hands slipped under my shirt. Just a little, but a daring thing for a man to do with a woman if she wasn’t his wife. Brom watched me oh-so-closely, catching the moment my mouth fell open, my breath coming faster in response to his touch, and speeding up again as he undid the top button. His hand claimed all the new territory as he discovered it, rubbing his palm over the mounded tops of my breasts, then staring, staring, before he went for another button. I couldn’t help it. My body ached with the memory of the other night, of the look of him, of the feel of them and I just wanted more. My hands went to my buttons, undoing a few in rapid succession before he chuckled and stopped me.

“Peace, sweet Pippin,” he told me. “We have time, all the time in the world right now.” But I didn’t want time. Feeling the effects of Zafira’s heat had unlocked something in me, something unfamiliar and fearfully unladylike but it was something I didn’t want to bundle up and cast away again. The Brom of that night had been a sinister shadow, one who’d promised a thousand pleasures, and I wanted to demand he fulfil each one. As if sensing my impatience, he said, “Let me take my time with you.”

And so my hands fell back limply onto the bed as I submitted to the pace of his attentions. And as I did, I became far more aware of him as he moved. His massive body crawled over mine on the bed, until he was crouching above me on his hands and knees. He stretched out one finger, sliding it down the slender slice of flesh revealed by my buttons, content initially to just trace the line of my sternum, then a little further out to where my ribs began. He pushed my shirt open just a little wider, revealing the inner swell of my breasts as they rose and fell in time with my faltering breath. And didn’t they feel swollen and achy as he trailed his knuckles along the sensitive flesh?

“Brom…”

He smiled at that. “So impatient. So, you’ve had a taste of us and now you want more?”

“Yes. Brom, I—”

My reply was cut off as his mouth slammed down on mine, claiming it in ways he hadn’t the night of Zafira’s heat. The difference now was that this was my husband, focussed on giving me pleasure, not a man driven mad with lust by a dragon. My hands went into his hair, sinking into the thick locks, feeling it trail over my skin until I grabbed great big handfuls of it, not letting him pull away. I writhed underneath him, the hard press of his lips, the slip of his tongue a precursor of what was to come, until finally he pulled back.

“I knew you would be like this,” he said in a tone of frank self-congratulation. “That underneath that battered urchin lay a passionate woman.”

He kissed me again, as if he couldn’t stop himself, but there was something much slower and more intense about it this time. I stroked his hair, his face, much more gently, as it felt like he kissed me with his entire soul.

“Pippin…”

He couldn’t get the words out because I was kissing him and he was kissing me, but I knew, somehow I knew. I remembered the way his hand had slapped down on the stone wall when he’d informed me I would need to choose a husband, and that he wanted to be considered as a possibility. Then there’d been the feel of his arms around me as I’d cried and cried at the injustice of the queen’s dictates. The way he’d brought me knives rather than jewels, wanting me to be strong, not pretty, right when I was feeling weak. And I pulled back from his kisses to tell him what I was feeling now.

“She hurt me,” I said to him, not bothering to explain who, because he knew. There was only one ‘she’ it could be, Queen Raina. “But she hurt you as well.”

He flicked open the top toggle of his leather armour, then slid my hand in the gap past his shirt so I touched the hot flesh of his chest, just above his heart.

“Raina is like a child pulling the wings off flies.” His lips curled as he described his queen, a woman from his own duchy. “But one with such power… If she could’ve left things as they were, I would’ve made you see that we were meant to be together, that her clumsy manipulations just created a barrier between us.”

“But not now,” I said with a defiant lift of my chin. “You’re mine. My husband.”

I wrapped my legs around his waist and then used my momentum to tip him over, so I was the one who straddled him, not vice versa. And when I got there, a feeling of rightness settled over me. Something had changed last night and suddenly I felt far more brazen than I ever would’ve dared to before.

“Mine, Brom.”

He laughed to himself, rolling up so I sat legs astride his lap, his hands going to my arse to hold me still.

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