Chapter 220: The Dragon Was Not Invited - Part 2

The sound of her gasp hits him like a claw raked down bone, and Ash has to bite down on his own tongue to keep from answering it. Mine, Ash thinks, and does not know if he means her or the sound or the low snarling want twisting through every vein in his body. Mine, mine, she is ours, she is hoard, she is...

His hand moves faster.

"Fuck," he grits out again, his hand moves rougher, his claws threatening to nick his own skin with every stroke. He doesn’t care. The pain barely registers against the overwhelming ache of wanting her. Dove.

Small, soft, fragile little Dove, with her trembling hands and her wide frightened eyes the first time she saw him, the first time she understood what she had stumbled into. She had looked at him like he was a monster. Maybe he is. He has never pretended otherwise.

But she is his, she will be his.

Another sound floats from the house. Her breath, hitching harder now, rising toward something. He can almost picture exactly how she looks right now, head thrown back, mouth parted, that furrow between her brows that means she’s close, so close, and his hips jerk forward on their own like his body thinks it can somehow close the distance between them through sheer want alone. If she were pressed up against his chest, her nails digging crescents into his hide, her whole body shaking apart because she couldn’t hold still, couldn’t stay quiet, could only beg.

Protect me, he imagines her saying, her voice small and sweet and utterly ruined. Please, Ash. Please. I need you to protect me.

His hips twitch forward into his own fist at the thought, and a rough noise claws out of his throat before he can stop it, something low and helpless. He’d give her that. He’d give her anything.

He grumbles under his breath, words tumbling out low and rough, barely words at all, more like growls shaped into intention. Gonna show her. Gonna show her how it’s supposed to be. Gonna fuck her raw, make her scream, make her forget any other name but mine.

He could share, maybe. The thought flickers through, unbidden, and for one disorienting second he actually considers it. Considers Thorne still being there, still having some claim, while Ash takes what he’s always known is his. But no. No, he doesn’t want to share. He wants her completely. He wants to be the only one who gets to hear that voice break apart like that, the only one who gets to feel her nails in his skin, the only one whose name she sobs when she falls apart.

He’d let her think she’s in control. That’s the part that guts him most, the part he can’t quite let go of even now. He wants her to dominate him, wants to hand himself over completely and let her believe she’s the one calling every shot, the one holding the reins. He’d beg for her. He’d let her ride him exactly the way she’s riding Thorne right now, let her set the pace, let her use him exactly how she wants, and he would love every second of it, because that’s the thing nobody else seems to understand about her. You don’t tame something like Dove. You let her think she’s tamed you instead, and you worship every second of the illusion. She’d hold onto my horn’s, he thinks, breath coming rough and uneven now, chest heaving. She’d wrap those little hands around it and she’d beg. She’d say...

"Please, Ash, I need you, I need you to keep me safe, please..."

The fantasy is so vivid his knees nearly buckle. He braces himself harder against the stone, claws scraping faint grooves into it.

He loves her. He hates that he loves her. He’s obsessed with her in a way that scares even him sometimes, in the small hours of the night when the ache of it keeps him from sleeping, when he catches himself dialing her number just to hear it ring before he hangs up in a panic. He wants to apologize. God, he wants to apologize, wants to grovel at her feet and promise he’ll be better, do better, never let her slip through his fingers again. But even now, even with his hand working desperately over his own aching length and her name rising unbidden in his throat, he can’t make the words come. Pride is a living thing lodged behind his ribs, and it won’t let him bend that far. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

In his heart, though, in the deep, primal, unshakable core of him, she is his. She has always been his. No amount of distance or silence or stubborn pride can change that single, burning fact. Imagines how tight she’d be around him, how her whole body would shake trying to take all of him, how she’d cry out from the stretch of it, the near-impossible fullness, and how he’d have to go slow, so slow, careful of every inch because she’s fragile, because she’s soft, because one wrong move could break the very thing he’s sworn to protect. I’d be gentle, he tells himself, even as his hand moves with anything but gentleness, even as the ridges catch and drag and send white-hot pleasure lancing up through his spine. I’d be so gentle with her. I’d make her beg for it and then I’d give her everything, I’d fill her up until she couldn’t take any more, until she was sobbing my name, until...

His hips stutter, cock pulsing hard in his fist, and the sound rising out of her from the house, breathless, shattering, unmistakably a climax, is what finally tips him over. He comes with a force that nearly buckles his knees, spilling hot over his own fingers and splattering onto the frost-hardened ground at his feet, her name tearing out of him in a hoarse, broken cry he can’t hold back. She’s part of the hoard, he reminds himself, voice barely more than a growled whisper in the dark, meant for no one but himself.

He stands there afterward, panting, sweat beading along his hairline despite the cold night air, his whole body trembling with the aftershocks. The sound of her laughing again drifts faintly from the house, soft, warm, sated, and it lands in his chest like a blade.

He needs to cool down. He needs to get out of here before he does something stupid, something he can’t take back. He tucks himself away with shaking hands, wipes his palm roughly against his jeans, and forces himself to take a step back into the deeper dark of the trees.

A few minutes later, Edrik emerged from behind the shed carrying the supplier’s bag. He did not approach Ash. He went straight toward the keeper’s office.

Ash stepped off the road.

The bear had found something in that bag, and he was no longer smiling.