“Let’s go.”
He snorted, hunkered down, and then launched into the sky.
I slammed against the spikes behind me, and my heart drove into my mouth. The plateau fell away, swiftly becoming nothing more than a dot of bare rock surrounded by the dense darkness of the forest.
Then he leveled his wings to soar, and my heart shook loose its worries to embrace the wind. I let the spikes go, spread my arms into it, flung back my head—and laughed.
A tremble ran through the big body I sat upon. The long skull tilted to aim one luminous eye on me.
“This,” I shouted, “is awesome.”
His eye widened. Then the muscles of his shoulders heaved as he climbed higher and higher. Until he carried us into the clouds.
The vapor clung to my skin and dotted his scales. I had a few moments of disorientation where I could barely see his head before me, and then he broke us free into the moonlight.
I gasped. The light layered the clouds with soft color and sparkled off the drops on his scales as though they were diamonds.
“It’s so beautiful,” I called to him. “Glorious.”
Did I imagine how some of the steel beneath me melted? His wings no longer beat so stiffly. His neck arched as he glanced back again. His metallic eyes gleamed.
“Beautiful,” I said again, much more softly. But his eyes glowed in response. I spread my fingers over his soft, warm scales and caressed them.
His huge orbs widened and then lit up like a supernova.
I wanted to touch him, and not as a Dragon. “Take us down, Talakai.” Although it lacked the power of my earlier command, he folded his wings and dropped us once more into the clouds.
We emerged closer to the ground than I expected. He arched his neck into me, and spread his wings—the air crackled against them as he slowed down to a hover above the plateau and touched down so gently I barely felt it.
The wind was gone as though it had never existed, and the plateau sat silent in the moonlight. My heart raced. As I climbed down from his neck, I knew what I wanted, but wasn’t sure how to get it.
If I hadn’t kept one hand on his forearm as I slid down, he would have been gone like the wind. I sensed the tremor that ran through him, that tensing of muscles as he prepared to launch.
“No,” I said, holding on. “Shift for me, Talakai.”
He shuddered again and, for the first time, spoke. “No.”
This was far more than just simple denial. The undertones of that single word made me shiver. But I was driven by something I feared to define. It once again flowed from deep within and into my words.
“Shift for me, Talakai.”
The bones moved beneath my hands. He groaned, a deep, visceral sound, as the human slowly emerged from the Dragon. I had a swift, tantalizing glimpse of nude flesh. The moonlight cascaded over contours so ripped it stopped my breath in the instant before the scales chased over his skin.
My knees threatened to cave. But as I gazed up into his eyes, my heart twisted.
What radiated from him wasn’t lust. Or rather, not just lust—it was there, pulsing and powerful, and it sent heat shooting straight through me.
But what showed so clearly in his eyes was pain.
Not physical. Emotional. It pulsed from them, pure and tortured, in the instant before he locked it down.
I reached a hand to trace his jaw and saw the quiver that ran through him. Who had hurt him so deeply? Left such scars?
I fisted my other hand in the hair that trailed over one shoulder, and pulled. He bent, but slowly, every inch fought for.
If I hadn’t seen the desire in his eyes, I would have yielded. It was chaotic and conflicted, but there.
But this was only a dream. And I knew what I wanted.
